Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Christina Rossetti 3: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

 

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A paper and poetry reading given at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of the series ‘Poets and the Faith’ on Tuesday the 13^th of August 2024.

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow:

What are brief? today and tomorrow:

What are frail? Spring blossoms and youth:

What are deep? the ocean and truth. 

In adulthood, Christina Rossetti once expressed a desire to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This came to nothing, she was much too busy on other things, but it tells us how influential Elizabeth was on Christina, Emily Dickinson, and other younger readers and writers of the time. Christina’s astounding ‘Monna Innominata’ is a rejoinder to Elizabeth’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, something she states explicitly in the introduction to that sonnet series.

Like the two poets we have been listening to, Christina was very well-read in Scripture and theology, but with her the discovery of worship and devotion turns into a lifetime of creativity. And vice versa: the discovery of creativity turns into a lifetime of devotion. A hard-won line goes “Obedience is the fruit of faith; patience is the early blossom on the tree of faith.” This patience exists as a grounding, a groundswell, a presence throughout her writing. Faith, both in the sense of the virtue and of the Christian religion itself, preoccupies Rossetti throughout her writing life, and could be called its driving force even where the word ‘faith’ is not overtly used. She speaks from inside her own chosen religious life and that is how we have to read her.

“Love is alone the worthy law of love”

 Love is alone the worthy law of love:

   All other laws have presupposed a taint:

   Love is the law from kindled saint to saint,

From lamb to lamb, from dove to answering dove.

Love is the motive of all things that move

   Harmonious by free will without constraint:

   Love learns and teaches: love shall man acquaint

With all he lacks, which all his lack is love.

Because Love is the fountain, I discern

   The stream as love: for what but love should flow

     From fountain Love? not bitter from the sweet!

   I ignorant, have I laid claim to know?

     Oh, teach me. Love, such knowledge as is meet

For one to know who is fain to love and learn.

 

To understand Christina, we must meet the family. Central is their mother, Frances Polidori Rossetti, a woman of strong character who was the mainstay of the family. Their father Gabriele brought with him to England a head full of Italian knowledge, most especially of the second greatest European poet, Dante Alighieri, all of which he taught in London, causing significant cultural influence that was only eclipsed later by Prince Albert’s German crazes. The parents are regularly described in the literature as “devout Anglo-Catholics”, though whether they actually recognised that term themselves is an open question. What’s important is that when Christina is a teenager in the 1840s, they are attending Christ Church Albany Street, London church of William Dodsworth, an important leader in the emerging Oxford Movement. This makes them at once both radical and conservative in that society, depending on your view. “The children were characterized by their father as being two storms – Christina and Dante Gabriel – and two calms – Maria and William.” (Duguid 863)

This leads us to Maria Rossetti, the eldest sister, who chucks worldly life in favour of the religious life. She eventually joins All Saints Sisters of the Poor at Margaret Street in Westminster, one of the first Anglican orders for women. The sisters are employed in nursing the poor and destitute in the parish. Milicent Hopkins was another member of the order, sister of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Maria herself wrote copiously, including a translation of the Monastic Diurnal into English and versions and commentaries on Dante. (He’s omnipresent in the Rossetti world.) Maria’s life, example and influence on Christina are impossible to measure, who herself wrote her own devotional calendars for the public and dedicated her remarkable long poem ‘Goblin Market’ to Maria.

Like the Brontës, we are looking at a family whose creative lives involve an extraordinary exchange of imaginative thought over time. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘D.G.’ as he is known fondly by his many fans, was himself not personally someone of committed faith, but he understands Christina’s commanding and original gifts, and is actively engaged in supporting her writing. We don’t have youtube clips of their editorial conversations, but are aware through their work of the remarkable reciprocity and mutuality in their respective enterprises. D.G.’s ultimate descent into squalor and drug addiction stands in marked contrast to Christina’s reserve, sobriety and humility. 

And then there is William Michael. He is a shining light in the family’s affairs, keeping everything going through bankruptcies, ill-health, all manner of crazy sibling behaviour, especially from the very wayward D.G. He wrote his own history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which they were all a part, and edited Christina’s New Verse after her death, writing in the introduction thus: “Christina’s habits of composing were eminently of the spontaneous kind. I question her having ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write out something or other, and then, after thinking out a subject, having proceeded to treat it in regular spells of work. Instead of this, something impelled her feelings, or ‘came into her head’, and her hand obeyed the dictation … I cannot ever remember seeing her in the act of composition … She consulted nobody, and solicited no advice, though it is true that with regard to her published volumes – or at any rate the first two of them – my brother volunteered to point out what seemed well adapted for insertion, and what the reverse, and he found her a very willing recipient of his monitions.”  [Everyman 463]

William attempts here in an empirical way to describe processes we can identify as like prayer. Indeed, often in reading her poetry we find ourselves close to liturgy, to the liturgical life that was her regular weekly experience.

Twice 

I took my heart in my hand

   (O my love, O my love),

I said: Let me fall or stand,

   Let me live or die,

But this once hear me speak –

   (O my love, O my love) –

Yet a woman’s words are weak;

   You should speak, not I.

 

You took my heart in your hand

   With a friendly smile,

With a critical eye you scanned,

   Then set it down,

And said: It is still unripe,

   Better wait awhile;

Wait while the skylarks pipe,

   Till the corn grows brown.

 

As you set it down it broke –

   Broke, but I did not wince;

I smiled at the speech you spoke,

   At your judgment that I heard:

But I have not often smiled

   Since then, nor questioned since,

Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,

   Nor sung with the singing bird.

 

I take my heart in my hand,

   O my God, O my God,

My broken heart in my hand:

   Thou hast seen, judge Thou.

My hope was written on sand,

  O my God, O my God;

Now let Thy judgment stand –

   Yea, judge me now.

 

This contemned of a man,

   This marred one heedless day,

This heart take Thou to scan

   Both within and without:

Refine with fire its gold,

   Purge Thou its dross away –

Yea, hold it in Thy hold,

   Whence none can pluck it out.

 

I take my heart in my hand –

   I shall not die, but live –

Before Thy face I stand;

   I, for Thou callest such:

All that I have I bring,

   All that I am I give,

Smile Thou and I shall sing,

   But shall not question much.

 

It is a commanding and confident voice that may plead “a woman’s words are weak” then proceed to lay out the terms of relationships, that are it turns out actually the very terms of existence. Her ability to pull the carpet out from under the reader, to leave the reader in two minds about what she is saying, to make a conversation of direct personal concern feel like a conversation the reader overhears by chance, to state straight the most pressing issue on her mind (and yours), are amongst the reasons why she enjoys such a renaissance. “She has that rarest of gifts, the gift of expressing deep feeling in quiet speech and perfect musical cadence.” (Sandars 221)    

Two other distinctive features of Christina’s writing are evident in this poem. The first, as William Michael says, is her spontaneity. DG, himself a well-known poet of the era, regarded his sister as the more spontaneous of the two poets, a word already used by William to describe her in general. It was said that “Christina’s genius roved where it listed and was incapable of education.” (Sandars 17) Also, that “her voice, clear, vibrant, and bell-like, was one of her greatest charms.” (Sandars 195) We often sense these things when hearing her poetry and it goes in hand with her remarkable skill at line variation. We see it in ‘Twice’, short and long lines interweave, there are well-timed starts and stops in the phrasing, the shift from address about a person to address about God made with the utmost calm. It’s hard to believe that some critics at the time complained about all these varying lengths of line, wanting something more rhythmic and Tennysonian. But the reader or listener notices these changes in tone, statement, pausing, &c. as the trust in her own spontaneity and direction. The sheer variety of spoken word that Christina could employ ranges from the nursery rhyme to the most majestic, almost Byzantine-like hymn, from the back-and-forth of an epic litany to the formal reading of a lesson from the Gospel. As here:             

 

“Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another” 

  Friend I commend to thee the narrow way:

Not because I, please God, will walk therein,

But rather for the love-feast of that day

  The exceeding prize which whoso will may win.

This world is old and rotting at the core

Here death’s heads mock us with a toothless grin

  Here heftiest laughter leaves us spent and sore.

We heap up treasures for the fretting moth,

Our children heap, our fathers heaped before,

  But what shall profit us the cumbrous growth?

It cannot journey with us, cannot save,

Stripped in that darkness be we lief or loth

  Stripped bare to what we are from all we have,

Naked we came, naked we must return

To one obscure inevitable grave.

  If this the lesson is which we must learn

Taught by God’s discipline of love or wrath

(To brand or purify His fire must burn) –

  Friend I commend to thee the narrow path

That thou and I, please God, may walk therein,

May taste and see how good is God Who hath

  Loved us while hating even to death our sin.     

 

To contemplate the sprawling metropolis of Melbourne in 2024, it is apparent fairly quickly that certain kinds of faith got us where we are. “Sad is Eros, builder of cities,” says W. H. Auden. Because, we know that the settler societies were animated by forms of faith at odds with the message of the Gospel. The 19^th century is the full-blown expression of the Industrial Revolution of which we, at the other end of that Revolution, are the unhappy and ambivalent inheritors in such forms as climate change, unquestioned consumerism, and forewarnings of extinction. This Revolution came about through a faith in Progress which was served through exploitation of humans and the environment, came to be the justification for imperial projects, leading often to political conflict and in fact world wars. Both Christina and Elizabeth, especially, were vocal critics of this kind of faith and where it would lead. They were able to do this because of their grounding in Christianity.      

The fabled crisis of religious faith in 19^th century English life, a popular theme in poetry classes of the last century, has always to be placed beside the extraordinary manifestations of actual faith in the same period, whether in the reaffirmations of church and society, or at the most personal level of individual life and experience. The three eminent Victorian poets we listen to this evening speak from examination and experience about the life of faith, firmly aware of the abiding nature of the Faith. Each of them belonged in highly creative family environments. Each was given freedom to pursue their creative, poetic lives. Each had access to books, to large home libraries that they were free to explore as they wished. Each had permanent access to Scripture. Each encountered at an early age the reality of the Anglican church, its teachings and practices. How they learnt from that church tradition, or rather traditions, and responded to them is an animating truth of their writing and witness. Important to say in this context is that none of them are the same, they develop their own special ways of speaking into the whole central matter of faith. Anglican tradition, we observe, is not about sameness but distinctiveness, their distinctive thoughts and voices.

from Later Life: Sonnet 10

 

Tread softly! all the earth is holy ground.

   It may be, could we look, with seeing eyes,

   This spot we stand on is a Paradise

Where dead have come to life and lost been found,

Where Faith has triumphed, Martyrdom been crowned,

   Where fools have foiled the wisdom of the wise;

   From this same spot the dust of saints may rise,

And the King’s prisoners come to light unbound.

O earth, earth, earth, hear thou thy Maker’s Word:

   ‘Thy dead thou shalt give up, nor hide thy slain’ –

   Some who went weeping forth shall come again

   Rejoicing from the east or from the west,

As doves fly to their windows, love’s own bird

   Contented and desirous to the nest.’

 

Christina Rossetti Sources

Works

The complete poems. Text by R. W. Crump. Notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers. Penguin Books, 2005

Goblin market. Introduction by Kirsty Gunn. Illustrations by Georgie McAusland. Batsford, 2021

Poems and prose. Edited by Jan Marsh. J. M. Bent; Charles E. Tuttle, 1994

Poems and prose. Edited with an introduction and notes by Simon Humphries. Oxford University Press, 2008

Also

Lindsay Duguid. ‘Christina Georgina Rossetti”, in Oxford dictionary of

national biography, volume 47, pp. 863-866. Oxford University Press, 2004

Colin Harrison and Christopher Newell. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy. Ashmolean Museum; Lund Humphries, 2010

The Rossettis. Edited by Carol Jacobs and James Finch. Tate Publishing, 2023

Mary F. Sandars. The life of Christina Rossetti. Hutchinson, [1930]  

William Rossetti. The Pre-Raphaelites & their world : a personal view : from Some reminiscences and other writings. The Folio Society, 1995