Cecilia never went to school
Without her gladiator.
The earliest lines that Christina Rossetti ever composed seem at first glance an inauspicious beginning for a girl who would grow up to become one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. But look again. This tiny ‘poem’, dictated by the five-year-old Rossetti when she was too young to write it down herself, contains in embryo the structure, ideas and themes characteristic of the poet’s adult work. We have a young girl, the spectre of a school, and then, surprisingly, a gladiator appears. This meeting of the mundane and the extraordinary, the material and the magical, is described in the simple yet tightly controlled style which would shape Rossetti’s best-known adult poetry, such as ‘A Birthday’ or ‘Goblin Market’, her most famous and widely studied poem. That Cecilia and her gladiator are united in metre as well as in purpose shows us that Rossetti’s technical ability was keeping pace with her developing imagination.
Of Rossetti’s first effort, her brother William Michael wrote, ‘There was no reason for coupling “gladiator” with “Cecilia”’, beyond the fact that a ‘“gladiator” would be a man capable of showing some fight for “Cecilia” upon emergency.’1 But here, as with the rest of Rossetti’s poetry, ‘showing some fight’ is reason enough. Her poems, both secular and devotional, create imaginative arenas where gods meet mankind, muses face poets, and hope does battle with despair. That these arenas are often domestic, that their conflicts are drawn on a small scale, and that their combatants are often female, does not make their struggles any less heroic.
In Rossetti’s poetry, ordinary household errands like grocery shopping can become extraordinary events rife with magical and transformative potential. In ‘Goblin Market’, for example, when young Laura exchanges a lock of her hair for the goblin merchants’ enchanted fruit, she doesn’t realize that her very self is part of the bargain. She begins to crave the fruit to the exclusion of all other wants, but the goblin men will only do business with her sister Lizzie. When Lizzie refuses to sample their fruit for herself, they turn violent and attempt to force-feed her their enchanted wares. Without tasting the fruit, she runs home and instructs Laura to suck its curative juices directly from her skin:
“Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
(ll. 468-74)
The poem’s fairy-tale world fascinated Victorian readers, most notably Lewis Carroll, who used it as an inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). According to William Michael, Christina Rossetti herself claimed that ‘she did not mean anything profound by this fairy tale’,2 but this is part of its attraction. ‘Goblin Market’ has been able to retain its grip on both Victorian and modern imaginations precisely because Rossetti is not prescriptive about its meaning.
When Rossetti fell out of fashion in the twentieth century, it was ‘Goblin Market’ that resurrected her reputation. The scenes of goblin assault on Laura and Lizzie’s virtue, as well as Lizzie’s very carnal cure of her ailing sister, recaptured the imagination of the reading public in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist classics like The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) discussed the poem in terms of female resistance and empowerment through sisterhood, while Playboy took a rather different view. The magazine reproduced the poem in 1973 for its ‘Ribald Classics’ series, accompanied by a Kinuko Craft illustration, which, unlike the poem itself, left little to the imagination. Although the devoutly religious Rossetti might not regard it as a compliment, that hers is the kind of poetry which engages both feminists and pornographers testifies to its universal and lasting appeal.
The feminist and not-so-feminist rehabilitation of Rossetti in the 1970s and 1980s opened the door for a re-evaluation of her life and work. The late 1980s and 1990s saw an unprecedented number of biographical and critical publications on Rossetti, a trend which continues into the new millennium, with books coming out at the rate of at least one per year. Christina Rossetti is now taking her rightful place alongside Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning as one of the nineteenth century’s most important poets, and one of Victorian scholarship’s most popular subjects. Her themes of love rejected, hope in grief, reserved anguish and resignation to the will of God, while not always fashionable, have proved durable.
Equally persistent has been Virginia Woolf’s notion that Rossetti’s unmarried status, religious faith and relative social isolation meant she was ‘an instinctive poet’ who ‘saw the world from the same angle always’ and never ‘developed very much’.3 From first to last, Rossetti’s poems are of exceptional quality, but this high standard does not reflect a lack of development. This selection hopes to emphasize the evolution of the poet’s style by presenting her poems in the order that they were written (where possible), rather than by the date of their publication. Viewed from this angle, it becomes evident that Rossetti’s craftsmanship is deliberate, her poetry honed and refined over years of reading, writing and thinking. It is a tribute to her skill that this progression seems ‘instinctive’.
Rossetti’s wide-ranging imagination, which sustained her over a poetic career spanning fifty years, was hot-housed in the unconventional environment of her childhood home. The youngest of four children, she was born in London on 5 December 1830 to Frances (née Polidori) and Gabriele Rossetti. Her father, an academic who became Professor of Italian at Kings College, was a Neapolitan exile whose Republican views had forced him to flee Italy for England in 1824. The Rossetti home on Charlotte Street near Portland Place enjoyed frequent visits from Gabriele’s fellow-exiles, which meant that Christina and her three siblings, William Michael, Dante Gabriel and Maria, grew up in a highly politicized atmosphere.
Eschewing the middle-class custom of the day, Frances brought her children up without the aid of a nanny, while the family sitting-room served as their nursery. Their Anglo-Italian background meant that the children spoke English with their mother and Italian with their father, and they were as accustomed to pasta as they were to traditional English fare. They enjoyed frequent visits to the zoo at Regent’s Park, where, biographers have suggested, Christina’s lifelong love of animals began. The urban Rossetti children especially looked forward to visiting their maternal grandfather Gaetano Polidori’s country house in Buckinghamshire. Gaetano doted on Christina, who was said to resemble her Polidori grandmother, the English beauty Anna Maria Pierce. A former secretary to the Italian poet Vittorio Alfieri and a translator of John Milton, Polidori encouraged his grand-daughter’s literary talent, and published her first collection of poetry, Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother, in 1847 when the poet was only seventeen.
Christina and her elder sister Maria were home-schooled by their mother, a well-read, ambitious woman who fervently wished that her children ‘should be distinguished through intel-lect’.4 While the brothers remained agnostic, Christina and Maria followed their mother’s religious example, becoming devout Anglo-Catholics. In 1843, when Christina was thirteen, the Rossetti women began attending services at Christ Church, Albany Street, where the dynamic Reverend Dodsworth influenced a generation of worshippers. He was a descendant of the Oxford Movement (1833–41), begun by John Keble and Henry Newman, among others, who had written a series of pamphlets called Tracts for the Times, promoting the restoration of religious rituals long abandoned by the Church of England. Their views, which came to be known as ‘Tractarian’, ignited fierce debates about reinstating practices such as confession, the use of religious icons and the establishment of ‘Sisterhoods’ of Anglican nuns. Maria Rossetti joined the Sisterhood of All Saints, Margaret Street, in 1873, but Christina was more at home following the Tractarian literary legacy, for part of their belief was that poetry itself could be a vehicle for the expression of divine truth.
Literature and poetry were as essential to the Rossetti household as religion and politics. Frances maintained a commonplace book containing selected passages from favourite poets and writers, to which her children also contributed. She taught them to take pride in their uncle John Polidori, who was Byron’s travelling physician and the author of The Vampyre (1819). According to Christina’s biographer Georgina Battiscombe, all of the children developed a special love of horror stories.5 Along with many of her contemporaries, Christina was an admirer of Anne Radcliffe’s gothic horror tales, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Other early favourite writers were John Keats, Charles Maturin, Pietro Metastasio, Alexander Pope, Walter Scott and, of course, Dante Alighieri, of whom their father was so fond that he named Charles Dante Gabriel, their second child, after the poet. The family also played a game called bouts rime’ s (literally, ‘rhymed ends’), which involved improvising sonnets within a given time-frame. William Michael observes that his sister was especially adept at these family competitions, noting that many of her sonnets were composed in under nine minutes. This untitled effort, later reprinted in her novella Maude, illustrates the skill of the eighteen-year-old Rossetti:
Some ladies dress in muslin full and white,
Some gentlemen in cloth succinct and black;
Some patronise a dog-cart, some a hack,
Some think a painted clarence only right.
Youth is not always such a pleasing sight,
Witness a man with tassels on his back;
Or woman in a great-coat like a sack
Towering above her sex with horrid height.
If all the world were water fit to drown
There are some whom you would not teach to swim,
Rather enjoying if you saw them sink;
Certain old ladies dressed in girlish pink,
With roses and geraniums on their gown: —
Go to the Bason, poke them o’er the rim.—
It is not difficult to believe this poem was composed by a poet whose Italian nickname in childhood was Vivace (‘Lively’), but there was another, darker side to Rossetti’s personality. As children, Christina and Dante Gabriel were known as ‘the storms’, by contrast with Maria and William Michael’s ‘the calms’. Rossetti could be tempestuous if she did not get her way. A frequently cited anecdote tells us how on being ‘rebuked’ by her mother on one occasion, she retaliated by cutting her own arm with a pair of scissors. In adolescence she developed a depressive strain, a condition which also affected her brother Dante Gabriel at different times during his life. Whether this is a question of artistic temperament or biological inheritance (their uncle John Polidori was a famous suicide) remains a mystery.
Her father also shared the passionate, sometimes depressive temperament of his two youngest children. In 1842, he fell seriously ill after his badly received, infamous publications on Dante, which insisted that the great poet’s works had been written in a secret anti-papal code. Thoroughly incapacitated, he gave up work, forcing Frances and Maria into governessing, while his daily care fell to Christina. There was a failed attempt by the Rossetti women at running a girls’ day school, but in 1845 the responsible William Michael became head of the family, stoically accepting a dull job at the Inland Revenue in order to support them, and to keep Dante Gabriel at art school.
Christina Rossetti herself experienced some kind of breakdown in 1845 when she was fifteen. She began to suffer from the various physical maladies that would plague her for the rest of her life. Still, she must have been made of pretty stern stuff, because, as William Michael notes, ‘she survived every single member of the Rossetti and Polidori families, myself and my children alone excepted’.6 Biographer Jan Marsh tells us that the diagnosis at the time, of angina pectoris, was unlikely, and points to a second-hand report of her medical notes in which her doctor mentioned that ‘she was more or less out of her mind (suffering, in fact, from a form of insanity, I believe a kind of religious mania)’.7 Whether the cause was physical or mental or a combination of the two, it seems that Rossetti recovered, though she endured the effects of ill-health all her life. It is tempting to suppose that it was after this breakdown that the poet’s ‘lively’ spirit was suppressed, and the ‘gloomy’ poetry for which she would become famous began. But there is another way to view this sequence of events: after Rossetti’s poetic career takes off, we hear no more of antics with scissors or episodes of being ‘out of her mind’.
Rossetti’s more severe symptoms appear to have lessened around the time that she began to publish her poetry. In 1848, ‘Heart’s Chill Between’ and ‘Death’s Chill Between’ appeared in The Athenaeum literary magazine, while in 1850 her poems were published in the magazine set up by Dante Gabriel and the rest of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art. Though the members of the Brotherhood were more famous, it was Christina who garnered the most critical praise. Publishing under the pseudo-medieval name of Ellyn Alleyn was her only real concession to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, which, guided by the spirit of Thomas Carlyle and the Arthurian poetry of Tennyson, pined for a lost, idealized medieval England. The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers’ contributions to the first issue of The Germ included poems with titles such as ‘My Beautiful Lady’, ‘Of My Lady in Death’ and ‘The Love of Beauty’. Christina Rossetti submitted ‘Repining’, a lengthy metaphysical debate between a woman and a Christ-figure.
While Rossetti’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelite artistic project remained peripheral, she formed a personal attachment to one of its quieter members, the painter James Collinson. Collinson was, though not a genius, a solid painter, whose presence in the rambunctious Pre-Raphaelite group seems odd in view of his retiring personality and reported tendency to fall asleep during the group’s revels. He was also a religious man, a member of Christ Church, Albany Street, and seemingly perfect for the devout Christina Rossetti. But after the pair were engaged, Collinson suffered a religious crisis and converted to Roman Catholicism, and Rossetti refused to marry him. Anglo-Catholicism was always having to defend itself against accusations of ‘Romish’ or ‘Papist’ inclinations, and although Rossetti was not strictly anti-Catholic (in fact, she wrote a sympathetic sonnet about Newman’s conversion to Catholicism), she seems to have felt that an inter-faith marriage was not compatible with her religion. This was not a decision she took lightly; William Michael describes it as ‘a blow from which she did not fully recover for years’.8
But while she was recovering, she was also writing. Her father’s death in 1854 presaged a flurry of activity; perhaps working kept grief at bay. Being rejected as a prospective Florence Nightingale nurse in the Crimean War did not prevent her from trying elsewhere; she joined the volunteers at the St Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women at Highgate, along with working at her family’s day schools. In the run-up to her most famous volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), Rossetti published the short story ‘The Lost Titian’ in Crayon and ‘Nick’ in National Magazine, as well as poems in Once a Week and Macmillan’s Magazine.
Goblin Market and Other Poems was a critical and commercial success, despite John Ruskin’s bemusing warning to Dante Gabriel that ‘your sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like’. He added that ‘she must have the Form first’.9 In fact, form almost always came first for Rossetti, and is a particular feature of ‘Goblin Market’, the subject of Ruskin’s unfair critique. Echoing the sales-pitch of the goblin merchants, Rossetti’s subliminal rhymes and rhythms transform what is essentially a shopping list into a catalogue of temptation:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
(ll. 5–14)
The sheer profusion of fruit (more is listed further on in the poem) is the key to its appeal, as is the sing-song rhythm of alternating dactylic and trochaic feet, which mimics the sound of a vendor hawking his wares. There is also a rhythmic forewarning of the loss of control which the fruit will provoke. Lines 5, 7 and 9 share the same dimeter, a dactyl followed by a trochee, while lines 6, 8 and 10 are comprised of two dactylic feet. But lines 11–14 unexpectedly unravel into exclusively dactylic dimeter, reflecting in metre how easy it is to get carried away by this magical fruit. The rhyme loses restraint along with the rhythm: where we might expect lines 5 and 6 eventually to find a corresponding rhyme, in fact after line 9 it becomes obvious that no such rhyme is forthcoming. Instead, we are given the same incantatory rhyming word, ‘berries’, whose sibilants rattle and hiss through every line like a tempting serpent.
Goblin Market and Other Poems proved Ruskin utterly wrong about Rossetti’s grasp of ‘form’. In fact, Rossetti is often at her best, and most sophisticated, when exploring a complex idea within the formal confines of, for example, the sonnet. ‘Remember’, one of her best-loved poems, is still frequently chosen for funerals and memorial services. Its deceptively simple form and ‘day by day’ language evoke the speaker’s struggle to come to terms with the complex realities of mortality:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that I once had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Encouraged by the success of Goblin Market, Rossetti prepared another volume of poetry, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, which was published by Macmillan in 1866. It was greeted with less critical fanfare, but nonetheless contains some first-rate work, such as ‘Twice’, ‘The Queen of Hearts’, ‘What Would I Give’, ‘Memory’ and ‘L.E.L.’, as well as her rare political poems ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children’ and ‘A Royal Princess’. That year also saw a second marriage proposal, this time from Charles Cayley, a scholar and translator who had been given Italian lessons by Gabriele. He was by all accounts the stereotypical absent-minded professor, abstracted and absorbed wholly by his work. Rossetti, who idealized the qualities of reserve and dutiful application, became great friends with Cayley. William Michael tells us that she turned down his proposal, however, because she had ‘probed his faith, and found it either strictly wrong or woefully defective’.10 Although biographers have wondered whether this was the true reason, speculating either that she was not in love, was afraid of sex, was possibly a lesbian, and so on, it is equally intriguing to take Rossetti at her word. Rossetti’s primary relationship outside her family was with God. Age and experience did not cause this bond to weaken; rather the relationship only intensified. Always a deeply religious person, both in her life and in her art, Rossetti gave God the kind of attention other poets might lavish on a human muse.
In 1870, she published Commonplace and Other Short Stories, a prose-work which was not as well reviewed as her poetry, causing a temporary retreat from short fiction. In 1872, she returned to form with Sing-Song, a book of children’s verse with illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Because they do not shy away from the darker aspects of childhood experience, these poems are as sophisticated and original as any of Rossetti’s adult work, and deserve much more critical and popular attention than they have thus far received. Her succinct style, her eye for a startling image and her love of rhyme and rhythm serve her children’s poetry well, as is evident in this untitled piece:
An emerald is as green as grass;
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brilliant stone,
To catch the world’s desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
But a flint holds fire.
A substantial amount of Rossetti’s poems for children have been included in this edition in the hope that they will be rediscovered by a new generation of readers.
Between the publication of Commonplace and Sing-Song, Rossetti fell victim to Graves’ disease, a malfunction of the thyroid gland, some symptoms of which are weight gain, goitre, protruding eyes and mood changes. William Michael informs us that his sister lost her good looks to this incurable illness. Her joking references to herself as ‘the fat poetess’ in her letters cannot quite conceal the very real pain this transformation caused her. Difficult times followed, including Dante Gabriel’s mental breakdown and Maria Rossetti’s moving out of the family home to become an Anglican nun.
In this time of upheaval, Christina turned once again to writing, producing a collection of prayers, the somewhat clumsily subtitled Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874). In the same year, she published Speaking Likenesses, a collection of short stories for children which was received with lukewarm reviews but sold well. Such was her popularity that in 1875 Macmillan published a collected edition of her poems, Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems, but the following year brought more heartbreak with the death of Maria from cancer at the age of forty-nine. A passage from Rossetti’s devotional prose-work of 1885, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, gives us a portrait in miniature of their close relationship. Maria is terminally ill, and the sisters are planning her memorial service. When the notoriously unfashionable Christina reveals her plan to wear an outmoded outfit to the funeral, her sister remarks tartly, ‘Why make everything as hopeless looking as possible?’11
Like Time Flies, the rest of Rossetti’s devotional prose-works were very popular, and generated more income than her poetry. Often a mix of poetry and prose, these volumes were intended to supplement other Christian readings, and to provide food for thought. Devotional writing was a way for women of a theological bent to participate in discussions usually reserved for official, male members of the clergy. Rossetti, whose relationship with her religion was as intellectual as it was spiritual, struggled powerfully with issues of faith, and took both her subject matter and her audience very seriously.
Although she is accused by William Michael of being ‘overscrupulous’ as a Christian, she is determined not to be so as a writer. Early on in Time Flies she displays a poet’s respect for form: ‘Scrupulous Christians need special self-sifting. They too often resemble translations of the letter in defiance of the spirit: their good poem has become unpoetical.’ We expect a devout Christian like Rossetti to argue that ‘unpoetical’ poems are redeemed by their ‘good’ message, but instead she challenges this commonplace. Morality and artistic merit are linked, but not in the way we might anticipate. ‘Scrupulous persons’, in fact, endanger the Christian message: ‘Their aim is to be accurate; a worthy aim: butdo they achieve accuracy? Such handling as blunts the pointed and flattens the lofty cannot boast of accuracy.’ The ‘spirit’ in which ‘the letter’ of Christianity is communicated is important to its meaning, as Rossetti makes clear: ‘he (or she) cannot be an efficient Christian who exhibits the religion of love as unlovely.’12
Readers responded to her frank, thoughtful style, ensuring that her prose-works went into multiple editions. Although Time Flies, with its diary-style entries and poems, would be of most interest to the general reader, her other works – Annus Domini, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1874), Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Letter and Spirit (1883) and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892) - give fascinating insight both into High Church theology and women’s place within it, as well as providing the original context for some of Rossetti’s most beautiful poems. These works also reveal Rossetti’s keen intellect, original thought, sense of humour, and sense of herself as a writer.
Along with the prose-works, Rossetti kept producing poetry, releasing A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881. This volume confirms Rossetti’s status as a master sonneteer, with ‘Monna Innominata’, ‘Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets’ and ‘The Thread of Life’. The most famous of these, ‘Monna Innominata’ (‘Unnamed Lady’), is a bravura sequence of fourteen Petrarchan sonnets describing the love of a female poet for her male muse. Technically and emotionally complex, these sonnets draw on Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Canzoniere to imagine what a troubadour’s muse might say ‘Had such a lady spoken for herself. Probably, Rossetti tells us in the preface to this poem, ‘the portrait left us might have appeared more tender, if less dignified, than any drawn even by a devoted friend’. ‘Monna Innominata’ picks up a theme originally explored in a sonnet of 1856 entitled ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, about Dante Gabriel’s obsessive paintings of his lover, Elizabeth Siddal. Although the painted woman is ‘Fair as the moon and joyful as the light’ (l. 11), the painter has depicted her ‘Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’ (l. 14).
Dante Gabriel’s mental and physical health had been deteriorating for some time, and the depression that had claimed the life of his suicidal uncle John Polidori at last appeared to claim him. His mental state was not helped by the chloral and morphia he was prescribed, and, after suffering a minor stroke and kidney failure, he died at Birchington in Kent in 1882. He was followed by his mother Frances in 1886, whose death dealt quite a blow to Christina, who was closer to her mother than to any other person in her life. In the interim, her would-be fiance and lifelong close friend Charles Cayley had also died (1883).
Rossetti’s final and most financially successful volume of poetry, Verses (1893), culled poems from her devotional prose-works Called to be Saints, Time Flies and The Face of the Deep. Characteristic of Rossetti, it is a sober yet hopeful collection, its more mature voice inviting comparison with the gambolling goblins of Rossetti’s youthful poetry. It is heaped with many forgotten and overlooked treasures which challenge the idea that her devotional work is ‘overscrupulous’, pious or unthinking. Take, for example, the following untitled poem whose first line, with its striking and inventive internal rhyme, is anything but ‘piteous’:
Piteous my rhyme is
What while I muse of love and pain,
Of love misspent, of love in vain,
Of love that is not loved again:
And is this all then?
As long as time is,
Love loveth. Time is but a span,
The dalliance space of dying man:
And is this all immortals can?
The gain were small then.
Love loves for ever,
And finds a sort of joy in pain,
And gives with nought to take again,
And loves too well to end in vain:
Is the gain small then?
Love laughs at “never,”
Outlives our life, exceeds the span
Appointed to mere mortal man:
All which love is and does and can
Is all in all then.
One of the primary aims of this edition is to draw attention both to Rossetti’s unjustly neglected devotional poems, and to the heavy influence of the Bible in Rossetti’s works. The sheer number of biblical allusions is nearly overwhelming, yet their treatment within the poetry should not be regarded as uninformed or unsophisticated. Half of her approximately 1,200 poems are specifically designated as devotional, but the remainder refer to the Authorized Version of the Bible so often that the distinction between secular and devotional work borders on hair-splitting. Although some critics have suggested that knowledge of the Bible is not required for an understanding or appreciation of Rossetti’s poetry, it would be extraordinary, not to mention counterproductive, to recommend that readers should continue in ignorance. Rossetti is as much a descendant of the Hebrew poet of the Song of Solomon as she is of Dante or Tennyson. Perhaps Rossetti’s gender, or her lack of official religious rank, is responsible for this attitude: it is difficult to imagine anyone suggesting to readers of William Vaughan, George Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins that biblical literacy does not enhance the experience of reading their work. As Betty S. Flowers noted in her introduction to the Complete Poems, an understanding of Rossetti’s religious poems’ literary and spiritual relationship to the Bible means that they can no longer be dismissed as slavish reiterations of Christian dogma.13
‘Babylon the Great’, for example, is a devotional poem based on Revelation 17:1–6, which could hardly be described as unimaginative or dully pious:
Foul is she and ill-favoured, set askew:
Gaze not upon her till thou dream her fair,
Lest she should mesh thee in her wanton hair,
Adept at arts grown old yet ever new.
Her heart lusts not for love, but thro’ and thro’
For blood, as spotted panther lusts in lair;
No wine is in her cup but filth is there
Unutterable, with plagues hid out of view.
Gaze not upon her, for her dancing whirl
Turns giddy the fixed gazer presently:
Gaze not upon her, lest thou be as she
When at the far end of her long desire,
Her scarlet vest and gold and gem and pearl
And she amid her pomp are set on fire.
Elements of gothic horror and Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale imagery combine with the apocalyptic language of Revelation to create a memorable anti-sonnet; so corrupting is the Whore of Babylon that she has perverted even the sonnet itself. Instead of the fourteen lines of love we might traditionally expect, we get a monstrous dark parody, where corrupted love goes up in flames. But Rossetti’s God soothes as often as he punishes:
As froth on the face of the deep,
As foam on the crest of the sea,
As dreams at the waking of sleep,
As gourd of a day and a night,
As harvest that no man shall reap,
As vintage that never shall be,
Is hope if it cling not aright,
O my God, unto Thee.
The surface simplicity of this untitled poem enacts the very ‘froth’ it describes: it is our understanding of these images’ deeper biblical resonances which takes us beneath their surface meaning. For example, the first line’s ‘froth’ becomes even more significant when we connect it to Genesis 1:2: ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ ‘Froth’ here is not simply froth in the secular sense, but also, more darkly, it evokes the absence of ‘the Spirit of God’. Rossetti’s poem puts metaphor itself to work in service of its point about disconnection from God. The word ‘As’ continually promises a comparison, but leads nowhere until it ‘clings’ to God in the final line.
The great critical and financial success of Verses might have suggested Rossetti to Queen Victoria as a successor for Poet Laureate, a post which had been empty since Tennyson’s death in 1892, and in fact would not be filled until 1896, two years after Rossetti’s death. Certainly, there were many who thought Christina Rossetti should be in the running, notably Lewis Carroll: ‘If only the Queen would consult me as to whom to make Poet Laureate! I would say, “for once, Madam, take a lady!”’ He further lamented, and quite rightly, ‘But they never consult the right people.’14
The ‘right people’ to consult in Rossetti studies have so far been the male members of her family. Much has been written on Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and we also have her brother William Michael’s painstaking notes on his sister’s poems, some of which are reproduced in this edition. His opinion is of course valid, and his notes on his sister’s activities and those of the Pre-Raphaelites are invaluable resources for the Victorian student. Yet Rossetti scholarship is currently finding more ‘right people’ to consult about Christina Rossetti, including her mother Frances and sister Maria, whose activities may have been less public than those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but were no less important to Christina’s literary development. Mary Arseneau has recently written a book on their contributions, further suggesting the importance of the Polidori aunts, Charlotte and Eliza, for whom Christina cared until their deaths.15
The other ‘right people’ to consult in the study of Rossetti are the writers whose influence her work proudly displays. Because of her lack of formal education, religious or otherwise, it is tempting to regard Rossetti as a somewhat naıve autodidact rather than a deliberate, intelligent and skilled artist. Indeed, Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘years of traffic with men and books did not affect you in the least’.16 But no poet traffics with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, and remains unaffected. The Romantics, both first and second generation, leave their mark on Rossetti’s work, particularly Keats. With unconventional educations and close family ties, Keats and Rossetti both wrote from the margins of a more famous inner circle of poets. Rossetti’s poems respond strongly to Keats, especially her early work, which laments being ‘Shut Out’, often ‘hears the nightingale/That sadly sings’ in ‘Dream-Land’, and yearns for ‘Sweet Death’.
It has been observed that, in contrast to Keats, Rossetti has not bequeathed us letters which reveal her personality or artistic intentions. But this is another case of not consulting the right people, or in this case, the right books. For a Keatsian level of autobiographical confession from Rossetti, it is necessary to consult her devotional prose-works, particularly Letter and Spirit, Time Flies and The Face of the Deep. If these neglected works were made widely available in affordable, accessible, annotated editions, they would do much to challenge Rossetti’s reputation as too morbid, humourless, pious, or uninvolved in the affairs of the world. The notes to this edition indicate poems which appeared originally in Rossetti’s devotional prose-works and include, where particularly relevant, the prose passages following or preceding the poems.
The notes also ‘translate’ the Victorian language of flowers for the modern reader. An acquaintance with the coded significance of flowers in nineteenth-century culture enriches our understanding of Rossetti’s poems. For example, in ‘Three Stages’ the speaker concludes ‘My happy happy dream is finished with’, and, as a consequence, she determines that her ‘spirit shall keep house alone, /Accomplishing its age’ (part 2, ll. 1, 23–4). But this solitary retreat is not all it seems, as the plants growing in its garden tell us:
There other garden beds shall lie around
Full of sweet-briar and incense-bearing thyme;
There I will sit, and listen for the sound
Of the last lingering chime.
(ll. 25–8)
In the language of flowers, thyme is a symbol of activity, while sweet-briar is an emblem of poetry. To ‘keep house alone’ is one thing, but to cultivate poetry in place of companionship is quite another. Rossetti coaxes the ‘garden’ of these final four lines into life so that the stanza achieves what the speaker, who sits and listens ‘for the sound’, merely longs for. The abab rhyming scheme allows the concluding ‘chime’ to linger, as the ‘sound’ quite literally chimes with the proceeding rhyme-word, ‘thyme’. The speaker of this poem may be resigned, but the poem itself remains vital and active.
Rossetti writes in Letter and Spirit that ‘To do anything whatsoever, even to serve God, “with all the strength,” brings us into continual collision with that modern civilized standard of good breeding and good taste which bids us avoid extremes.’17 Despite Rossetti’s reputation for personal reserve and faithful resignation, hers is a poetics which does not shy away from collision and confrontation. In an era which was suspicious of professional women writers, not to mention female religious thinkers, her battle took place in public, in the form of her published, paid work. The five-year-old Rossetti had provided ‘Cecilia’ with a gladiator to walk her to school. The adult Rossetti made poetry itself her champion. Whether it is Laura of ‘Goblin Market’ resisting the monstrous merchants, the muse of ‘Monna Innominata’ turning to face her troubadour, or the speaker of hundreds of devotional poems asking difficult questions of God, Rossetti’s poetry always stands up to bullies. In the spirit of the demure but quietly confident sister of ‘The Lowest Room’, Rossetti compels us to wonder, ‘Why should not you, why should not I/ Attain heroic strength?’