SOURCE: Maxwell, Catherine. “‘Devious Symbols’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Purgatorio.” Victorian Poetry 31, no. 1 (spring 1993): 19-40.

In the following essay, Maxwell elucidates the religious elements of “The Woodspurge.”

Rossetti's short lyric “The Woodspurge,” a favorite of the anthologists and a perennial choice for inclusion in practical criticism papers, is one of the pieces by which the work of this still underread poet is best known. The reasons for this are perhaps not hard to fathom. What Pater in 1883 called “a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakably novel,”¹ and the uncanny blend of spirituality and sensuality, the peculiarly heightened language and sustained symbolism that characterize a major piece like “The House of Life,” still arouse curiously ambivalent responses in many critics and readers, for whom there lingers an unsettling foreign or hybrid quality to this verse, not quite congruent with good taste. To such readers, “The Woodspurge” seems like a welcome release. Celebrated...