# data[].attributes.body
Update: ward confirmed no discharge ut

# data[].attributes.body
Christina Rossetti's Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jerome J McGann Christina Rossetti's Poems A New Edition and a Revaluation

# data[].attributes.headline
The Pre-Raphaelites: BBC half-hour documentary

# data[].attributes.subject
The Pre-Raphaelites: BBC half-hour documentary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries (BBC Documentary) Part 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3. The Pre-Raphaelites article Dinah Roe

# data[].attributes.headline
Book chapter: 'Christina Rossetti's addictive market' (Richard J. Walker)

# data[].attributes.subject
Book chapter: 'Christina Rossetti's addictive market' (Richard J. Walker)

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjbnd.17?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood: Christina Rossetti's addictive market Christina Rossetti's addictive market from Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century on JSTOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood:, Labyrinths of Deceit, pp. 243-255

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Loom | Send a video. Not a thousand words.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get your message across with instantly shareable videos for work. Capture your screen, record your front-facing camera, and narrate it all at once, then instantly share with a simple link.

# data[].attributes.headline
Revision Guide by teacher Charlotte Unsworth

# data[].attributes.subject
Revision Guide by teacher Charlotte Unsworth

# data[].attributes.headline
In Defense of Goblin Market as a Victorian Fairytale

# data[].attributes.subject
In Defense of Goblin Market as a Victorian Fairytale

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Food and Cooking PLUS In defense of GM as fairytale

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Food and Cooking PLUS In defense of GM as fairytale

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/birthday

# data[].attributes.body
Sexuality and Love

# data[].attributes.body
Sexuality column (Maynard; Oz)
Sisterhood column (Scott Rodgers)
Religion (Mary Arsenau)
The Market for poetry (Lee Eriikson)

# data[].attributes.headline
Re-reading Sisterhood - Scott Rogers (2003)

# data[].attributes.subject
Re-reading Sisterhood - Scott Rogers (2003)

# data[].attributes.body
"Rossetti demonstrates how women's relationships, even
within female communities, are triangulated in relation to men."

This essay will illuminate GM; Soeur Louise; Maude Clare (any poems with two females).  What about Remember?

# data[].attributes.headline
“In Defense of ‘Goblin Market’ as a Victorian Fairy Tale” 2015, Erica Leigh Durian

# data[].attributes.subject
“In Defense of ‘Goblin Market’ as a Victorian Fairy Tale” 2015, Erica Leigh Durian

# data[].attributes.body
Durian, Erica Leigh.  Unpublished  Manuscript. 2015. All Rights Reserved.
This reading prioritises the poem as a fairy tale, as CR stressed it to be. Durian argues that fairy tales support a range of meanings and interpretations, and that therefore such a stance does not preclude other readings, but actually supports its status as fairy tale.

# data[].attributes.body
An approach to reading texts
Includes a New Historicist reading of Goblin Market

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Extracts from Brindle New_Historicism_and_CRs Goblin Market

# data[].attributes.headline
Extracts from Harold Bloom – ‘Genius’ (2002)

# data[].attributes.subject
Extracts from Harold Bloom – ‘Genius’ (2002)

# data[].attributes.body
These extracts are useful generally on the CR as erotic; on the doctrine of soul-sleep, and for finding a quote about how she merges the sacred and the secular (non-religious).

He also states that CR believes “all love between women and men is founded upon mutual betrayal”.

It has comments explicitly on Uphill, and briefly on ‘Remember’, ‘A Birthday’, ‘Goblin Market’

# data[].attributes.headline
Pre-Raphaelite Sensuality and Christian Morality in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (Janine Davidge)

# data[].attributes.subject
Pre-Raphaelite Sensuality and Christian Morality in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (Janine Davidge)

# data[].attributes.body
This essayist argues that Goboin Market "incorporates a Pre-Raphaelite sensualistic quality to allegorically represent the tempting pursuit of sensuality forbidden to not only Victorian women but women and men in general"
She doesn't see the religious and sensual aspects as contradictory.

# data[].attributes.headline
A New Historicist reading of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’

# data[].attributes.subject
A New Historicist reading of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’

# data[].attributes.body
Kym Brindle. Read this! "‘Goblin Market’ was published at a time of widespread unease about the development and work of Anglican religious sisterhoods."... "Specific fears centred on women’s role within the church prompting debates as to the extent to which women should be allowed to enter into religious life. As a leading promoter of protestant sisterhoods, Pusey’s ideas provoked outrage from those who believed celibacy contradicted women’s ideological destiny as wives and mothers."

# data[].attributes.headline
‘Locked together in one nest’:
The Limitless Polysemy of Rossetti’s Goblin Market

# data[].attributes.subject
‘Locked together in one nest’:
The Limitless Polysemy of Rossetti’s Goblin Market

# data[].attributes.body
Haythem Bastawy 2015
argues "that a psycho-analytic reading of Rossetti’s Goblin Market could successfully sustain itself, combining elements of Marxist, feminist, religious, sexual and queer readings under the banner of the unconscious"

# data[].attributes.headline
"Like a Beacon Left Alone": The Position of Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'

# data[].attributes.subject
"Like a Beacon Left Alone": The Position of Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'

# data[].attributes.body
Peter Merchant 1994

# data[].attributes.headline
NEW: Julia Saville on Marriage and Gender

# data[].attributes.subject
NEW: Julia Saville on Marriage and Gender

# data[].attributes.body
Notes from Stephen's Prickett's chapter

# data[].attributes.body
- The Secret of Christina Rossetti"
Angela Leighton (1990)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When I Am Dead, My Dearest The Secret of Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.body
Anthony H Harrison

# data[].attributes.headline
Landow - ‘Rossetti's dead speakers concentrate more narrowly upon offering a woman's view of male conceptions of romantic love and loss’.

# data[].attributes.subject
Landow - ‘Rossetti's dead speakers concentrate more narrowly upon offering a woman's view of male conceptions of romantic love and loss’.

# data[].attributes.headline
NEW Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and "Goblin Market"

# data[].attributes.subject
NEW Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and "Goblin Market"

# data[].attributes.body
Mary Arseneau 1993

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Incarnation and Interpretation - CR the Oxford Movement and Goblin Market

# data[].attributes.headline
The Madwoman in the Attic - extracts referencing VARIOUS critics

# data[].attributes.subject
The Madwoman in the Attic - extracts referencing VARIOUS critics

# data[].attributes.body
I have drawn out a variety of perspectives

# data[].attributes.body
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar:
Long; excellent - shorter edit to follow

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/harrison2/1.html

# data[].attributes.body
Suzanne Williams

# data[].attributes.body
By critic F. Elizabeth Gray

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
N INETEENTH -C ENTURY G ENDER S TUDIES

I SSUE 10.2 (SUMMER 2014)
"With thrilling interest":
Victorian Women Poets Report the News
By F. Elizabeth Gray , Massey University, New Zealand

<1> When, on October 25, 1854, Major General James Brudenell led a small force of mounted cavalrymen armed with lances and sabres on a frontal assault on a well-prepared, elevated, and impregnably defended Russian artillery battery, the doomed attempt left 118 dead and 127 wounded for no military gain. The widely reported tactical fumble was, however, within weeks elevated to the stuff of nationalistic myth upon the publication in The Examiner, on 9 December 1854, of Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade." To be memorised and recited by generations of schoolchildren as the embodiment of British values, the poem, as Kathryn Ledbetter has adroitly argued, was also a savvy marketing ploy on the part of its author.( 1 ) Tennyson drew on journalistic accounts to create an emotive and nationalistic account that in turn built his own reputation and profits. While Tennyson offers arguably the supreme example of a Victorian poet capitalising on the news, countless nineteenth-century women also published periodical poetry that drew from contemporary news accounts creative and other kinds of capital. Women poets used journalistic accounts somewhat differently from Tennyson: less to promote themselves as cultural or literary authorities than to create dialogues that forwarded their own values, sometimes in counterpoint to the accounts that inspired them; and to challenge conventional thinking about the authoritative status of texts purporting to offer 'a true account'.

<2> Women launched themselves into journalism in increasing numbers in the Victorian period, but often recorded the dilemmas they faced, dilemmas that were particularly sharp if they sought reporting work. In "The Confessions of a Newspaper Woman", Helen M. Winslow describes her life as a female reporter on a metropolitan daily paper:

I have attended an all-day convention, and worked far into the night, writing reports for messenger boys to take in sections "red hot" to the presses ... I have worked eight hours a day in my dark, dingy city office ... doing the work evenings ... going to the theatres from twice to five times a week ... The life is too hard and hardening... I have crawled from my bed in the morning only to fall back across it in a dead faint... Women are not fitted for the rush-at-all-hours a reporter's life demands. There will be a chance for them as editorial, fashion, household, society, and critical writers.( 2 )

<3> Such an account reflected and reinforced the concentration of Victorian women contributors to the 'cosy corners' of periodical publishing (the Fireside Chats, the Mothers' and Fashion columns, and particularly at century's end, the celebrity interviews). The guides for women seeking journalistic work that proliferated in the latter decades of the nineteenth century largely agreed, as does the writer of an article entitled "Young Women as Journalists" who warns "the girl reporter" she must assume "a bold mien" when she encroaches on a masculine and essentially threatening domain. The risks of the close proximity both to men and to unsavoury places and circumstances underlie the warning "it [reporting] is not an occupation which tends to the development of feminine graces" ( Girls Own Paper, 396). Michelle Tusan has shown that while the women's advocacy press in the second half of the century affirmed and valued the contribution of women journalists, most women maintained only "a marginal existence" in the profession, often facing serious prejudice (15). The pioneering efforts of reporters like Emily Crawford and Lady Florence Dixie notwithstanding,( 3 ) it was generally agreed that the nineteenth-century newsroom was no place for women. However, twenty-first century scholars of the nineteenth-century press have to date largely overlooked the considerable, various, and creative engagement of many Victorian women with reporting and with the production of news. One of the primary venues for this engagement was the genre of poetry.

<4> Occasional poetry, verse specifically possessed of a public or social occasion, was beloved by the Victorians and by their Poet Laureate.( 4 ) Topical verse, as a narrower subset of occasional poetry, also proliferated in the nineteenth century; it may be defined as verse that, with a greater or lesser degree of specificity, responded to current events or contemporaneous issues. Such verse, of which Elizabeth Barrett's "The Cry of the Children" is perhaps the most famous Victorian example, insists upon being examined in close relation to the texts that contributed to its production: the journalistic reports in the dailies and weeklies, the parliamentary reports and commissions, the self-identifyingly factual material that occasioned the creation of self-consciously creative art. Dallas Liddle has challenged scholars to more closely examine what he dubs "peri-journalism," that is, poetic, historical and novelistic texts "generated at points of contact and translation between genres" (167). Topical poetry provides just such a suggestive contact point.

<5> When the topical poem is itself published in a newspaper or periodical, the contact point between news reporting and poetic refraction then becomes even richer, taking on multiple dimensions. In recent years, periodical poetry has been recuperated as a serious site for study. In 2007, Linda Hughes' provocative article on the omission of poetry from the Wellesley Index argued for the signal importance of the poetry printed in newspapers and magazines in relation to periodicals' "cultural politics, editorial principles, authorship, formal dynamics, and visuality" (115). Natalie Houston, in a study of poetry published in the Times in the 1860s, focusses somewhat more closely on poems treating topical events, which she notes sometimes "participated in a textual conversation of several weeks' length" (237). Most recently, the Spring 2014 issue of Victorian Poetry is devoted to periodical poetry, and although none of the articles specifically treats the inter-relationship of journalism and verse, Alison Chapman's and Caley Ehnes' introduction takes care to note that "publishing in an ephemeral serial allowed the swift circulation of topical poems directly related to news events, interweaving poetry and journalism" (3).( 5 )

<6> This article focuses on topical poetry by Victorian women, published in periodicals, that self-consciously enters and constructs a conversation with news events presented in the same or other periodicals. As Houston has rightly noted, the highly topical nature of much periodical poetry renders it difficult to assess when extracted from the original context (234), but when deliberately read in and through that original context, these poems' complex operations may be revealed and analysed. In using the term 'conversation' I am drawing on Jahan Ramazani's recent book Poetry and its Others, which, arguing against Bakhtin's dictum that lyric poetry is essentially monologic, claims that news is one of poetry's most frequent and productive interlocutors. Ramazani argues that in undertaking active dialogue with news, poetry "feasts on, digests and metabolizes" this other linguistic form (7). Although the book focuses mostly on later twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, Ramazani's call to "cast[] poetry into animated conversation with neighboring discourses" (7) applies just as urgently to nineteenth-century verse. In this article I read three examples of such nineteenth-century poems, in the context of contemporary journalistic accounts, asking a series of questions: What is the poem doing with the news? How is the news being reflected, refracted, or repurposed within the poem? How is the reader invited to respond to the poem, in distinction from response to news accounts of the same issue or event? I argue that the three women poets participate in and shape critical conversations not just about events and their interpretation, but also about the validity of emotion as a source of 'truth,' and about the fractured and constructed nature of authenticity and authority.
**
<7> Laurel Brake has noted that all periodical texts unavoidably foreground their temporally and contextually constructed nature: "by virtue of the format in which they appear, [these texts] are self-confessedly historical, contingent, looking backward and forward, with a historical identity" (54). Topical poems are particularly conscious and explicit in their confession of historicity. But such poems may question that relationship to history and 'true accounts' even as they avow it. Without rehearsing here the debate about the relationship between poetry and truth that dates back to Plato, I suggest that Victorian women's topical poetry foregrounds questions of authority that operate on multiple levels and are deeply implicated with gender. Women's topical poetry problematizes authority as it produces a self-consciously second-hand and secondary version of an originary account. It queries how the veracity of its own secondary account may be asserted or evaluated. It asserts the authority of the female writer to intervene in the conversation about a news event, in the face of the exclusion of the female writer from the physical site of the news room. And, as in the case of Christina Rossetti's poem on a widely-reported but subsequently corrected account of an incident in the 1857 Indian Mutiny, a poem may serve to highlight the fictive rather than factive nature of the most reliable-sounding news, suggesting a relocation of readerly 'trust' from unreliable report to the unimpeachable personal witness of the poet's emotive response.

<8> The provenance of Rossetti's poem "In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857" has been traced by Jan Marsh. Actual events at Jhansi, Rossetti's inspiration, are still contentious. In June, 1857, Indian troops at Jhansi mutinied, and some 60 European men, women, and children took refuge in the Star Fort, under the charge of Captain Alexander Skene, British superintendent of the Jhansi District. By June 8, all the Europeans were dead, but the circumstances of their deaths were to be hotly debated. The first report of the death of Captain Skene seems to have been published in the Times, on 2 September, 1857 (5). The Times printed an extract from a letter giving details of the deaths of Captain and Mrs Skene. This letter reported Skene, upon realising the hopelessness of their plight, shot his wife then himself. The Times report appears here in full:

The Mutiny at Jhansi

The following extract from a letter, just received, giving a detailed account of the death of Captain Skene, Superintendent of the Jhansi District, and of his noble wife, also of Captain Gordon, Assistant-Superintendent, will be read with thrilling interest by all whom those officers were known:-

"It is all true about poor Frank Gordon. He, Alick Skene, his wife and a few peons managed to get into a small round tower when the disturbance began; the children and all the rest were in other parts of the fort - altogether sixty. Gordon had a regular battery of guns, also revolvers; and he and Skene loading for them. The peons say they never missed once, and before it was all over they killed thirty-seven, besides many wounded. The rebels, after butchering all in the fort, brought ladders against the tower and commenced swarming up. Frank Gordon was shot through the forehead and killed at once. Skene then saw it was no use going on any more, so he kissed his wife, shot her, and then himself." R. G.

<9> This same letter was printed verbatim in the Illustrated London News on 5 September, 1857 (242). However, this account was soon contradicted by a number of other eye-witness accounts, and on September 11 the Times printed a new letter, with some corroboration from surrounding letters, reporting that Skene, his wife, and the other Europeans had surrendered and voluntarily left the fort, under assurances of safe passage. They were subsequently all killed, according to these new accounts, "by the sword" (8).

<10> According to Rossetti's notebooks, her poem "In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857" seems to have been written between September 2 and September 8 1857,( 6 ) that is, after the initial letter from R. G. was printed in the Times but before the Times issued its revised version of events. Rossetti depicts the last, loving moments of Captain Skene and his wife, as they prepare for Skene to fire the bullets that will end both their lives. Although it was apparent within a matter of days that such a scene never happened, Rossetti still chose subsequently to publish her poem, first in the periodical Once a Week (on August 13, 1859, where it appeared over a misprinted name: 'Caroline G. Rossetti'), and subsequently reprinted with an extra stanza in the volume Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). She published and republished this poem, despite full knowledge that the facts it reported were not, in fact, true. Why Rossetti did so, how she explained it, and what these choices indicate about her claims for the respective authority of poetry and news, are questions worth investigating. Here is the complete text of the 1859 poem.

"In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857"

A hundred, a thousand to one; even so;
Not a hope in the world remained:
The swarming howling wretches below
Gained and gained and gained.

Skene looked at his pale young wife:-
"Is the time come?"-"The time is come!"-
Young, strong, and so full of life:
The agony struck them dumb.

"Will it hurt much?" "No, mine own:
I wish I could bear the pang for both."
"I wish I could bear the pang alone:
Courage, dear, I am not loth."

Kiss and kiss: "It is not pain
Thus to kiss and die.
One kiss more."-"And yet one again."-
"Good-bye."-"Good-bye."

<11> The title of the poem offers directions for initial decoding by the reader by providing a highly specific location and date. That date indicates to the reader that this poem functions as a poem but also as more than a poem: it requires to be read as an account of 'the facts of' June 8, 1857. Furthermore, the title insinuates that these are accepted facts, of which the reader possesses existing knowledge, as no gloss is provided either for the specific tower or the particular location, Jhansi. How the reader should treat this account is the most interesting challenge of this somewhat slight poem. The poem implicitly acknowledges its secondary relationship to these facts because it is clear 'Caroline G. Rossetti' was not present in the tower (or for that matter in the Indian sub-continent) to bear witness. Indicating another degree of secondary relationship, Rossetti's debt to the original R.G. letter printed either in the Times or the Illustrated London News seems clear in the outline of events that she borrows, and even in the vocabulary (for example, she retains the emotive and dehumanising word "swarming"). Jan Marsh has shown how keen Rossetti was to publish both this poem and "Maud Clare" in Once a Week; Rossetti hoped to capitalise on the topical appeal of the tragic event, counting on the popular frisson lingering even though, in 1859, two years had passed since the original event.

<12> Yet despite the locative operations of the title and within the originating framework borrowed from newspaper accounts, Rossetti chooses her own point of focus, which is not on the "swarming howling wretches below" but rather on the mutual devotion of the married couple, which she portrays through repeated instances of syntactic and metrical symmetry. With the line "Skene looked at his pale young wife", Rossetti initiates a mirroring in which the two protagonists become virtually indistinguishable. The utterances of the two so closely correspond that the mutual reassurances of the third stanza must be read extremely closely to ascertain which party is to take the decisive action. The two are encompassed within and described with the same adjectival phrase ("young, strong, and so full of life"), and their actions are identical to the point of dispensing utterly with pronouns: "Kiss and kiss." The scene very rapidly (after a single stanza) moves from the exterior of a besieged Indian tower to " in the round tower," an interior scene of such marital harmony that the husband and wife truly seem 'one flesh'.

<13> Marital fidelity and devotion even unto death, rather than martial bravery and derring-do, thus centre Rossetti's poem about the round tower at Jhansi. That the topical trappings of this portrait of devotion were subsequently revealed to be fictional does not in fact have any impact on the poignancy of the 'true focus' - or the purported truth - of her account. Rossetti extends the potential range of the reader's emotional response beyond that evoked by R.G.'s letter: this account presents not just a tragedy, but a heroic and inspiring testament. As Ledbetter has noted in British Victorian Women's Periodicals, poetry that appeared in newspapers could modify the news in certain ways, articulating emotion, providing a kind of relief from harsh (or bluntly reported) realities, and offering reassurance of the continuation of certain cultural edifices (109-10). Following such a reading, Rossetti's poem offers an alternative interpretive framework for events at Jhansi, one that de-emphasises war horror and that instead salutes the unsubduable nature of British amity and fealty.

<14> Rossetti made a number of alterations in subsequent reprintings of this poem. In 1862, she inserted a new stanza after the second:

Close his arm about her now,
Close her cheek to his,
Close the pistol to her brow-
God forgive them this!

<15> Marsh suggests this added stanza gives more historical context (more 'true facts') which readers in 1862 would need, whereas 1859 readers, still in sufficient proximity to this and other tales of the horrors of the Indian Mutiny, would not require any more information than that provided by the title. While it extends the syntactic mirroring of the previous stanzas, the new stanza also inserts a note of Christian piety, beseeching the Lord to forgive the sins of murder and suicide.

<16> Later still, Rossetti reprinted the poem yet again. In the 1875 reprinting, Rossetti appended a footnote: "I retain this little poem, not as historically accurate, but as written and published before I heard the supposed facts of its first verse contradicted" (see Crump vol.I 26, 237). This is a notable explanation for what it does not explain, and for what it elides. It seems clear the poem was written when the 'supposed facts' were still uncontradicted, but it was first published some two years after the initial report of the deaths of Captain and Mrs Skene was withdrawn. The poem is, as Rossetti blithely notes, "not... historically accurate", but the 'supposed facts of its first verse' are subordinated to the greater truths of its whole - a depiction of idealised British, Christian, married love. While the events themselves may be questionable, Rossetti's account is beyond reproach. Rossetti's choices to publish and republish this poem, in relation to the retracted and the 'new' versions of actual events, make a claim for the validity of the message of this poem, despite (or even in contrast to) the non-validity of its original source. Rossetti's poem claims it tells a different kind of truth, and presents a different and unimpeachable kind of authority.
**
<17> Some ten years later, Dora Greenwell's poem "Grand Coeur Pour Grande Heure," first published in Saint Paul's Magazine in December 1870, treats the Franco-Prussian war, also known as the War of 1870. In July of that year Napoleon III had somewhat hubristically declared war on Prussia, which was allied with the Northern German Confederation and several German states, and the German coalition speedily defeated the French in a series of battles across eastern and northern France. The French lost the crucial Battle of Sedan on September 2, resulting in the capture of Napoleon III and his troops, and while the French continued to resist for several more months, Paris eventually fell on January 28, 1871. The united German Empire was declared, and France lost long-disputed territory: in May 1871 Germany was granted the regions of Alsace and Lorraine.

<18> In December 1870, when "Grand Coeur Pour Grande Heure" first appeared, the war was technically still on-going, though France's ultimate defeat was imminent and widely apparent (Greenwell's biographer William Dorling later wrote of the poem's composition: "At the time when France was crushed by German arms, and lay wounded and bleeding at the feet of her proud conqueror, Miss Greenwell wrote the following stirring lines" [204]). The conflict received broad reporting in England's press. The Times printed regular dispatches from its own correspondents as well as offering bulletins of reports from German and French papers. Daily newspapers as well as weekly and monthly periodicals regularly and closely documented events and details of the war, including the fall of Strasbourg, the numbers of casualties, and the superiority of the German armaments. St Paul's itself, within its monthly format of leisurely, lengthy essays interspersed with the occasional poem, printed four commentaries on the conflict between September and December 1870. In the same December issue as Greenwell's poem appeared, Archibald Forbes contributed a detailed twelve-page exposition outlining his "comprehension and appreciation of the Prussian soldiery, and of the Prussian military system, its characteristics and its advantages" (282), arguing the reasons he perceived for the Prussian success and the French failure in the war. Greenwell's poem, however, does not admire the Prussians.

"And is it, then, by fate or chance
Decreed, that as the ages roll
The world shall be without its France,
The body be without its soul?
Yea! let them spurn thee with their heel,
And plunge within thy heart their steel;
Be thine all anguish life can feel;
Their best, their worst, let foemen try,
Beloved France! thou canst not die!

"No! not though to dust should grind,
And beat thee into fragments small,
And scatter thee unto the wind!
Instinct, each fiery particle
With life, as is the breath of God,
Would kindle into life the clod
Whereon it fell; and thou be chief
In glory, as thou art in grief!

"Arise! and grapple with thy foes.
Thy foes without, thy foes within;
And fear not thou to meet and close
In pangs of death! thy travail throes
Are these; a purer life to win;
Shake forth thy lilies! let thy lark*
Soar, singing still above thy dark,
Ensanguined fields; the dawn is nigh;
Beloved France! thou canst not die!"

* The Gallic Legion ( alauda) was so named by Julius Caesar.

(emphasis in the original; footnote in the original)

<19> Greenwell's poem tantalisingly combines the identities of artwork and news reporting. Artistic elements are prominent: the French language title immediately communicates both the poem's subjective approach and sympathy for France, as well as its non-literal, creative response to the subject matter, founded on an emotionally stirring metaphor (a rough contextual translation of the titular phrase is "great heart for the challenging hour"). In addition to assuming an emphatically subjective and sentimental identity, the poem deploys an array of self-consciously poetical tools, opening with a rhetorical question and then moving to an invocation, directly addressing a personified France. The first stanza utilises metonymy: "[let them] plunge within thy heart their steel"; the second, biblical allusion. The third stanza makes particular use of repetitive phrasing and alliteration as it urges the French on to repeated efforts, even if those efforts seem to mean certain defeat and death. As it concludes, the poem (romantically, but impractically) compares the pains of death to labour pains ushering in a new life; it also strikes echoes of La Marseillaise in its mention of France's "ensanguined fields".

<20> Complicating its identity, the poem also asks to be read in terms of its relationship to historical fact, the contemporary conflict between 'Beloved France' and the German-Prussian alliance. The poem's footnote displays self-consciously fact-based authority, directing the reader that the phrase "let thy lark soar" should be read as more than just a poetical device: the metaphor in which "lark" represents the French forces is grounded in a verifiable historical fact (and further demonstrates the author's knowledge of Latin). Other facts are noticeable by their absence from the poem. No specific events or details of the war are offered. Even the antagonist of "beloved France" is not named, only referred to as "foes" or "foemen," or simply "them". On the one hand, the lack of specificity is explicable through the poem's consciousness of its historical and publication contexts: no poem published in England in 1870, dramatizing France as entangled in a bloody conflict, would need a gloss for readers to identify the antagonists as Prussian forces. Though Greenwell would not have known this in advance, the editors of St Paul's Magazine placed Forbes' detailed discussion of those forces some forty pages after her own poem, and his essay supplies detailed critiques of the battles of Gravelotte and the Spicherenberg (additionally noting, "the thorough checkmate of the French at Sedan is among the most brilliant of modern strategic performances" [291]). So the poem doesn't need to supply journalistic specificity because it assumes the journalistic specificity of its surroundings; in this case, it consciously directs it should be read and understood within a journalistic context. But on the other hand, omitting specific details of France's dire military position - and omitting even the name of France's enemy - helps create the emotional directiveness of the poem, as it urges France to battle nobly on without acknowledging military defeats, and urges St Paul's English readers to sympathise with the French rather than with the contemptibly anonymous foe. Thus Greenwell's poem places itself in intimate relation to journalism -and it undertakes related, but different, work.

<21> Interestingly, when "Grand Coeur Pour Grande Heure" was republished - but NOT on its first publication in the St Paul's Magazine - the poem has a date appended at its foot: 'September 29th, 1870'. The presence of this date with the poem's reprinting in Dorling's 1889 posthumous collection of Greenwell's poems means that even when extracted from the immediate periodical environment of its first appearance, the poem still asks readers to read it in relation to the historical and textual context in which it was first published. It must be read 'in conversation.' The date refers to the poem but also points beyond the poem itself; it insists that the reader place and read the poem in a specifically chronological context with reference to specific historical events; it encourages readers to conceive of the poet as inspired by current events; it foregrounds its own topicality and its relation to fact.

<22> The September date itself provokes a series of questions. This dating suggests to the reader either that the poem was composed on September 29th or that the poem comments on a particular historical event that occurred on this date - or that was reported on this date. This last possibility suggests an elision between the poem and a wartime dispatch, or a reporter's correspondence. In accounts of the military campaign and in contemporary newspapers, I cannot find September 29 1870 as having particular significance,( 7 ) but, as Ledbetter has shown in her analysis of Tennyson's political verse in periodicals, both the facts and the rhetoric of a periodical account may prompt or influence the writing of a poem. For example, it might be argued that Greenwell's poem offers a response to a passionate editorial published in the Times on September 29th, 1870, which urged the French to be practical and surrender rather than waste further lives:

Those who really knew how to fight knew also when to yield. It is otherwise with the advocates and journalists now attempting to sway the destinies of unhappy France. Men who do not fight seem unable to comprehend that the national war has been fought out. They cannot be brought to admit that all was lost when Sedan was lost... There can be no more delusive patriotism, no more hollow and false sympathy, than that which would urge France to further exertions... (9)

<23> Arguably, Greenwell's poem presents a counter-editorial. The Times piece, along with Forbes' article and other contemporary and subsequent accounts, agree that France was effectively defeated after the Battle of Sedan. Greenwell's poem notably omits mention of Sedan or, as noted above, of any specific event or occurrence within the war. Eschewing specifics, unabashedly partisan, it utters a generalised rallying cry exhorting "Beloved France" to continue to fight. The specific detail both offered (in the September 29th date) and withheld (in terms of facts about the war) foregrounds the poem's relationship to fact or report, and simultaneously suggests specificity is not an essential element of a truthful account.

<24> In terms of the poem as reportage, the address of the poem provokes its own questions. Is "Grand Coeur" truly directed at France's resistance, as the invocation suggests? Or is the poem directed at the English readers of St Paul's Magazine, to help them interpret the events of the war and (correctly) identify the villain and the hero of the conflict? Such a question may, however, be predicated on a false division: the poem might be better understood as orienting itself toward multiple audiences, working as multiple texts, in multiple literary contexts. Greenwell's poem's relationship to journalism is complex, simultaneously dependent, affirmative, and corrective. It assumes a journalistic context in order to be understood, and also offers an interpretive guide to that journalistic context, helping readers respond appropriately. To borrow Ramazani's terms, the poem digests and metabolises the news in order to insist both on its identity as a poem (that is, a conscious art-work) and on its authority to (rightly) interpret events and to (appropriately) direct the sympathies of the reader.
**
<25> In one final example from late in the century, a poem entitled "A Woman's Wage" appeared in the Women's Penny Paper on November 30, 1890, page 64, taking as its topic an article published earlier that month in the reputable, serious-minded Fortnightly Review, concerning the working conditions of women and specifically the pay-rates of seamstresses. The poem's relationship to the original report is made explicit in the parenthetical note appended directly below the poem's title, which reads thus:

(In a recent article in the Fortnightly Review, Miss Clementina Black states that such skilled work-women as army embroideresses can only earn 2d. an hour after a long apprenticeship; other women earn only 1d. an hour.) (parentheses in the original)

<26> Black's original article, "The Organization of Working Women," appeared in the Fortnightly Review in November 1889 (695-70). Unlike the previous two examples, this article does not report war news, but rather offers commentary on a contemporary social issue. The author positions herself quite explicitly: she is arguing a position, as she states in her second sentence, in which she compares the effects of economic competition on poor women to "a slavery which I believe to be worse than any of which record exists in the world" (695). The article, while not purporting to be objective, does signal unequivocally its claims to present true facts. Black writes,

I know a young woman who applied for work at a large shop: she is a skilled dressmaker. The master of the shop offered her 6. a week as an out-door hand. She said she could not live on it. He replied that he could get plenty to come at that price. [...] I visited several of these women [army embroideresses] about a year and a half ago, and carefully noted their several cases. I concluded that their wages ranged from about 2d an hour downwards (697). [...] I have myself seen the wage-book of a London woman who was paid eightpence a dozen for shirts... (698).

<27> The author emphasises her personal witness, as an informed observer of what she relates: the economically-based suffering of an entire class. After analysing a complex of causes, the second half of the article clear-sightedly explores responses to the situation, querying the potential consequences of raising wages, decrying the unintentionally destructive philanthropy of the rates system (which enables the continuation of wages below subsistence level), and, with emphasis but without histrionics, promoting the unionisation of women workers. Black marshals careful and systematic arguments, appealing to reason throughout. It is only through unionisation, claims Black at her ringing close, "that [women of the labouring classes] may now at last deliver themselves from the bondage in which many of them have been born and lived" (704).( 8 )

<28> The Women's Penny Paper poem "A Woman's Wage," credited to C. A. Dawson, owes a clear though unacknowledged debt to Hood's "The Song of the Shirt".( 9 ) Its debt to the Black article, while overtly claimed, is more oblique and the relationship between the two texts more vexed and fractured. The first two stanzas read:

An attic sloping-roofed, a broken chair
Hard by the cheerless table, and a light
Guttering in a window-draught, no rags can stop;
No fire, no food, the hopeless want of all
That give their magic warmth to hearth and home!
A woman, wan as death, her painful bones
Upstanding through the skin, the long claw hands
Clasping the cloth and flying down the seams
Until the pile of heavy needlework
Rises completed and she seeks her wage.

Her wage? The heavy wage of toil, of toil
Through twelve long hours, twelve long and cheerless hours
Of garret chill and cramp and loneliness!
Good honest labour worth an honest wage,
A Christian wage beseeming wealth and power,
Our civilised and happy century!
Oh! A good wage, a wage well merited,
"Twelve pence for twelve hours' work!" a righteous wage,
A wage to live and fatten on, a wage
To teach unceasing industry-
In every woman's ears throughout the land to ring
Until she rises from her ingle-side
And sobbing-through her tears, cries "Shame, shame, shame!"

<29> The poem echoes and magnifies Black's indignation, explicitly repeats the penny-an-hour pay rate recorded by Black, and also deploys Black's metaphor of slavery. However, the poem stops well short of echoing the solution that Black's article offers, and actually suggests a solution substantially different. In promoting unionisation, Black suggests that working women may "deliver themselves." In contrast, the fourth stanza of Dawson's poem addresses "we sister souls," invoking the predominantly middle class readers of the Women's Penny Paper as some kind of intercessor, granting them the only real agency in the poem, and handing them responsibility for ending the slavery of the suffering (and passive) seamstress:

... Let us look
Till eyes are dim with tears, till in our hearts
Flames the resolve, the strong resolve that yet
Shall move the world to empire of new day,
The glad new day of Justice. Let us look
Till burning thoughts arouse to burning deeds,
And we can sweep this curse from Christendom;
Can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, strike
These fetters from our sisters, and so turn
This bitter slavery into a bond
Binding all women in love's charity.

<30> Similarly phrased appeals to the sisterhood animate many poems and articles in the Women's Penny Paper (and its successor, the Woman's Herald), a late-century daily dedicated under the editorship of Henrietta Muller to reporting and promoting the progress of women across Great Britain and the world. However, in promoting an ideal of a global sisterhood spearheaded by philanthropic middle-class activists, as opposed to a union organised by and empowering the working women it represents, this poem works to distinctly different political ends to those promoted by the original Fortnightly Review article. In the article, Black aims to reveal that while entry into the labour market and the ensuing economic competition has led to an increase in liberty - "better education and greater freedom" (697) - for a number of middle- and lower-middle class women, what has worked to the benefit of many has also led to the piteous under-payment of the least powerful and least resourced groups of working women. The complicated operation of the labour market and the contributing role of other women is, however, elided in Dawson's poem. No cause for working class seamstresses' suffering is identified other than "accident of birth"; no responsibility is accorded to any party other than "this curse". The poem promotes sentiment over specificity. Its focus has moved from a collection of organised women to one singularised working woman who is simultaneously de-personalised, made no more than a collection of ciphers of suffering (a conglomeration of "painful bones" and "long claw hands"). Such strategies work, in effect, to ward off the threat of working-class women's political agency. Far from promoting unionisation, the poem emphasises individual weakness rather than collective strength. While filled with emotive declarations and decrials, the political impetus of the poem differs markedly from its originary source. Dawson's poem invokes but redirects Black's urgent emotionality to make its middle-class readers respond in a sympathetic but politically abstract way to the plight of the seamstresses, as distinct from responding by supporting the organisation of working women to help intervene in their own plight. The original article is digested by the poem to make the original message, I suggest, more 'digestible' to the Women's Penny Paper 's particular readers.
**
<31> The women's topical periodical poems discussed above all work in conversation with the news reports that inspired them. This article argues that this was a dynamic and constructive conversation by which poem and poet could arrogate to themselves particular kinds of authority, in relation to but also distinct from the authority of the journalistic accounts on which the poems depend but from which they simultaneously distance themselves. The poems simultaneously connect themselves to their specific historical context to make sense AND construct independent identities and meanings for themselves. Such an argument is illustrated particularly by the case of Rossetti's poem, which was originally inspired by actual events, but which by the time of its publication had lost even that secondary connection to 'accuracy' when the incident on which the poem is based was revealed to be fictional. Independent of factual anchoring, the poem asserts its own veracity in terms of the emotive response it invokes and the cultural values it promotes.

<32> As Kirstie Blair has noted, "poems... when placed within the context of a newspaper column and located within a specific community of readers, ... operate as sophisticated and often politically charged reflections upon current events, as well as upon the practice and purpose of poetry" (91). These women's poems diverge from any simplistic mission 'to inform' and take on multi-valent identities as independent and authoritative conveyers of particular values to newspaper and periodical readers. Greenwell's response to reportage of the 1870 war raises for debate the varying degrees of textual authority granted to journalistic report, editorial, and poem. Asserting the validity of its own account, in implicit relation to other published accounts, it problematizes the reliability of all accounts. Dawson's poem even works to modify the explicit political message of the article to which it responds.

<33> Reading Victorian women's topical verse and periodical journalism beside and through each other enables us to begin to reconceptualise women poets' challenges to conventional understandings of the role and authority of poetry at a time when their own cultural and literary status was severely circumscribed. Inconstructing creative and emotive dialogues with reported news, and foregrounding the creative reconstruction of their own accounts, these women poets arrogate to themselves expanded forms of authority. They provide readers with alternative responsive possibilities, boldly using poetry to suggest alternative analytical frameworks, to promote particular values, and to suggest diverse political viewpoints.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NCGS 10.2 (Summer 2014): F. Elizabeth Gray, "'With thrilling interest': Victorian Women Poets Report the News"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
N INETEENTH -C ENTURY G ENDER S TUDIES I SSUE 10.2 (SUMMER 2014) "With thrilling interest": Victorian Women Poets Report the News By F.

# data[].attributes.body
via British Library website: Gender and Power:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Christina Rossetti: gender and power | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Victorian period witnessed massive changes in thinking about women’s roles in society. Dr Simon Avery asks how Christina Rossetti’s poetry sits within this context, looking at her representations of oppression, female identity, marriage and the play of power between men and women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When I Am Dead, My Dearest The Secret of Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.body
Jerome J. McGann

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Christian Context of Thomas Carlyle and Christina Rossetti Compared

# data[].attributes.body
Poetic Vocation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
o William Edmonston Aytoun, the satirist of Spasmodicism and contributing editor of Blackwood's Magazine, Christina Rossetti on 1 August 1854 forwarded six new poems, along with what most students of her work today would perceive as a startlingly self-assertive cover letter. In it she disingenuously describes herself as an "unknown and unpublished" writer, a "nameless rhymester." But speaking, as she says, "to a poet," she takes the liberty of insisting that Aytoun consider her works seriously. She stresses her own true identity as a poet, explaining: "I hope that I shall not be misunderstood as guilty of egotism or foolish vanity, when I say that my love for what is good in the works of others teaches one that there is something above the despicable in mine; that poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality; and that I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right." (Quoted by Sandars, Christina Rossetti, 85; original letter in the Yale University Library Special Collections).

Despite Rossetti's deliberate assertions that a commitment to the poetic vocation was of primary importance in her life, critics until very recently have been reluctant to view her as a writer fully devoted to her craft. She was, in fact, a determined and careful artist whose unremitting ambition was to fulfill her potential to generate perfected poetic artifacts, "pure" creative works "directed to that which is true and right" This passage further points to what emerges as the pivotal tension of her existence, arising from a conflict, not always easily resolved for Rossetti, between aesthetic and moral (indeed, often ascetic or even prophetic) impulses. Evidence from this letter written when she was twenty-three, and also [1/2] from earlier and later letters, confirms Rossetti's unrelenting belief in her own vocation as an artist. Yet critics still have not fully acknowledged her drive for aesthetic fulfillment, and, as a result, they have frequently been misguided in evaluating the precise aesthetic qualities, effects, and implications of her work. With the first two volumes of Rebecca Crump's projected three-volume variorum edition of Rossetti's poetry now available, however, we can begin a decades-overdue revaluation of Rossetti's methods of composition, her aesthetics, the value of her poems, and her true position in relation to the other major Victorian poets (As Jerome J. McGann has observed, Crump's new edition will have a "salutary, restorative effect" on Rossetti criticism [NER, 208]). But first, we must establish the proper sociohistorical and literary contexts in which to view her work.

Easy access to the previously scattered manuscript texts of Rossetti's poems, and to the emendations of those texts after their initial publication, at last provides an opportunity to scrutinize the artistic procedure of an enigmatic poet. For almost a century Rossetti has suffered severely from the critical approaches of biographical scholars who have frequently read her verse to lay bare the nature of her unfulfilled passions or to discover the identity of her innominate lover. Readings of Christina Rossetti's works by such critics have depended on the fallacious assumption that her poetry is written for the most part in a confessional poetic mode, as that mode was reinforced by the atmosphere of earnestness inescapable for middle-class Victorians (For the most important recent discussions of this issue, see Ball, "Sincerity"; Davie, "On Sincerity from Wordsworth to Ginsberg"; Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity).Such, however, is by no means predictably the case with Rossetti's often experimental verse. Her poems are exploratory, presenting notably different views - from poem to poem and even from one version of a poem to another - of a given set of social, psychological, amatory, and artistic issues. Moreover, as only the most recent commentators have begun to indicate, her aesthetic values often derive from extremely diverse and sometimes ostensibly incompatible literary sources.

In light of the misplaced emphases of past scholarship (as well as the dearth of genuinely useful criticism), a full reassessment of Christina Rossetti is in order. We need a full-scale, dependable biography, an edition of her complete letters, an annotated bibliography of her reading, and clear-minded critical treatments of her previously unstudied poems (that is, the bulk of them). Such a reassessment has profound implications that may well force us to revise currently accepted approaches to Pre-Raphaelite poetry as a whole and to see more clearly than ever the Pre-Raphaelites' importance in providing aesthetic documents that constitute the transition between Romantic and modern literary modes.

The most important piece of work to propagate the myth of Rossetti's "romantic" sincerity and her artistic innocence is William Michael Rossetti's "Memoir," which appears in his collected edition of her Poetical Works [2/3], published ten years after Christina's death. There he promotes and extends a previously generated image of her poetic practice. He explains that

her habits of composition were entirely of the casual and spontaneous kind, from her earliest to her latest years. If something came into her head which she found suggestive of verse, she put it into verse. It came to her (I take it) very easily, without her meditating a possible subject, and without her making any great difference in the first from the latest form of the verses which embodied it.... What she wrote was pretty well known in the family as soon as her impeccably neat manuscript of it appeared ... but she did not show it about as an achievement, and still less had she, in the course of her work, invited any hint, counsel, or co-operation. (Works, lxviii-1aix)

William Michael was simply wrong - or at least significantly misguided - on both of the major points he introduces here. His sister revised in very important ways and, during her mature years, consistently sought criticism of her manuscripts from Dante Gabriel. In his memoir William Michael is, however, in part transmitting an image of his sister - as a pious and ascetic woman unconcerned with worldly achievements - that she herself had been at some pains to cultivate, especially after 1870. This image suppresses half the truth of Christina Rossetti's values and aspirations. Once dislodged, assumptions of her artistic innocence - that is, of the spontaneity and therefore craftlessness of her poetic production and the selflessness of her pursuits in general - must be radically qualified. We may then begin to discover the kind of values - emotional, social, and psychological, but especially literary - that inspire and inform Rossetti's poetry. From analysis of her texts and her revisions of them, along with epistolary and established biographical evidence, we can place Christina Rossetti with greater precision than before on the stage of rapidly changing aesthetic values in England from 1860 to 1900. We can also begin to understand more fully that the ways in which she diverges in her poems from the artistic practices and values of her brother, Dante Gabriel, and the other Pre-Raphaelites are more subtle and limited than we might expect, given the traditional image of Christina Rossetti as a withdrawn and highly religious woman who appeared to devote her life almost exclusively to her family and her God. In fact, for the most poetically productive years of her life - that is, until 1871 - she devoted it, equally and irrepressibly, to her art. [3/4]

Any revaluation of traditional portraits of Christina Rossetti's artistic procedures or of her complex sense of vocation as an artist might usefully begin with exploratory readings of one of her most heavily revised poems. "Maude Clare" is a poem with what is, for Christina Rossetti's works, a not unusual textual history. Her procedures for revising "Maude Clare" and the effects of her major changes in its text are similar to those of "Song," "Echo," "Bitter for Sweet," "The Poor Ghost," "A Royal Princess," "An Immurata Sister," "Cor Mio," and dozens of other poems in her published volumes. Rebecca Crump concludes that the first (and only extant) manuscript of "Maude Clare" was produced "probably after December 8, 1857, and before April 14, 1858" (Poems, 1:244). The manuscript version of the poem contains forty-one stanzas. However, by the time it appeared in Once a Week on 5 November 1859, the work had been radically shorn to fifteen stanzas. Rossetti carefully pruned it once more before printing it as a poem of twelve stanzas in Goblin Market and Other Poems. In this 1862 version "Maude Clare" is a balladic narrative consisting entirely of dialogue except for the first stanza, which describes the poem's two central female characters, and the fourth stanza, which depicts Lord Thomas's reaction to the appearance at his wedding of Maude Clare, his jilted lover. The narrator's sympathies at the start of the poem are uncertain:

Out of the church she followed them
With a lofty step and mien:
His bride was like a village maid,
Maude Clare was like a queen (Poems, 1:44-45)

Introduced in the second stanza is Thomas's "lady mother," whose words suggest the central theme of the poem (fidelity versus betrayal in love) and raise questions crucial in evaluating the characters. Ambiguously, "With smiles, almost with tears." she pronounces this benediction upon the newly married couple:

"May Nell and you but live as true
As we have done for years;

At this point in our (first) reading we may well wonder if there is any extraordinary reason for the apparent tension between the mother's smiles and tears; whether the marital fidelity she cherishes might be an illusion; what beyond the usual anxieties might have caused the father to be pale on his wedding day; and what causes Tom's and his bride's pallor now. The narrator immediately provides the puzzling explanation that Tom "was pale with pride.' As for Nell, we are told that "Tom gazed long on pale Maude Clare / Or ever he kissed the bride," an action that might distress any woman in the midst of nuptials. In the next three stanzas Maude Clare presents her wedding gifts "To bless the hearth, to bless the board, / To bless the marriage bed,7 but the gifts are bitterly ironic because they include an amulet and another love token formerly given her by Tom: "'My half of the golden chain / You wore about your neck'" and

By this point the reader perhaps feels little sympathy for Maude Clare because of her bad timing, the arrogance of her ironies, and her queenly mien, which suffers in comparison with the implied humility and ingenuousness of the bride "like a village maid." Tom's inability in the next stanza to "match her scorn with scorn," his faltering speech, and his poignant sense of shame (he "hid his face") make Maude Clare look all the worse. So does her immediate verbal assault on Nell, which makes us question Maude's own potential for fidelity rather than caprice:

If her indifference is genuine, we condemn Maude Clare for unjustly disrupting the occasion and for vainly upstaging the married couple. If it is a mask, then she is stiff doing little service by her tantrum to herself or to the man she would be thought still to love. In the poem's last two stanzas, Nell reinforces most readers' initial, positive impressions of her. Unlike Maude Clare, she shows courage and tenacity along with her previously implied humility: [5/6]

Nell has the last words, and they significantly reflect our comparative valuation of Tom's two lovers. Many readers would retain little sympathy and perhaps even feel hostility for Maude Clare by the end of the poem.

I stress these points because the thrust of the manuscript text of "Maude Clare" is entirely different from the greatly reduced, austere, but powerful version I have just described. In the manuscript poem Maude Clare appears without question as the most sympathetic figure in the work, a woman betrayed and victimized by a capricious lover who chooses to marry for money. Throughout this version, narrative description of the setting and events dominates over dialogue, and as a result, the poem lacks the dramatic intensity of the 1862 version. Its discursiveness also detracts from the poem's emotional power, and much poetic energy is sacrificed - in narrative descriptions and additional dialogue - to provide signals for evaluating the characters.

Our sympathies are initially guided by conventional symbols that obtrude in the first manuscript stanza and that become relevant once the central characters are introduced:

The fields were white with lily buds,
White gleamed the lilied beck,
Each mated pigeon plumed the pomp
of his metallic neck.
(Poems, 1:245)

By the seventh stanza the reader retrospectively identifies Maude Clare, whose "cheeks were pale like pearls," with the purity and potential of the "lily buds" but also with their traditional symbolic resonances implying innocence and self-sacrifice. By contrast, we identify the soon-mated Nell with the detached and complacent, wealthily "plumed" pigeon of line four. Her "metallic" neck clinches our identification of her with money and further suggests insensitivity and invulnerability. Apparently Nell is like Thomas in her callousness. As early as stanza four Maude Clare identifies [6/7] him clearly as"'a false false love of mine."' His behavior, we learn two stanzas later, has desolated Maude Clare, who now retains "never a sparkle in her eyes / That had wept the yesternight." Moreover, we learn in stanza seven that Tom has deserted this dazzling, lilylike maiden for "a new love frank and fair, / . . . who lacked the witching winning grace / Of his old love pale Maude Clare" (245).

In this version of the poem, as in the published one of 1862, Tom is desperately embarrassed by Maude's presence at the wedding, but here he suffers guilt for a much clearer reason:

Tom's guilty behavior contrasts with the stalwart and heroic demeanor of Maude Clare, who, decked 'in jewels, is virtually deified by the narrator: "Lady Maude glittered" in the train of the bride and groom "Like a star of the firmament." She, rather than the married couple, attracts the admiring attention of the audience at the wedding:

"Health to the bride and length of days
"And hopes fulfilled and wealth." (246)

Even Lord Thomas "turned to young Maude Clare / Before he drank the health." But despite her success in drawing the attention and sympathies of those about her, after all the feasting, singing, gift-giving, and benedictions, Maude Clare suffers unspeakably as she turns to address the couple: "But oh her heart must ache," we are told by the narrator in a fine that anticipates and undercuts any suspicion that Maude is arrogant or unjustified in her recriminations. After her words to the couple (the same as those of the 1862 version), Maude Clare - as if to emphasize an already clear point - adds that Nell "has purchased" her husband "with gold," words that might well have reminded Victorian readers of Tennyson's Maud, published only two years before Christina Rossetti's poem was first written.

The manuscript poem ends with three rather than two stanzas of re- [7/8] sponse from Nell. These differ entirely from those of the 1862 version. In them Nell's indignation seems tellingly lame, her protest too much taken up with advice delivered safely after the fact:

Here Nell displays only callousness in her defensive, legalistic reply to Maude Clare, rather than the tenacity and boldness that make her the more attractive of Tom's lovers in the 1862 version.

These two texts of the same poem by Christina Rossetti tell us a good deal about her habits of composition and make clear the inadequacy of merely thematic approaches to her poems. The differences between the manuscript poem and the 1862 version also reveal much about Rossetti's rigorous aesthetic values, her central concern with artistic efficacy, and her ability to compose with a sense of artistic detachment that belies assumptions of her poetry's sincerity as well as critical propensities to interpret its contents biographically. Arguments that this poem is dramatic rather than lyrical, and thus not subject to "sincere" impulses, are irrelevant, for Rossetti's ruthless artistry was applied impartially to every kind of poetry she wrote.

Rossetti's famous "Song" ("Oh roses for the flush of youth"), for instance, appears in its published form as a lyric lament acknowledging the speaker's resignation to an unfulfilled life and an early death, aptly represented by her choice of "withered leaves" of ivy as a memorial, rather than any traditional floral symbol of a more meaningful life (roses, laurel, violets, or bay). Our attention is focused finally, not on the barely sketched character of the speaker or her fate, but on the tradition of flower symbolism itself, especially as it is employed in literature of "the old time" (Poems, 1:40).

[8/9] Although the title of the original version of the work, "A Song in a Song" suggests the self-conscious literary concerns of the poem, the stanzas themselves (the first three of which are deleted in the final version)draw attention away from the issue of traditionary symbolism and its proper uses. The poem instead erects a dramatic relationship between a different speaker and his dead beloved; he now loiters (Re Keats's knight at arms) in expectation of his own death: "I sit and sing her song, / And muse upon the past. " The first two stanzas emphasize the beloved's former beauty and her lover's despair at her unexpected death. The poem's final version is thus radically reformed and refocused upon predominantly aesthetic issues rather than those of elegiac or courtly love poetry.

Revisions of "The Bourne" demonstrate an even more drastic redirection than those of "Song." A devotional poem first written in 1854 in twelve stanzas, the work was reduced to two stanzas by the time of its first publication, nine years later, in Macmillan's Magazine. The published version contained only the second and fifth of the original stanzas. The first version is clumsily entitled "There remaineth therefore a rest," and with a good deal of overwriting it describes a soul's experience during what was known to Victorian millenarians and Anabaptists as "Soul Sleep," the waiting period between a person's death and resurrection at the Second Coming. (For a fuller commentary on Rossetti's acceptance and employment of the doctrine of "Soul Steep," see R.P. A central biblical text from which the doctrine of soul-sleep or psychopannychism originates (but which McGann does not cite) is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17.) In this version Rossetti tediously rehearses the details of anticipated experience during Soul Sleep: the "cool" bed of the grave; the slumber and renewal that take place there; the equality of all the dead in this condition; an end to physical suffering; and the incipient process of fulfillment and perfection that culminates with the soul "Struggling panting up to God" (Poems, 1:280).

The published version of 1863 has been radically pared by means of simple but careful selection among the earlier stanzas. The altered title itself is a brilliant addition that reflects a new semiotic concern in the poem. As a pun, it is multivalent, at once suggesting continuity ("a stream or brook") and division ("a boundary"), an ending ("goal") and a beginning ("born"). The text retains from the original a thematic emphasis on the transitoriness and vanity of earthly life, but that emphasis surprisingly dissolves in the closing third of the poem. There we learn that, in the grave, "a very little girth / Can hold round what once the earth / Seemed too narrow to contain" (Poems, 1:142). The emphasis in these lines upon form and dimension, of course, introduces an insistence on spiritual infinitude and the impossibility of its full realization during earthly life. At the same time, however, the reader's attention is directed to the potential for a corollary expressional infinitude inherent in the medium of the poem [9/10] itself. Like the remains of the originary body (poet or speaker), the poem is "a very little girth" (in the new version) and yet "contains" our transcendent spirituality Indeed, expression of the latter is demonstrably dependent on the existence of the former. The "bourne," at which the powers of spirit and language meet and the one becomes embedded in the other, is the self-reflexive poem. Thus, as a symbol of the boundary between physical and spiritual worlds, as a locus for knowledge of eventual spiritual fulfillment, as an imaginative space where sensations of such fulfillment might be generated, and as the vehicle for transmuting all perceptions of prospective rebirth into material form, the poem itself is "Tbe Bourne."

In an unpublished letter of 1888, responding to questions from an anonymous admirer, Rossetti retrospectively explained one aesthetic principle that was central, during her early years, to the developing poetic style revealed in revisions of such poems as "Maude Clare" "Song," and "The Bourne" She also forcefully acknowledged the importance of her brother Dante's tutelage. She explained: "Perhaps the nearest approach to a method I can lay claim to was a distinct aim at conciseness; after a while I received a hint from my sister that my love of conciseness tended to make my writing obscure, and I then endeavoured to avoid obscurity as well as diffuseness. In poetics." she concluded insistently, "my elder brother was my acute and most helpful critic." (letter, Troxell Collection, Princeton University Library.)

Rossetti's attempt to approach her ideal of "conciseness" is manifest in the revisions of "Maude Clare," "Song," and "The Bourne" that I have reviewed, but it is everywhere visible in her best poems as well. Pursuit or that single ideal, however, leads directly to ostensibly subordinate characteristics of her poetic style as well as to corollary aesthetic values that dominate the poems. It leads to tautness and a directness of expression, a deceptive simplicity of poetic surfaces that contrasts significantly with the "arduous fullness," the density and involutions of Dante Rossetti's style; it leads to dramatic intensity, to deliberate ambiguity, and, even more notably, to Christina Rossetti's often open-ended symbolic modes of expression (for instance, in Goblin Market, "A Birthday," "Up-Hill," and The Prince's Progress). It leads, also, to a thematic structure in her poems that is densely, though often ambiguously, allusive. The quest for conciseness often compels her to generate meaning by manipulating allusions to Plato, the Bible, Saint Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Herbert, Crashaw, Maturin, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, and to troubadour traditions. One typical thematic mode of her poetry, then, is intertextual, directing her reader away from the apparently simple surface meanings of her poems and toward historically layered literary statements and traditions, consideration [10/11] of which complicates, amplifies, and reifies the meanings of her own verse. Unlike her brother's densely wrought poems, the diffusive effects of Christina Rossetti's poetry come as often from explicit or implied literary allusions and parodic procedures as from recurrent image patterns, symbolism, or play with language. The demands her poetry places upon its readers, therefore, are hardly best served by approaching her works as veiled autobiography, or by neo-Freudian interpretations of them, or by single-minded new-critical - rather than critically pluralistic - methodologies. (See William Fredeman's remarks on the biographical approach to Rossetti criticism [("'From Insult to Protect'" and "Impediments and Motives"].)

At this point, one might well ask how criticism of Rossetti - and, by implication, discussions of other ostensibly autobiographical poets - is to proceed if exclusively thematic, psychobiographical, and noncontextual readings of her poems are proscribed. Some progress has been made already by recent critics who suggest the importance of purely literary considerations in reading Rossetti's poetry (and, by implication, some of Dante Rossetti's important poetry). From their earliest adolescent days, during which they wrote poetry and fiction in an atmosphere of sibling competition encouraged by their father and by their grandfather Polidori (who promised publication on his home press), the Rossetti children all possessed a highly literary self-awareness. It is no coincidence that all four children, including the Anglican nun, Maria, published major literary or critical works during their lives. Significantly, all published on Dante, and, of course, both Christina and Dante Gabriel allude repeatedly in their letters and works to Dante and the literary tradition he subsumed and perpetuated." (The critical and editing activities of William Michael Rossetti are well known, but his translation of Dante is not. And Victorianists at large are even less familiar with Maria Rossetti's A Shadow of Dante, which Christina admired enormously (and which was widely used as a classroom text in the nineteenth century). See FL, 75, 171.)

There are a number of potentially fruitful approaches to the Rossettis' poetry. One, already touched upon by Jerome McGann, Barbara Fass, and Joan Rees among the major critics, is to look at the Rossettis' productions as self-conscious attempts to appropriate and extend specific literary traditions. One of these is obviously that of medieval French love poetry, which began with the troubadours and culminated with Petrarch, Dante, and the Renaissance sonneteers." (Rossetti reveals her extensive interest in the troubadour roots of Petrarchan and Dantean tradition in the preface to her sonnet sequence, Monna Innominata, which was composed over perhaps as long as a fifteen-year period (see Rees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 152-53).) Analysis of their works in this context would expose the Rossettis' self-conscious and detached use (and pastiche) of specific forms and conventions of love poetry.

Another approach especially relevant to Christina Rossetti's work is sociohistorical and uses incontrovertible biographical data and historical contexts to illuminate her works. Her letters, hundreds of which remain unpublished, are an invaluable source of information, for they reflect and comment specifically upon her artistic ambitions, her poetic methods, her reading, her acquaintances, [11/12] and her responses to political, social, and religious issues of the day. A third approach to Rossetti criticism would investigate her use of the set of traditions surrounding Romantic "sincerity," especially as these appear in Blake, Keats, and Coleridge and as they are absorbed by Romantic and Victorian novelists. These traditions very often deliberately mask the detachment of the writer who, largely through his or her artificially "sincere" tone, elicits specific emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic responses from the reader.

Concern with this latter tradition introduces a fourth, complementary approach to the poetry of both Rossettis, one that perceives the primary purpose in their literary efforts to be the generation of the most beautiful and affective artifacts possible. At the base of such efforts in every case are clear aesthetic values, which may vary in emphasis from work to work. In the case of the 1862 text of "Maude Clare," for instance, the values that dominate are dramatic and emotional intensity, ambiguity, and irony. These must, of course, be distinguished from the poem's central moral values of humility, fidelity, and courage. In all of Rossetti's significant poems, however, thematic (or "moral") considerations are coterminous with, if not subordinated to, aesthetic ones: sometimes even the possibility of deriving clear themes or ideas from a work is undercut. Art, comprehensive of relevant traditions, becomes the supreme value, as Dante Rossetti suggests in his introductory sonnet to The House of Life, in "Love's Last Gift" from the same sequence, and even in such apparently polemical poems as "The Burden of Nineveh." At the center of the latter work, transcending the histories of specific men's passions, fears, ideals, and ideologies (as well as those of their civilizations), is the winged beast of Nineveh, an infinitely interpretable work of art.

As we know, Dante Rossetti, the reluctant aesthete, was the most frequent and effective critic of his sister's manuscript poems. Christina alluded to him repeatedly as her mentor, and, as the revisions of "Maude Clare" suggest, she was, like him, ultimately more interested in the quality and effectiveness of a poem than in conveying themes or in being sincere and self-expressive. The extent to which artistic perfection was the preeminent concern in Christina Rossetti's poetry, as it was in her brother's, was perceived by early commentators like Arthur Symons, Virginia Woolf, and Justine DeWilde but has been ignored by most of her critics for the last fifty years.(See Symons, "Christina Rossetti," in Two Literatures, 48; Woolf, Second Common Reader, 264; and DeWilde, Christina Rossetti.) Yet her irrepressible concern with the artistry of her works and with her own artistic vocation is unmistakable in her early letters. After her grandfather Polidori printed two volumes of her childhood poems, one in 1842 when she was twelve years old and one in 1847; after she succeeded in placing two poems in the Athenaeum in 1848; and after seven of her works appeared pseudonymously in The Germ during 1850, [12/13] Rossetti subsequently endured a frustrating hiatus in her publishing career. From 1851 until 1861 she saw only two of her poems and one short story appear in print, despite the self-confidence of her letters of submission to potential publishers.

The sense of urgency with which she pursued artistic success is, perhaps, most powerfully revealed in the second half of the 1854 letter to Aytoun quoted earlier. In an emotionally intense conclusion, she remarks,

I do not blush to confess that ... it would afford me some gratification to place my productions before others, and ascertain how far what I do is expressive of mere individualism, and how far it is capable of approving itself to the general sense. It would be a personal favour to me if you would look into the enclosed with an eye not inevitably to the waste paper basket, and a further obligation if, whatever be the result, you would vouchsafe me a few words as to the fate of the verses. I am quite conscious that volunt[ary]eer contributors have no right to expect this of an editor; I ask it simply as a courtesy. It is mortifying to have done something sincerely, offer it in a good faith; and be treated as a "non avenue." [Quoted in Sandars, 86]

A similarly solemn dedication to her art also surfaces in brief comments responding to William Michael Rossetti's queries in 1849 about progress with her poem, "Three Nuns." She responds that "my dreary poem is not completed, but a few appropriate stanzas have been added since my leaving town. You will easily believe that, whatever other merit it lacks, it possesses unity of purpose in a high degree" (FL, 6).

Despite such passages in her letters, however, and despite prevalent opinion among her critics and biographers, Christina Rossetti was by no means always as earnest as this letter or her later petition to Aytoun suggests. On numerous epistolary occasions she demonstrates irrepressible wit. Yet her humorous self-inflations or self-deprecations most often serve to reinforce perceptions of her sense of vocation as an artist. Writing to William in 1850, for instance, while still enjoying the glow kindled by her prospective appearances in The Germ, she gives this advice: "Do you know, I seriously urge on your consideration the increase of prose and decrease of poetry in the Germ, the present state of things strikes me as most alarming. Should all other articles fail, boldly publish my letters; they would doubtless produce an immense sensation. By hinting that I occupy a high situation in B - ck--m P - l - e, substituting initials and asterisks for all names, and adding a few titles, my correspondence might have quite a success." (Christina Rossetti to William Michael Rossetti, 31 Jan. 1850, Troxell Collection, Princeton University Library.)

[13/14] Three years later, in a similar vein, she fantasizes that the depleted family fortunes might be reconstituted if justice were truly done to her short story, "Nick," then circulating. This could be accomplished, she insists, if only the story were submitted along with her own portrait: "a first-rate business head perceiving at a glance its capabilities, has [the portrait] engraved prefixed to ["Nick"], and advertised ... all over the civilized world" with wonderful success. She prophesies that "The book spreads like wild-fire. Addey at the end of 2 months, struck by a late remorse, and having an eye to future contingencies, sends me a second cheque for £200; on which we subsist for a while. At the publication of the 20th edition Mrs Addey (a mild person of few words) expires; charging her husband to do me justice. He promises with one suppressed sob. Next day a third cheque for £2000 reaches me. This I divide; assigning half to Maria for her dowry, and handing the rest to Mama. I then collapse. Exeunt Omnes." (Christina Rossetti to William Michael Rossetti, 13 Aug. 1853, Troxell Collection, Princeton University Library).

Letters such as these facetious ones, along with those earnestly soliciting publication of her works and yet others of the 1860s playfully expressing envy of her visibly more successful, rival "poetesses" (especially Jean Ingelow), expose a Victorian woman with a clear vision of her vocation; she was anxious, if not determined, to make that vision real. Yet, although Christina Rossetti lived until 1894, most of her best poems were produced (though not necessarily published) before 1871, when she nearly died of Graves' disease. Afterwards, she led a virtually cloistered life in London, where any foray beyond the bounds of her home in Torrington Square was, as she repeatedly explained to her correspondents, "formidable." After 1871 she published only one volume of new poems (in 1881). She expended most of her creative energies during the last twenty years of her life in writing seven books of devotional prose or religious commentary. In 1874 she explained in a letter to her publisher, Alexander MacMillan, who was urging her to compile a new volume of poems, that "the possibility of your thinking proper some day to reprint my two volumes [Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress], is really gratifying to me as you may suppose; but as to additional matter, I fear there will be little indeed to offer you. The fire has died out, it seems; and I know of no bellows potent to revive dead coals. I wish I did." (4 Feb. 1874, in Packer, Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, 99.) The insistently prosaic echoes here of Coleridge's lament in "Dejection: An Ode" would not have been lost on either "the staunch Mac" or Christina herself. But what is also forcefully apparent to later readers of this letter is Rossetti's refusal in any way to compromise her artistic integrity for fame or profit.

[14/15] In William Michael's memoir of his sister, he remarks, this time without any mistake,

It may be asked - Did Christina Rossetti consider herself truly a poetess, and a good one? Truly a poetess, most decidedly yes; and, within the range of her subject and thought, and the limits of her executive endeavour, a good one. This did not make her in the least conceited or arrogant as regards herself, nor captious as to the work of others; but it did render her very resolute in setting a line of demarcation between a person who is a poet and another person who is a versifier. Pleadings of in misericordiam were of no use with her, and she never could see any good reason why one who is not a poet should write verse in meter. (Works, 1xix)

The extent to which Christina Rossetti did insist upon the unique capabilities of the artist, as well as the autonomy of the artist's imagination and creative powers, is clear from her commentaries on her own poems. Paradiginatic is a passage from a letter written by her on 13 March 1865 to Dante Rossetti, who was at the time supervising her revisions of poems that would appear in The Prince's Progress (1866). Her comments in the passage concern the poem "Under the Rose" (in 1875 retitled "The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children"). Some readers might incorrectly assert that this is a surprisingly worldly poem for Christina Rossetti. It is a 545-line monologue spoken by a young woman, Margaret, who, in recalling events of her past life, has concluded that she is the illegitimate daughter of a kindly, unmarried aristocratic woman. In order to retain her reputation, Margaret deduces, this eminent lady was forced to repudiate Margaret at her birth. At the end of "Under the Rose," Margaret, now ostensibly her mother's servant but virtually an adopted child, determines to lead a life of resignation and renunciation, keeping her mother's secret but thereby also fully retaining her own autonomy.

Judging from Christina Rossetti's response to him, her brother was dismayed by the "unpleasant-sided subject" of this poem, but more especially by the fact that it came from a woman's pen. Rossetti's reaction to Dante's critique of "Under the Rose" is as illuminating as anything she wrote about her own art, or, indeed, about any other author's work. Not only does it reveal her perceptions of the relationship between art and the commonly accepted sexual roles of men and women, but it also makes explicit her understanding of the relations between poetry and the personal experience of the author. Although she begins the passage with the [15/16] self-effacing rhetoric typical of her, she concludes on a strongly assertive note. To Dante Gabriel she writes,

U. the R. herewith ... I meekly return to you, pruned and rewritten to order. As regards the unpleasant-sided subject I freely admit it: and if you think the performance coarse or what-not, pray eject it ... though I thought U. the R. might read its own lesson, but very likely I misjudge. But do you know, even if we throw U.the R. overboard, and whilst I endorse your opinion of the unavoidable and indeed much-to-be-desired unreality of women's work on many social matters, I yet incline to include within female range such an attempt as this: where the certainly possible circumstances are merely indicated as it were in skeleton, where the subordinate characters perform (and no more) their accessory parts, where the field is occupied by a single female figure whose internal portrait is set forth in her own words. Moreover the sketch only gives the girl's own deductions, feelings, semiresolutions; granted such premises as hers, and right or wrong it seems to me she might easily arrive at such conclusions: and whilst it may truly be urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don't see why "the Poet mind" should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities (Troxell, Three Rossettis, 143.)

The keynote of this passage appears in its final sentence, where her description of "the Poet mind" is reminiscent of Keats's ideals of the chameleon poet and of "negative capability." But Rossetti's full commentary is fascinating in several respects. For one thing, her rhetorical strategy is cunning; more significantly, the strategy contributes to our understanding of Christina Rossetti's patterns of behavior in life as well as the values that inexorably support those patterns. Her apparent indifference to the publication of this poem is genuine and reflects her relentless quest for autonomy and self-sufficiency. This quest at last resulted in her virtually complete withdrawal from active life, as well as her reliance upon "the Poet mind"--the creative imagination that generates experience - to sustain her, to enrich her, and to serve as both a buffer and a mechanism for mediation between her and the external world that threatened always to encroach upon her independence.

Like her friend A.C. Swinburne in the second half of his career, Christina Rossetti became an ascetic aesthete, whose spheres of experience, [16/17] both secular and religious, were largely internal and imaginative. Both modes of experience were grounded, however, in external - socially and historically "real" - institutions, those of artistic tradition and the church. Her creative impulse oscillated between two ideal passions, whose respective objects were man and God. Both passions were intense and involved suffering, but the experience of them made her always accessible to exquisite, ethereal sensations of the spirit and emotions, sensations akin to the "wakeful anguish of the soul" memorialized by Keats. For Rossetti, only thralldom to art and to religion could generate ideal experiences of this sort that transform and transcend experience in the "real" world. Because of the capacities of the "Poet mind" Christina Rossetti could (unlike Keats) happily renounce life in the world for the superior life of the imagination. Such a life, of course, allows for the sublimation of physical ills and the manipulation of moral values, while ensuring freedom from censure, oppression, and responsibility. The religious aesthete, in life, enjoys the "paradise within" while preparing for the more permanent Paradise of the afterlife. For Christina Rossetti art and prayer became the primary modes, not merely of self-expression, but of existence. Rather than attempting to mirror reality, they subsumed it.

Much of Rossetti's poetry, therefore, abjures both didacticism and sincerity, actively resisting autobiographical readings. Many of her poems are self-reflexive, directing our interest to a fictive personality (as in "Under the Rose" and "Maude Clare"); to the process of creation; to specific literary works and general literary traditions that provide the enabling conditions for her own work; or to the created artifact itself, rather than to any external reality or extrinsic concerns. Such poems sometimes appropriately reveal her ability to be playful and ironically detached, to parody the kinds of issues her poetry raises. Such is the case in a poem like "Winter: My Secret." In it the speaker confesses to wearing masks:

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I.
. . . . . .
I cannot ope to everyone who taps.
And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth.
(Poems, 1:47) [17/18]

And we are taunted in the last stanza:

Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun or too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess. (47)

We find the clue to understanding this enigmatic poem in its self-parodic tone. The extraordinary fact here is that the work builds a thoroughly engaging relationship between the speaker and reader out of nothing substantial. No events transpire or are described, and even the "secret" has no extrinsic reference. The reader's curiosity and affection for the speaker are generated entirely by means of a fictive enigma that compels our interest. The poem thus becomes a commentary upon itself, upon the "secret" power of art. It also becomes, on an admittedly small scale, an exemplification of artistic perfection, a self-sufficing artifact. That such may be its design is indicated by the clear allusions, in the first three lines of the last stanza, to Keats's odes "To a Nightingale" and "To Autumn," both of which are concerned with acts of poetic creativity and the acceptance of created beauty (whether imaginative or natural) for its own sake.

Like many of Rossetti's poems, "Winter: My Secret" skillfully indulges in linguistic, formal, and metaphorical play. Such works by her are often unsettling because of their self-conscious experimentation and their aesthetic as well as substantive challenges to convention. Yet, unlike "Winter: My Secret," these works frequently close in conventionally settled ways - with the thematic, dramatic, or psychological tensions resolved. Closure, however, very often embodies a literal resignation of the rebelliousness of language, themes, and characterization within the works, a giving over of the potential evoked in the poems for destabilizing the conventional world (of language, social expectations, literary conventions) in which the poems are usually set.

The much-discussed dualisms, contraries, and oppositions in Rossetti's poems open up a space for decoding the world as we know it or expect it to be, and for encoding a new world, or a new apprehension of the old world's genuine truths or possibilities for change. But this potential is often abruptly truncated in the end by a deliberate reintroduction of the conventional world and expectations associated with it. Such a pattern of development enables varied and opposed reader-responses, including re [18/19] lief that conventional "order"or reality is restored; disappointment that a promised new order remains unrealized; or a synthesis of both of these responses, in which emotional, psychological, and aesthetic dissatisfactions evoked by the conclusion refocus reader attention on the generative space that the poem has made visible. The pattern even of Rossetti's nondevotional poems is thus eschatological: by drawing attention to the open-endedness of language, of literary traditions, of social or amatory possibility, she thrusts the reader into a new world that is at first disorienting. But he or she is finally delivered back into the old world that was briefly deconstructed or subverted. Some of Rossetti's best-known and most ambitious poems, including Goblin Market, Monna Innominata, and "The Lowest Room" operate in this way, as does her early novella, Maude. Even the larger structure of her volumes of poetry usually reflects this dialectical mindset, which insistently evokes a concern with purely aesthetic matters by means of the tensions it generates. The counterpoint between the "secular" and devotional poems in her three major volumes of verse (published in 1862, 1866, and 1881), for instance, effectively directs a reader's attention to the distance between the adventurous and the conventional, and finally to the issues of aesthetic modes and motives - of beauty and rhetoric - that displace other potential critical issues, such as thematics, biography, or history.

Even a wholly undisguised ideal of self-sufficing and self-reflexive artistry is clear in a number of Christina Rossetti's poems, though sometimes that ideal is equated with a more conventional ideal of beauty, as it is in "A Summer Wish":

Live all thy sweet life thro',
Sweet Rose, dew-sprent,
Drop down thine evening dew
To gather it anew
When day is bright:
I fancy thou wast meant Chiefly to give delight.

Sing in the silent sky,
Glad soaring bird,
Sing out thy notes on high
To sunbeam straying by
Or passing cloud;
Heedless if thou art heard
Sing thy full song aloud. [19/20]
Oh that it were with me
As with the flower;
Blooming on its own tree
For butterfly and bee
Its summer morns:
That I might bloom mine hour
A rose in spite of thorns.

Oh that my work were done
As birds that soar
Rejoicing in the sun:
That when my time is run
And daylight too,
I so might rest once more
Cool with refreshing dew. [Poems, 1:42-43]

The symbols in this poem are open ended, of course, but the work might easily be seen to advocate the value of beauty created "chiefly to give delight" and its language insists on the exuberance, the "rejoicing," that accompanies the act of (poetic) creation: "Heedless if thou art heard / Sing thy full song aloud."

"A Summer Wish" also manifests a pervasive characteristic in Rossetti's poetry, both secular and religious: her use of what Ruskin in her own day designated "the pathetic fallacy." The projection by a speaker of a state of mind and emotion upon what would normally be seen as external, objective, and nonfeeling is clearly a solipsistic poetic strategy that reconstitutes "the world" and empirical conceptions of it. (Ruskin saw the practice as originating with the Romantics.) In this way intellectual and emotional responses displace "the world" and regenerate it as artifact or aesthetic object, "a thing of beauty."Ruskin described poets who in this way anthropomorphically impute fife to the object-world as "Reflective or Perceptive." In that category he included Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson, poets whose work was necessarily limited by its very modes of generation and operation. As Harold Bloom has observed, Ruskin's "Perceptive" poets were later termed "Aesthetic" poets by Walter Pater. They comprise "not a second order but the only poets possible in the universe of death, the Romantic world" in which Rossetti lived (Bloom, Walter Pater, 6). Pater's description of aesthetic poets appeared first in his 1868 review, "Poems by William Morris," and became famous when published as part of the conclusion to The Renaissance.

[20/21] Analysis of the body of Christina Rossetti's poetry in its proper literary historical contexts demonstrates that, like Morris's work, hers embodies important characteristics of "aesthetic poetry," as Pater describes them, and it does so precisely by means of the dominant tensions upon which it is constructed: between beauty and death; between love of man and love of God; between the ephemeral and the eternal; between the sensory and the transcendent. It "projects above the realities of its time a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that world [it] takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is, literally an artificial or "earthly paradise." It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal" (Sambrook, 105).

What of course distinguishes Rossetti's work from that of Morris and other "aesthetic" poets is that her "finer ideal" is extrapolated largely from Christian texts and doctrine, especially from Neoplatonic reifications of Christian orthodoxy. Indeed, Plato's most distinctive characteristic according to Pater is equally Rossetti's: an "aptitude for things visible, with the gift of words, empowers [her] to express, as if for the eyes, what except to the eye of the mind is strictly invisible, what an acquired asceticism induces [her] to rank above, and sometimes, in terms of harshest dualism, opposite to, the sensible world." (Plato and Platonism, 139-40). For Pater, Plato is "a seer who has a sort of sensuous love of the unseen."

Rossetti's amatory poetry, also like that of "aesthetic" poets, often returns in setting, or merely in theme, to a "profound medievalism," in which "religion shades into sensuous love, and sensuous love into religion." Dominated by a frequently dreamlike atmosphere, poems from "The Convent Threshold," "Three Nuns" and The Prince's Progress to "An Old World Thicket," "Paradise," and Monna Innominata seem to operate largely in "a Kingdom of reverie": "Of religion this poetry learns the art of directing towards an imaginary object sentiments whose natural direction is towards objects of sense. Hence a love defined by the absence of the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting against all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian. It is the love which is incompatible with marriage" (Sambrook, 106-7). In the great bulk of the poems, too, there appears "the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life ... the sense of death and the desire of beauty; the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death." Rossetti's poetry can sometimes even appear to assume "artistic beauty of form to be an end in itself"(Sambrook, 113).

In these Paterian terms, then, we can perceive aestheticism as a fundamental impulse in a large number of Rossetti's works. Her poetry does, of course, embody several major "thematic" concerns. These include the agonizing conflicts between erotic passion and love of God; the manifold beauties of nature; the need to renounce earthly love and all the world's vanities to await death and salvation. Yet these concerns are often subordinated to her interest in attaining an ideally beautiful world - a beatific paradise - or, equally often, to the process of generating such a world in beautiful poetry (or, self-reflexively, to beauty's multifarious powers and its historical precedents). Thus Rossetti is manifestly self-conscious about form in her poems, about the literary origins of her subject matter, and about language, the processes and effects of signification in reconstituting reality. As we shall see, however, such reconstitutions often operate on more than an aesthetic and self-referential level. They can also serve to present a critique of social reality, literary tradition, or the ideologies inherent in both.

Thanks to Rebecca Crump's systematic presentation of Christina Rossetti's poetry and the processes of its creation, we now can better understand the nature and effects of her aesthetic self-consciousness. We can also test our critical assumptions about Rossetti, and, seeing how they fail, begin to construct new ones. As the reward for our efforts, we may well revise our traditional image of Rossetti as a repressed, unfulfilled, patient Victorian woman who turned in despair from human love to the devout, chaste, and chastening love of Christ. This role she may well have filled. But beyond it she persistently and as a comprehensive vocation played out the role of artist, and her art in every sense sustained her. Her art - like that of Keats and, from formalist and aestheticist perspectives, that of the troubadours, Dante, the Petrarchans, and the early Tennyson, all of whom she deliberately assimilated - reflects the ideal of self-sustaining redemptive beauty. Ultimately, the interaction of the traditions that enthralled her resulted in the Keatsian tempering of a Dantean mysticism in which human and divine love merge and become fulfilled in art. These Romantic literary mythologies, I would argue, incorporated but transcended Christina Rossetti's merely personal experiences of love and religion. That her purely aesthetic sensibilities superseded even these mythologies allowed her to become one of the most enduring Victorian poets. [22/23]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Introductory: Christina Rossetti and the Poetic Vocation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
o William Edmonston Aytoun, the satirist of Spasmodicism and contributing editor of Blackwood's Magazine, Christina Rossetti on 1 August 1854 forwarded six new poems, along with what most students of her work today would perceive as a startlingly self-assertive cover letter. In it she disingenuously describes herself as an "unknown and unpublished" writer, a "nameless rhymester."

# data[].attributes.body
Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry

# data[].attributes.body
Anthony H. Harrison

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Piety, Poetry, Passion Contexts for Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Emblematic Tendencies in the Works of Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dualism in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Christina Rossetti's Religious Poetry Watching, Looking, Keeping Vigil

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Overview of Feminism in the Victorian Period (American Journals Online)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Christmastide Poems of Christina Rossetti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with a Memoir and Notes by William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), except as noted.

# data[].attributes.headline
Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" Elizabeth Campbell (1990)

# data[].attributes.subject
Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" Elizabeth Campbell (1990)

# data[].attributes.body
I LOVE this piece of criticism, not all of it, but where it points towards. It implies a subversion of, a radical shift away from, (patriarchal) market forces as they were known and valued by (esp. male) Victorians. It presents how Goblin Market brings female rhythms and cycles to the market, disrupting it, turning it on its head (in more ways than one..!), questioning assumptions about the need for consumption, and promoting new rules / undermining the dominant rules of engagement with and within the market.  It is from 1990 -but I think this is criticism for our times, where, for the first time in history, many ordinary people in capitalist societies are querying the norm that production and consumption are worthwhile in themselves. So I will be taking you through it at some point - if not now, then in Year 13 :)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
OF MOTHERS AND MERCHANTS FEMALE ECONOMICS IN CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S 'GOBLIN MARKET'

# data[].attributes.headline
“TO TAKE WERE TO PURLOIN”: SEXUALITYIN THE NARRATIVE POEMS OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTIFAHRÏ ÖZ

# data[].attributes.subject
“TO TAKE WERE TO PURLOIN”: SEXUALITYIN THE NARRATIVE POEMS OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTIFAHRÏ ÖZ

# data[].attributes.body
Not just about Goblin Market...