woodspurge

Updated: May 23, 2025

Some songs, especially "Penumbra" and "The Woodspurge," of intense sweetness and sadness, were also included; and the simple directness of "Jenny" showed, like "Nineveh," capacities in the poet not easily to be inferred from the bulk of his poems.

George Saintsbury - A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

Here the otherwise insignificant presentation of the three-cupped woodspurge, representing originally a mere side-current of the stream of consciousness, becomes the intellectual symbol or fetich of the whole psychosis forever after.

Havelock Ellis - Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 : Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy

You had the same thought that Rossetti expresses in 'The Woodspurge': 'The wind flapped loose, the wind was still, Shaken out dead from tree to hill; I had walked on at the wind's will, I sat now, for the wind was still. That's Rossetti, if you remember. Slightly suggestive of 'Blow Ye Winds of the Morning! Blow! Blow! Blow! but more or less pleasing."

John Kendrick Bangs - The Idiot

In brain terms it indicates an activity of the higher centers, a sort of side-tracking or long-circuiting of the primitive energy; ... Rosetti's poem, 'The Woodspurge, gives a concrete example of the formation of such a symbol.

Havelock Ellis - Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 : Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy