I'm in that sweet mood where pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to mind.

“Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” is really interesting to me because Wordsworth seems to capture a moment that many people don’t really discuss or write about. Wordsworth describes a complex human emotion in seven very short stanzas. The feeling I am referring to is when a person suddenly has an almost unexplainable, bizarre, irrational fear, gut feeling, or thought. I think this emotion most often arises when the person really cares about something or someone and is extremely worried about something happening. The fact that Wordsworth was able to capture this sort of moment in poetry is very fascinating to me.

In “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” the speaker tells a story of going to see his love, Lucy, and upon arriving having this sudden feeling that she had died. I think the feeling comes out so powerfully because the speaker uses a very dramatic, story-telling tone until the last stanza. This keeps the reader interested and at the edge of his/her seat. Many parts of the poem drag along, keeping tension in each line. For example, “The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot/ Came nearer, and nearer still” (15-16) or“My horse moved on; hoof after hoof.”(21).

On a completely different note, I find myself sometimes irritated with Wordsworth’s rhyme schemes. They often sound childish and Dr. Suess-ish to me which makes taking the poetry seriously very hard for me. There was even a time in class when Onno read some of Wordsworth’s poetry aloud and he (or someone else) said “It sounds Dr.Suess-ish.”I am currently in a Poetry workshop so I know how hard it is to do what Wordsworth does and I appreciate and respect that. After reading some of Wordsworth poetry I wondered why the rhyming bothered me at all. I came to the conclusion that in today’s literary society, poetry is…much different. Many forms have been abandoned or completely modified, including rhyme schemes. The only place we often see rhyme schemes like this is in a children’s book or an old Disney movie. So Wordsworth didn’t do anything wrong, we kind of just met at the wrong time.