New Selected Poems

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

New Selected Poems

edited by

rachel mann

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)

Goblin Market

In the Round Tower at Jhansi

Dream-Land

At Home

Love From the North

Winter Rain

Cousin Kate

The Lambs Of Grasmere (1860)

A Birthday

Remember

After Death

An Apple-Gathering

Echo

Winter: My Secret

Another Spring

Fata Morgana

No, Thank You, John

Twilight Calm

Wife to Husband

Shut Out

Song

Bitter for Sweet

Sister Maude

The First Spring Day

The Convent Threshold

Up-Hill

‘A Bruised Reed Shall He Not Break’

A Better Resurrection

The Three Enemies

One Certainty

Sweet Death

A Testimony

Old And New Year Ditties

The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866)

from The Prince’s Progress

Spring Quiet

A Portrait

One Day

What Would I Give?

Memory

Vanity of Vanities

L.E.L.

Eve

The Queen of Hearts

Dost Thou not Care?

Weary In Well-Doing

Good Friday

The Lowest Place

Poems Added in Goblin Market,

The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1875)

A Dirge

Dead Hope

A Daughter of Eve

Amor Mundi

A Christmas Carol

When My Heart is Vexed, I Will Complain

Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872; 1893)

‘In The Meadow – What In The Meadow?’

‘Crying, my little one, footsore and weary’

‘Margaret Has A Milking-Pail’

‘January Cold Desolate’

‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’

A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)

The Key-Note

Pastime

Italia, Io Ti Saluto!

Yet A Little While

Monna Innominata

De Profundis

A Life’s Parallels

Golden Silences

Mariana

Poems (1888, 1890)

One Sea-side Grave

A Hope Carol

A Candlemas Dialogue

He Cannot Deny Himself

Balm in Gilead

Advent Sunday

Advent

Christmastide

St John the Apostle

Epiphany

Epiphanytide

Vigil of the Presentatio

Feast of the Presentation

The Purification of St Mary The Virgin

Vigil of the Annunciation

Vigil of St Peter

St Peter

Sunday Before Advent

Lay Up For Yourselves Treasures in Heaven

Privately Printed Poems

Sappho

Unpublished Poems

Two Thoughts of Death

From the Antique

Seasons

Holy Innocents

A Bed of Forget-Me-Nots

A Chilly Night

Introspective

The Summer Is Ended

A Study (A Soul)

The Heart Knoweth its Own Bitterness

Three Stages

The Last Look

Next of Kin

All Saints

Autumn

In an Artist’s Studio

Maude

Index of Titles

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

C.H. Sisson, editor of Carcanet’s 1984 Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems, opens and closes his introduction with a brace of striking claims. He begins by affirming Ford Madox Ford’s 1911 statement that ‘Christina Rossetti seems to us the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced.’ He closes by asserting that ‘in her sobriety she is the most naked of poets.’ Sisson was a formidable critic and his analysis is difficult to gainsay over thirty years on from his Selected. Indeed, it is tempting to re-baptise Christina Rossetti ‘the great naked Victorian poet’. In our rather more (social) media-obsessed times, it would surely make an eye-catching tagline.

Sisson’s selection was ground-breaking. If the 1970s and ’80s signalled a specifically feminist recovery of Rossetti’s reputation, thanks, in part, to scholars of the stature of Cora Kaplan, Angela Leighton, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar et al, the critical revolution was far from complete. Sisson’s assertion that, by the 1980s, Rossetti’s high reputation was ‘hardly questionable’ strikes me as a little bold. Even if Rossetti’s poetics – clean, simple and often unexpectedly strange – had been reclaimed as subversively feminist, the brilliant work of critics like Isobel Armstrong arguably risked providing a new set of critical constraints for Rossetti’s works. With hindsight, there is something strangely bracing about Sisson’s patrician, masculine voice offering leaven to the ‘(re-) discoveries’ of feminist theorists.

Sisson’s Carcanet selection includes Rossetti’s long-unavailable children’s story Maude: A Story for Girls, a piece of juvenilia written when she was about eighteen. Published in a short-run by her brother William Michael nearly fifty years after it was written, Sisson takes Maude as ‘undoubtedly a self-portrait, and a highly critical one’. It represents a fascinating study of an upper middle-class adolescent girl’s sensibility and, as William Michael notes, even by 1897, Christina’s religiously motivated self-abnegation came over as a little priggish. He says that the ‘worst harm’ Maude seems to have done ‘is that, when she had written a good poem she felt it to be good’. Unsurprisingly, Maude hardly represents the peak of Rossetti’s powers, but it is revealing and earns a reprint here, not least because of its religious seriousness. While biographers such as Frances Thomas and, supremely, Jan Marsh have taken recent biographical studies of Rossetti to the level of fine art, Sisson brought new focus to Rossetti’s poetics through his insistence that ‘with any poet the starting-point, social as well as literary, is worth finding out about’.

The facts of Rossetti’s life are well-known. She was born on 5 December 1830, into a prominent Anglo-Italian family. In 1824, her poet-father Gabriele fled the kingdom of Naples for London with a price on his head, and in 1826 he married Frances, daughter of Gaetano Polidori. Polidori was formerly secretary to the poet Alfieri, and father of John, briefly famous as Byron’s physician. Gabriele taught Italian and published, by subscription, a commentary on the Inferno during a period when Dante’s works were relatively unknown. He was appointed Professor of Italian at King’s College, London in 1830/1.

Christina was the youngest of four children. Maria Francesca, who became a nun, was born in 1827, while art-superstar Dante Gabriel (born at the height of Gabriele’s Dante obsession) was born in 1828. William Michael, career civil servant and Christina’s literary executor, came along in 1829. Of the new-born Christina, her father wrote to her aunts, ‘She is considered to be the very picture of Maria, but more beautiful. She … looks with that round face of hers, like a little moon risen at the full.’ Family accounts of the children’s life in the Rossetti home indicate a tellingly un-English milieu. In his introduction to Christina’s Collected Poems (1904), William Michael writes:

The children were constantly with their parents; there was no separate nursery, and no rigid lines drawn between the big one and the little ones. Of English society there was extremely little – barely one or two families…; but of Italian society – in the sense of Italians who hunted up and haunted our father as an old acquaintance or as a celebrity – the stream was constant… there were exiles, patriots, politicians, literary men, musicians… fleshy and good-natured Neapolitans, keen Tuscans, emphatic Romans… all this – even apart from our own chiefly Italian blood – made us, no doubt, not a little different from British children in habit of thought and standard of association.

Having said all this, their mother – half-English and a former governess to an English family – undertook the entire education of the girls. Furthermore, all four children were baptised and brought up in the Church of England, and it was in the emergent world of Anglo-Catholicism that Maria and Christina found the habitus of their adult lives.

Arguably, during the late twentieth-century peak of feminist critical interest in Rossetti’s poetry, the intensely religious tenor of Christina’s life was seen, at best, as irrelevant to her significance and, at worst, an embarrassment to be minimised. Sisson himself, not driven by any doctrinaire consideration, is honest enough to admit that he finds much of her specifically devotional and ecclesiastical verse and writings ‘largely unreadable’. His Selected contains rather fewer of these poems than mine. I do not aim to sport with modern readers’ sensibilities. I recognise that European culture travels ever further away from the kind of biblical literacy that Christina (and even Sisson) assumed. The Book of Common Prayer and the King James’ Bible no longer supply a common literary substrate between writers in English, if they ever did. In offering a wider selection of her poems shaped by her Anglo-Catholicism – by turns, lavish in its devotion and, yet, austere and reserved in what it might say of the Sacred – I hope to invite readers to make faithful, yet daring readings of both her most seemingly secular as well as her vast oeuvre of devotional writings.

However, before treating with Rossetti’s faith and religion, there is a dimension that simply cannot be ignored: the impact on reading Rossetti generated by the ‘Pre-Raphaelite …’ – choose your metaphor here – ‘… Juggernaut’, ‘… Industry’, ‘… Behemoth’ and so on. Despite the relative brevity of its existence, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which her brother Dante Gabriel was the most famous member, continues to exercise a significant grip on ideas about midto- late nineteenth century art and culture. For good or ill, any kind of study of Christina’s poetry – certainly the poetry of her most-famous phase, which includes 1862’s Goblin Market and other poems – needs to wrestle with the curious shadow cast by Dante Gabriel, the Pre-Raphaelites and their advocates into the twenty-first century. While there has been some fascinating critical push-back recently, in which women artists like Evelyn de Morgan and critics such as Joanna Boyce have been ‘recovered’ from the long, sometimes unappealing shadows of Millais and Burne-Jones, ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ aesthetics continue to operate predominantly through a male gaze, constructing women as tragic muses.

It is always risky to load too much significance on a single poem. However, In an Artist’s Studio, written in 1856 but only published after Christina’s death, is a genuinely fascinating text. It both offers some suggestive ways to delineate Rossetti’s relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and indicates fruitful directions for reading her work post-Sisson (who didn’t include the poem in his Carcanet selection). William Michael’s note on the poem in the 1904 Complete Poems says that this Petrarchan sonnet refers ‘apparently to our brother’s studio, and to his constantly-repeated heads of the lady whom he afterwards married, Miss Siddal’:

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.

He feeds upon her face by day and night,

   And she with true kind eyes looks back on him

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:

   Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

   Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Clearly, given its Petrarchan form, it displays Christina in argumentative mood. The opening octave serves to set up the argument or proposition of the poem, while the closing twin tercets or sestet serves to offer a resolution. Within this structure the volta in the ninth line presents ‘a turn’ in the argument. If the sonnet form is, by convention, a poem of love, In an Artist’s Studio perhaps offers an insight into the feminist edge present in Christina’s poetry: for it constitutes a cutting critique of the ways in which the female model is painted, ‘framed’ and controlled by the male artist. In its repeated use of ‘one face’, ‘one selfsame figure’ and ‘same one meaning’ Rossetti presents a female form vampirised by her brother’s male gaze.