Still Waters Run Deep
Poetically speaking, William Wordsworth was a straight shooter. In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," in fact, he states "the principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them […] in a selection of language really used by men." In other words, he wanted to make the language of poetry accessible to all. More than that, he wanted to make poetry's subject matter available to all. He represented small, daily scenes with emotional resonance, and in doing so, he was trying to make the point that the life experiences of everyone—from every walk of life—were valuable and worth rendering into art.
In the case of "Strange fits of passion," we have the simple tale of a man going to visit his beloved, who then realizes something profound about the price of being in love. Wordsworth serves up similarly simple, but powerful, poems in "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "The Solitary Reaper," and "Tintern Abbey."