READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  Image: ‘The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen’ by J. M. W. Turner.  Undated. Pencil, red ink, and watercolour on paper. “Once as we descended a mountain side by side with the mountain torrent, my companion saw, while I missed seeing, a foambow.” A what?, I asked the page, a foambow? Clearly Christina Rossetti knows about foambows, even if she has never seen a foambow. The OED lists its first use in ‘Oenone’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1832: “And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens.” While Rossetti uses the word in the entry in her daily devotional ‘Time Flies’ (published 1885) for September 16, continuing: “In all my life I do not recollect to have seen one, except perhaps in artificial fountains; but such general omission seems a matter of course, and therefore simply a matter of indifference. That single natural foambow which I might have beheld and espied not, is the one to which may attach a tinge of regret; because, in a certain sense, it depended upon myself to l

  Reading Christina Rossetti widely for next month’s Poets and the Faith paper at St. Peter’s, I rediscover her ‘reading diary’ of 365 daily reflections, published in 1885 in London under the title ‘Time Flies’. Wondering what she has to say in this daily devotional about the coming week, I turn to her entry for July 22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, of whom she notes in her terse manner: “The date of her death is unknown.”   Rossetti writes: “A record of this Saint is a record of love. She ministered to the Lord of her substance, she stood by the Cross, she sat over against the Sepulchre, she sought Christ in the empty grave, and found Him and was found of Him in the contiguous garden.”   Contiguous here means the touching or adjoining garden, but also especially surely a place of meeting, where one meets another without touching. This is a place where death meets life. The relationship, listed by the poet with such rhythm and concision, is brought into stronger focus in the next s