Christina Rossetti : 13 poems

They desire a better country

I

I would not if I could undo my past,

Tho’ for its sake my future is a blank;

My past, for which I have myself to thank,

For all its faults and follies first and last.

I would not cast anew the lot once cast,                             

Or launch a second ship for one that sank,

Or drug with sweets the bitterness I drank,

Or break by feasting my perpetual fast.

I would not if I could: for much more dear

Is one remembrance than a hundred joys,                       

More than a thousand hopes in jubilee;

Dearer the music of one tearful voice

That unforgotten calls and calls to me,

‘Follow me here, rise up, and follow here.’

II

What seekest thou far in the unknown land?                   

In hope I follow joy gone on before,

In hope and fear persistent more and more,

As the dry desert lengthens out its sand.

Whilst day and night I carry in my hand

The golden key to ope the golden door                                

Of golden home; yet mine eye weepeth sore

For the long journey that must make no stand.

And who is this that veiled doth walk with thee?

Lo, this is Love that walketh at my right;

One exile holds us both, and we are bound                       

To selfsame home-joys in the land of light.

Weeping thou walkest with him; weepeth he?—

Some sobbing weep, some weep and make no sound.

III

A dimness of a glory glimmers here

Thro’ veils and distance from the space remote,            

A faintest far vibration of a note

Reaches to us and seems to bring us near,

Causing our face to glow with braver cheer,

Making the serried mist to stand afloat,

Subduing langour with an antidote,                                      

And strengthening love almost to cast out fear,

Till for one moment golden city walls

Rise looming on us, golden walls of home,

Light of our eyes until the darkness falls;

Then thro’ the outer darkness burdensome                     

I hear again the tender voice that calls,

‘Follow me hither, follow, rise, and come.’

 Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

    Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

    From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

    A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

    You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

    Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

    They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

    Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

    Yea, beds for all who come.

Poem animation by Jim Clark

Shut Out

The door was shut. I looked between

 Its iron bars; and saw it lie,

 My garden, mine, beneath the sky,

 Pied with all flowers bedewed and green:

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.

A shadowless spirit kept the gate,

 Blank and unchanging like the grave.

 I peering through said: ‘Let me have

 Some buds to cheer my outcast state.’

He answered not. ‘Or give me, then,

 But one small twig from shrub or tree;

 And bid my home remember me

 Until I come to it again.’

The spirit was silent; but he took

 Mortar and stone to build a wall;

 He left no loophole great or small

 Through which my straining eyes might look:

So now I sit here quite alone

 Blinded with tears; nor grieve for that,

 For nought is left worth looking at

 Since my delightful land is gone.

A violet bed is budding near,

 Wherein a lark has made her nest:

 And good they are, but not the best;

 And dear they are, but not so dear.

When I’m dead, my dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,

 Sing no sad songs for me;

 Plant thou no roses at my head,

 Nor shady cypress tree:

 Be the green grass above me

 With showers and dewdrops wet;

 And if thou wilt, remember,

 And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,

 I shall not feel the rain;

 I shall not hear the nightingale

 Sing on, as if in pain:

 And dreaming through the twilight

 That doth not rise nor set,

 Haply I may remember,

 And haply may forget.

After Death

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept

And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may

Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,

Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.

He leaned above me, thinking that I slept

And could not hear him; but I heard him say,

‘Poor child, poor child’: and as he turned away

Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.

He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold

That hid my face, or take my hand in his,

Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:

He did not love me living; but once dead

He pitied me; and very sweet it is

To know he still is warm though I am cold.

From the Antique

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:

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.

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.

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.

In an Artist’s Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases,

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 canvas means

The same one meaning, neither more or 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.

What does the donkey bray about?

What does the donkey bray about?

What does the pig grunt through his snout?

What does the goose mean by a hiss?

Oh, Nurse, if you can tell me this,

I'll give you such a kiss.

The cockatoo calls ‘cockatoo,’

The magpie chatters ‘how d'ye do?’

The jackdaw bids me ‘go away,’

Cuckoo cries ‘cuckoo’ half the day:

What do the others say?

The Poor Ghost

'Oh whence do you come, my dear friend, to me,

With your golden hair all fallen below your knee,

And your face as white as snowdrops on the lea,

And your voice as hollow as the hollow sea?'

'From the other world I come back to you,

My locks are uncurled with dripping drenching dew.

You know the old, whilst I know the new:

But to-morrow you shall know this too.'

'Oh not to-morrow into the dark, I pray;

Oh not to-morrow, too soon to go away:

Here I feel warm and well-content and gay:

Give me another year, another day.'

'Am I so changed in a day and a night

That mine own only love shrinks from me with fright,

Is fain to turn away to left or right

And cover up his eyes from the sight?'

'Indeed I loved you, my chosen friend,

I loved you for life, but life has an end;

Through sickness I was ready to tend:

But death mars all, which we cannot mend.

'Indeed I loved you; I love you yet,

If you will stay where your bed is set,

Where I have planted a violet,

Which the wind waves, which the dew makes wet.'

'Life is gone, then love too is gone,

It was a reed that I leant upon:

Never doubt I will leave you alone

And not wake you rattling bone with bone.

'I go home alone to my bed,

Dug deep at the foot and deep at the head,

Roofed in with a load of lead,

Warm enough for the forgotten dead.

'But why did your tears soak through the clay,

And why did your sobs wake me where I lay?

I was away, far enough away:

Let me sleep now till the Judgment Day.'

A Study (A Soul)

She stands as pale as Parian statues stand;

Like Cleopatra when she turned at bay,

And felt her strength above the Roman sway,

And felt the aspic writhing in her hand.

Her face is steadfast toward the shadowy land,

For dim beyond it looms the light of day;

Her feet are steadfast; all the arduous way

That foot-track hath not wavered on the sand.

She stands there like a beacon thro' the night,

A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is;

She stands alone, a wonder deathly white;

She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,

Indomitable in her feebleness,

Her face and will athirst against the light.

Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;

   Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

   As sunlight on a stream;

      Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,

   Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;

   Where thirsting longing eyes

      Watch the slow door

That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

   My very life again tho’ cold in death:

Come back to me in dreams, that I may give

   Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:

      Speak low, lean low,

As long ago, my love, how long ago.

Winter: My secret

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.

Or, after all, perhaps there’s none:

Suppose there is no secret after all,

But only just my fun.

Today’s a nipping day, a biting day;

In which one wants a shawl,

A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:

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: who ever shows

His nose to Russian snows

To be pecked at by every wind that blows?

You would not peck? I thank you for good will,

Believe, but leave the truth untested still.

Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust

March with its peck of dust,

Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,

Nor even May, whose flowers

One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours.

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 nor too much cloud,

And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,

Perhaps my secret I may say,

Or you may guess.

A reading of Christina Rossetti's "Winter, My Secret" by Natascha McElhone

E la Sua Volontade è nostra pace (Dante)

Sol con questi pensier, con altre chiome (Petrarca)

Youth gone, and beauty gone if ever there

Dwelt beauty in so poor a face as this;

Youth gone and beauty, what remains of bliss?

I will not bind fresh roses in my hair,

To shame a cheek at best but little fair,--

Leave youth his roses, who can bear a thorn,--

I will not seek for blossoms anywhere,

Except such common flowers as blow with corn.

Youth gone and beauty gone, what doth remain?

The longing of a heart pent up forlorn,

A silent heart whose silence loves and longs;

The silence of a heart which sang its songs

While youth and beauty made a summer morn,

Silence of love that cannot sing again.

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.

Judging from somewhat idealized sketches made by her brother Dante, Christina as a teenager seems to have been quite attractive if not beautiful. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor Pre-Raphaelite brethren, but the engagement ended after he reverted to Roman Catholicism.

When Professor Rossetti's failing health and eyesight forced him into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by starting a day school, but had to give it up after a year or so. Thereafter she led a very retiring life, interrupted by a recurring illness which was sometimes diagnosed as angina and sometimes tuberculosis. From the early '60s on she was in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.

All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.

After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894.   Glenn Everett Victorian Web

More information on Christina Rossetti  : Victorian Web

Interesting essay :

Painted Ladies :  Christina Rossetti versus the male gaze. By Rachel Vorona Cote.

Poetry Foundation, July 23, 2018.

Sometimes, Rossetti suggests, female agency resides in self-preservation—the choice to be silent or to conceal or to withhold or even to mislead. “Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell,” the poem’s speaker declares. Was this Rossetti’s coded declaration of independence? We can’t know for sure. Beyond her poems, she left no template for those who followed her. To biographers’ knowledge, she never told another woman how to be an artist. After all, she struggled with her own notions of how to be one. She never sought these answers from Dante Gabriel, yet she must have known that his influence over her was diffuse. However much she agreed to collaborate with him, she resisted redefinition and submission. Unlike the women beaming from the PRB’s portraits—luminous but silenced—she chose her own self-representation. For a female poet, perhaps some of the secrets she keeps are just as vital as the verse she shares.

More poems here : Poem Hunter