My Heart is Like a Singing Bird - Selected Bird Poems of Christina Rossetti

By Christina Rossetti and John James Audubon

"My Heart is Like a Singing Bird - Selected Bird Poems of Christina Rossetti" contains a fantastic collection of beautiful nature poetry by English poet Christina Georgina Rossetti, with each poem linked by the common theme of birds. A wonderful little poetry pocket book brimming with 15 delightful avian poems coupled with colour illustrations by John James Audubon that would make for a fantastic gift for birdwatchers, twitchers and literature lovers alike. Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894) was an English writer famous for her devotional, romantic, and children's poems. Her most well known poems include "Goblin Market" and "Remember", and she also wrote the lyrics to two famous British Christmas carols: “In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Love Came Down at Christmas". Other notable works by this author include: “Commonplace and Other Stories” (1870), “Speaking Likenesses” (1874), and “Called to Be Saints” (1881). Contents include: “Birds and Poets, an Excerpt by John Burroughs”, “A Birthday”, “The First Spring Day”, “A Birds-eye View”, “On the Wing”, “A Bird Song”, “Bird Raptures”, “Bird or Beast?”, “A Green Cornfield”, “Gone Forever”, “Symbols”, “April - An excerpt from The Months: A Pageant”, “Freaks of Fashion”, “An Old World Thicket”, “A Wintry Sonnet”, and “The Peacock has a Score of Eyes”. Ragged Hand is proud to be publishing this brand new collection of classic poetry now complete with illustrations by James John Audubon and an excerpt by John Burroughs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ragged Hand
• Release date: Oct 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528792837

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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Christina Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti was born on 5th December 1830, at 38 Charlotte Street, London. She was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional and children's poems – best known for her works Goblin Market, Remember, and the Christmas carol, In the Bleak Midwinter.

Rossetti was the daughter of Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and a political exile from Vasto, Abruzzo, and Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician, John William Polidori. She had two brothers and a sister (Dante, William, and Maria), all of whom grew up to become fellow writers and artists.

Christina was a lively and intelligent child, and was educated at home by her mother and father. They gave her religious works, classics, fairy tales and novels to study – and Rosetti delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. The influence of the work of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home, and would have a deep impact on Rossetti's later writing.

In the 1840s, her family faced severe financial difficulties due to the deterioration of her father's physical and mental health. In 1843, he was diagnosed with persistent bronchitis, possibly tuberculosis, and faced losing his sight. He gave up his teaching post at King's College and though he lived another eleven years, suffered from depression and never fully recovered. As a result of this tension, when she was fourteen, Rosetti suffered a nervous breakdown and left school. Bouts of depression and related illness followed.

It was during this period that Rossetti, her mother and her sister became deeply interested in the teachings of the Church of England – and