Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti

By Christina Rossetti and Katharine McGowran

With an Introduction and Notes by Katherine McGowran.

Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth century poetry can be complete without attention to this prolific and popular poet. Rosetti's inner life dominates her poetry, exploring loss and unattainable hope.

Her divine poems have a freshness and toughness of thought, while many of her love poems are erotic, and as often express love for women as for men. The varied threads of Rossetti's concerns are drawn together in what is perhaps her greatest poem, the strange and ambiguous 'Goblin Market'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Jul 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781848706040

Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti was born in 1830 in London. She was the youngest child in a creative Italian family, which included her famous brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their father, a poet and political exile from Italy, fell ill when Rossetti was a teenager and the family suffered financial difficulty. Rossetti started writing at a young age and her poems were often influenced by her religious faith. She published various poems in literary magazines, but it was Goblin Market & Other Poems, published in 1862 to great acclaim, that established her position as a prominent poet. She became ill towards the end of her life, first from Graves’ disease and then from cancer, but she continued to write until her death in 1894.

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Contents

Introduction

Notes to the Introduction

Works cited

Bibliography

A Note on the Text

Selected Poems

A Soul

From the Antique

Listening

Cobwebs

A Chilly Night

A Triad

In an Artist’s Studio

Introspective

Cousin Kate

Sister Maude

Promises like Pie-crust

An Echo from Willow-wood

A Sketch

The Heart Knoweth Its Own Bitterness

A Pause

Goblin Market

The Prince’s Progress

Maiden-Song

Dream Land

At Home

The Poor Ghost

A Portrait

By the Sea

Gone for Ever

Love from the North

Maggie a Lady

From Sunset to Star Rise

Spring Quiet

Winter Rain

Vanity of Vanities

Days of Vanity

The Ghost’s Petition

Enrica, 1865

A Chill

Somewhere or Other

Noble Sisters

Jessie Cameron

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter: My Secret

Autumn Violets

A Dirge

A Bird’s-eye View

Fata Morgana

Memory

‘They Desire a Better Country’

The Lambs of Grasmere, 1860

A Birthday

A Bride Song

Confluents

Remember

After Death

The Lowest Room

Dream-Love

An End

Dead Hope

Twice

My Dream

On the Wing

L. E. L.

Song (‘Oh roses for the flush of youth’)

The Hour and the Ghost

Shall I Forget?

Life and Death

A Summer Wish

A Year’s Windfalls

An Apple Gathering

Song (‘Two doves upon the selfsame branch’)

Maude Clare

Echo

Another Spring

Bird or Beast?

Eve

A Daughter of Eve

The Bourne

Song (‘Oh what comes over the sea’)

Venus’s Looking-glass

Love Lies Bleeding

Bird Raptures

The Queen of Hearts

‘No, Thank You, John’

Beauty is Vain

May

A Pause of Thought

Twilight Calm

Wife to Husband

Mirage

A Royal Princess

My Friend

Shut Out

Sound Sleep

Song (‘She sat and sang alway’)

Song (‘When I am dead, my dearest’)

Dead Before Death

Twilight Night

Bitter for Sweet

What Would I Give?

The First Spring Day

The Convent Threshold

Amor Mundi

Uphill

‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children’

In the Round Tower at Jhansi

A Christmas Carol

Despised and Rejected

A Better Resurrection

Advent

The Three Enemies

Consider

Weary in Well-Doing

One Certainty

By the Waters of Babylon

Christian and Jew

Good Friday

Symbols

The World

A Testimony

Paradise

Sleep at Sea

Mother Country

Who Shall Deliver Me?

‘When My Heart is Vexed, I will Complain’

A Rose Plant in Jericho

From House to Home

Old and New Year Ditties

Amen

The Lowest Place

Sonnet

The Key-note

Pastime

‘Italia, Io Ti Saluto!’

A Ballad of Boding

Yet a Little While

He and She

Monna Innominata

One Sea-side Grave

De Profundis

Tempus Fugit

Brother Bruin

A Life’s Parallels

At Last

In the Willow Shade

Buds and Babies

A Wintry Sonnet

Freaks of Fashion

An October Garden

‘Summer is Ended’

Passing and Glassing

Soeur Louise de la Miséricorde

An ‘Immurata’ Sister

‘There is a Budding Morrow in Midnight’

The Thread of Life

An Old-world Thicket

Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets

‘For thine own sake, O My God’

Until the Day Break

A Hope Carol

Christmas Carols

Patience of Hope

Notes to the Poems

Alphabetical List of Poem Titles

Alphabetical List of First Lines

Introduction

Throughout her life Christina Rossetti cultivated an image of herself as a reclusive poetess. A devout and pious Anglican, she lived quietly and wrote over five hundred religious poems and several devotional prose works. In the memoir which prefaced his 1904 edition of her poems, Rossetti’s brother William recalled that her social reticence and reserve was matched by an abhorrence of ‘display’: ‘Upon her reputation as a poetess she never presumed, nor did she ever volunteer an allusion to any of her performances: in a roomful of mediocrities, she consented to seem the most mediocre as the most unobtrusive of all’ (‘Memoir’, p. lvi). [1] Seemingly inward-looking, sentimental and deeply religious, Rossetti was presented for much of the twentieth century as a writer whose poems dealt primarily in private emotion, and who shunned the publicity of fame. Yet this apparently self-effacing poet, who published her first work at the age of seventeen, was the first of the writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement to win critical attention. As well as poetry and devotional prose, Rossetti wrote a number of stories for children. Her poetic output, which includes lyrics, narrative poems, ballads and sonnets, displays the range of a poet of considerable talent and ambition. Rossetti’s poems are rarely as straight­forward as their simple surfaces might suggest and her use of traditional literary forms is frequently challenging and innovative.

Rossetti was the daughter of Gabriele Rossetti, patriotic poet, scholar and professor of Italian, and his half-Italian wife Frances Rossetti. Her father escaped from Naples in 1821 following the failure of a political uprising that sought to gain a constitution for the kingdom. Her mother, a governess, was the sister of Dr John Polidori, Byron’s physician-companion and author of The Vampyre (1819). Christina, born in 1830, was the youngest of the Rossetti’s four precocious children. Her brothers, the editor and critic William Michael Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti the famous poet and painter, were founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Rossetti’s sister Maria, who entered the order of the All Saints Sisterhood in 1873, shared their father’s passion for Dante and their mother’s unswerving commitment to her Anglican beliefs, an inheritance which Christina, though outwardly no less pious, found more troubling.

Christina was by all accounts a warm-hearted and outgoing, if somewhat temperamental, child, given to outbursts and tantrums. She had a ‘passionate temper’ which during one quarrel with her mother resulted in her seizing a pair of scissors and ripping up her arm to vent her anger (Packer, p. 10). Yet sometime during her mid-teens, she suffered an emotional or spiritual trauma that resulted in the permanent alteration of her character. She decided she would give up all pleasurable pastimes and amusements because she felt she delighted in them too much. From this point on, she saw relatively little of society beyond her immediate circle of family and close friends, and adhered strictly to the tenets of her Anglican faith which was such a dominant influence on her life and work. As her brother William recalls: ‘Her temperament and character, naturally warm and free, became a fountain sealed ’ (‘Memoir’, p. lxviii).

Despite the self-imposed restrictions that this highly scrupulous way of life involved, Christina did not altogether give up society. She belonged to ‘The Portfolio Club’, a group of women writers whose members included the suffragist Barbara Bodichon and the poet Bessie Rayner Parkes. And she also became an unofficial member of the Pre-Raphaelite ‘brotherhood’ of artists and writers, contributing poems to issues of their literary magazine The Germ under the pseudonym ‘Ellen Alleyn’. She attended some of the Pre-Raphaelite gatherings held at the family home in Charlotte Street, though her habitual reserve usually prevented her from participating. During the 1840s and 1850s, Christina posed for several Pre-Raphaelite painters, including her brother Dante Gabriel and William Holman Hunt. Her poem ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ (p. 5) is most likely based on Dante Gabriel’s studio. It offers a disturbing account of the relationship between artist and model, portraying the artist as a kind of vampire, feeding upon the face of the ‘nameless girl’ (p. 5) who appears, in various guises, in all his pictures. Christina briefly took up drawing and sketching herself during the 1850s, attending classes for young ladies at the school set up by another member of the Pre-Raphaelites, Ford Madox Brown, in Camden Town. In 1854, prompted by reports of appalling casualties in the Crimea, she applied unsuccessfully to become a nurse. Towards the end of the 1850s Christina worked as a volunteer at Highgate Penitentiary, a home established with the aim of rescuing fallen women and training them for ‘fitter’ employment in the outside world.

In the autumn of 1847, Christina accepted a proposal from James Collinson, a painter known to her through his connections with the Pre-Raphaelites. However, when he converted to Roman Catholicism (he had been a regular member at the High Anglican church where Christina and her mother worshipped), she broke off the engagement, citing religious differences as the cause. At some time during the 1860s, Christina turned down another proposal of marriage, once more it seems on religious grounds. Charles Cayley, an ex-pupil of her father’s, was a poet and writer who was engaged on a translation of Dante when the two met. Despite Christina’s rejection of him, they remained close friends until his death. Her motives remain slightly obscure, and in the case of Cayley, her brother William was convinced of her deep and permanent affection for the shy scholar (Memoir, p. liii).

The publication of Christina’s first volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1862 brought her to the attention of a number of writers and reviewers. She received good notices in the London Review, the Literary Gazette and the Athenaeum, which praised the vivid imagery and originality of her verse. Christina was compared favourably to contemporary women poets like Adelaide Procter and Jean Ingelow, whose popularity elicited an occasional twinge of envy. Rossetti was also touted as the only possible successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The comparison with Barrett Browning was in some ways inescapable as her posthumously published Last Poems (1862) appeared in the same year as Goblin Market. Rossetti’s symbolist tendencies and fondness for lush medieval settings seem to mark her out as indifferent to contemporary concerns and the opposite of a writer like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for whom poetry was a public, political activity. Remarking on the absence of politics in her verse in a letter to her brother, Rossetti explained: ‘it is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics and philanthropy with Mrs Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I’ (Letters, p. 31). Rossetti’s poems lack the explicit references to contemporary social problems of Barrett Browning’s poems, [2] yet they often contain their own indirect social critique.

Despite Rossetti’s disclaimer about ‘politics and philanthropy’, she campaigned vigorously on behalf of social causes like the Anti-Vivisection Movement and the Protection of Minors Bill, which sought to end the exploitation of child prostitutes by raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Fame brought petitions from people who sought Christina’s endorsement and her letters during this time reveal her active engagement and efforts on behalf of various causes. However, when Augusta Webster, a poet whose work Rossetti admired, solicited her support for the 1878 suffrage bill, Rossetti was reluctant to offer it, replying in terms which revealed a conflict between her religious beliefs (the Bible’s emphasis on a distinction between the sexes – women being subordinate to men) and her recognition of the restrictive ‘barrier of sex’ (Bell, p. 112) which prevented women’s advancement and participation.

In 1872 Christina was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder from which she suffered intermittently for the rest of her life. Around the same time, Dante Gabriel’s health began to deteriorate. His symptoms consisted of paranoid delusions and were fuelled by a combination of guilt over Lizzie Siddal’s death (she died in 1862 after taking an overdose of laudanum) and the accusations of critics who were levelling charges of immorality and excessive sensuality at the Pre-Raphaelite poets. [3] He became increasingly dependent on the drug chloral and never quite recovered his health or his mental equilibrium. He died ten years later, following a stroke. In 1883, Christina’s old friend and former suitor Charles Cayley died, leaving instructions that she was to be his literary executor. Three years afterwards, Frances Rossetti, with whom Christina had lived all her life, also died. The combination of these sad losses and her own ill health made Christina increasingly reluctant to seek society. Her looks had been considerably altered by attacks of Graves’ disease, which discoloured her skin and made her eyes unusually prominent. She spent an increasing amount of time writing devotional works, poetry and prose, which she published through the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

The publication of Christina’s second and third volumes of poetry, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866) and A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) helped to secure her reputation. In 1885 Christina received a volume of poems by the Irish poet Katharine Tynan inscribed ‘with humility and reverence to the first of living women poets by the last and the least’ (Marsh, p. 535). Tynan visited Rossetti in the 1880s, but was somewhat disconcerted to find the older poet dressed rather prosaically, the romantic image she had had being dispelled by her hostess’s tweed skirts and stout boots. Tynan’s expectations of a poet ‘trailing robes of soft, beautifully coloured material’ (p. 536) suggest the potency of the myths surrounding Rossetti. She seems to have been an iconic as well as an inspiring figure for the generation of women poets who came after. Tynan was only one of a number of women writers who drew inspiration from Rossetti. Many of the next generation of women poets, including Alice Meynell, Charlotte Mew and Michael Field, are indebted to her.

In 1892 Christina was found to be suffering from breast cancer. She had an operation in May, but the cancer recurred a year later. Prescribed opiates for the pain, she started to have hallucinations which worried her atheist brother William. On her deathbed she expressed fears of going to hell, her religious beliefs providing more terror than consolation at the end of her life. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, alongside her father, mother and sister-in-law Lizzie Siddal (Rossetti, ‘Memoir’, p. lix).

Like many Victorian poets, Rossetti’s reputation waned during the early decades of the twentieth century, and it is only relatively recently that her work has been subject to a critical revaluation. Although popular poems like ‘A Birthday’ (‘My heart is like a singing bird’) and the ‘song’ ‘When I am dead, my dearest’ continued to be anthologised, these lyrics with their easy musicality and apparent simplicity represent only one side of Rossetti’s poetic output and achievement. Recent criticism has suggested that behind the myth of the saintly recluse, bent on mortification and pining for lost-love, lies a more complex figure whose poetry is less straightforward than it first appears.

Rossetti wrote poetry all her life, quite naturally and spontaneously. Her earliest efforts were often the product of bouts rimés (poems written to given rhymes), a game which she played with her brothers. Frances Rossetti encouraged her children to write and there was a family magazine to which they contributed poems and short stories. Thus, like the young Brontës, the Rossetti children had an outlet for their literary endeavours. At the age of eleven, Christina composed a series of verses dedicated to her mother, earning herself a reputation as the ‘poet of the family’ (Sharp, p. 73). In 1847, when she was seventeen, these and other poems were collected together and published as Verses by Christina G. Rossetti. Christina’s grand­father Gaetano Polidori printed the book on his private press and distributed it to family and friends.

Rossetti’s early lyrics, many of which are about unfulfilled or unrequited love, show signs of the fluency and immediacy that characterises her poetry. These characteristics have led to a tendency to see Rossetti primarily as a poet of personal experience whose melancholy lyrics are expressions of private grief. Hence, her poems have been examined for clues to her history; the speakers of sighing poignant lyrics like ‘Mirage’ and ‘Echo’ viewed as versions of herself. Yet to read Rossetti’s lyrics as directly or indirectly revealing about her own life is to overlook the fact that they emerge from a tradition of women’s writing which itself drew inspiration from the first woman poet: Sappho. Rossetti borrows the melancholy tone and the theme of unhappy love from Felicia Hemans and L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon). While the poem ‘L. E. L.’ (p. 104) is an obvious homage to the earlier poet, others like ‘Remember’ and ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, betray the influence of both Hemans and Landon.

Although Rossetti inherits the myth of the suffering, suicidal poetess, she is alive to its uses, and its ironies. At the age of fifteen, Rossetti wrote a semi-autobiographical novella, Maude, about a young poetess whose melancholy verses perplex those who read them:

. . . it was the amazement of every one what could make her poetry so broken-hearted as was mostly the case. Some pronounced that she wrote very foolishly about things she could not possibly understand; some wondered if she really had any secret source of uneasiness; while some simply set her down as affected. Perhaps there was a degree of truth in all these opinions. [Maude, p. 31]

This teasing proposal of alternatives which may or may not explain the derivation of Maude’s ‘broken-hearted’ poetry suggests Rossetti’s awareness of the ways in which such poetry, especially when written by a young woman, might be received. Her response is to confound such readings, while also signalling the possibility that broken-heartedness might be an affectation, a pose deliberately adopted by the writer.

The playful and sceptical attitude revealed in Maude offers an insight into the ways in which Rossetti positions herself in relation to this tradition. Although she identifies with it, she also ‘probes it from within’ (Leighton,

p. 141). Critics have noted that Rossetti’s own ‘broken-hearted’ verses are, on closer examination, less transparent and perhaps less heartfelt than they appear. The composure of Rossetti’s speakers lends her poetry an air of ‘indifference’ that is lacking in the work of her predecessors (pp. 144–5). For example, the first stanza of the ‘Song’ ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, in which a speaker exhorts her lover not to mourn her, ends on a note which sounds oddly unconcerned: ‘And if thou wilt, remember, /And if thou wilt, forget.’ This indifference is then carried over into the second stanza, in which the dead speaker imagines herself in a state far beyond life, love and feeling:

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget

The assertions of the opening lines of this stanza, ‘I shall not see . . . ’/ ‘I shall not feel . . . ’ give way to the indeterminacy of ‘dreaming through the twilight’. Death is figured here as a curiously attractive state, a state of anaesthetized cynicism in which the speaker’s lost-love becomes inconsequential: ‘Haply I may remember,/And haply may forget.’ The variation of the two-line refrain, which hovers between remembering and forgetting, at the end of the second stanza underlines the suggestion of the speaker’s acceptance of this uncertainty.

Rossetti, then, writes both with and against the tradition of sentimental, ‘womanly’ verse. Borrowing the themes of love and loss from her predecessors, she handles them with a sense of irony and objectivity. Rossetti’s lyrics speak as much of emotional reserve in the face of loss as they do of suffering. In her hands, the lyric ‘I’ starts to seem less like a mirror than a mask. Certainly many of her poems are, like the quizzical, teasing lyric ‘Winter: My Secret’ (p. 76), concerned with withholding rather than revealing:

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:

Perhaps some day, who knows?

But not today; it froze, and blows, and snows,

And you’re too curious: fie!

Provocative and mischievous, the poem creates and sustains a curiosity which it then refuses to satisfy. In an elaborately worked-out tease, the speaker promises much but ultimately reveals nothing. The poem is a series of postponements and deferrals, hints and hesitations; the speaker’s circumlocutions are shadowed by the broad movement of the poem which progresses from winter to spring to summer

Reviews for Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti

[big_bang_gorilla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you like the poet, this is a handsome volume done up with decoration and typeface that mimic the period very well.

[porian_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A nice selection of Ms Rossetti's classic. The layout is nice and the print is agreeable, but there are no scholarly notes to distract a reader with. The book often only quotes parts of poems, which gets annoying when you keep seeing the same title over and over, but it gives a great range of poetry from the religious verse to love poetry to children's rhymes. She has the most marvelous ear and can pull off some rhymes that most normally can't.