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Christina Rossetti missed seeing a foambow

 

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 look at it, yet I did not look.” So, this is about missing a marvel because we were looking in the opposite direction at the time. Her biographer Mary Frances Sandars (1930) is strangely chiding, saying “if Christina Rossetti’s mind were set on some poem which would add to the beautiful literature of the world, if even she were allowing sway to fancies and feelings which would lead to such a composition, it was foolish to blame herself for being unmindful of a foambow.” Which is not Rossetti’s point we know, because the poet increases the emotional meaning in the next tense sentence: “I might have done so, and I did not: such is the sting today in petty matters.” Rossetti is reflecting on how minor losses and mishaps have a way of returning to memory, sometimes years later without warning, causing pangs or stings. All of which leads, with a leap, to a typical Rossetti concluding refrain: “And what else will be the sting in matters all important at the last day?” Foambow is not that important! Indeed, the word itself appears in lines by subsequent Victorian poets – William Morris, Charles Kingsley and H. B. Cotterill, to wit “in the sun-lit mountain slopes, the pine-woods and the glittering walls of rock, and in the colours of the foam-bow suspended amidst the spray of the swift down-thundering cataract,” before evaporating without trace. Google Image delivers a mere half-page for foambow, pictures of girls’ glitter foam bow hair accessories and boys’ DIY bow-and-arrow kits with foam tips. Not a foambow in sight. Helpfully though, Sandars identifies where Rossetti missed the foambow on her continental tour with her mother and brother William: “At any rate she saw the Falls of Schaffhausen, of which William gives an enthusiastic description.” Christina may have missed the iris formed by sunlight upon foam or spray, as of a cataract, but she knew her Tennyson.


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