I was an English major in college, and my favorite poet was the first-generation Romantic William Wordsworth. For one thing, there’s the name, the best example of nominative determinism in the annals of English literature.

But what I most love about Wordsworth is the way he acts as a bridge between the formal, at times stultified style of the poetry that came before him, and the dawn of a new era that venerated individual emotion and experience — both the good and the ill. All that comes together in one of my favorite Wordsworth poems: “Surprised by Joy”

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind–

But how could I forget thee? Through what power,

Even for the least division of an hour,

Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

To my most grievous loss?

Beneath the archaic language, the “thees” and so forth, the verse describes a father who is temporarily distracted from his loss by a moment of joy, only to recall with agonizing suddenness that the one person he wishes to share it with — his young child — is gone. The “surprise” in “Surprised by Joy” is that it was possible, even for the briefest moment, for the poet not to be consumed by that “most grievous loss.”

Like most of Wordsworth’s poems, “Surprised by Joy” was drawn from his personal experience — in this case, the loss of his daughter Catherine in 1812, when she was just three years old. Wordsworth and his wife Mary had five children, two of whom died young: Catherine, and their son Thomas, who passed away from measles at age 6, just a half year after Catherine’s death.

To lose two young children in less than a calendar year is a grief I cannot fathom. But it was unbearably common at the time.

© Vox