How is Nature portrayed in the poem "The Woodspurge" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti? Please incorporate points about tone/mood, literary features, theme and persona; give evidence from the poem for each point.

The Power of Nature

In the face of his insurmountable grief, the speaker feels so powerless that he cannot even fight against the wind in Stanza 1. When the wind is blowing, the speaker moves according to the wind, and when the wind stops, so does the speaker. The speaker's hair falls upon the grass, and his ears pick up the sounds of the passing day—however, he himself is not fully present. His aimless eyes fall upon a woodspurge in the shade, and it is the only thing that sticks with him in his time of grief.

In a way, the speaker is completely in communion with nature in this scene. He is not an active individual; instead, he is just as much a part of the landscape as the wind, or the "dead" leaves that are shaken out of the trees (2). The way that the poem is organized emphasizes this point: we start with a large-scale view of a landscape, then Rossetti narrows our view to the speaker himself, and then he narrows our view even further so that we are looking at what the speaker is looking at—the woodspurge. The way that the speaker is sandwiched between natural elements emphasizes that he is merely a part of this larger scene.