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In the late 1850s, the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti wrote a poem about her annoyance with a suitor who couldn't seem to comprehend the fact that she didn't want to marry him-despite her telling him so quite plainly. In a move that kind of makes her the Taylor Swift of the nineteenth-century (or really, makes Taylor Swift the Christina Rossetti of the twenty-first), she didn't simply write about the incident, but included the suitor's first name and published the poem in her debut collection Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862. The poem is called "No, Thank You, John." Which is an excellent title.

Evidence suggests that Rossetti's poem was indeed based on a real issue she had with a suitor. In his 1908 biography Family Letters of Christina Rossetti , William Michael wrote "John was not absolutely mythical for, in one of her volumes which I possess, Christina made a pencil jotting, 'The original John was obnoxious because he never gave scope for 'No, thank you.'"

The poem seems to refer to their specific conversations about her refusal, with lines like "I have no heart?" and "don't call me false." And it features some absolutely fantastic punchlines, the best of which is: "I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns/ Than answer 'Yes' to you." Damn.

Scholars have debated the identity of the "original John," with many concluding that it was the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Brett. Rossetti's biographer Violet Hunt notes that Brett had proposed to Rossetti and was rejected, and in 1858, Brett abruptly stopped work on a portrait he had been painting of her, never to finish it.

According to William Michael, Christina's brother, the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was probably aware of John's full identity, and tried to prevent her from publishing the poem about him, claiming that it was "utterly foreign to your primary impulses" (meaning her impulse to write a poetry collection in the first place, which she didn't decide to do to complain about boys). Her brother's comment makes more sense if the poem was indeed about his colleague; he was probably worried about awkwardness in their artistic circle if she publicly criticized their colleague, her admirer (to be clear, I'm speculating here).

But her brother was also incorrect in his evaluation of "No, Thank You, John" as irrelevant to her project-even though Rossetti's poem is a personal reaction to a private incident, its inclusion in her collection is enormously significant regarding the collection's thesis. Goblin Market and Other Poems is a collection that offered alternate takes on female desire, friendship, love, experiences, and potential. "No Thank You, John" is about a woman who asserts her own desires, knows that she deserves to be happy on her own terms, and speaks up for herself when her choices are dismissed. It is about a woman who grows angry when a man acts as though he is entitled to her love or hand because of a positive rapport they may have had, or, worse, simply because of his own desire to have her, in the first place.

At the end of the poem, she offers friendship to him instead, which is a gesture not only of agency, but also an assertion of equality. Perhaps most effective is the speaker's tone of weariness at having to break her feelings down to simple bullet-points so that they might finally be understood or accepted, and at having to explain this matter yet another time; few things feel so timeless as women exhaustedly, exhaustively explaining to men that they don't owe them love.

It reads:

I never said I loved you, John:

Why will you tease me, day by day,

And wax a weariness to think upon

With always "do" and "pray"?

You know I never loved you, John;

No fault of mine made me your toast:

Why will you haunt me with a face as wan

As shows an hour-old ghost?

I dare say Meg or Moll would take

Pity upon you, if you'd ask:

And pray don't remain single for my sake

Who can't perform that task.

I have no heart?-Perhaps I have not;

But then you're mad to take offence

That I don't give you what I have not got:

Use your common sense.

Let bygones be bygones:

Don't call me false, who owed not to be true:

I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns

Than answer "Yes" to you.

Let's mar our pleasant days no more,

Song-birds of passage, days of youth:

Catch at to-day, forget the days before:

I'll wink at your untruth.

Let us strike hands as hearty friends;

No more, no less: and friendship's good:

Only don't keep in view ulterior ends,

And points not understood

In open treaty. Rise above

Quibbles and shuffling off and on:

Here's friendship for you if you like; but love,-

No, thank you, John.

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Christina Rossetti once wrote a poem calling out a suitor who would not take no for an answer.

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In the late 1850s, the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti wrote a poem about her annoyance with a suitor who couldn't seem to comprehend the fact that she didn't want to marry him-despite her telling him so quite plainly.

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Food & Representations of Gender in Goblin Market 

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Food & Representations of Gender in Goblin Market 

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Carole Counihan argues that 'men's and women's ability to produce, provide and consume food is a key measure of their power,' (1998:2) whilst Jack Goody has argued, 'gender hierarchies are maintained, in part, though differential control over and access to food' (quoted in Counihan, 1998:2). This essay considers the relevance of food in both a physical sense and its symbolic significance in Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening and Christina Rosetti's long poem Goblin Market.

I first explore how traditional gender roles are built upon the idea of the man as the provider, and arguing Rossetti and Chopin act to reject this by presenting female characters who can provide for themselves. I also consider food consumption in relation to gender identity and discovery, before closing with a consideration of the symbolic importance of fruit, and the links to female identification with Eve in the works.

If we look first of all at The Awakening, the novel's opening chapters immediately present us with a father, Mr Pontellier, who is neither reliable in, nor necessary to, the provision of food for the family. In chapter one as Mr Pontellier leaves his family, his wife asks 'coming back to dinner?' to which he 'shrugged his shoulders.' (1994:5)

The inconclusive gesture first of all shows that he is neither decisive nor forceful as you might expect a man to be. Secondly, it shows his irrelevance to the families eating, he does not need to be present for the family to eat, and it appears Mrs Pontellier is unconcerned by the prospect of the absent husband at meal time, as she 'laughed, nodding good-by to him.' (1994:5) But it is also suggested that he is an unreliable provider. On parting from his children he 'promised to bring them back bonbons and peanuts,' (1994:5) whilst tellingly on his return he 'had forgotten the bonbons and peanuts for the boys.' (1994:7)

Clearly, he is established as being perhaps not an incapable provider, but certainly an unreliable one, there is no guarantee that he can provide that which he claims he will. As such, this seems to undermine his position in the gender hierarchy, as he fails to fulfil his expected role as a male.

Further evidence Mr Pontellier is unnecessary to food provision comes when he sends his wife a box of 'friandises,' (1994:8) as whilst this is an example of his providing for his wife, the contents are not essential, they are 'luscious and toothsome' (1994:8), they are luxuries. As such, Mrs Pontellier gives the contents of the box away to other ladies. These ladies however 'all declared that Mr Pontellier was the best husband in the world' because of this, whilst Edna herself 'was forced to admit that she knew of none better.' (1994:9)

This example shows a number of very interesting ideas; first of all the reaction of the other women highlights the traditional perception of the husband as the provider, they declare he is the best husband in the world because he has provided some luxurious foods, nothing else shapes their opinion of Mr Pontellier. Thus the primacy of food provision to notions of the good husband is stressed. However, by giving the food away, Edna acts to reject the food.

As Counihan argues, 'just as giving food creates connection, refusing it severs connections. Both giving and refusing can be a means of attaining power.' (1998:6) Thus by rejecting the food provided for her, Edna frees herself from connections to her husband; by proving she does not need to be provided for by her husband, she asserts her power and independence. For me, this incident early in the novel lays the foundations for her later self assertion, and her distancing herself from her husband.

In Goblin Market, we find a similar engagement with the nature of gender roles in relation to the ability to provide food. If we look at Laura first, for the goblins fruit she 'longed but had no money.' (2006:1468) As such, she is completely in the power of the goblins, and they can force her to do as they please. The fact that when they ask her to 'buy from us with a golden curl', she 'drops a tear more rare than pearl,' (2006:1468) not only carries sexual undertones, but on a more superficial level clearly conveys her unwillingness, her unhappiness at this. This is not something that she wants to do, however, in order for her to eat, she must give up her innocence and put herself in the power of the male.

Thus, not only does Rossetti present the balance of power absolutely in the hands of the males, with the woman as the dependent, but also portrays this fact in a negative light, through the negative, yet submissive, reaction of Laura. There is then a further emphasis in this dependent position, as Laura subsequently 'dwindled [...] and would not eat,' as she 'kept watch in vain' (2006:1472) for the goblin men. The absence of the male therefore is linked in the text to a wasting away and to not eating. 'Would not' however implicitly suggests that it is through choice that she is not eating, suggesting that the gender roles which emphasise the supremacy as man as provider are in fact merely perpetuated by women like Laura.

This is later built upon by the actions of Lizzie, who rejects this view that the man is the only source of food provision, and that a dependence upon him must necessarily exist. Unlike Laura, Lizzie has money, shown by the fact that she 'put a silver penny in her purse' (2006:1473) before confronting the goblins. She is then able to '[toss] them her penny' (2006:1474) in exchange for the fruit, she is in a position to lawfully provide for herself.

The goblins however reject her money, and try to make her eat their fruit herself, and beat her when she refuses them, she 'would not open lip from lip / Lest they should cram a mouthful in.' (2006:1475) This, I believe, shows her rejection of the notion that men are necessary to food provision, their role in the gender hierarchy is subsequently undermined entirely, as they are left completely powerless over Lizzie.

Not only does Lizzie reject the goblins fruit and the male as provider, but she also shows that women are in fact the ultimate providers. I mean that not only is Lizzie capable of providing because she has money, but she is by nature a provider. This is shown by her becoming food herself, as she returns to Laura declaring 'Never mind my bruises [...] Eat me, drink me, love me.' (2006:1476) Counihan argues that 'women are food to the foetus and infant,' (1999:63) and I believe that in this respect, Rossetti shows Lizzie as extending her relationship with her sister to a maternal one.

She has become food to Laura, much as she would to her child. The effect of this is not only to challenge the gender hierarchy, which places man as the provider at the top, but also to offer a moral, guiding message to women to a large degree. Casey argues that 'Victorian female writers [...] perceived their maternal role as endowing them with the power to teach - and hence morally guide - the race.' (1991:64)

To this end, I would suggest that we therefore see Rossetti presenting the maternal nature of women as a powerful, moral, redeeming force. Through this, Rossetti challenges the gender hierarchy, by showing women are capable of providing, and that their provision works on a very moral level. We might perhaps also suggest she offers this role of provider in contrast to the male, who takes advantage of the role of provider for his own gain, rather than a moral cause.

The Awakening by contrast, does not show the woman providing for the good of others, nor for any moral purpose, but quite the contrary in fact. Chopin places a great deal of emphasis on Edna's ability to provide for herself, but that is all she is concerned with, providing for herself, and shaping her identity through this. Edna's final actions before moving into her own house, as she conceives the idea of this meal, she declares 'I shall give a grand dinner before I leave the old house!' (1994:77)

The old house, of course, embodies the old patriarchal values; it is her husbands house, she objects in fact that 'the house, the money that provides for it, are not mine.' (1994:76) By resolving specifically to hold a grand dinner as her final action in the house, I believe she symbolically asserts the fact that she is capable of providing for herself, of living without the provision of men. The dinner is, in my opinion, not about treating and providing food and entertainment for others, but rather it is to display to others that she is capable of providing. As soon as she has proven this, she moves out to her own house, to live independently and free of her husband. Continued on Next Page "

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The Relevance of Food to Representations of Gender in "The Awakening" and "Goblin Market"

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Carole Counihan argues that 'men's and women's ability to produce, provide and consume food is a key measure of their power,' (1998:2) whilst Jack Goody has argued, 'gender hierarchies are maintained, in part, though differential control over and access to food' (quoted in Counihan, 1998:2).

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Renunciation & Redemption in Goblin Market

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Renunciation & Redemption in Goblin Market

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In "Goblin Market" (1862), Christina Rossetti (1830‑1894) presents a story of two sisters who must endure carnal lust in order to embrace a higher and purer realm of sexuality: marriage. This poem is a story of renunciation, but not one of denying the body and its desires in order to embrace the spiritual nature of the soul. Instead, Lizzie and Laura learn to embrace both their earthly and spiritual natures in traditional, Victorian marriage. Lizzie appears as a type of Christ in her redemption of Laura, but it is a role that encompasses both earthly and spiritual redemption.

The poem begins with the goblin men's continual cry, "Come buy, come buy" (l. 4). What these goblins represent is clear by their seductive, sexually explicit, description of their fruity wares: "Plump unpecked cherries / . . . Bloom‑down‑cheeked peaches, / Swart‑headed mulberries, /Wild free‑born cranberries /. . . Pomegranates full and fine" (ll. 7, 9‑11, 21). The goblin men appear to sell fruit, but they really appeal to, and try to waken, women's carnal lusts: "sweet to tongue and sound to eye" (l. 30). The goblins symbolically want their customers' bodies, not money for their wares. It is a siren song that Laura and Lizzie, desiring neither to "see no evil" nor "hear no evil," must avoid, for both see the goblin men as evil characters: "You should not peep at goblin men" (l. 49). These goblin men do not represent sexuality in general but its worldly aspect, carnal lust; they desire to consume the body without its spiritual counterpart, the soul. Sexuality in itself is not evil, just the goblins' distorted representation of it, which is why their song is so seductive to virgins.

Original cover illustration of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

If these "men" represent carnal lust, then Laura's purchase and consumption of goblin fruit initially seems like a loss of her virginity. Her "fall" begins when she first "rear[s] her glossy head" and repeatedly tells Lizzie to "look" (ll. 52, 54). Laura naively thinks she can buy fruit with standard money, of which she has none. However, what the goblin men want is not her money but herself, of which their fruit is a lure: "'You have much gold upon your head, / . . . Buy from us with a golden curl'" (ll. 123, 125). Once Laura "buys" their fruit with part of her body, her hair, and sensuously eats it, she has "fallen." Ironically, Laura awakens to her sensuality only to have it taken from her because she has experienced such sensuality in the wrong context: worldly, carnal lust. It is only after eating the goblin fruit that Laura's senses cease functioning; appearing "deaf and blind" (l. 259), she can no longer see the goblins or hear their cries. Lizzie, still pure, alone can hear "that goblin cry, / 'Come buy'" (ll. 255‑56): "I hear the fruit‑call but I dare not look" (l. 243). Without eating goblin fruit, Lizzie's sensuality is not dulled. The theme is not renouncing all sexuality but enjoying it in its proper sphere: the marriage of body and soul, not the carnal lusts of goblin men.

Laura's "purchase" of goblin fruit results in the symbolic, not actual, loss of her virginity. Although Roxanne Eberle sees Laura as a "fallen woman" (175), and Lizzie's salvation of her as a "program of reclamation" (183) due to Rossetti's reclamation of prostitutes (168), this is not an accurate reading of the poem. After Laura and Lizzie heed the call, the goblins are compared to animals, less-than-human creatures. The moment that Laura heeds the goblin cry of "come buy," these "men" take on animal‑like characteristics; they are like cats (ll. 71, 109, 340), rats (ll. 73, 110, 340), snails (ll. 74, 111, 342), wombats (ll. 75, 341), ratels (ll. 76, 341), and birds (ll. 77, 112, 343). Laura's heeding their cry results in her own objectification, for she "whisper[s] like the restless brook" (l. 53); she is "a rush‑imbedded swan," a "lily," a "moonlit poplar branch," and a ship (ll. 82‑85). It is this dehumanization, in which Laura becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, from which Lizzie rescues her, not her status as a "fallen woman." Lizzie saves Laura so that she can recognize her femininity and sexuality from a healthy perspective: marriage, the sacramental union of body and soul, and a celebration of both earthly and spiritual passion.

The contrast Rossetti sets up between Laura and Lizzie is interesting in its evaluation of Victorian expectations of women, and a foretaste of Lizzie's later appearance as a type of Christ. Lizzie is a typical, Victorian woman of good character; "full of wise upbraidings" (l. 142), she appears "modest" (l. 209), "content" (l. 212), "placid" (l. 217), "tender" (l. 299), and industrious. By contrast, although she continues working on the sisters' farm, Laura gradually loses interest in "swe[eping] the house, / Tend[ing] the fowls or cows," and "fetch[ing] honey" (ll. 293‑95). Laura exists "in an absent dream / . . . longing for the night" (ll. 211, 214). She is described as "a leaping flame" (l. 218) and, "in a passionate yearning," refuses to sleep (l. 266). Laura's health and beauty rapidly fade after she ceases working; according to Rossetti, these are not admirable qualities in a woman. Lizzie must save Laura from laziness and ill health so she can become a productive wife and mother. However, the domesticity Laura returns to is fulfillment, not renunciation.

Lizzie's trip to the "goblin market" to redeem her sister marks her initial appearance as a type of Christ. Here, the "marketplace" takes on additional significance as both the temple, where Jesus drives out the moneychangers, and Golgotha, the site of Jesus' crucifixion. Like Jesus in the temple, Lizzie does not buy anything from the goblins, which reinforces her purity, for "her penny [still] jingle[s] / . . .in her purse" (ll. 452‑53). Throughout the redemption scene, Lizzie's encounter with them is, like Christ, vicarious suffering: "for your sake I have braved the glen / And had to do with goblin merchant men" (ll. 473‑74). While physically attacked by the goblins, like Christ during His passion Lizzie "utter[s] not a word" (l. 430) and refuses to fight back. Lizzie as Christ is a vehicle for understanding Laura's spiritual and physical redemption.

To Lizzie, the goblins also appear animal‑like, but only after she heeds their call to save her sister. Trying to lure Lizzie with their cry of "come buy," these goblins begin "Clucking and gobbling / . . . Chattering like magpies, / Fluttering like pigeons, / Gliding like fishes" (ll. 335, 345‑47). Enduring their symbolic rape, Lizzie is also objectified; however, she appears "like a lily in a flood," a "beacon left alone," a "fruit‑crowned orange tree," and "a royal virgin town" (ll. 409, 412, 415, 418). The difference is that Lizzie's motives are pure. For her sister rather than herself, she "listen[s] and look[s]" (l. 328), responding to the goblins' song of carnal lust and procuring the juice of goblin fruit. Such sexuality "is neither good nor evil in itself but . . . produce[s] either good or evil results, depending upon the viewer's response" (Grass 374). Laura responds to goblin sexuality for the experience, Lizzie for her sister's spiritual and physical health.

Lizzie as a type of Christ is reinforced in the problematic, passionate "redemption" scene, which some critics see as veiled homoerotic desire. However, Lizzie tells Laura to suck the goblin juice off her face and neck, in words recalling the Last Supper: "Eat me, drink me, love me, / Laura, make much of me" (ll. 471‑72). It is an intensely sensuous but chaste moment between the sisters because Lizzie should be seen as Christ here, not as an incestuous lover. Therefore, what redeems a seemingly an erotic situation is Lizzie's symbolic identity with Christ.

Rossetti contrasts two kinds of passion: one proper, the other improper. Sensuously eating goblin fruit robs Laura of a pure celebration of sexuality; gorging on its "wormwood" (l. 494) juices through Lizzie allows Laura to embrace her sexuality within marriage. Goblin fruit is not evil except the vehicle through which it is enjoyed: evil goblins or pure Lizzie (Grass 374). Both Laura and Lizzie recognize the pure nature of sexuality, for it allows them to hear and ignore the goblins' cries of "come buy." The vehicle of Lizzie's "redemption" of Laura is sensuality, with goblin fruit now seen as "the fiery antidote" (l. 559): "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / . . . . Eat me, drink me, love me" (ll. 468, 471). Such "redemption" allows Laura to embrace, not renounce, her earthly sexuality. However, it must be enjoyed only in the proper context of marriage. Continued on Next Page "

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"Goblin Market:" Renunciation and Redemption in Christina Rossetti's Narrative Poem

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In "Goblin Market" (1862), Christina Rossetti (1830‑1894) presents a story of two sisters who must endure carnal lust in order to embrace a higher and purer realm of sexuality: marriage. This poem is a story of renunciation, but not one of denying...

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The Victorian Age was a time of rapid economic, social, and cultural change throughout England. Beginning in the late 1700s and early 1800s, industry began to take shape in Britain, launching England into an era characterized by "momentous and intimidating" social movements, surprising inventions, and a remarkable energy driving the time ("Victorian Age" 1099). This culminated under the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), as people migrated from the country to the city in the hopes of finding better wages as a result of the Industrial Revolution (Service 83). The changes brought about by massive population movement and industrialization impacted the full breadth of life for all of England's citizens, while the unprecedented speed of this social and economic revolution afforded people far too little time to process each new innovation before being carried away by the next "torrent of ideas and technologies" ("Victorian Age" 1105).

Just like all other citizens, Victorian authors had mixed reactions to the processes of industrialization. Some extolled the virtues of this "new age of promise, progress, and triumph" while others dubbed it the "Time of Troubles" ("Victorian Age" 1105). Those who openly criticized the negative effects of industrial growth-particularly its effects on women's traditional roles-used their writing as a platform for their ideas. ("Victorian Age" 1117). Charles Dickens's Hard Times and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" stand as examples of such politicized writing and provide insight into the atmosphere of the time period while simultaneously commenting on the effects of industrialization on women.

The speed, success, and innovation of the Victorian Era was epitomized by the creation of the first London railroad in 1838 (Service 73). Running from Bricklayers' Arms to Greenwich, the opening of the railroad sparked an interest in expanding travel and trade options that ultimately led to London becoming a major importer of foreign goods to sell to its citizens such as Chinese tea, Indian cotton, and Australian beef ("Victorian Age" 1103). In "Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti addresses the skepticism associated with the sudden access to previously unattainable goods. The titular goblin merchant men tempt maidens daily with a wide assortment of fruit that could not possibly be grown in the same environment and are not native to England. The goblins' claims that they have fruits like "pine-apples," "apricots," "pomegranates," and "citrons from the South" indicate that they, like London business men, are able to import goods on a large scale (Rosetti 13-14, 21, 29). By casting the menacing goblins as importers, Rossetti uses them as stand-ins for the British businessmen in order to communicate her negative opinion of industry. This is furthered by Laura's warning to her sister that they must not buy the foreign fruit because they do not know "upon what soil [the fruits] feed their hungry roots" (Rossetti 44-45). This assertion casts doubt upon the safety and trustworthiness of the goods that were not natively English and permeated the British economy during the 19 th century.

This passage also allows Rossetti to comment on the dangers English women were facing as newly targeted shoppers. Shortly after the trade boom, the creation of the department store caused leisurely women to be courted as consumers for the first time ("Victorian Age" 1111). This new ability of women to contribute to the economy directly translates to the story of Laura and Lizzie as the goblin men's calls of "come buy, come buy" can only be heard by maidens who have never before partaken of their goods (Rossetti 4). The negative perception of businesses targeting women is made clear by Lizzie's statement that the offers of the goblin men "should not charm us" because "their evil gifts would harm us" (Rossetti 65-66). The characterization of the merchants as sinister, persistent goblins and their obviously imported fruits as wicked and dangerous is emphasized by Lizzie's story of Jeanie-a girl who ignored the warnings of others, gave in to the goblins' cries, and indulged in their juicy products. Through Lizzie's account of Jeanie's life after eating the goblins' fruit, Rossetti is able to assert that once women have had a taste of consumerism their appetite for buying will become insatiable and self-destructive just as Jeanie "pined and pined away" her life searching for a way to get her hands on more exotic goblin fruit (Rossetti 154).

Rossetti continues this symbolic narrative into the account of Laura's experiences after succumbing to the goblin vendors' "sugar-baited words" to underscore the fact that the newly awarded opportunity to shop during this time of unhalted economic progress was an inherent temptation to women (Rossetti 234). Just as ladies in Victorian London were suddenly presented with the previously unheard of chance to purchase exotic items, Laura finds herself alone with the goblin men for what appears to be the first time after her sister, recognizing the potential danger of being out at dusk with the goblins, flees from the grove. The goblins' decisions to greet Laura by giving her "a crown of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown" and to showcase their fruit on a golden dish represent the Victorian advertisers' creation of ads specifically designed to target and flatter female consumers in order to capitalize on this newfound and inexperienced consumer bloc. (Rossetti 99-100).

Although she admittedly "longed [to purchase the fruit], but had no money," Laura's revelation that her hair is now an acceptable form of payment can be seen as Rossetti's commentary on the British women's sudden ability to participate in the burgeoning economy that had, until this point in time, excluded them (Rossetti 106). Furthermore, Rossetti's claim that Laura had "never tasted such before" strengthens the comparison between Laura and women of the Victorian Era who were new to the rapidly changing world marketplace (Rossetti 132). The decision to follow this line with the rhetorical question "how should it cloy with length of use" can be clearly read as a warning by Rossetti that women will eventually become sick from eagerly participating in the industrialized business cycle since mass consumption, like the goblins' fruit, is too sweet to be consumed excessively by those who have never tasted it before (Rossetti 133).

Allowing women to take advantage of the innovations in international trade was merely the first way in which the continuous and confusing procession of social reforms sparked by the Industrial Revolution began to grant women both political and economic rights they had previously been denied. Prior to the 1870s, married women in Britain were not allowed to vote, own property, or claim custody of their own children, and immediately forfeited what few legal rights they did have upon tying themselves to their husbands as "one body" in marriage (Victorian Age" 1110).

At the same time, unmarried or "redundant" women were desperate to improve their quality of life but had so few opportunities for social advancement that tens of thousands of girls turned to the booming London prostitution industry in order to make a living ("Victorian Age" 1111). The conflict between targeted economic advertising and cultural expectations forced women to suddenly grapple with crumbling gender norms. Efforts made during the Victorian Era to counteract the negative effects of these prevailing antiquated gender stereotypes on women were directly influenced by the abundance of progress stemming from industrialization. Although these strides in social evolution are now regarded as feminist triumphs, as Dickens and Rossetti both point out the upending of women's traditional roles in society was met with much doubt and uncertainty which led to many questioning whether or not women were prepared for the new, highly technical industrial culture.

The female characters in Dickens's socially critical novel, Hard Times, epitomize the aforementioned internal struggle between upholding time-tested ideas of femininity and assimilating into the fast-paced culture produced by the Industrial Revolution. Traditional Victorian femininity was defined as being a domestic, unadulterated, nurturing creature who enjoyed mundane activities such as creating cross-stitched pillowcases or sketching pastoral scenes. According to this standard, the ideal woman is primarily motivated by an intrinsic desire to marry and fulfill the needs of her husband and children while protecting them from the "squalor" and gloom of the industrial world. As Dickens points out, it is no surprise that this sedentary existence would clash with the fast-paced world 19 th century ladies found themselves living in ("Victorian Age" 1111). Through his characterization of Rachael, Louisa, and Mrs. Gradgrind, Dickens is able to showcase the varying degrees to which Victorian women were shaped by their rapidly changing environment and the adverse effects their attempts to incorporate elements of the new cultural climate into their nature had on their ability to fulfill the mold of the ideal woman.

Being one of the only nurturing, maternal figures in Dickens's Hard Times, Rachael represents women who were still clinging to the customary role of Victorian ladies as reliable caretakers and emotional anchors for the men in their lives. This is evidenced by Rachael's relationship with one of the workers in Coketown's immense system of industry named Stephen Blackpool. Dickens first introduces Rachael through Stephen as he is frantically searching for her in the darkened streets after completing his shift at the factory. The instant satiation of his rising panic brought on when he finally catches sight of her casts Rachael as accomplishing the main purpose of women during this time: quieting the "savage beast" her husband might become as a result of his time spent toiling away in the "savage jungle of free trade" ("Victorian Age" 1111).

Stephen's immense praise of Rachael's constancy and ability to encourage him "in that cheering way" for an unspecified number of years prior to this encounter speaks to the level of relentless persistence and determination she has shown in order to continue being an escape for Stephen from the hustle and bustle of Victorian life (Dickens 54). Additionally, Stephen goes on to assert that Rachael's mere touch is enough to "calm the wild waters of his soul" and "abate the raging sea" within him which aligns Rachael even more with the picturesque Victorian lady (Dickens 62). Rachael's sympathetic side is further showcased in her interactions with Stephen's unpredictable, invalid wife. Described as "a disabled drunken creature" and "a creature so foul to look at," Mrs. Blackpool is detested by everyone she comes in contact with, including her husband (Dickens 55). Rachael's willingness to look past the woman's unsavory appearance and behavior while sitting by the bedside and tending to her wounds speaks to the boundlessness of her compassion and feminine need to care for others.

In spite of Rachael's strict adherence to the essential womanly principles of nurturing and selflessness, she is unable to escape the harsh realities of the industrial age unscathed. Although she is in love with Stephen and he with her, Rachael is unable to achieve the ultimate goal of Victorian women-marrying a suitable husband and producing offspring-because of the laws that were in place during this time. As Hard Times was first published in 1854, prior to the Divorce and Marital Causes Act of 1857, the world of Coketown was still governed by religiously motivated laws prohibiting divorce ("Victorian Age" 1111). Rachael's urging for Stephen to "try to think not" of his desire to separate from his abovementioned wife in order to begin a new life with her and "let the laws be" shows the extent to which she is rendered helpless by both the society in which she lives and her own passive, feminine nature (Dickens 53, 54). Rachael's inability to turn her strong romantic feelings for Stephen into a marriage shows that even the most idealistic young women suffered during the Victorian Era.

The stark contrast between Louisa Gradgrind's defiant, youthful curiosity and her rigid, fact based upbringing makes her the perfect representation of women attempting to integrate their sense of prescribed Victorian womanhood into the developing industrial culture of the mid-1800s. Like Rachael and her real world counterparts, Louisa is subjected to the wills of the men in her life. Her father's philosophy that instilling in his daughter only the cold, hard facts and "root[ing] out everything else" is sufficient for her development coincides with the overabundance of new knowledge and scientific discoveries that entered the everyday sphere during the Victorian Age (Dickens 5). Dickens's description of Louisa's "eminently practical" father's attempts to override her emotional nature with only the most irrefutable scientific laws can be viewed as the overwhelming influence London's industrialized society had on the British women's behaviors and ways of thinking (Dickens 12).

Although this highly factual way of life affords the ladies an extensive understanding of the world around them, it fails to prepare them to deal with the emotional roller coaster that accompanies romantic relationships. Upon learning of Mr. Bounderby's proposal of marriage from her father, Louisa is uncertain how to respond as this is a matter that must be considered both rationally and emotionally. Her father's advice to consider Bounderby's offer "simply as one of tangible Fact" just as she has been taught to her consider all other occurrences in her life, shows the part facts and technology play in corrupting the characteristically feminine objective of obtaining a husband (Dickens 77).

As a result of this invasion of facts, the search for a spouse shifts from being purely motivated by the desire to provide love and support for someone else, to being a highly scrutinized endeavor that produces relationships ill-equipped to stand the test of time as evidenced by Louisa's dealings with James Harthouse. Though she is married to Mr. Bounderby at the time, when Mr. Harthouse expresses his interest in beginning an extramarital affair with her, Louisa claims that "there rose up a rebellion" within her heart against the binding tie of her marriage (Dickens 164). Her assertion that this upheaval was the result of the conflict between her "two individual natures" goes to show the difficulty Victorian women had reconciling the old-fashioned notions of womanliness with the rapidly evolving influences of their industrialized society (Dickens 165). By having Louisa follow this with the statement that these differing aspects of her personality could not be ruled by any "general laws," Dickens is directly criticizing the oppressive regulations that existed during the Victorian Era (Dickens 165).

Louisa's mother, Mrs. Gradgrind, rounds out the spectrum of Dickens's symbolic female characters. First introduced as "a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls," Mrs. Gradgrind's wholehearted immersion into the pervading culture of facts through her marriage to the factually driven Thomas Gradgrind has left her nearly incapacitated (Dickens 16). Dickens fashions her with "surpassing feebleness" and "imbecility" to allow her to function as a depiction of the Victorian women who completely abandoned the feminine ideals in favor of the technologically advanced nature of the time (Dickens 16). This characterization of Louisa's mother illustrates the widely accepted Victorian thinking that women were so intellectually inferior to men that they would "buckle under the weight of serious thought" ("Victorian Age" 1111).

Through Mrs. Gradgrind's reactions to Louisa's unsavory behaviors, Dickens is able to affirm the line of thinking that women cannot solely inhabit the commercialized world of their male contemporaries without sacrificing both their sanity and aspiration of starting a family. In Victorian society, Mrs. Gradgrind's remark that parenting Louisa is "enough to make one regret ever having had a family at all" spits directly in the face of the traditional way of thinking about women as longing primarily to be mothers and wives (Dickens 17). By creating a character who is reduced to being wholly unfit to rear her children and who verbalizes her desire that should have never been born, Dickens paints an impactful picture of the effects overwhelming amounts of facts, like those produced by the Industrial Revolution, had on women in the 1800s.

Charles Dickens and Christina Rossetti works offer a unique glimpse into the conflicted, and muddled world their authors inhabited. Rossetti's carefully crafted symbolism allows readers in both the 19 th and 21 st centuries to see past the initial shock and awe that accompanied the sudden international trade boom and more fully understand the potentially detrimental side effects associated with importing foreign goods. Similarly, Charles Dickens's intentional characterization of the three main female characters effectively communicates the struggles women faced when trying to merge expectations and reality. Together, the two works serve as still relevant expressions of the various ways in which women suffered as a result of their willingness to be suppressed in an attempt to stretch between the shifting demands of their families, and the immovable rock of social standards. These works reflect the effects, the tumultuousness, uncertainty, and forward moving progress of the Victorian Age had on the women of London.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. Print.

Rossetti, Christina Georgina. "Goblin Market." The Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44996. 2016. Web. 12 April 2016.

Service, Alistair. London 1900. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1979. Print.

The Longman Anthology of British Literature Vol 2B. Eds. Damrosch, David and Kevin J.H.

Dettmar, Christopher Baswell, Clare Carroll, Heather Henderson, Constance Jordan, Peter J. Manning, Anne Howland Schotter, William Chapman Sharpe, Stuart Sherman, Jennifer Wicke, Susan J. Wolfson. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2006. Print.

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Women's Struggles in Industrialized Victorian London as Depicted in Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

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The Victorian Age was a time of rapid economic, social, and cultural change throughout England. Beginning in the late 1700s and early 1800s, industry began to take shape in Britain, launching England into an era characterized by "momentous and intimidating" social movements, surprising inventions, and a remarkable energy driving the time ("Victorian Age" 1099).

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Costs

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In this course, Dr Ross Wilson (University of Cambridge) explores the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Having begun with a summary of Rossetti's critical reception, both in her own lifetime and then after her death, we then explore Rossetti's poetry through five key themes: repetition, repetition, expectation, ambiguity and uncertainty, and the speaker.

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June 2017

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June 2017

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Terms for analysis of verse

Accentual Verse: Verse in which the metre depends upon counting a fixed number of stresses (which are also known as 'accents') in a line, but which does not take account of unstressed syllables. The majority of Germanic poetry (including Old English) is of this type.

Accentual-Syllabic Verse: The normal system of verse composition in England since the fourteen century, in which the metre depends upon counting both the number of stresses and the total number of syllables in any give line. An iambic pentameter for example contains five stressed syllables and a total of ten syllables.

Alexandrine : a line of six iambic feet, often used to mark a conclusion in a work which is in heroic couplets: Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism (1709) satirised this technique (which he was not above using himself): ' Then, at the last and only couplet fraught | With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, | A needless Alexandrine ends the song, | That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.' The final line of that extract is of course itself an alexandrine. Spenser used an alexandrine to end his modified form of ottava rima. The same word is used to describe a line of twelve syllables which is the dominant form of French verse. See syllabic verse.

Allegory: the saying of one thing and meaning another. Sometimes this trope works by an extended metaphor ('the ship of state foundered on the rocks of inflation, only to be salvaged by the tugs of monetarist policy'). More usually it is used of a story or fable that has a clear secondary meaning beneath its literal sense. Orwell's Animal Farm, for example, is assumed to have an allegorical sense.

Alliteration: The repetition of the same consonants (usually the initial sounds of words or of stressed syllables) at the start of several words or syllables in sequence or in close proximity to each other. In Anglo-Saxon poetry and in some fourteenth century texts such as Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight rigid patterns of alliteration were an essential part of poetic form. More recently it is used for expressive or occasionally onomatopoeic effect.

Anaphora: Repitition of the same word or words at the beginning of consecutive syntactic units.

Apostrophe: In rhetoric the word is used to describe a sudden address to a person or personification. In punctuation the same word is used to describe the mark ' which can be used to indicate the beginning and end of direct speech, a quotation, or an elision. From the late sixteenth century an apostrophe was used, very irregularly, to indicate a possessive form of a noun: by the mid-nineteenth century it was established by convention that singular possessive forms should be indicated by "'s" ('the cat's pajamas') and that regular plural possessive forms should be indicated by "s'" ('my parents' house'). If a plural does not normally end in 's' then the form "'s" is used for the plural possessive form ('the children's tea was delicious'). The main exception to this rule is 'it's', which is used as the contracted form of 'it is' or 'it has'. The form 'its' is reserved for the possessive use ('the door has lost its paint').

: The word is usually used to describe the repetition of vowel sounds in nieghbouring syllables (compare Alliteration. The consonants can differ: so 'd eep s ea' is an example of assonance, whereas 'The queen will sw eep past the d eep crowds' is an example of internal rhyme. More technically it is used to describe the 'rhyming of one word with another in the accented vowel and those which follow, but not in the consonants, as used in the versification of Old French, Spanish, Celtic, and other languages' (OED).

Blank verse : is the metre most frequently used by Shakespeare. It consists of an unrhymed iambic pentameter. It was first used in Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's, translation of Books 2 and 4 of Virgil's Aeneid, composed some time in the 1530s or 40s. It was adopted as the chief verse form in Elizabethan verse drama, and was subsequently used by Milton in Paradise Lost and in a wide range of subsequent meditative and narrative poems.

: a rhymed pair of lines, which are usually of the same length. If these are iambic pentameters it is termed a heroic couplet. This form was made popular by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and became the dominant poetic form in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In the work of Alexander Pope it becomes a flexible medium for pointed expression. Couplets of four iambic feet (i.e. eight syllables in all) are called octosyllabic couplets. These were favoured by John Gower, Chaucer's near contemporary, and became a vehicle for a comically brisk style in Samuel Butler's satirical poem Hudibras (1663-78).

Decorum : In literary parlance, the appropriateness of a work to its subject, its genre and its audience.

Elision : The omission of one or more letters or syllables from a word. This is usually marked by an apostrophe: as in 'he's going to the shops'. In early printed texts the elided syllable is sometimes printed as well as the mark of elision, as in Donne's 'She 'is all States, all Princes I'.

(plural fabliaux): A short, pithy story, usually of a bawdy kind.

: the basic unit for describing metre, usually consisting of a certain number and combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. Stressed and unstressed syllables form one or other of the recognised metrical forms: an iamb is 'di dúm'; a trochee is 'dúm di', a spondee is 'dúm dúm' (as in 'home-made'), an anapaest is 'di di dúm', and a dactyl is 'dúm di di'.

Feminine Rhyme : a rhyme of two syllables in which the final syllable is unstressed ('mother | brother'). If an iambic pentameter ends in a feminine rhyme the last, unstressed, syllable is usually not counted as one of the ten syllables in the line ('To be or not to be, that is the question' - the 'ion' is unstressed and takes the line into an eleventh syllable). Feminine rhyme can be used for comic effect, as it is frequently in the works of Byron: 'I've spent my life, both interest and principle, | And think not what I thought, my soul invincible.' It can also be sometimes used to suggest a feminine subject-matter, as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 20, which is addressed to the 'master mistress of my passion' and which makes extensive use of 'feminine' rhymes.

Free Verse : verse in which the metre and line length vary, and in which there is no discernible pattern in the use of rhyme.

(from Latin genus, type, kind): works of literature tend to conform to certain types, or kinds. Thus we will describe a work as belonging to, for example, one of the following genres: epic, pastoral, satire, elegy. All the resources of linguistic patterning, both stylistic and structural, contribute to a sense of a work's genre. Generic boundaries are often fluid; literary meaning will often be produced by transgressing the normal expectations of genre.

Homophones : Words which sound exactly the same but which have different meanings ('maid' and 'made').

Iambic pentameter : an unrhymed line of five feet in which the dominant accent usually falls on the second syllable of each foot (di dúm), a pattern known as an iamb. The form is very flexible: it is possible to have one or more feet in which the expected order of accent is reversed (dúm di). These are called trochees.

: strictly a sub-set of allegory: irony not only says one thing and means another, but says one thing and means its opposite. The word is used often of consciously inappropriate or understated utterances (so two walkers in the pouring rain greet each other with 'lovely day!', 'yes, isn't it'). Irony depends upon the audience's being able to recognise that a comment is deliberately at odds with its occasion, and may often discriminate between two kinds of audience: one which recognises the irony, and the other which fails to do so. Dramatic irony occurs when an audience of a play know some crucial piece of information that the characters onstage do not know (such as the fact that Oedipus has unwittingly killed his father).

Lexical set : words that are habitually used within a given environment constitute a lexical set. Thus 'Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...' form a lexical set.

: the transfer of a quality or attribute from one thing or idea to another in such a way as to imply some resemblance between the two things or ideas: 'his eyes blazed' implies that his eyes become like a fire. Many metaphors have been absorbed into the structure of ordinary language to such an extent that they are all but invisible, and it is sometimes hard to be sure what is or is not dead metaphor: 'the fat book' may imply a metaphor, as may also be the case when we talk of a note of music as 'high' or 'low'. Mixed metaphors often occur when a speaker combines two metaphors from very diverse areas in such a way as to create something which is physically impossible or absurd ('the report of the select committee was a bombshell which got right up my nose'). These often result from the tendency of metaphors to become received idioms in which the original force of the implied comparison is lost. See also Simile.

Metre: A regular patterned recurrence of light and heavy stresses in a line of verse. These patterns are given names. Almost all poems deliberately depart from the template established by a metrical pattern for specific effect. Assessing a poem's metre requires more than just spotting an iambic pentameter or other metrical pattern: it requires you to think about the ways in which a poem departs from its underlying pattern and why. Emotion might force a reverse foot or trochee, or the normal patterns of speech might occasionally cut across an underlying rhythm. See Iambic Pentameter.

Monorhyme : A rhymescheme in which all lines rhyme (aaaa etc.)

Onomatopoeia : The use of words or sounds which appear to resemble the sounds which they describe. Some words are themselves onomatopoeic, such as 'snap, crackle, pop.'

Ottava rima : an eight line verse stanza rhyming abababcc. In English it is usually in iambic pentameter. It was introduced into English by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the 1530s, and was widely used for long verse narratives. Sir John Harington translated Ariosto's Orlando furioso into ottava rima in 1591; Byron used the form in Don Juan (1819-24). Edmund Spenser produced a nine line modification of the form which ends with an alexandrine and rhymes ababbcbcc. for his Faerie Queene (1590-6). This is known as the Spenserian stanza, and was quite widely used by Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Personification : the attribution to a non-animate thing of human attributes. The thing personified is often an abstract concept (e.g. 'Lust'). Personification is related to allegory, insofar as personification says one thing ('Lust possessed him') and really means another. But it is opposed to allegory insofar as it aims for the maximum degree of explicitness, whereas allegory necessarily involves greater degrees of obliquity.

Plosive: A consonantal sound in the formation of which the passage of air is completely blocked, such as 'p', 'b', 't'. The blockage can be made in a variety of places (between the lips, between the tongue and teeth, between the tongue and palate). A 'bi-labial plosive' is made with the lips (Latin labia): examples are 'p' and 'b'; a 'dental plosive' is made by blocking the passage of air with the tongue and the teeth ('d', 't'); an 'uvular' plosive is made right at the back of the throat ('q', 'g'). Phoneticists (people who study the science of pronunciation) distinguish between 'voiced' and 'unvoiced' plosives. This is the distinction between 'b' (in saying which you have to make a sound as well as simply letting the air escape between your lips; hence it is 'voiced') and 'p' (in saying which you do not have to make a sound; hence it is termed 'unvoiced'). Similarly 't' is an unvoiced dental plosive; 'd' is a voiced dental plosive. The International Phonetic Association provides more information about how words are pronounced and the specialised alphabet with which such sounds are transcribed.

: a verse stanza of four lines, often rhyming abab. Tennyson's In Memoriam rhymes abba, however.

Register : a term designating the appropriateness of a given style to a given situation. Speakers and writers in specific situations deploy, for example, a technical vocabulary (e.g. scientific, commercial, medical, legal, theological, psychological), as well as other aspects of style customarily used in that situation. Literary effect is often created by switching register.

Rhetorical Figures : Linguistic effect can be perceptible to the mind and/or the eye. Figures of thought appeal to the mind by twisting language in a way that is strictly improper, but licensed by usage. Thus the word 'is' is used improperly in the sentence 'John is a lion', but the metaphorical usage is permissible. Or when we hear the sentence 'All hands on deck', we understand that the word 'hands' is being used as a synecdoche for sailors. Figures of thought are sometime called tropes (from a Greek word meaning 'turn', 'twist') or conceits (from a Latin word meaning 'concept', because the conceit appeals to the mind). Figures of speech are perceptible to the eye and the ear. Thus rhyme is a figure of speech, as is alliteration and anaphora. Figures of speech are sometimes called schemes (Greek 'forms').

: When two or more words or phrases contain an identical or similar vowel-sound, and the consonant-sounds that follow are identical or similar (red and dead). Feminine rhyme occurs when two syllables are rhymed ('mother | brother'). Half-rhyme occurs when the final consonants are the same but the preceding vowels are not. ('lo ve | ha ve'). Eye rhyme occurs when two syllables look the same but are pronounced differently ('kind | wind' - although sometimes changes in pronunciation have made what were formerly perfect rhymes become eye rhymes). Rime riche occurs when the same combination of sounds is used in each element of the rhyme, but where the two identical sounding words have different senses ('maid | made'). This was in the medieval period regarded as a particularly perfect form of rhyme. Leonine rhyme occurs when the syllable immediately preceding the caesura rhymes with the syllable at the end of the line. The Rhyme Scheme, or regularly recurring patterns of rhyme within a poem or stanza, is recorded by using a letter of the alphabet to denote each rhyme, and noting the order in which the rhymes recur (aabbcc... is the most simply rhyme scheme of all, that of the couplet).

Rhythm: a term designating the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse or prose. Different lines of verse can have the same metre but a different rhythm. Thus two lines of alliterative verse in Middle English poetry might have the same metrical pattern of four stressed syllables, but their rhythm might differ by having a greater or lesser number of unstressed syllables intervening between the stressed syllables.

Rhyme Royal: A form of verse which consists of stanzas of seven ten-syllable lines, riming a b a b b c c. It was first used by Chaucer, and was also the form chosen by Shakespeare for the tragic gravity of his narrative poem Lucrece (1594).

: a comparison between two objects or ideas which is introduced by 'like' or 'as'. The literal object which evokes the comparison is called the and the object which describes it is called the . So in the simile 'the car wheezed like an asthmatic donkey' the car is the tenor and the 'asthmatic donkey' is the vehicle. Negative similes are also possible (as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun'). Epic similes are more extended similes, which might involve multiple points of correspondence between tenor and vehicle. The frequently occur in long heroic narrative poems in the classical tradition, such as Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), as when Milton describes the combat of Satan and Death:

'Incenst with indignation Satan stood
Unterrifi'd, and like a Comet burn'd,
That fires the length of Ophiucus huge
In th' Artick Sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes Pestilence and Warr. Each at the Head
Level'd his deadly aime; thir fatall hands
No second stroke intend, and such a frown
Each cast at th' other, as when two black Clouds
With Heav'ns Artillery fraught, come rattling on
Over the Caspian, then stand front to front
Hov'ring a space, till Winds the signal blow
To joyn thir dark Encounter in mid air:
So frownd the mighty Combatants, that Hell
Grew darker at thir frown, so matcht they stood...'

This double simile (first Satan is compared to a comet, then to a cloud) reflects back on the literal action: the violent energy of the comet is damped down by the immobile clouds. This change of vehicle reflects back on the fight which is the simile's tenor: it suggests that Satan starts off blazing with eagerness to fight Death, and then pauses, perhaps nervously.

Sonnet: In its earliest usages this can mean just 'a short poem, often on the subject of love.' Now it is almost always used to denote a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter. There are two main forms of Sonnet: the 'Shakespearean Sonnet' rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. It was the form favoured by Shakespeare, in his Sonnets (1609), although it is first found in the work of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The three quatrains can be linked together in argument in a variety of ways, but often there is a 'volta' or turn in the course of the argument after the second quatrain. The final couplet often provides an opportunity to sum up the argument of the poem with an epigram. Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1595) introduced a variant form in which the quatrains are connected by rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The 'Petrarchan Sonnet', which is the earliest appearance of the form, falls into an octet, or eight line unit, and a sestet, or six line unit. The Petrarchan sonnet form rhymes abbaabba cdecde (although the sestet can follow other rhyme-schemes, such as cdcdcd). Often there is a marked shift in the progression of the argument after the octet in the Petrarchan sonnet, which is sometimes vestigially registered in the Shakespearean form by a change of argument or mood at the start of the third quatrain. Sonnets may be free-standing poems, or they may form part of an extended sequence of poems which might relate in a loose narrative form the progress of a love affair (as is the case in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Amoretti and Petrarch's Canzoniere).

: 'A group of lines of verse (usually not less than four), arranged according to a definite scheme which regulates the number of lines, the metre, and (in rhymed poetry) the sequence of rhymes; normally forming a division of a song or poem consisting of a series of such groups constructed according to the same scheme' (OED). See also ottava rima, quatrain. This term is preferable to the less technical 'verse', since that word can also refer to a single line of a poem. In printed poems divisions between stanzas are frequently indicated by an area of blank space.

: Emphasis given to a syllable in pitch, volume or duration (or several of these). In normal spoken English some syllables are given greater stress than others. In metrical writing these natural variations in stress are formed into recurrent patterns, such as iambs, anapaests or trochees.

: A stanza or other grouping of lines within a poem. In classical odes the term is used of the first group of lines which might be followed by an antistrophe which exactly replicates the form of the strophe.

: The smallest unit of speech that normally occurs in isolation, or a distinct sound element within a word. This can consist of a vowel alone ('O') or a combination of a vowel and one or more consonants ('no', 'not'). Monosyllables contain only one syllable ('dog', 'big', 'shoe'); polysyllables contain more than one syllable. The word 'syllable' contains three syllables.

Synecdoche: the rhetorical figure whereby a part is substituted for a whole ('a suit entered the room'), or, less usually, in which a whole is substituted for a part (as when a policeman is called 'the law' or a manager is called 'the management'). See metonymy.

Topos: from a Greek word meaning 'place', a 'topos' in poetry is a 'commonplace', a standard way of describing a particular subject. Describing a person's physical features from head to toe (or somewhere in between) is, for example, a standard topos of medieval and Renaissance poetry.

: a foot of two syllables, in which the accent falls on the first syllable (dúm di). Some words which are trochaic include 'broken', 'taken', 'Shakespeare'.

: a general term for any figure of speech which alters the literal sense of a word or phrase: so metaphor, simile and allegory are all tropes, since they affect the meaning of words. In the rhetorical tradition tropes are contrasted with , which are rhetorical devices which affect the order or placing of words (so the repetition of a particular word at the start of each line is a figure).

Basic Grammatical Terms

: A word which qualifies or modifies the meaning of a noun; as in a ' red hat' or a ' quick fox'. They can be used to complement the verbs 'to be' or 'to seem' ('Sue seems happy today'). Adjectives are sometimes formed from nouns or verbs by the addition of a suffix such as '-able' (lovable), '-ful' (heedful), '-ic' (heroic), '-ish' (foolish), '-ive' (combative), '-ous' (famous), or '-y' (needy).

: A word which qualifies or adds to the action of a verb: as in 'he ran quickly', or 'he ran fast'. Adverbs can also qualify adjectives, as in 'the grass is intensely green'. They are usually formed by adding '-ly' to an adjective: 'playfully', 'combatively', 'foolishly'. They can also sometimes be formed by the addition of '-wise' to a noun ('the hands went round clockwise).

: The word is often used but very hard to define. It is a sentence or sentence-like construction included within another sentence. A main clause might be a simple noun plus verb ('I did it'). A co-ordinate clause is of equal status with the main clause: 'I did it and she did it at the same time.' A subordinate clause might be nested within a sentence using the conjunction 'that': 'he said that the world was flat.' Here 'he said' is the main clause and the subordinate clause is 'the world was flat'. Relative clauses are usually introduced by a relative pronoun: 'I read the book which was falling to pieces'; 'She spoke to the man who was standing at the bar.'

Conjunction : A word used to connect words or constructions. Co-ordinating conjunctions such as 'and', and 'but' link together elements of equal importance in a sentence ('Fish and chips' are of equal importance). Subordinating conjunctions such as 'because', 'if', 'although', connect a subordinate clause to its superordinate clause ('We will do it if you insist'; 'We did it because he insisted).

: A word used as the name or designation of a person or thing, such as 'duck' or 'river'. Abstract nouns denote abstract properties, such as 'invisibility', 'gentleness'. Proper nouns are nouns that designate one thing, as, for example, personal names.

Object: Usually the thing to which the action of a verb is done. More technically a substantive word, phrase, or clause, immediately dependent on, or 'governed by', a verb, as expressing, in the case of a verb of action, the person or thing to which the action is directed, or on which it is exerted; that which receives the action of the verb. So 'the man patted the dog', 'the woman was reading the book'. An indirect object of a verb denotes that which is indirectly affected by an action, but wihch is not the immediate product of it, as 'Give him the book', 'Make me a coat'.

Participle : a word derived from a verb which functions like an adjective, as in 'let sleeping dogs lie'. More technically 'A word that partakes of the nature of a verb and an adjective; a derivative of a verb which has the function and construction of an adjective (qualifying a noun), while retaining some of those of the verb'. Present participles usually end in '-ing' and usually describe an action which is going on at the same time as the verb: so in the sentence '"Go and play on your own street," she said, kicking the ball', the saying and the kicking are simultaneous. Past participles usually end in '-ed' or '-en' ('the door was kicked in'; 'the door was broken'). They are used in two main ways: combined with the verb 'have' they form a past or 'perfect' tense (so called because it describes an action which has been completed or 'perfected'), as in 'I have smashed the plate'. Past participles can also be used in passive constructions (which describe what was done to something rather than what something did), as in 'the plate was smashed'.

Preposition : A part of speech which indicates a connection, between two other parts of speech, such as 'to', 'with', 'by' or 'from'. 'She came from China', 'He gave the chocolates to me'.

Pronoun: A part of speech which stands for a noun: 'he', 'she', 'him', 'her', 'them'. Possessive pronouns express ownership ('his', 'hers'). Reflexive pronouns are 'herself', 'himself', 'myself' and are used either for emphasis (he did it all himself'), or when an action reflects back on the agent who performs it ('he shot himself in the foot'). Relative pronouns include 'who', 'which', 'that' and are usually used in the form 'he rebuked the reader who had sung in the library'. Interrogative pronouns ask questions (' Who stole the pie?'; ' Which pie?'). Indefinite pronouns do not specify a particular person or thing: ' Anyone who studies grammar must be mad.' ' Somebody has to know about this stuff.'

: This is a term which professional linguists still find impossible to define adequately. It is usually supposed to be 'A sequence of words which makes complete sense, containing subject, object and main verb, and concluded by a full-stop'.

: Usually the person or thing who is performing the action of a verb. More technically the grammatical subject is the part of a sentence of which an action is predicated: 'the man patted the dog'. It can be a single noun, or it can been a complex clause: 'the bald man who had just picked up the ball gave it to the dog.'

(Greek 'together arrangement'): a term designating the way in which words can be arranged and modified to construct sentences. Writers characteristically use syntactic sub-ordination when they aim for a highly formal effect, and syntactic co-ordination when they aim for a simpler, more straight-forward effect.

: Usually a word which describes an action (such as 'he reads poems', 'she excels at cricket'). More technically 'That part of speech by which an assertion is made, or which serves to connect a subject with a predicate.' This technical definition includes the most frequent verb in the language: the verb 'to be' which can be used to connect a 'subject', such as 'he', with a 'predicate', such as 'good at hockey'. There are verbs which take an object ('he raps the desk'), which are called transitive verbs. Other verbs do not, and are termed intransitive verbs ('I sit, he lives'). Some verbs can be used either transitively or intransitively: 'I sing' is an intransitive usage; 'Paul McCartney sings "God save the Queen"' is a transitive usage. The main verb is the verb on which the structure of the sentence depends, and without which the sentence would not make any sense. In the following sentence the verb 'fell' is the main verb: 'The boy, who had run too quickly, fell'.

Further Reading

There are many dictionaries of literary terms available. One of the most user-friendly is The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed. Chris Baldick (Oxford, 1990). More substantial (and also slightly more expensive) The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edition, ed. J.A. Cuddon, revised C. E. Preston (Harmondsworth, 1998). John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook (Oxford, 1996) is a very helpful guide to ways of using this technical vocabulary in practical criticism.

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Accentual Verse: Verse in which the metre depends upon counting a fixed number of stresses (which are also known as 'accents') in a line, but which does not take account of unstressed syllables. The majority of Germanic poetry (including Old English) is of this type.

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Poet Christina Rossetti was born in 1830, the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Francesca in 1827, Gabriel Charles Dante (famous under the name Dante Gabriel but always called Gabriel by family members) in 1828, William Michael in 1829, and Christina Georgina on 5 December 1830. In 1831 Gabriele Rossetti was appointed to the chair of Italian at the newly opened King's College. The children received their earliest education, and Maria and Christina all of theirs, from their mother, who had been trained as a governess and was committed to cultivating intellectual excellence in her family. Certainly this ambition was satisfied: Maria was the author of a respected study of Dante, as well as books on religious instruction and Italian grammar and translation; Dante Gabriel distinguished himself as one of the foremost poets and painters of his era; and William was a prolific art and literary critic, editor, and memoirist of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Christina became one of the Victorian age's finest poets. She was the author of numerous books of poetry, including Goblin Market and other Poems (1862), The Prince's Progress (1866), A Pageant (1881), and The Face of the Deep (1882).

Rossetti's poetry has never disappeared from view. Critical interest in Rossetti's poetry swelled in the final decades of the twentieth century, a resurgence largely impelled by the emergence of feminist criticism; much of this commentary focuses on gender issues in her poetry and on Rossetti as a woman poet. In Rossetti's lifetime opinion was divided over whether she or Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the greatest female poet of the era; in any case, after Browning's death in 1861 readers and critics saw Rossetti as the older poet's rightful successor. The two poets achieved different kinds of excellence, as is evident in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's comment on his sister, quoted by William Sharp in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1895): "She is the finest woman-poet since Mrs. Browning, by a long way; and in artless art, if not in intellectual impulse, is greatly Mrs. Browning's superior." Readers have generally considered Rossetti's poetry less intellectual, less political, and less varied than Browning's; conversely, they have acknowledged Rossetti as having the greater lyric gift, with her poetry displaying a perfection of diction, tone, and form under the guise of utter simplicity.

Rossetti's childhood was exceptionally happy, characterized by affectionate parental care and the creative companionship of older siblings. In temperament she was most like her brother Dante Gabriel: their father called the pair the "two storms" of the family in comparison to the "two calms," Maria and William. Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behavior, and she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper. Years later, counseling a niece subject to similar outbursts, the mature Christina looked back on the fire now stifled: "You must not imagine, my dear girl, that your Aunt was always the calm and sedate person you now behold. I, too, had a very passionate temper; but I learnt to control it. On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath. I have learnt since to control my feelings-and no doubt you will!" Self-control was, indeed, achieved-perhaps too much so. In his posthumous memoir of his sister that prefaces The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904) William laments the thwarting of her high spirits: "In innate character she was vivacious, and open to pleasurable impressions; and, during her girlhood, one might readily have supposed that she would develop into a woman of expansive heart, fond of society and diversions, and taking a part in them of more than average brilliancy. What came to pass was of course quite the contrary." As an adult Christina Rossetti was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.

Frances Rossetti read to her children, favoring religious texts such as the Bible, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), and the writings of St. Augustine, or moralistic tales such as those by Maria Edgeworth. When the children began reading for themselves, however, they generally shunned their mother's edifying selections in favor of the imaginative delights of The Arabian Nights or Thomas Keightley's Fairy Mythology (1828); later favorites included Sir Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis. Until 1836, when the boys began attending day school, the four children were offered similar instruction by their mother; thereafter, only Dante Gabriel and William were formally instructed in classics, mathematics, and sciences. Asked to describe her poetic influences, Rossetti speculated in a 26 March 1884 letter to Edmund Gosse: "If any one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather's cottage-grounds some thirty miles from London." At Gaetano Polidori's cottage at Holmer Green she fostered the attention to the minute in nature that marks her poetry; there she also observed the corruptibility and mortality that became keynotes in her work. Her reminiscences in Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) include reflections on childhood adventures at the cottage: her patient attendance on a strawberry, only to find it blighted before it has fully ripened, and her burial of a dead mouse and later observation of its decay. The visits to Holmer Green ended in 1839 when her grandfather sold the house and moved to London. A great lover of nature, Rossetti nevertheless spent most of her life in the city.

In his memoir William notes that Christina composed her first verse, "Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator," before she was old enough to write. Her next attempt was an aborted tale, modeled on The Arabian Nights, about a dervish named Hassan; and she wrote her first poem, "To my Mother on her Birthday," when she was eleven. The children produced a family newspaper, "The Hodge-Podge or Weekly Efforts," the first issue of which was dated 20 May 1843, and later a periodical titled "The Illustrated Scrapbook." Christina's early poetic efforts included experiments in lyric, devotional, pastoral, ballad, and fantasy forms.

Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti's poetry. She was also influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement, as is documented in the annotations and illustrations she added to her copy of John Keble's The Christian Year (1827) and in her reading of poetry by Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman. For more than twenty years, beginning in 1843, she worshiped at Christ Church, Albany Street, where services were influenced by the innovations emanating from Oxford. The Reverend William Dodsworth, the priest there until his conversion to Catholicism in 1850, assumed a leading role as the Oxford Movement spread to London. In addition to coming under the religious influence of prominent Tractarians such as Dodsworth, W. J. E. Bennett, Henry W. Burrows, and E. B. Pusey, Rossetti had close personal ties with Burrows and Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church theologian who became her spiritual adviser. The importance of Rossetti's faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated. More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry.

Gabriele Rossetti's health collapsed in 1843, leaving him virtually blind and unable to teach. Frances Rossetti returned to her former employment as a daily governess. Maria and William also took employment, Maria as a nursery governess and William in the civil service. Dante Gabriel continued his art studies, while Christina remained at home as a companion to their ailing father. In 1845 she, too, suffered a collapse in health. The breakdown has mystified biographers, some of whom have surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic and rescued Rossetti from having to make a financial contribution to the family by working as a governess like her mother and sister. She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, but another doctor speculated that she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania. Her biographer Jan Marsh conjectures that there may have been an attempt at paternal incest: the father's breakdown and the resultant changes in family fortunes leaving a needy patriarch in the daily care of his pubescent daughter, Christina's recurring bouts of depression, her lifelong sense of sinfulness, nightmarish poems about a crocodile devouring his kin, a poetic image of a "clammy fin" repulsively reaching out to her, and the recurring motif of an unnameable secret, Marsh suggests, could be indications of suppressed sexual trauma. Rossetti had bouts of serious illness throughout her life; William insists in his memoir that one cannot understand his sister unless one recognizes that she "was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid." The morbidity that readers have so often noted in her poetry, William suggests, was attributable to Christina's ill health and the ever-present prospect of early death rather than any innate disposition.

By her sixteenth birthday Christina, who was regarded as the poet in the family, had written more than fifty poems that were transcribed into a notebook by her sister. In 1847 a collection of her poems, titled Verses, was privately printed by her grandfather Polidori. As Marsh points out, this private publication, dedicated to her mother, decorously avoided anything resembling public display, but at the same time it constituted a juvenile literary debut in the tradition of other women poets such as Browning and Felicia Hemans. It was circulated among family and friends and was well received. The thirty-nine poems are notably literary in their inspiration, which is traceable to the Gothic writers Radcliffe, Lewis, and Charles Maturin; the English poets George Herbert, George Crabbe, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and the Italian poets Dante, Torquato Tasso, and Pietro Metastasio. The first and most striking poem in the collection is "The Dead City," an ambitious 275-line dream vision of a magnificent city, succulent banquet, and voluptuous revelers all turned to stone, the evocative descriptions of which anticipate the Pre-Raphaelite style. Here, as in Rossetti's most famous poem, " Goblin Market" (1862), lusciously described fruits represent the temptations of self-indulgence and pleasure. This genre-a narrative that combines fantasy with moral allegory-was an important one for Rossetti, and she employed it in more-accomplished poems such as "Goblin Market," "From House to Home," "The Prince's Progress," and "A Ballad of Boding," as well as in her tales "Nick," "Hero," and Speaking Likenesses, with Pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes (1874). A morbid strain can be seen in many of the poems in the collection: themes of mortality, inconstancy, and corruptibility figure prominently. Although Rossetti's mature style is not fully realized at this point, Verses is important as a tangible sign of her commitment to poetry and of her family's recognition of her vocation."

Later in 1847 Dante Gabriel, William, and Christina began a tradition of playing bouts rimés, a game in which two of them would race to compose a sonnet conforming to a set of line endings provided by the third. Christina excelled at the exercise, composing sonnets in a matter of minutes. In 1848 she had her first taste of fame when, at Dante Gabriel's instigation, she submitted two of her poems, "Death's Chill Between" and "Heart's Chill Between," to the prestigious literary periodical The Athenaeum; their acceptance made her a nationally published poet at seventeen. During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group; she even refused to have her work read aloud in her absence at its meetings, on the grounds that such display was unseemly. Nevertheless, her poetry has been described as "Pre-Raphaelite" in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism. Later in her career a reviewer in the Catholic World (October 1876) called her the "queen of the Preraphaelite school"; but more-recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti's work have been overemphasized at the expense of proper notice of the Tractarian influences. Certainly, Rossetti was involved in the early days of Pre-Raphaelitism. She sat as Mary for Dante Gabriel's paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), and her pensive Italianate countenance was a familiar image in the first phase of the movement. The art and poetry of the brotherhood has a strong sacramental element, and Rossetti had more in common with this early manifestation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic than she did with its later developments.

Late in 1849 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood initiated a periodical, The Germ, as a vehicle for the members' innovative views on art. Its four issues-dated January to April 1850-provided a venue for seven of Rossetti's poems: "Dreamland," "An End," " Song" ("Oh roses for the flush of youth" ), "A Pause of Thought," "A Testimony," "Repining," and "Sweet Death." These publications, which were anonymous in the first issue and pseudonymous thereafter, found an appreciative, though small, audience. The poems, and others composed at this time but not published until later, show that Rossetti had by then attained her mature poetic style, in which pain, loss, and resignation are expressed in diction and images that strike the reader as simple, perfect, and effortless."

One of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, James Collinson, proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848. She refused the offer, giving Collinson's recent conversion to Roman Catholicism as the reason. Collinson promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted. Collinson has struck biographers as an unlikely suitor (anecdotes generally portray him as a lackluster sleepyhead), and opinion is mixed as to whether Rossetti was ever in love with him. The engagement ended in the spring of 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism.

In 1850 Rossetti wrote Maude: A Story for Girls (1897), a novella that was not published until after her death. The title character's appearance and personality bear many similarities to accounts of the author, and this work, with its exploration of the tensions among the sometimes incompatible categories of female, poet, and Anglo-Catholic, is usually considered a semi-autobiographical portrait of the adolescent Rossetti. Fifteen-year-old Maude Foster is a poet whose "broken-hearted" verse dwells on themes of suffering, world-weariness, resignation, and religious devotion. Some of Rossetti's important early poems, later published under the titles "Song" ("She sat and sang alway"), "Three Nuns," and "Symbols," are included as Maude's productions, and a bouts rimés contest also appears in the narrative. Rossetti returned to this mixing of genres-prose punctuated with poetry-in her devotional works Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Time Flies, and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). Religious issues play a central role in the story when Maude suffers a spiritual crisis, and Anglo-Catholic practices are described as she discusses with her cousins the heavily symbolic lectern cover they are embroidering, the question of a vocation as a nun, and the Eucharist. The main conflict in the narrative revolves around Maude's experience of the incompatibility of ladylike behavior and poetic achievement. Like the author, Maude is torn between pride in her work and moral qualms about that pride. The heroine's overactive conscience and endless self-recriminations provide considerable insight into Rossetti's own overscrupulous nature.

The family's financial crisis continued, and in 1851 the Rossettis moved from Charlotte Street to Camden Town, where Christina and her mother briefly ran a small day school. A second attempt at establishing a school, this time in Frome, lasted from March 1853 to February 1854, the only period in Rossetti's life when she made her home outside London. When she returned to the city, the family moved to Albany Street. At this point Christina and her mother permanently gave up teaching, and the family lived on William's and Mary's earnings and Frances's modest inherited income. Gabriele Rossetti died on 26 April 1854. For most of her adulthood Christina was financially supported primarily by William, a debt that she made provisions in her will to repay.

Throughout her twenties Rossetti continued to write poetry and prose. Her Italian heritage is apparent in the Italian poems "Versi" and "L'Incognita" and an unfinished epistolary novel, "Corrispondenza [ sic] Famigliare," which were published in a privately printed periodical, The Bouquet from Marylebone Gardens during 1851 and 1852. Attempts at publication in prestigious periodicals such as Blackwood's and Fraser's in 1854 failed. In a letter of 1 August 1854 to William Edmonstoune Aytoun of Blackwood's Rossetti declared: "poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality; and... I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right."

Rossetti has often been depicted as shrinking from worldly concerns, but, in fact, she did engage in humanitarian work. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she volunteered to join Florence Nightingale's nurses but was turned down. Her aunt Eliza Polidori did join Nightingale in Scutari, and Rossetti temporarily took over some of Polidori's district visiting, providing assistance to the sick and poor of the parish. In early 1859 Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of "fallen" women. As an "associate" at Highgate, Rossetti was known as "Sister Christina" and wore a habitlike black uniform with a veil. When she was on duty she resided at the penitentiary, probably for a fortnight at a time. By the summer of 1859 Rossetti was devoting a good deal of time to her work at Highgate, and its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal, and illegitimacy, such as "Cousin Kate," "'The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,'" and "From Sunset to Star Rise," though poems composed before the period of her work at Highgate- "An Apple-Gathering," "The Convent Threshold," and "Maude Clare" for instance-demonstrate her prior interest in the fallen woman. " Goblin Market," with its theme of a fallen woman being saved by a "sister," can also be seen as informed by Rossetti's experiences at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. Her interest in this topic reflects the Victorian concern about prostitution as a social evil; other Pre-Raphaelite treatments of the subject include Dante Gabriel's poem " Jenny," begun in 1847 and revised in 1858-1859 and again in 1870; his unfinished painting Found (1854-1881); and William Holman Hunt's The Awakened Conscience (1853)."

In the 1850s a few of Rossetti's poems were published in anthologies; "Maude Clare" appeared in Once a Week (5 November 1859) and the short stories "The Lost Titian" ( The Crayon, 1856) and "Nick" ( National Magazine, October 1857). In 1861 she submitted poems to Macmillan's Magazine, and Dante Gabriel sent " Goblin Market" to the art critic John Ruskin in the hope that he would recommend it to William Makepeace Thackeray, editor of The Cornhill. Ruskin's criticism of Rossetti's masterpiece is infamous. In his letter of 24 January 1861 to Dante Gabriel, Ruskin singled out for criticism the original meter that is now so often praised: he acknowledged the poem's "beauty and power" but asserted that it was unpublishable because it was "so full of quaintnesses and offences," adding, "Irregular measure... is the chief calamity of modern poetry... your sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like." Almost simultaneously, Rossetti's poem "Up-hill" was accepted enthusiastically for Macmillan's (February 1861), and Alexander Macmillan expressed an interest in seeing more of her work. During 1861 Macmillan's published two more of Rossetti's poems: " A Birthday " (April 1861) and "An Apple-Gathering" (August 1861). In June of that year Rossetti took a short vacation in France."

In 1862 the Macmillan firm brought out Rossetti's first commercially published volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems. Although some of the poems had been published in Macmillan's, Once a Week, and The Germ, and others were included in the manuscript for Maude, most were taken from the notebooks in which Rossetti had been writing since the private printing of Verses in 1847. Comparisons of the manuscript and printed versions of the poems show that most were not substantially revised. Usually the earliest extant version of a given poem is the fair copy transcribed into the notebook; if Rossetti reworked it in the act of composition, such drafts no longer exist. She often changed a word or two in preparation for publication; where major revisions occurred, they took the form of the deletion of whole stanzas, sometimes reducing a poem by more than half its original length: such is the case with "Maude Clare," " Echo," and "Bitter for Sweet." This tendency to reduce is part of the economy of expression that is a Rossetti trademark, and the result is poetry in which meaning is suggestive rather than explicit. Looking back on her career, Rossetti wrote in an 1888 letter to an unknown clergyman that "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, my elder brother was my acute and most helpful critic." Throughout her career Dante Gabriel not only critiqued her work but also negotiated with publishers, assisted with book design, corrected proofs, and provided illustrations for her publications. As Goblin Market and Other Poems was being prepared for the press, he advised on the selection of poems, suggested dividing them into secular and devotional sections, and proposed new titles for some-including the title poem, which was originally called "A Peep at the Goblins." He also provided frontispiece and title-page designs drawn from that poem.

Goblin Market and Other Poems was a critical success, with favorable notices in many periodicals, including The London Review (12 April 1862), The Spectator (12 April 1862), The Athenaeum (26 April 1862), The Saturday Review (24 May 1862), The Eclectic Review (June 1862), and The British Quarterly Review (July 1862). Critics welcomed a fresh and original poetic voice: The Eclectic Review hailed "a true and most genuine poet," while The Athenaeum remarked that "To read these poems after the laboured and skilful but not original verse which has been issued of late, is like passing from a picture gallery, with its well-feigned semblances of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors which greets us with the waving grass and the pleasant shock of the breeze." " Goblin Market," "Up-hill," "An Apple-Gathering," and "Advent" were frequently singled out for praise.

Today "Goblin Market" remains Rossetti's most discussed poem. Critics have dismissed her protest that she intended no allegorical meaning and have interpreted in various ways her fairy tale of two sisters' responses to the temptation of goblin fruit. Lizzie rejects the luscious fruit as "evil," but Laura purchases it with a lock of her hair and indulges. Afterward she wastes away, pining for more fruit. The goblins refuse to allow Lizzie to purchase fruit to save her sister, try to persuade her to eat with them, then attempt to force the fruit into her mouth. Lizzie escapes and runs home to Laura, who is cured by tasting the juices smeared on her sister's face. The poem ends years later with Laura telling the story to the sisters' offspring; she concludes by saying:

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.

The suggestiveness of the narrative runs in many directions, and this multivalency is perhaps the most striking quality of the poem. It can be read as a straightforward moral allegory of temptation, indulgence, sacrifice, and redemption. It has also been interpreted as a specifically Christian allegory, with a reenactment of the temptation in the Garden of Eden and a Christ-like offer of redemption through sacrifice-a reading that is encouraged by the Eucharistic diction of Lizzie's greeting, "'Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me.'" Significantly, this Christ is a female one, and feminist readings of " Goblin Market" have often focused on its positive image of sisterhood. Psychoanalytic interpretations have regarded the sisters as two aspects of one psyche and have emphasized the sexuality of the poem, noting both its orality and its lesbian dynamics. Marxist critics have pointed to the poem's separation of the domestic and commercial spheres and to Lizzie and Laura's attempts to do business in a marketplace designed to make women into goods to be exchanged rather than agents in their own right. Critics of many orientations have noted that the sensuality of the fruit, its prohibition to maidens, and its association with nuptial pleasures suggest that Laura's transgression is a sexual one. In this interpretation, Lizzie's climactic redemption of Laura can be seen as a critique of the Victorian cultural understanding of the fallen woman, for here she is not forever lost but is saved by a sister's intervention.

In " Goblin Market" the sisters are endangered by male goblins, and Laura is redeemed through the strength of sisterhood; elsewhere in Goblin Market and Other Poems, however, the danger that men pose as sexual predators is not offset by female solidarity. Throughout the volume Rossetti presents a bleak appraisal of gender relations. The flimsiness and inconstancy of romantic love is a recurring theme, as is the treachery of sister against sister in a ruthlessly competitive marriage market. In "Cousin Kate" the unnamed speaker has been seduced by a nobleman and has borne him a son; now she finds herself a discarded "plaything," supplanted by her fair and pure cousin Kate, whom the lord has taken not as a mistress but as his wife. The women in this ballad do not live up to the code of sisterly conduct with which " Goblin Market" concludes. Kate usurps her cousin's position and ensures the latter's status as "an outcast thing"; the speaker accuses Kate of betrayal of female loyalty, but her own moral integrity comes under question in the final stanza when she gloats that while she has borne her former lover a son, her cousin remains barren.

Adversarial women are also depicted in "Noble Sisters," a deftly ambiguous dialogue in which the reader must evaluate the reliability of two speakers with opposed moral viewpoints. Similarly, in "Sister Maude" the reader is asked to consider whose sin is greater: the woman who has taken a lover or her sister, who exposes the illicit union. Other pieces in Goblin Market and Other Poems that depict the failure or betrayal of human (as opposed to divine) love and explore women's sexual and economic vulnerability include "At Home," "A Triad," " After Death," "The Hour and the Ghost," "An Apple-Gathering," "Maude Clare," and "The Convent Threshold." These works serve to reinforce the devotional poems' theme of looking to the next life for reward, happiness, and fulfillment. Indeed, with the exception of " A Birthday " and its ecstatic declaration that "the birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me," little evidence exists anywhere in the volume that human love is satisfied or satisfying.

The theme of the inconstancy and insufficiency of any love except God's pervades the devotional section. Deferral of satisfaction is constantly advocated, as in "The Convent Threshold," in which the speaker urges her lover to join her in repentance for their "pleasant sin." The speaker's motives are complex, however, for her purpose seems to be the prospect of resuming their "old familiar love" in heaven. Consistently in Rossetti's poetry the concerns of this world are regarded as inconsequential in comparison to the promise of salvation. Throughout her canon, but especially in the devotional poems, biblical image and idiom merge with Rossetti's own voice. Revelation and Ecclesiastes are favorite sources, and the "vanity of vanity" refrain is a recurring motif.

Other pieces reveal some of Rossetti's poetical range: the political subject matter of "In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857"; the social critique of "A Triad"; the banter of "No, Thank You, John" ; the whimsical, teasing mystery of "Winter: My Secret" ; and the darker, suggestive mystery of poems with enigmatic and unnamed significances, such as "My Dream," "May," and "A Pause of Thought." In a style that has affinities with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but that she made distinctively her own, Rossetti's precisely drawn natural details assume the weight of suggestive symbolism. For example, in "An Apple-Gathering," in which the speaker finds herself abandoned by Willie and replaced by "Plump Gertrude," the speaker's ill-considered plucking of apple blossoms and the concomitant forfeit of a rich harvest resonates on many levels. Similarly, "Up-hill" and "Symbols" effortlessly evoke profound meaning from the simplest details: an uphill journey toward a place of rest, a flower that blooms and fades, and eggs that fail to hatch. Many poems in Goblin Market and Other Poems continue the morbid strain that was so prominent in Verses. "Dream-land," "At Home," " Remember," " After Death," "An End," "Song" ("Oh roses for the flush of youth"), " Echo," "A Peal of Bells," "May," "A Pause of Thought," "Shut Out," "Song" (" When I am dead, my dearest"), "Dead Before Death," "Bitter for Sweet," and "Rest" strike the signature Rossetti notes of longing, loss, resignation, and death. In the final two poems in the volume, "Old and New Year Ditties" and "Amen," this loss is met with the promise of fulfillment, expressed in the biblical figures of marriage and the fruitful garden. Critics have noted that Rossetti's volumes are carefully arranged into meaningful sequences, and Goblin Market and Other Poems includes many examples of significant continuities among the poems and correlations between the nondevotional and devotional sections.

During the early 1860s Rossetti was often in contact with female artists-including the members of the Portfolio Society, an informal group organized by Barbara Bodichon-and female poets, such as Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell. She published poems in the feminist periodicals The English Woman's Journal and Victoria Magazine and in various anthologies, in addition to making regular appearances in Macmillan's. A respiratory complaint led her to spend the winter of 1864-1865 in Hastings, where she began work on her next poetry volume, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866).

That Dante Gabriel played a large role in the preparation of the book is evident from the almost daily correspondence between brother and sister, which provides valuable insight into Rossetti's methods and includes some spirited rebuttals to Dante Gabriel's criticisms. Rossetti's letters make it clear that she tried to write to order for the book, which was not her preferred method of composition. In later years she acknowledged in a 20 May 1885 letter to W. Garrett Horder that "Just because poetry is a gift... I am not surprised to find myself unable to summon it at will and use it according to my choice." According to William Michael Rossetti in Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903), the title poem originated in a suggestion from Dante Gabriel that she "turn a brief dirge-song... into that longish narrative, as pièce de résistance for a new volume." The Prince's sojourn with the Alchemist gave Rossetti some difficulties, as she explained in a 16 January 1865 letter to Dante Gabriel: "the Alchemist makes himself scarce, and I must bide his time." Rossetti was not given to rewriting, and once written, the Alchemist remained unchanged: "He's not precisely the Alchemist I prefigured, but thus he came," she wrote to Dante Gabriel on 30 January, "& thus he must stay: you know my system of work."

In a letter of 10 February she rejected Dante Gabriel's suggestion that she try to write an episode in which the Prince would fight in a tournament, pleading inability, lack of inspiration, and the formidable precedent of Tennyson's two tournaments in Idylls of the King (1859). Publication of the volume was delayed for a year, while Rossetti waited for Dante Gabriel's promised illustrations. In May 1865 she, William, and their mother traveled in France, Switzerland, and Italy. That same year she met Robert Browning, who visited her in London and told her about his work in progress, The Ring and the Book (1868-1869).

The Prince's Progress and Other Poems was met with mildly favorable reviews. The critic for The Saturday Review (23 June 1866) thought that the title poem lacked "subtle suggestion," while the reviewer for The Reader (30 June 1866) pronounced it "too long to suit Christina Rossetti's genius for short lyrical thoughts." In a letter of 6 March 1865 to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti agreed that "The Prince's Progress" lacked "the special felicity (!) of my Goblins." "The Prince's Progress" has never attracted the same intensity of critical scrutiny as " Goblin Market" and typically suffers in comparisons with that masterpiece. As the reviewer for the 23 June 1866 issue of The Athenaeum observed, the two title poems are similar in that both are allegories of temptation; in "Goblin Market," however, temptation is overcome, while in "The Prince's Progress" it wins out. The Prince procrastinates at great length before setting out to claim his waiting bride. He does not, however, remain true to his purpose, and on his journey he is sidetracked and delayed first by a milkmaid, then by an alchemist, and finally by a circle of ministering females who save him from drowning. When he arrives at his bride's palace, she is dead. The element of spiritual allegory is evident in "The Prince's Progress"; even the title echoes Bunyan's allegorical The Pilgrim's Progress, a literary influence from Rossetti's earliest childhood. The pilgrimage of Bunyan's Christian through an emblematic landscape is a topos that Rossetti must have absorbed into her own consciousness, for her poems often depict journeys in which topographical details, such as paths that go uphill or downhill, are morally and spiritually significant. For instance, the easy downhill path of " Amor Mundi" is clearly the way to damnation, while the upward climbs of "Up-hill" and "The Convent Threshold" are made by those who aspire to salvation.

While biblical language and image are pervasive in "The Prince's Progress," the poem also has a fairy-tale quality; the unhappy ending, however, serves to critique the gender roles typical of that genre. Relegated to a passive role, the waiting bride dies because of the Prince's failure to complete his quest in a timely fashion; her fate underlines the dangerous predicament of women waiting to be rescued. Elsewhere in The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, however, women engage in lives of active service, deferring satisfaction in this life in favor of the reward promised in the next. In "A Portrait" the sacrifice of "youth," "hope and joy and pleasant ways" for the sake of serving the "poor and stricken" earns the heroine union with the Bridegroom Christ in Paradise. In "A Royal Princess," which originally appeared in Poems: An Offering to Lancashire (1863), an anthology published in support of Lancashire textile workers, the title figure realizes that her wealth and privilege are based on the enslavement of others: "Once it came into my heart and whelmed me like a flood, / That these too are men and women, human flesh and blood." The poem ends with the princess's rebellion against the insulation from social concerns to which she has been subject because of her class and gender; echoing the biblical Esther, she risks all in offering herself and her wealth to an angry, hungry mob.

Dante Gabriel was highly critical of a long poem that his sister included in The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, "'The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.'" Responding in a letter of 13 March 1865, Rossetti vigorously defended the woman poet's right to explore indelicate issues such as illegitimacy: "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... 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." The speaker of "'The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children'" lives as a servant in the household of her mother, who so fears social condemnation that she does not acknowledge her illegitimate daughter. Mother and daughter suffer the lifelong consequences of illegitimacy, while the seducer father is absent from the poem and, presumably, free of social stigma. The poem shows the injustice of conventional morality in a patriarchal society and offers the equality of the grave as the only solution.

Typically, Rossetti's poems evince a concern with individual salvation rather than social reform. Writing to Dante Gabriel in April 1870, she declared, "It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I, and having said my say may well sit silent." The Prince's Progress and Other Poems lays great emphasis on the transitoriness of this life, a recurring theme in the Rossetti canon. The lesson to be learned from poems such as "On the Wing," "Beauty is Vain," "The Bourne," "Vanity of Vanities," "Grown and Flown," "A Farm Walk," and "Gone for Ever" is that all earthly things are unreliable, illusory, and passing. Implicitly contrasted with the fleeting quality of this life is the permanence of God and the heavenly reward. With its comparison of human and divine love, "Twice" is a characteristic statement of this theme. The speaker first offers her heart to her lover, who, with a "friendly smile" and "critical eye," sets it aside as "unripe." The speaker then offers the broken heart to God, with the entreaty "Refine with fire its gold, / Purge Thou its dross away." The failure of human love is a keynote in the volume, beginning with the title poem and appearing again in "Jessie Cameron," "The Poor Ghost," "Songs in a Cornfield," "One Day," "A Bird's-Eye View," "Light Love," "On the Wing," "Maggie a Lady," "The Ghost's Petition," "Grown and Flown," and "'The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.'"

In the autumn of 1866 Rossetti declined an offer of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley. Cayley had begun studying Italian with her father in 1847, sharing the Rossettis' enthusiasm for Dante and endearing himself to them with his attentive visits during their father's final illness. A hesitant romance probably began to develop between Rossetti and the awkward, absentminded scholar around 1862. Rossetti's reasons for rejecting his proposal can only be surmised. In a note in his edition of The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908) William says that she turned Cayley down "on grounds of religious faith." At the time, William thought that there might be financial obstacles to the union and offered the couple a place in his household; his sister responded on 11 September 1866: "As to money I might be selfish enough to wish that were the only bar, but you see from my point of view it is not.- Now I am at least unselfish enough altogether to deprecate seeing C.B.C. continually (with nothing but mere feeling to offer) to his hamper & discomfort: but, if he likes to see me, God knows I like to see him, & any kindness you will show him will only be additional kindness loaded on me." Much is unknown about the relationship between Cayley and Rossetti. In his memoir William notes that "Christina was extremely reticent in all matters in which her affections were deeply engaged" and that "it would have been both indelicate and futile to press her with inquiries, and of several details in the second case [Rossetti's relationship with Cayley]- though important to a close understanding of it-I never was cognizant." Cayley and Rossetti remained close until his death in 1883, and Rossetti served as his literary executor. She declined to have a large packet of her letters to him returned to her, asking that they be destroyed. After Rossetti's death, William found in her desk a series of twenty-one highly personal poems written in Italian. Composed between 1862 and 1868 and titled "Il Rosseggiar dell'Oriente" (The Reddening Dawn), the sequence is generally understood to be addressed to Cayley; it was first published in Rossetti's New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected (1896).

In 1867 Rossetti published in The Churchman's Shilling Magazine three religious and moralistic stories: "The Waves of this Troublesome World: A Tale of Hastings Ten Years Ago" (April and May 1867), "Some Pros and Cons about Pews" (July 1867), and "A Safe Investment" (November 1867); all were republished in Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870). For this volume Rossetti was persuaded by Dante Gabriel to defect from Macmillan to his publisher, F. S. Ellis. Commonplace and Other Short Stories was a commercial failure, though reviewers singled out "The Lost Titian" and the title story, with its Jane Austen-like social comment, for praise.

From 1870 to 1872 Rossetti was dangerously ill, at times apparently near death, with a condition characterized by fever, exhaustion, heart palpitations, stifling sensations, occasional loss of consciousness, violent headaches, palsied hands, and swelling in the neck that made swallowing difficult. Her hair fell out, her skin became discolored, her eyes began to protrude, and her voice changed. After some months her doctors diagnosed a rare thyroid condition, exophthalmic bronchocele, more commonly known as Graves' disease. Although Rossetti recovered, the threat of a relapse always remained. Moreover, the crisis left her appearance permanently altered and her heart weakened.

The reception of Rossetti's collection of stories left Ellis disinclined to publish her next work, a collection of poems for children. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book was published by Routledge in 1872 and was favorably received; the public was particularly pleased by the illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Some of the poems are primarily edifying, promoting, for instance, patience or good manners; others are memory aids for learning about numbers, time, money, months, and colors. The sound and meter of these little rhymes delight the ear, and Rossetti's wit is evident in the playfulness of lines such as "A hill has no leg, but has a foot; / A wine-glass a stem, but not a root." Again nature presents an emblematic aspect, and the phenomena of wind, rain, growth, and death and the alternation of night and day suggest a larger order. Most of the poems are evocative of the security of an ideal childhood, but others modulate into more-serious subject matter in simple and moving explorations of death and loss. Some critics have questioned the appropriateness of these darker themes for the intended audience.

Dante Gabriel had been prone to insomnia for some time and had become dependent on alcohol and chloral in his attempts to sleep. By June 1872 his paranoid belief that there was a conspiracy led by Robert Buchanan, author of "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871), to ruin his reputation had become clearly delusional, and he was raving and hearing voices. William concluded that his brother was insane and put him under the care of Dante Gabriel's friend Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, in whose home he took a large dose of laudanum in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Cared for by friends, Dante Gabriel made a partial recovery, though he continued his use of alcohol and chloral.

In 1873 Maria Rossetti joined the All Saints' Sisterhood. In March 1874 William married Lucy Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. The combined household of the newly married couple and William's mother, sister, and aunts Charlotte and Eliza Polidori was not a harmonious one.

Following her recovery from Graves' disease Rossetti published the first of her six volumes of devotional prose, Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874). In these devotional writings readers can find explicit statements of themes treated in the poetry of previous decades, and in many instances Rossetti discusses natural and biblical images, virtually glossing favorite poetic symbols. More generally, the devotional prose provides insight into Rossetti's symbolic method, for she repeatedly indicates that this world is to be read as "typical," "suggestive," "emblematical," and "symbolical." Annus Domini consists of 366 meditations, each of which includes a passage from scripture followed by a collect beginning with an invocation to Christ. The texts are arranged in the order of their appearance in the Bible, and prayers throughout are intensely Christ-centered; even Old Testament passages prompt an address to Christ.

Rossetti returned to Macmillan for the publication of Speaking Likenesses in 1874. The book consists of three tales framed by the dialogue among a storytelling aunt and her nieces. Many readers have noted the sexual implications of the monstrous children in the first tale-boys bristling with hooks, quills, and angles; girls exuding sticky and slimy fluids-and that the predatory games they play amount to a figurative rape. While terror predominates in the first tale, in the second a young child's desire to have a gypsy tea ends in frustration and despair as she fails to master the tasks of lighting a fire and boiling a kettle. The final tale, in which danger and temptation are overcome, rounds out the volume with a happy ending. The influence of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) is evident, and Rossetti herself described the work to Dante Gabriel in a letter of 4 May 1874 as "a Christmas trifle, would-be in the Alice style, with an eye to the market." The title, Rossetti explained to Macmillan on 27 July 1874, refers to the way the heroines "perpetually encounter 'speaking (literally speaking) likenesses' or embodiments or caricatures of themselves or their faults." Ruskin lamented in a 21 January 1875 letter to the publisher Ellis that Speaking Likenesses was the worst of the children's books from the previous Christmas season: "How could she or Arthur Hughes sink so low after their pretty nursery rhymes?"

In 1874 Macmillan offered to bring out a new edition of Rossetti's complete poems and inquired after new compositions. On 4 February Rossetti responded, "the possibility of your thinking proper some day to reprint my two volumes, is really gratifying to me as you may suppose; but as to the 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." In 1875 the idea of a new edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems and Prince's Progress and Other Poems was taken up again. In a 30 January letter to Macmillan, Rossetti said that she would try to gather new pieces as well as "waifs and strays," poems that had appeared in magazines but had not been published in her collections. In Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1875) pieces from the previous volumes and thirty-seven new ones are intermingled into a single poetic sequence. Rossetti omitted some poems from the new collection, most notably "A Triad," "Cousin Kate," and "Sister Maude," all of which explore sexual issues. Evidently she did not work under her brother's guidance in preparing the volume, for Dante Gabriel's 3 December 1875 letter addressed the book as a fait accompli. While he conceded that "A Royal Princess" is "too good to omit," he thought it bore the taint of "modern vicious style," a kind of "falsetto muscularity" in part traceable to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's influence. He also perceived this taint in "No, Thank You, John" and, more prominently, in "The Lowest Room," and he lectured his sister that "everything in which this tone appears is utterly foreign to your primary impulses" and warned that she should "rigidly keep guard" against it. Although "The Lowest Room" had been published in Macmillan's Magazine in March 1864, Dante Gabriel had prevailed in keeping it out of The Prince's Progress and Other Poems. In this extended dialogue between two sisters the younger asks, "Why should not you, why should not I / Attain heroic strength?"-a question at the heart of the poem's engagement with Homeric epic and with women's search for fulfilment in the modern Christian age. The tensions between the sisters, between aspiration and opportunity, and between ambition and resignation are highly charged and never fully resolved. One speaker's hard-won submission-"Not to be first: how hard to learn / That lifelong lesson of the past; / Line graven on line and stroke on stroke; / But, thank God, learned at last"-and acceptance of the "lowest place" are undermined in the final stanza by her anticipation of an inversion of this hierarchy in the heavenly order, where "many last be first." This inversion of earthly and heavenly status appears again in "The Lowest Place," the final poem in the collection. The richness of this well-known lyric comes largely from its curious blend of timidity and temerity, for self-abnegation promises to be rewarded with exaltation, and thus the speaker's humble request is also an audacious one.

In 1876 Rossetti, her mother, and her aunts left William's Euston Square home and moved to Torrington Square, Bloomsbury. In November, Maria died of cancer; Christina's reminiscence in Time Flies portrays her death as an example of spiritual confidence and anticipation of salvation. Biographers have often commented on its contrast to Christina's deathbed anguish.

Rossetti's next book, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies on the Benedicite (1879), was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), which published the rest of her devotional prose works as well as Verses (1893), her collection of devotional poems. Seek and Find consists of two series of studies on the Benedicite, a long poem praising a catalogue of God's works that is included in the Book of Common Prayer as an apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel. The first series of studies in Seek and Find, "Creation," contemplates each item in the Benedicite-heavens, waters, the sun, birds, other animals, and human beings-in the context of its creation by providing and discussing scriptural passages that are generally, though not exclusively, from the Old Testament. The second series, "Redemption," considers the same items in relation to Christ and cites mainly New Testament passages.

Like many of Rossetti's poems, her devotional works are double-edged swords of submission and assertion: while they urge obedience to divine will, they also encroach into the traditionally male territories of theological study, biblical exegesis, and spiritual guidance. Similarly, Rossetti's views on gender issues combine the conservative with the radical. Citing biblical teaching on woman's subordination to man, Rossetti had written to the poet Augusta Webster in 1878 that because she believed that "the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes," she could not sign a petition for women's suffrage. She went on, however, to suggest that suffrage is not enough to protect women's interests and that female representation in Parliament would be more consistent with the aims of the women's movement. She also argued for the heroic possibilities of maternal love and its potential to sweep away "the barrier of sex." It is not uncommon to find such traces of subversiveness in Rossetti's apparently conservative statements on gender roles. An extended discussion of the subject in Seek and Find begins with a quite traditional discussion of woman as a lesser light-a moon to man's sun. But Rossetti then moves from a statement about the feminine lot being one of obedience to a paragraph-long comparison between the feminine role and the position that Christ voluntarily assumed on earth, and she ends with a leveling of gender hierarchies: "one final consolation yet remains to careful and troubled hearts: in Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one (Gal.iii.28)."

Biographers have painted an overly simplistic portrait of the middle-aged Rossetti as narrowly conservative, reclusive, and overly pious. Her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism certainly intensified, and it took some odd forms, such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord's name printed on them. From 1876, when she moved to Torrington Square, until her final illness Rossetti worshiped at Christ Church, Woburn Square. Mackenzie Bell relates the impression that she made on a fellow member of the congregation: "A friend informs me that towards the close of her life Christina always sat in the very front pew in church. She remained until the very last before leaving the building, and it was evident from her demeanour that even then she strove to avoid ordinary conversation, evidently feeling that it would disturb her mood of mind." Never comfortable socially, by this time she was reluctant to venture beyond her intimate circle of family and friends: she was aware that she possessed a degree of fame, and she felt self-conscious in conversations that bore the aspect of an interview. She also dreaded receiving unsolicited poems from aspiring writers, because she was torn between kindness and honesty regarding the merit of the work. Though increasingly reclusive, however, Rossetti was more politically outspoken in these later years. Critical of slavery, imperialism, and military aggression, she was most passionately committed to the antivivisection movement, at one point breaking with the S.P.C.K. over its publication of a work condoning animal experimentation. She also petitioned for legislation to protect children from prostitution and sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent.

Rossetti's next work, Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, published in 1881, had been completed by 1876; Macmillan had turned it down under its previous title, "Young Plants and Polished Corners." A devotional accompaniment for the red-letter saints' days, Called to Be Saints provides for each day an account of the saint's life, a prayer, an intricate "memorial" in two columns linking the saint's life with biblical texts, and descriptions of the emblem, precious stone, and flower associated with the saint and discussions of their appropriateness. Although biographers have tended to emphasize the narrowing of Rossetti's interests in her later life in that she then wrote in an exclusively devotional vein, one might note that she dealt with a wide array of topics within this framework. In Called to Be Saints she ranges from the biblical and hagiographical to the botanical and petrographical.

As her poetic creativity decreased, Rossetti cultivated a modest scholarly impulse. Earlier instances of her scholarly writing include her entries on Italian writers and other celebrities in the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857-1863); in her article on Petrarch she claims to be a descendant of Laura. In 1867 she had published the first of two articles on Dante, a commendatory piece written in support of Cayley's terza rima translation of The Divine Comedy (1851-1855). After attending lectures on The Divine Comedy at University College, London, from 1878 to 1880 she wrote a more ambitious article, "Dante: The Poet Illustrated out of the Poem" (1884). In 1882 she considered undertaking literary biographies of Adelaide Proctor and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and she took a commission and began to research a life of Ann Radcliffe, but a lack of materials prevented her from completing it. She agreed to trace allusions to Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio for Alexander Balloch Grosart's scholarly edition of The Faerie Queene in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser (1882-1884), a project from which she withdrew because of ill health. She spent many afternoons at the British Museum and was a tireless reader of periodicals, including The Athenaeum, Macmillan's Magazine, The Saturday Review, Blackwood's, and The Edinburgh Review.

Rossetti's research on Petrarch and Dante informs one of the most important poems of her maturity, " Monna Innominata," which appeared in her third commercially published poetry collection, A Pageant and Other Poems (1880). A sequence of fourteen sonnets- thus subtitled "A Sonnet of Sonnets"-" Monna Innominata" draws attention to its links to the medieval amatory tradition both in its prose preface and in the epigraphs from Dante and Petrarch that introduce each sonnet. In his notes in The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti William Michael Rossetti attested that the introductory prose note was "a blind interposed to draw off attention from the writer in her proper person" and that the sonnet sequence was an "intensely personal" utterance. The subject matter of love deeply felt, reciprocated, and yet unfulfilled is generally taken to refer to Rossetti's relationship with Cayley, but its import is not limited to this context. Recent criticism of " Monna Innominata" has explored its complex intertextual operations, particularly its revisionary treatment of the sonnet form, whose gender roles Rossetti deliberately and self-consciously reverses by having the unnamed lady, traditionally the silent object of the male sonneteer's desire, express her love. In doing so, Rossetti is emulating the gender subversion of Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to whom she refers in her preface as "the Great Poetess of our day and nation."

Although it is not the title poem, " Monna Innominata," with its valedictory mode, its questioning of the very possibility of fulfilled desire, and its reappraisal of the sonnet form, sets the tone for A Pageant and Other Poems. Rossetti opens the volume with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to her mother, drawing attention both to the expectations raised by the tradition of the genre- "Sonnets are full of love"-and to the preponderance of sonnets in her collection: "and this my tome / Has many sonnets." But in the sonnet sequences that follow- " Monna Innominata," "Later Life," "'If thou sayest, behold, we knew it not,'" "The Thread of Life," and "'Behold a Shaking'" - Rossetti veers away from the amatory tradition by dwelling on the love of and aspiration for union with God. These sonnet sequences are complemented by the abundance of multipart poems in the volume, such as "The Months: A Pageant," "Mirrors of Life and Death," and "'All thy works praise Thee, O Lord.' A Processional of Creation," as well as smaller poetic sequences, such as the seasonal sequence "An October Garden," "'Summer is Ended,'" and "Passing and Glassing" and the three Easter poems, "The Descent from the Cross," "'It is finished,'" and "An Easter Carol."

Anticipating the final farewell to youth, beauty, and song in " Monna Innominata, " in "The Key-note" Rossetti laments "the Winter of my year" and the silencing of "the songs I used to know." Similarly, desire is relinquished in "Till Tomorrow":

Long have I longed, till I am tired
Of longing and desire;
Farewell my points in vain desired,
My dying fire;
Farewell all things that die and fail and tire.

By reiteration and accretion the passing months, the progression of seasons, and blooming and fading flowers become poignant and nostalgic symbols of the process of aging. Some poems provide consolation, as when the robin in "The Key-note" "sings thro' Winter's rest" or in the title poem, "The Months: A Pageant," a performance piece consisting of a procession of personifications of the twelve months, where "October" offers comfort: "Nay, cheer up sister. Life is not quite over, / Even if the year has done with corn and clover." But the real movement of the volume is toward relinquishment of love, beauty, Italy, hope, and life itself. The final poems of the non-devotional section return to the seasonal, vegetative cycle. "An October Garden" begins, "In my Autumn garden I was fain / To mourn among my scattered roses," while the next poem, "'Summer is Ended,'" asks if bliss will inevitably end as the rose does, a "Scentless, colourless, . . . meaningless thing." The following poem, "Passing and Glassing," confirms the human analogy readable from "withered roses . . . the fallen peach," and "summer joy that was," saying that "All things that pass / Are woman's looking glass; / They show her how her bloom must fade."

Familiar Rossetti themes are in evidence in the devotional pieces: renounced desire, weariness with this life, the "vanity of vanities" refrain, and God's love for the unworthy supplicant. Rossetti's youthful verses had been called morbid, and death remains a central theme in A Pageant and Other Poems but with an altered emphasis. While in earlier verses death was presented in its more-sentimental aspect, often intruding into the frailty of romantic love, in A Pageant and Other Poems it is contemplated in a subdued and personal way, as a foreseeable and inevitable event. In the sonnet sequence "Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets" Rossetti writes, "I have dreamed of Death:-what will it be to die / Not in a dream, but in the literal truth / With all Death's adjuncts ghastly and uncouth." Always doubting her worthiness of salvation, Rossetti imagines her deathbed and acknowledges the possibility that she "May miss the goal at last, may miss a crown." In "The Thread of Life," a sequence of three sonnets, the speaker contemplates the essential and solitary self, aloof from external objects and bound by "inner solitude," and realizes that "I am not what I have nor what I do; / But what I was I am, I am even I." This self, her "sole possession," she offers to God. The relation of the self to the external world is again contemplated in "An Old-World Thicket," which begins with an epigraph from Dante and is obviously engaged with the legacy of Romanticism.

In "'All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord.' A Processional of Creation" all aspects of the created world declare God's glory, each according to its nature. In "Spring and Autumn" the two seasons declare, respectively, "I hope,- / And I remember," and these vernal and autumnal attitudes resonate through the volume. In "Later Life" the speaker is "glancing back" on "Lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack, / Hopes that were never ours yet seemed to be." The devotional poems trace the yielding of unfulfilled earthly hopes in exchange for the heavenly reward. This life is full of "promise unfulfilled, of everything, / That is puffed vanity and empty talk." Paradoxes abound in "Later Life" as Rossetti writes, "This Life we live is dead for all its breath," "Its very Spring is not indeed like Spring," and she looks for rebirth through "Death who art not Death." The conundrum/insight is reiterated in the pair of sonnets titled "'Behold a Shaking'": "Here life is the beginning of our death, / And death the starting-point whence life ensues; / Surely our life is death, our death is life." The final poems bring a satisfying closure to the volume, looking past the end of this life and ending with a divine embrace in "'Love is as strong as death.'" Though sales were sluggish, A Pageant and Other Poems was a critical success: the sonnet sequences, in particular, were praised by reviewers, and " Monna Innominata" was compared favorably with Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in Birchington on Easter Sunday 1882. Christina's commemorative poem, "Birchington Churchyard," was published in The Athenaeum (25 April 1882). The following winter she composed her fourth book of devotional prose, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883), in which she considers the Ten Commandments in terms of Christ's two great commandments, to love thy God and thy neighbor. "A Harmony on First Corinthians XIII," first published in the January 1879 issue of New and Old, a church magazine, was revised and included as an appendix.

Rossetti's next book, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, published in 1885, is both the most readable and the most autobiographical of her devotional works. As the subtitle suggests, the book is diarylike in structure, with daily entries consisting of meditations on religious feast days and saints' days, poetic compositions, or personal reflections and reminiscences. The most often quoted passages are those in which Rossetti describes her experiences of nature and elaborates on the moral and symbolic meaning suggested by them. She regards a spider attempting to escape its own shadow as "a figure of each obstinate impenitent sinner, who having outlived enjoyment remains isolated irretrievably with his own horrible loathsome self." One glimpses Rossetti's affection for God's smallest creatures in the pleasure she took in visiting a garden where she "sat so long and so quietly that a wild garden creature or two made its appearance: a water rat, perhaps, or a water-hunting bird." She goes on, "Few have been my personal experiences of the sort, and this one gratified me."

After her mother's death in 1886 Rossetti continued to keep house for her elderly aunts Charlotte and Eliza until their deaths in 1890 and 1893, respectively, while working on a commentary on the Book of Revelation. The last of Rossetti's six devotional studies, The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, published in 1892, bears the familiar dedication to her mother, but now "for the first time to her beloved, revered, cherished memory." A substantial work, The Face of the Deep consists of wide-ranging, free-association meditations on each verse of Revelation. While some passages engage in traditional exegesis, others are more personally contemplative and address issues of spiritual and moral duty. More important for today's reader, The Face of the Deep includes more than two hundred poems; Rossetti combined them with poems from Called to Be Saints and Time Flies into a volume of devotional poems titled simply Verses. Published in 1893 by the S.P.C.K., this collection of 331 religious lyrics was Rossetti's last volume to appear during her lifetime. She undertook extensive revisions and arranged the poems into eight sections that form a double poetic sequence: spiritual progress is traced in terms of the individual's relationship with God in the first four sections and from a universal perspective in the final four. Rossetti's devotional poems have received scant critical attention, but Verses enjoyed great popularity and continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century.

In 1892 Rossetti was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy that was performed in her own home. The cancer recurred the following year, and after months of acute suffering she died on 29 December 1894. Rossetti had attained fame as a poet and had earned high regard as a spiritual guide; some had even speculated, after Tennyson's death in 1892, that she would make a suitable successor to the laureateship. After her death many articles appeared with personal reminiscences, expressing admiration of her saintliness and assessing her poetry and prose. The sole surviving sibling, William made special efforts to document his sister's life and edit her work. In New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected he made available carefully edited and annotated texts of poems from periodicals and anthologies and many unpublished ones, some written late in Rossetti's life and others that she had written earlier but had not published presumably because she deemed them either too personal or not up to the standard of her best work. Maude appeared in 1897 and The Poetical Works in 1904; the latter remained, despite its awkward divisions and arrangement, the standard edition of her poetry until Rebecca W. Crump's The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1979- 1990), which prompted a modern reassessment of Rossetti's poetry.

While many other women poets are still in the process of being "rediscovered," Rossetti is undergoing a radical revaluation which promises a new appreciation of the complexity and variety of her work. In the century after her death her reputation survived largely on the strength of "Goblin Market" and a handful of lyrics. Her lyric gift has never been doubted, but the unassuming tone and flawless finish of these compositions has sometimes led critics to suggest that their lyric purity is achieved at the expense of intellectual depth and aesthetic complexity. Such assessments have been bolstered by William's description of her as a "casual" and "spontaneous" poet to whom verse came "very easily, without her meditating a possible subject," and without her having to undertake substantial revisions. More recently critics have expressed suspicion of William's reconstruction of his sister's life, his censorship of her letters, and his revisionist editing in the posthumous collections of her poetry.

For several decades after her death Rossetti criticism tended to be narrowly biographical, her mournful lyrics and fantastic allegories being used to construct narratives of agonizing conflict between secular and sacred impulses, renounced love, and repressed passion. In the 1980s a Rossetti renaissance began as feminist critics undertook a reexamination of her poetry, addressing particularly "Goblin Market" and exploring Rossetti's representation of sororal bonds, female creativity, and sexuality and her critique of patriarchal amatory values and gender relations. The trends today run toward a proliferation of critical approaches, many of which re-contextualize Rossetti in Victorian culture, and toward critical interest in a wider range of her works, including her fiction, nonfiction, and children's poetry. Critics continue to study Rossetti's response to and influence in a women writers' tradition; also under discussion are gender-conscious models for positioning Rossetti in the mainstream (that is, predominantly male) canon. Christina Rossetti has often been called the greatest Victorian woman poet, but her poetry is increasingly being recognized as among the most beautiful and innovative of the period by either sex.

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Poet Christina Rossetti was born in 1830, the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the...

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"Maude Clare," by Christina Rossetti, deals differently with the common Pre-Raphaelite theme of tragic love than do contemporary members of the PRB. While Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems infuse love with elements of tragedy through the introduction of death, Christina Rossetti's work, 'Maude Clare" deals with a more complex form of tragic love. As Lord Thomas's previous love, Maude Clare's presence sullies the nuptials between Nell and him, adding conflict to the wedding day occasion. Neither bride nor groom experience pure joy during the occasion because of Maude Clare's conspicuous attendance:

My lord was pale with inward strife,
And Nell was pale with pride;

Rather than using flowery description or hard-edged realism, like her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti primarily composes her narrative poem of dialogue. Her unusual preponderance of dialogue with little attention to description of the environment gives the reader a sense of watching a scene in a play, rather than reading a poem.

Instead of stealing the focus of the wedding day, as one would traditionally expect, the bride forfeits all the attention to Maude Clare. A former lover (perhaps a very recent lover) of Lord Thomas, Maude usurps the reader's attention as the focal point of the narrative at the outset of the first stanza:

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.

Rossetti continues to contrast Maude Clare and the bride throughout the poem. Nell serves as a secondary character, speaking only in retaliation to Maude Clare's non-too-well masked jabs, and pales, literally and figuratively, in comparison to Maude Clare's stature and personage. As an ironic wedding gift, Maude Clare offers Thomas and Nell both physical amulets of love like 'half of the golden chain" that Thomas wore, as well as a more biting gift of her 'share of a fickle heart." Though Rossetti doesn't specifically delineate the exact circumstances that lead to this uncomfortably awkward and emotionally charged wedding scene, she highlights the profound tension between Maude Clare and Nell. Furthermore, Lord Thomas struggles to reconcile his marital vows and obligations to Nell with Maude Clare, the 'More wise, and much more fair" other woman. Maude Clare claims that she has washed her hands of Thomas and that Nell can have his heart, which lacks 'bloom" or 'dew", implying that it has somehow lost its sparkle. The tone of her words and her conspicuous domination of the scene reveal her true, somewhat bitter attachments, however. In the end when, in a curt exchange of dialogue, the two women shoot venom-charged words at one another, Nell's retaliation concludes the poem. The interchange reminds us of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream when, while fighting over Lysander's affections, Helena attacks Hermia by calling her a puppet, prompting the deterioration of the argument into a clawing, biting, physical confrontation:

"Yea, tho' you're taller by the head,
More wise, and much more fair;
I'll love him till he loves me best,
Me best of all, Maude Clare."

Though not the blushing, bubbling bride that one might stereotypically expect, Nell gets the last word, but not the last thought. Rossetti's choice to emphasize Maude Clare's name in the finale leaves the reader to ponder the impending doom of Thomas and Nell's marriage. With the looming presence of Maude Clare at their wedding, acting as a bad omen for the marriage in general, it's unlikely that Thomas will ever love Nell the best, as she hopes. The tragedy lies not in a spiritual love lost by means of mortality, but instead in the interplay of a love triangle that leaves all parties unsatisfied, confused, and still longing for an ill-manifested vision of love.

Questions

1. The originally published manuscript version of 'Maude Clare" had forty-one stanzas, as compared to the 1862 version, which contained twelve. According to Anthony H. Harrison, the more detailed, longer version paints a picture of Maude Clare as a sympathetic character with whom the reader can truly identify. How does Rossetti portray Maude Clare in the shorter, 1862 version? Can the reader empathize with her or is her disruption of the wedding scene depicted as nasty and underhanded?

2. Although dialogue dominates the poem, it has two stanzas of pure narration. Still, however, Rossetti does not give the narrator a clear identity. Who is the narrator? What purpose does she serve? What impact does the narrator's relative anonymity have on the poem?

3. There are two moments in the poem when Rossetti references the natural world. In the sixth and seventh stanzas while describing a romantic day Thomas and Maude Clare spend together, she writes about the 'faded leaves" and the lilies through which the lovers wade. The seventh stanza ends with: ''The lilies are budding now'." What significance does the natural world, specifically the lilies, have in the poem?

4. Compare 'Maude Clare" to 'After Death." How are Nell and the speaker in 'After Death" similar? What contrasts are there between these two depictions of tragic love? How do they differ from other PRB depictions of tragic love, like 'The Blessed Damozel" or 'Porphyria's Lover"?

5. What qualities of the ideal Victorian woman do Nell and Maude Clare embody? Could either be likened to Dante Gabrielle Rossetti's Fair Lady? Why or why not?

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"Maude Clare," by Christina Rossetti, deals differently with the common Pre-Raphaelite theme of tragic love than do contemporary members of the PRB. While Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems infuse love with elements of tragedy through the introduction of death, Christina Rossetti's work, 'Maude Clare" deals with a more complex form of tragic love.

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Christina Rossetti in the Victorian Context

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Christina Rossetti in the Victorian Context

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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]

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Introductory: Christina Rossetti and the Poetic Vocation

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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."

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A Supreme General Resource Hub for Victorian  Context

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Prosody is a technical term used in linguistics and poetry to describe the patterns, rhythms or meters of a language.

Prosody can refer to the rules for the pronunciation of a language as well as its versification. The correct pronunciation of words includes:

enunciation,

proper accenting

making sure each syllable has its required length

Syllable Length

Syllable length doesn't seem terribly important for pronunciation in English. Take a word like "laboratory." It looks as though it should be divided syllabically into:

la-bo-ra-to-ry

So it appears to have 5 syllables, but when someone from the U.S. or U.K. pronounces it, there are only 4. Oddly, the 4 syllables aren't the same.

Americans heavily stress the first syllable.

'lab-ra-,to-ry

In the U.K. you probably hear:

la-'bor-a-,try

When we stress a syllable, we hold it an extra "time".

The Latin for time is " tempus" and the word for the duration of time, especially in linguistics, is " mora." Two short syllables or " morae" count for one long syllable.

Latin and Greek have rules about whether a given syllable is long or short. More than in English, length is very important.

Why You Need to Know About Prosody

Whenever you read ancient Greek or Latin poetry you are reading the writing of a man or woman who has replaced the mundane with the loftier speech of poetry. Part of the flavor of the poetry is conveyed by the tempo of the words. To read the poetry woodenly without trying to grasp the tempo would be like reading sheet music without playing it even mentally. If such an artistic rationale doesn't motivate you to try to learn about Greek and Roman meter, how's this? Understanding the meter will help you to translate.

A foot is a unit of a meter in poetry. A foot will usually have 2, 3 or 4 syllables in Greek and Latin poetry.

( Remember: one short syllable has one "time" or "mora".)

A foot composed of two short syllables is called pyrrhic.

A pyrrhic foot would have two times or morae.

A trochee is a long syllable followed by a short and an iam(b) is a short syllable followed by a long. Both of these have 3 morae.

A foot with 2 long syllables is called a spondee.

A spondee would have 4 morae.

Uncommon feet, like the dispondee, can have 8 morae, and there are special, long patterned ones, like the Sapphic, named after the famous woman poet Sappho of Lesbos.

Trisyllabic Feet

There are eight possible feet based on three syllables. The two most common are:

the dactyl, which is named visually for the finger, (long, short, short)

the anapest (short, short, long).

Feet of four or more syllables are compound feet.

A verse is a line of poetry using feet according to a specified pattern or meter. A meter can refer to a single foot in a verse. If you have a verse made up of dactyls, each dactyl is a meter. A meter is not always a single foot. For instance, in a line of iambic trimeter, each meter or metron (pl. metra or metrons) consists of two feet.

Dactylic Hexameter

If the meter is dactyl, with 6 meters in the verse, you have a line of dactylic hexameter. If there are only five meters, it is pent ameter. Dactylic hexameter is the meter that was used in epic poetry or heroic poetry.

There is one additional important bit of confusing information: the meter used in dactylic hexameter can be either dactyl (long, short, short) or a spondee (long, long).

Meter for the AP Exam

For the AP Latin - Vergil Exam, students need to know dactylic hexameters and be able to determine the length of each syllable.

-UU|-UU|-UU|-UU|-UU|-X.

The last syllable may be taken to be long since the sixth foot is treated as a spondee. Except in the fifth syllable, a long syllable can replace the two shorts (UU).

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Prosody is a technical term used in linguistics and poetry to describe the patterns, rhythms or meters of a language. Prosody can refer to the rules for the pronunciation of a language as well as its versification.

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Reading poetry is enlightening and enjoyable. Every now and then, a poem catches you, captivates you, and you just have to set it to memory because you want to live with it and share its wondrous phrases with others. Yet, how do you begin to memorize the verse?

It's quite simple: start at the beginning and memorize the poem line by line. Some poems will be more of a challenge than others, and the longer the poem, the longer it will take to memorize. Don't worry about that and take your time to really enjoy the memorization process and understand every hidden meaning within the poem.

The reward of being able to cite a poem with deep personal meaning is worth the effort. Let's look at the process of memorizing a poem (in poetic verse, of course).

How to Memorize a Poem

Read the poem over, slowly. Read it to yourself, aloud.

Try to understand the mystery of why it works for you using the same words that pass by unremarkably every day.

Try to understand the poem by understanding the poem inside the poem; to understand the mystery by letting the mystery retain its mystery.

Read and say the poem over, slowly and aloud.

Understand the poem by knowing every word's meaning: etymological investigation.

Dive off the line breaks themselves, into the abyss, cutting the shape of the page around the poem. The poem contains its opposite.

Read and say the poem over, slowly, aloud. Feel its shape in your lungs, your heart, your throat.

With an index card, cover everything but the first line of the poem. Read it. Look away, see the line in the air, and say it. Look back. Repeat until you've got it.

Uncover the second line. Learn it as you did the first line, but also add the second line to first, until you've got the two.

Then it's on to three. Always repeat the first line on down, till the whole poem sings.

With the poem now internalized, you are free to perform it.

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Reading poetry is enlightening and enjoyable. Every now and then, a poem catches you, captivates you, and you just have to set it to memory because you want to live with it and share its wondrous phrases with others. Yet, how do you begin to memorize the verse?

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Victorian Web

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The Complex Nature of Early Pre-Raphaelitism: Five Strands

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Delivery Guide for OCR AS/A Level English Literature

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The approaches outlined above will assist students in developing the technical vocabulary and analytical skills and strategies that will enable them to formulate, test and articulate personal and creative responses to any of the texts they study as part of the A Level English Literature course.

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Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Although her fundamentally religious temperament was closer to her mother's, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.

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Christina with brother Dante, sister Maria and mother in Chelsea in 1863.

As part of the BBC Poetry Season to find the nation's favourite poet, we appraise Christina Rossetti.

Though mythologized by some of her contemporaries as the pious recluse of 30 Torrington Square (Bloomsbury), where Christina Rossetti lived from 1873 until her death in 1894, the truth is that she loved London.

The late-Victorian writer William Sharp remembers a conversation between the poet and a friend about the poetic advantages of living in the countryside. Rossetti made her position very clear.

"I am", she said, "not only as confirmed a Londoner as was Charles Lamb, but really doubt if it would be good for me, now, to sojourn often or long in the country."

"But", the lady insisted, "let me ask, do not you yourself find your best inspiration in the country?"

Rossetti's answer could not have been more emphatic: "Oh dear, no!" "My knowledge of what is called nature is that of the town sparrow which makes an excursion occasionally from its home in Regent's Park or Kensington Gardens."

"I am fairly sure", Rossetti added, "that I am in the place that suits me best."

Born and raised in Charlotte Street (Regent's Park), Rossetti belonged intellectually to London.

She was part of both the Pre-Raphaelite circle (which included poets such as her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Meredith and A.C. Swinburne) and the London's Ritualist scene of Anglo-Catholicism, one of whose centres was Rossetti's own church in Albany Street (Regent's Park).

Though Rossetti did not use London as the subject of her poetry, her observations of life in London (always framed in the context of her religious beliefs) influenced her view of the world and her poetry.

Her poetic allegories were often critical of materialism, capitalism, consumer culture and social inequity.

A rare autobiographical reference to one of her early experiences of the metropolis shows how London's cultural milieu affected her work.

"A great many years ago," wrote Christina Rossetti in "Time Flies: A Reading Diary" (1885), "I visited a large waxwork exhibition brilliant with costumes, complexions, and historical effigies."

This was no other than Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, then situated in the Baker Street Bazaar in Portman Square, which was at a walking distance from her home in Charlotte Street.

In the late 1840s, Madame Tussaud's biggest waxwork attraction was the "Royal Family At Home!" The exhibition included a "Magnificent Display of Court Dresses, of Surpassing Richness including Twenty Five Ladies' and Gentlemen's Costumes, introduced to convey to the Middle Classes an idea of Regal Splendour."

"His Majesty Louis Phillipe" and "The Magnificent Coronation Robes of George IV, worn and designed by himself and worth upwards of £18,000" were also on display.

The visit left a strong impression on the young poet. "Entering that gorgeous assembly I literally felt shy! The real people present did not abash me", she explained in Time Flies, "it was the distinguished waxen crowd which put me out of countenance."

She was awed by the exhibition because it seemed to the poet "to furnish a parable of many passages in many lives":

"Things are seen as that waxwork, things unseen as those real people.

Yet, over and over again we are influenced and constrained by the hollow momentary world we behold in presence, while utterly obtuse as regards the substantial eternal world no less present around us though disregarded."

Rossetti's response to this experience appears in one of her most important poems of this early period, "The Dead City" (1847), a poem that foreshadows the way in which she will tackle social criticism in her poems.

An allegorical reading of the phantasmagoria of materialism and consumer culture, the poem begins with a speaker rambling in what appears to be a pre-Edenic world, full of beatitude and blessed solitude.

But "at length" a light appears in the horizon and, "as in a dream;/ A strange dream of hope and fear", the speaker arrives to "A fair city of white stone" where all is "utter loneliness" and "deathless desolation".

But, suddenly, the speaker sees a "tent that shone" where "not one was gone":
Then the breezes whispered me:
The feast "lacked no guest":
Yea they all were statue-cold,
And none broke the stillness, none; Full of fear I would have fled;
Full of fear I bent my head,
Shutting out each stony guest: --
When I looked again the feast
And the tent had vanished.
I was the sole living one.
And methought that silently
Many seemed to look on me
With strange stedfast eyes that shone. Men and women, young and old;
With the life-like look and smile
And the flush; and tall the while
The hard fingers kept their hold.
To my great astonishment
To the feasters up I went -
Lo, they all were turned to stone. Enter in, and look, and see
How for luxury and pride
A great multitude have died:--
And I entered tremblingly.
A splendid feast is laid out in the tent. Luscious fruits ("juicy in their ripe perception") are presented in "vessels of gold/ set with gems of worth untold."

In their desire for unlimited riches and luxury, the guests have lost their humanity, their souls trapped in bodies of stone.

Like Madame Tussaud's waxworks, they are the ghosts of the city, warning us about the dangers of materialism:

The poem ends with the suggestion that the experience has been a form of awakening for the speaker: "What was I that I should see/ so much hidden mystery? /And I straightway knelt and prayed."

"The Dead City" is an example of Rossetti's use of allegory in her poetry to highlight the phantasmagoria of urban materialism.

The poem, like much of Rossetti's poetry, suggests not only the need for a spiritual awakening but also the necessity of living outside the materialism of everyday life: the topic of perhaps her best poem, "Goblin Market" (1862).

Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo's new book "Michael Field, The Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials" (with Marion Thain) is published on 15 July by Broadview Press

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Christina with brother Dante, sister Maria and mother in Chelsea in 1863. As part of the BBC Poetry Season to find the nation's favourite poet, we appraise Christina Rossetti. Though mythologized by some of her contemporaries as the pious recluse of 30 Torrington Square (Bloomsbury), where Christina Rossetti lived from 1873 until her death in 1894, the truth is that she loved London.

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - Souer Louise De La Misericorde

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - Souer Louise De La Misericorde

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - No, Thank you, John

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - No, Thank you, John

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Period 7 - Religion & Sexuality - 25th November

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Period 7 - Religion & Sexuality - 25th November

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General Analysis of Rossetti's Poetry

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Good for context and verse form (AO2 + AO3)

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'Sister Maude' by Christina Rossetti: A* Analysis

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Buy my bargain revision guides: GCSE English Language guide for 2017/18 exams: http://www.mrbruff.com/mr-bruffs-guide-to-gcse-language or on Kindle http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B012DS1R1M GCSE English Literature guide for 2017/18 exams: http://www.mrbruff.com/mr-bruffs-guide-to-gcse-literature or on Kindle http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B012TQP2L4 'Mr Bruff's Guide to A' Level English Literature': http://www.mrbruff.com/mr-bruffs-guide-to-a-level-literature/ or get the Kindle edition at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B011YZ8HUY 'Mr Bruff's Guide to Grammar': http://www.mrbruff.com/grammar/ or get the Kindle edition here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00QFTI6PG 'Mr Bruff's Guide to 'An Inspector Calls'': http://mrbruff.com/product/mr-bruffs-guide-to-an-inspector-calls-ebook/ or on Kindle: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B015ALK7QA 12 other guides at mrbruff.com too!

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Period 7 - Alienation Feedback

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - Remember

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'Shut Out' was published in Christina Rossetti's first collection of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1862. Below we offer some notes towards a summary and analysis of Rossetti's 'Shut Out' in terms of its language and meaning.

Shut Out

From bough to bough the song-birds crossed,
From flower to flower the moths and bees;
With all its nests and stately trees
It had been mine, and it was lost.

We'll begin with a brief summary of 'Shut Out'. Rossetti's speaker peers between the iron bars of a garden gate and sees a garden full of flowers ('Pied' suggesting the garden is dappled with lots of different colours and shades of flower - compare Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Pied Beauty'). She observes the birds moving from tree to tree and the insects from flower to flower, and laments that this garden had once belonged to her, but is now lost. A spirit without a shadow guards the gate; Rossetti pleads with this mysterious guard, who is always on duty, to let her take some flowers to cheer her in her outcast state. The guard doesn't answer. Rossetti then requests a simple twig from one of the shrubs and trees in the garden, so that her garden might remember her until she is able to enter it again; once more, though, the guard doesn't answer.

Instead, the guard sets about building a wall to complement the gate which already shuts Rossetti's speaker out from her garden (or the garden that used to be hers). Now she can't even look through the iron bars of the gate and admire the garden from afar! Her view is completely obscured. (Her eyes are 'straining' not only because she has been peering in at the garden, trying to look at it through the gate, but also because they are straining to fight back tears.) Now she cannot even look at the garden, she sits all alone and cries, but doesn't grieve, because now she can't see the garden any longer, there is 'nothing left worth looking at'. Out of sight, (almost) out of mind.

Rossetti's speaker concludes by announcing that a flowerbed full of violets is budding nearby, and a lark has made its nest in it. This newer, smaller garden is good, the speaker acknowledges, but she cannot love it as much as she loved the garden she has lost.

What are we to make of this poem? How should we interpret or analyse 'Shut Out'? When a garden is used in a poem like this - that is, suggesting some sort of allegory or symbolism (and the shadowless 'spirit' which guards the garden certainly suggests we are to interpret this garden as symbolic) - it's tempting to relate it to the Garden of Eden, that paradise which, in the Christian story found in the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve lost when they flouted God's commandment and ate the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. As punishment for their disobedience, God throws them out of the Garden of Eden. Paradise has been lost. Has Christina Rossetti's speaker in 'Shut Out' been exiled from her garden for a similar reason? Is she unable to enter the Pearly Gates of the Kingdom of Heaven? Why has she lost her paradise?

The poem doesn't vouchsafe this information, but the central message might be interpreted as follows: those things which we have lost attain a status which far exceeds their actual value, by virtue of being lost. We want the things we cannot have, and - equally - we long to regain the things which have been taken from us. In love, for instance, we often find it more difficult to move on when it was not our decision to end the relationship, and long to regain the person who has left us. Anyone who comes after them will find it difficult to live up to the reputation of that lost beloved.

Of course, this is only one example: the poem isn't 'about' lost love any more than it's about an actual garden. It functions as a metaphor for many things. Similarly, we might say that somebody who dies and is taken from us in their prime will always live in our memories as they were when they left us - they become semi-legendary because, taken from us, they are no longer around to remind us that they were, in fact, less than perfect.

Indeed, on the issue of death and mourning, the rhyme scheme of 'Shut Out' might be analysed as significant. The most famous poem to use the abba quatrain in the decade prior to the publication of 'Shut Out' was also one of the most popular poems of the entire Victorian era: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam, which had appeared in 1850. Tennyson's poem is a long elegy for his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in his early twenties in 1833. Tennyson's use of the abba rhyme scheme throughout this book-length poem suggests an inability to move beyond his grief, something that characterises much of In Memoriam: he takes one step forward (moving from the a to the b rhyme of the stanza) only to find himself, at the end of each stanza, taking a step back to the a rhyme with which it began.

It might be said that Christina Rossetti's 'Shut Out' is using the abba rhyme scheme for a similar reason. It is about losing something - or someone - and being unable to replace that something (or someone). In the last analysis, 'Shut Out' contains such emotional force because its garden imagery can be interpreted in a number of ways.

Discover more about Rossetti with our short overview of her life, our analysis of her classic poem Goblin Market, our summary of her underrated poem 'Twice', and our thoughts on her classic sonnet about an artist painting a female model.

Image (bottom): Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Wikimedia Commons.

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A Short Analysis of Christina Rossetti's 'Shut Out'

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A summary of a classic Rossetti poem 'Shut Out' was published in Christina Rossetti's first collection of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1862. Below we offer some notes towards a summary and analysis of Rossetti's 'Shut Out' in terms of its language and meaning. Shut Out The door was shut.

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - From the Antique

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Poetry Revision Guide

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Gender and Power - Rossetti

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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.

In 1870, the acclaimed Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830-94) sent a letter to her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in which she commented on her abilities as a writer. Comparing herself to her great female predecessor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61), she noted: 'It is not in me, and therefore, it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I'. While Rossetti might not have written about politics in such a focused and sustained way as Barrett Browning (whose works examined issues such as nationalism, revolution, slavery, and industrialisation), there was one key area with which both poets were concerned: the politics of gender and power.

The Victorian period witnessed massive changes in thinking about women's roles in society with much debate concerning women's education, employment opportunities, marriage, sexuality, psychology, and the right to vote. Within this context, Christina Rossetti had complicated views on female suffrage and equality. At times she used the Biblical idea of woman's subordination to man as reason for maintaining the status quo, while at others she argued for female representation in Parliament and spoke out against the sexual exploitation of women in prostitution. In many ways this shows her to be a particularly complex thinker about the position of women in society and it is certainly a concern which she comes back to time and again in her poetry. Her views may not always be 'radical' as such, but they are usually far from conservative and often questioning, challenging and potentially subversive.

Oppression and alienation

The oppression and alienation which many Victorian women might have experienced due to their exclusion from key systems of power is felt strongly in Rossetti's four-stanza poem, 'From the Antique'. Composed in 1854 but never published in Rossetti's lifetime - possibly because of its unmistakeable critique - the poem opens with an unflinching expression of despair:

It's a weary life, it is; she said:-

Doubly blank in a woman's lot:

I wish and I wish I were a man;

Or, better than any being, were not: (ll.1-4)

These initial lines, with their austere word choice, are uncompromising in their analysis of woman's place in society. The metrical change at the beginning of the second line places an increased emphasis on 'Doubly blank', while the sense of longing and despondency is caught in the repetitions. Far better to be a man, the speaker suggests, before the surprise turn proposes the desire for extinction altogether. So 'weary[ing]' is the position of women that annihilation is preferable, since this would enable escape from gender expectations and imposed identities. While 'the world would wag [carry] on the same' (l.9), seemingly indifferent to women's plight, the speaker would have removed herself from the endless cycle of bleak conformity where individuals 'wake and weary and fall asleep' (l.16).

Notebook of Christina Rossetti (two of six), 18 December 1856-29 June 1858

Manuscript copy of 'In an Artist's Studio' by Christina Rossetti, copied into one of her notebooks, 1856. A comment on the female muse, the poem remained unpublished during her lifetime.

Usage terms: Public Domain

This sense of women's entrapment, which the speaker of 'From the Antique' seeks to eradicate, is also felt in Rossetti's remarkable poem, 'In an Artist's Studio'. Composed in 1856 but not published until after Rossetti's death, this poem is written in the form of a sonnet, traditionally the poem of love. What 'In an Artist's Studio' offers, however, is a cutting critique of the ways in which the female model - William Michael Rossetti suggested she might be based on the Pre-Raphaelite muse, Elizabeth Siddal - is painted, 'framed' and controlled by the male artist:

One face looks out from all his canvasses,

One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;

We found her hidden just behind those screens,

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,

A saint, an angel;-every canvass means

The same one meaning, neither more nor less. (ll.1-8)

On looking round the studio, the speaker is appalled by the reductive similarity of all the paintings, the single vision of the artist caught in the repeated use of the word 'one' - '[o]ne face', '[o]ne selfsame figure', 'same one meaning'. The model's actual identity is lost and she is subsequently reconstructed as various female icons ('queen', 'saint', 'angel') or as a 'nameless girl'. Indeed, the idea of the model being at the mercy of the artist's whims is reinforced at the beginning of the sonnet's sestet, where the artist appears as a kind of vampire figure who 'feeds upon her face by day and night' (l.9). The model is drained of life, the poem suggests, so that the artist can gratify his fantasies. Indeed, time and again in Rossetti's poems, the female figure is depicted as entrapped or confined - physically, psychologically or both.

Marriage and the complexities of relationships

In a number of her poems Rossetti examines women's position in society through consideration of the institution of marriage (see, for example, 'A Triad' and 'Love From the North'). In the ballad-like poem 'Maude Clare', which was written in 1857-58 and published in Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, this examination takes place just after the wedding service itself. The church here becomes the site of conflict as the newly-wed Thomas and Nell are intruded upon by Maude Clare, Thomas's previous lover. Throughout the poem, Nell and Maude Clare are set up as opposites - 'His bride was like a village maid,/ Maude Clare was like a queen,' we are told in the first stanza (ll.3-4) - and it is increasingly Maude Clare, rather than the new bride, who is the focus of attention. Indeed, in a poem which is composed principally of dialogue, Maude Clare dominates the meeting as she returns to Thomas the gifts that he has previously given her ('half of the golden chain/ You wore about your neck', ll.21-22) and then offers Nell her 'share of a fickle heart' (l.37) - a neat reversal of the friendship and community traditionally associated with the wedding gift.

Notebook of Christina Rossetti (two of six), 18 December 1856-29 June 1858

Extract from a manuscript copy of 'Maude Clare' by Christina Rossetti, copied into one of her notebooks, dated 8 December 1857.

Usage terms: Public Domain

Thomas remains significantly silent throughout, hiding his face and barely able to stutter Maude Clare's name - a clear critique of dominant masculinity - and it is interestingly left to Nell to confront the intruder. For in the poem's final two stanzas, it is Nell who takes over the speaking voice, directly addressing Maude Clare and asserting, in a phrasing which rings out a challenge, that she will take what Maude Clare spurns:

"Yea, tho' you're taller by the head,

More wise, and much more fair;

I'll love him till he loves me best,

Me best of all, Maude Clare." (ll.45-48)

I never said I loved you, John:

Why will you teaze me day by day,

And wax a weariness to think upon

With always 'do' and 'pray'?

[....]

I have no heart?-Perhaps I have not;

But then you're mad to take offence

That I don't give you what I have not got:

Use your own common sense. (ll.1-4; 13-16)

Manipulating power

The astonishing 'Winter: My Secret', written in 1857 and published in 1862, illustrates another way in which the speakers of Rossetti's poems establish strategies for defying expectations and conventions. As William Michael Rossetti noted, this poem was originally called 'Nonsense', a title which gestures towards the text's playful nature. With its bounding rhythms, skilful word play, and building up of image on image, the poem is teasing and mischievous as the speaker refuses to share a 'secret' that she knows:

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:

Perhaps some day, who knows?

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

And you're too curious: fie!

You want to hear it? well:Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell. (ll.1-6)

Behind this playfulness, however, is an intriguing study in the manipulation of power. For the speaker denies entry to the reader - 'I cannot ope [open] to every one who taps' (l.13) - and instead metaphorically wraps herself in protective clothing ('a shawl,/ A veil, a cloak', ll.11-12) which will keep others out. Her privacy is not to be intruded upon and she consequently leaves the reader guessing at her knowledge, even suggesting that there might not be a secret after all, 'only just my fun' (l.9). This therefore becomes an intriguing poem about what is not said, where the speaker skilfully withholds power and control. The game is hers and she will only 'tell' when and if she chooses.

In poems such as these, then, Rossetti's speakers demonstrate both an awareness of, and resistance to, those social and political expectations which define acceptable roles for women and which potentially leave them powerless. While poems such as 'From the Antique' and 'In an Artist's Studio' emphasise the ways in which women might be trapped by convention, other poems such as 'Maude Clare', 'No, Thank You, John', and 'Winter: My Secret' reveal a much more complex negotiation of power which enables the women to achieve agency, equality and self-sufficiency. As such, Rossetti's poems make an intriguing contribution to those crucial debates around the Woman Question and gender relations which were central to the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Dr Simon Avery is Reader in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Westminster. His publications include Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2011), Mary Coleridge: Selected Poems (2010), Thomas Hardy: A Reader's Guide (2009) and the Broadview edition of Hardy's The Return of the Native (2013). He is currently working on a study of modernity and place in the late-Victorian period and various projects concerning the history of Queer London.

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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.

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Christina Rossetti - AQA - Anthology Zone

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Rossetti had a flying start with a family like that and had a happy childhood, although she suffered a serious illness when she was 15. She could speak Italian and English, and she was able to read and write poems in Italian too. She was encouraged from an early age to develop her artistic talents.

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A secondary school revision resource for GCSE English Literature about Christina Georgina Rossetti's poem, "Sister Maude".

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Wikipedia

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The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites and sometimes abbreviated as PRB) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic Geo…

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Introduction " Christina Rossetti, selected poems Study Guide from Crossref-it.info

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The world of Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets 1540-1660

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - Echo

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From the Antique - Analysis

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Rossetti's poem explores the difficulties of women in the Victorian era, struggling to find a place where they are valued for themselves and what they can offer in a world where - sometimes - men seem to have all the power. Bleakly she asks the question: would anyone notice if I were gone? It's a heartbreaking lyric poem which speaks to the misery that seems to have haunted Rossetti for a good part of her life.

It's a weary life, it is, she said:
Doubly blank in a woman's lot:
I wish and I wish I were a man:
Or, better then any being, were not:

Rossetti's writing from the perspective of a speaker - the "she" suggests not Rossetti herself but a speaker. The "weariness" is echoed in much Victorian poetry (Tennyson's Mariana 's refrain "I am aweary") but the emptiness and dreary nature of a life that is so restricted. Simon Avery calls the word choice "austere"; noting its cold, bleak nature.

Middle class milieu or working class grind?

Is Rossetti talking about all women, or a particular class of women here? Rossetti herself is relatively comfortable - although the family suffered financial difficulties they were never considered to be working class. Rossetti was also very involved with working class women through her work with 'unfortunates' and single mothers, Rossetti is concerned for the plight of all women. Working class women often actually have more freedom in some respects because their financial circumstances dictate they go into the world and work - is this "weariness" actually a little self-indulgent from a middle-class woman given the hardships working women often experience?

Does this single speaker speak for herself, or is "she" in fact all women? The metrical changes at the beginning of the stanza emphasise the phrase "doubly blank" to highlight the emptiness of the female world.

By writing "she said", Rossetti also distances herself from her speaker, allowing her the ability to speak/writer more freely while hiding behind the attribution. The duality - "doubly"- holding views that she may wish to express, and allowing herself as a writer the ability to refute her own writing: perhaps a reason why From the Antique was not published within her lifetime.

Context: a woman's lot

Note her religious views on feminist issues though (be aware the term "feminist" is anachronistic - nobody at the time would have used it, it was really coined afterwards) as Rossetti believed women should be well treated and respected but not equal politically - she was opposed to women's university education, and signed petitions against female suffrage, for example. Her beliefs stem from the biblical understanding that woman comes from, and is therefore subject to, man: to give her the vote would create a false equality. Women should be prized for their feminine qualities - compassion, morality, support and guidance etc - but are not the same as men and the sexes should be treated differently.

The repetition of "I wish" highlights the futility of her desire - the syndetic structure (repeated use of "and") also has the effect of adding a fairy-tale quality - also highlighting its lack of reality. She would prefer being nothing (note though - not dead merely nothing) than being a woman.

Were nothing at all in all the world,
Not a body and not a soul:
Not so much as a grain of dust
Or a drop of water from pole to pole.

Separation of body and soul?

The subjunctive "Were" is used to highlight the importance of the statement, and the sense of possibility (although this is misleading - there is no possibility here) Rossetti separates the body and soul - prefacing both with the "not" to indicate that there is no separation, perhaps, of the two - the body and soul are both female and therefore neither should exist. The line "not so much as a grain of dust" holds echoes of the funeral service - "ashes to ashes, dust to dust", calling on religious ideas of the body's impermanence in contrast to that of the soul. Lacking "dust" and "water", the earth surely ceases to be - and so, Rossetti's speaker argues that were her body and soul reduced to dust and water, there would still be no mourning or even notice of their disappearance.

The whole second stanza is this conditional imaginary scenario - if I cease to be, reminiscent of Keats' "when I have fears that I may cease to be" (1818) in which the poet imagines a fear of not leaving his mark on the world, but makes peace with the "wide world" he experiences. While Keats is comforted ultimately by his lack of importance in the world - standing on the edge of it, "alone", Rossetti's speaker is not so peaceful.

Still the world would wag on the same,
Still the seasons go and come:
Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.

The conditional "were" of the second stanza is answered in this stanza's opening with a more definitive "would": "still the world would wag on the same." "Wag" almost seems dismissive, reminding of wagging tongues, gossip of little consequence. Is this anger and bitterness, causing her to reject the world itself as meaningless (perhaps in some ways more like Keats and his comfort that "love and fame to nothingness do sink"?) or is it an attempt to comfort herself by insisting that the lack of consequence in the world is not limited to her alone? Her obliteration from the world would count for nothing, and nobody would notice or care - but the world would keep on turning if she is not there and is that perhaps an indication that Rossetti isn't as sympathetic as might first be thought?

Nature is quick to fade away, not eternal after all

The speaker turns to nature - as Keats so often does - and identifies the "blossoms", "cherries" and "bees" - all short-lived, temporary and quick to fade away yet they are more permanent through their repeated life-cycles than she will be. It's interesting that in this poem there's little religious comfort to be had other than the eternal nature of the earth. Even the seasons are temporary - they "go and come"; the inversion of the usual collocation has an almost dream-like quality in the rhythm here, as well as enabling Rossetti to complete the "come/hum" rhyme scheme.

None would miss me in all the world,
How much less would care or weep:
I should be nothing, while all the rest
Would wake and weary and fall asleep.

The blunt short line "None would miss me in all the world." brooks no argument, end-stopped to heighten her sense of defiance - or despair? Rossetti changes the tense from the subjunctive "were" to the modal "should" - a change indicating that there is a decision being made at the end; the "should" is far more final.

One woman, or all women?

The final line's actions "wake and weary and fall asleep" has an unsettled rhythm; the "wear" seeming out of place. The change of "weary" from adjective in line 1 ("it's a weary life") to verb in the final line "would wake and weary" may suggest a change in perspective. A woman's life is weary - dreary, boring and dull - but the people in the world "weary" - do they become weary, or weary others? Yet it seems likely that she's suggesting that, like the speaker herself, others in the world will also find their lives weary. Is this an indication that she's speaking of women in general - or is it even broader than that? Does she count the rest of humanity as equally worthless, in some regards, and so an individual's feeling weary or unimportant is in fact itself actually quite selfish and they should realise their place in the wider world?

The final "asleep" brings back the previous suggestion of nothingness - the passing of conscious into unconsciousness, the "not" that afflicts the entire second stanza.

Rossetti's despairing tone

On first reading, the woman speaker can seem despairing, even suicidal. But towards stanza 3-4 some doubt creeps in - is she being bitter or sarcastic? If the latter, then is there a different purpose behind this apparent frustration? Is she advocating change or acceptance of a woman's situation?

Structural instability

Rossetti uses a relatively complex structure (a lot of her poems have irregular metre) alternating between 8, 9 and 10 syllables and between iambs and anapests which creates a more naturalistic rhythm but also sometimes catches off-guard - the final line seems to be cut short, for example. This irregularity is to an extent off-set against the regularity of rhyme and stanzas; the abcb rhyme scheme leaves each stanza feeling complete, while the regular pacing of the stanzas - four quatrains - also implies a regularity which could reflect the dullness of the speaker's existence.

Critical viewpoints:

"Composed in 1854 but never published in Rossetti's lifetime - possibly because of its unmistakeable critique - the poem opens with an unflinching expression of despair.... So 'weary[ing]' is the position of women that annihilation is preferable, since this would enable escape from gender expectations and imposed identities", Simon Asvery, British Library

The poem implies a concern with the duality a woman faces- the inability to see herself as important yet, to ourselves, aren't we always?

"As Simone de Beauvoir has pointed out, in a patriarchal culture woman inevitably experiences herself as object and other. The problem is especially acute during adolescence when woman must make herself into or pretend to be an alluring object. Then "the very face itself becomes a mask"" ( Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: the inward pose in 'Shakespeare's sisters: feminist essays on women poets' ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar)

Historical and social contexts to consider:

The increasing recognition of women's roles beyond the traditional wife and mother

Women being given greater rights in law

Married Women's Property Act 1856

Society for the Employment of Women establish 1860

Suffrage and female emancipation

Possible practice questions:

Discuss Rossetti's presentation of relationships in From the Antique.

Discuss Rossetti's use of religious influences in From the Antique.

Discuss the use of nature in From the Antique.

Discuss Rossetti's creation of an imaginary persona in From the Antique.

Discuss the ways in which Rossetti present the covert and the overt in From the Antique.

Discuss Rossetti's attitude towards women in From the Antique

Discuss Rossetti's portrayal of her speaker's disturbance in From the Antique. Discuss Rossetti's portrayal of gender expectations in From the Antique Discuss Rossetti's portrayal of society in From the Antique

In your answer, explore the writer's use of language, imagery and verse form, and consider the ways in which you find the poem characteristic of Rossetti's work in your selection,
See some sample pages

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From The Antique by Christina Rossetti: complete analysis

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Rossetti's poem explores the difficulties of women in the Victorian era, struggling to find a place where they are valued for themselves and what they can offer in a world where - sometimes - men seem to have all the power. Bleakly she asks the question: would anyone notice if I were gone?

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Period 7 - Rossetti - Alienation - 14th October 2016

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OCR English Literature Exam Criteria - Hamlet (Page 1) & Rossetti (Page 2)

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Gender in 19th Century Britain

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Cambridge University Lecture - Rossetti's Reception

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MASSOLIT: The Critical Reception of Christina Rossetti

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Goblin Market - Context Analysis

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OCR Poetry Anthology - Pages 81-95

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OCR Rossetti Teaching Guide

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Rossetti Biography - Religion

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Lecture - Monica Cure - Difficulty of Simplicity of Rossetti

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Monica Cure: The Difficulty of Simplicity in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti - THI

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Christina Rossetti's Religious Poetry by Esther T. Hu

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Esther Hu, a lecturer in Victorian literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, examines the religious poetry of Christina Rossetti. Hosted by Humanities Foundation on October 18, 2006.

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British Library - Romantics, Victorians & Religious Poetry

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BBC - Poetry Season - Poets - Christina Rossetti

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Rossetti was born in London in 1830 into a remarkable family of artists, scholars and writers. Her father was an exiled Italian revolutionary and poet and her brothers William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were founding members of art movement the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

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Victorian Web - Excellent Research

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - Perceptions of Rossetti

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OCR Candidate Style Answers

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Critic: Bocher - Love of God and Love of Man

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Critic: Harrison - Pre-Raphaelitism and Tractarianism

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Mr Dowling - Lesson - In the Round Tower