The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, embraced an intense attention to the physical detail of the natural world including its capacity for beauty and its susceptibility to decay. Rossetti's poetry, particularly the House of Life sonnet sequence, meditates obsessively on the relationship between bodily love, sensory richness, and mortality. The Pre-Raphaelites worked in the decade of the Great Stink and successive cholera epidemics, and their engagement with the body's beauty coexisted with Victorian awareness of its fragility and its capacity to become the food of worms.

Rossetti's 'The Woodspurge' and other poems of minute natural observation show the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility applied to the smallest and most overlooked natural phenomena, in a tradition that connects with Burns's louse and Heaney's insect verse. The Victorian awareness of the body as both site of intense beauty and as eventual food for worms and parasites — made urgent by epidemic disease — gives Pre-Raphaelite poetry much of its characteristic tension between sensuous life and bodily mortality. Their work connects the Romantic tradition of insect and decay poetry to the late Victorian and modernist periods.