Surprised By Joy?

Surprised by joy -- impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport -- Oh!  with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
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?  That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn 
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
~William Wordsworth

Today has me pondering on the age old question of "how could such a thing happen?"  Over the weekend, I read a novel about a man and a woman who are friends for nearly 20 years and eventually get married, only to have the woman die, completely unexpectedly, at the age of 37, leaving the man to go on without her, trying to find joy in the days stretching ahead.  With this fiction on my mind, I was going about my morning, still wallowing a bit in the sadness of it all, when I got the news that the husband of a good friend died yesterday of heart problems.  He was 36.  His wife is weeks away from giving birth to their fourth child.  What a sickening blow.

So the thought I have had throughout the day is how and when will this friend, now a thirty-something widow with soon-to-be-four children find joy again?  And this Wordsworth poem came to mind.

Wordsworth was grappling with his own grief when he wrote it.  His youngest daughter, Catherine, died in 1812 when she was only three years old.  This poem describes the double grief that goes along with the loss of someone dear -- the death itself, and then (almost worse) the memory pangs that grip and cramp like some sort of cruel after-birth, long after the fact.  Wordsworth seems to berate himself for slipping up, forgetting for a moment, and feeling joyful -- chiding, "But how could I forget thee?"

But I've always considered the poem a hopeful one.  The human spirit is a resilient one.  Joy finds a way to creep in -- even if (for a time) only in bits and pieces.