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    Amor Mundi

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    panaceaxy

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    Amor Mundi

    Uploaded by

    panaceaxy
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    12 views2 pages

    Amor Mundi

    Uploaded by

    panaceaxy

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Amor Mundi

    “Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing


    On the west wind blowing along this valley track?”
    “The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
    We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.”

    So they two went together in glowing August weather,


    The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;
    And dear she was to dote on, her swift feet seemed to float on
    The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight.

    “Oh what is that in heaven where gray cloud-flakes are seven,


    Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?”
    “Oh that’s a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous,
    An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.”

    “Oh what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly,
    Their scent comes rich and sickly?”—“A scaled and hooded worm.”
    “Oh what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?”
    “Oh that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.”

    “Turn again, O my sweetest,—turn again, false and fleetest:


    This beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.”
    “Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting:
    This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”
    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).

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