Skip to main content

Christina Rossetti and the Wombat

 


When Dante Gabriel Rossetti acquired a wombat (circa 1869), his sister Christina was amongst the most enraptured Londoners in her response to the Antipodean creature. As usual with Christina, she immediately penned an Effusion, others would say an Ode, this time in Italian. All good odes open with an O. “O Uommibatto,” she exclaims, “Agil, giocondo, / Che ti sei fatto/ Irsuto e tondo!” Let’s unpack that. Her impression is spontaneous (D.G. himself said she was the more spontaneous poet), espying how the wombat is agile and carefree. One biographer, Mary Sandars (1930), translates ‘giocondo’ as frisky, which I suggest she’s used to rhyme with tricksy, however ‘giocondo’ comes closest to joyous, Betty Flowers’ word in the Penguin Complete Poems (2003). Fans of Leonardo da Vinci will notice the connection with his most famous portrait, and who is to say Christina does not have La Gioconda in mind upon meeting this mysterious and happy being? How you have grown hairy and round, is the gist of the next line, as one would but wonder who had never before seen such a creature. The addressee, Uommibatto, is a most curious coinage to anyone halfway familiar (like me) with Christina’s writings, strikingly using the word for man (uomo) in connection with bumping or beating (battere), conjuring a picture of boisterous liveliness. D.G.’s frontispiece to her extraordinary poem ‘Goblin Market’ features a wombat, amongst other creatures, while one of the goblins in the story is likened to a wombat. The main rhyme thread is giocondo-tondo-vagabondo-mondo-pondo, which is worth pondering when we notice how the second half of the poem shifts, via these rhymes, from lightness to heaviness, from initial delight at the vision glorious to the weighty meaning of the wombat’s very existence. Because Christina knows what they all know, this being, “hairy and round”, came from the other side of the world, down under. Sandars translates, “Pray run not from us/ A vagrant wild,/ Pray do not vanish”, expression of a fear of loss, even perhaps the death of the wombat far from home. “Deh non fuggire/ Qual vagabondo,/ Non disparire/ Fornado il mondo,” this last phrase “piercing the globe” thinks Sandars, while Flowers sees that Christina is talking about burrowing. For burrowing is, as every Australian knows, a basic characteristic of wombats, though the poet is not just thinking about digging. How do we imagine the world? “Pesa davvero/ D’un emisfero/ Non lieve il pondo,” she concludes, this creature embodying the reality of our hemispherical planet, grace and then gravity. The lines are almost untranslatable. Sandars goes, “the weight ‘tis clear/ Cannot be told.” Flowers too bumbles about, close to the gist, saying: “It’s really the weight of/ a hemisphere/ Not a light burden.” How do we imagine the world?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy?

This is one of two short papers given by Philip Harvey at the first Spiritual Reading Group session for 2014 on Tuesday the 18 th of February in the Carmelite Library in Middle Park. He also gave a paper on that occasion, which can be found on the Library blog, entitled ‘A Rationale for Purgatory’ . Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in one of her books how her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would say that when reading poetry we can spend a great deal of time discussing what it means, but the first and main question about a poem is not what does it mean, but why was it written. That is the place to start. Here are eleven reasons that I offer quietly to help us think about this poem: Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy? You may have other reasons and these are invited. We will spend most of our time today looking at meanings, but also at why. I wrote these out as they occurred to me, so there is no priority order. 1.      He wrote the poem because ...
4 comments
Read more

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Poetry of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams delivers the twelfth John Rylands Poetry Reading last year   This is a paper given by Philip Harvey in the Hughes Room at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne on Sunday the 6 th of December as one in an Advent series on religious poets. The original title of the paper was ‘The text that maps our losses and longings’. Everything Rowan Williams says and writes reveals a person with a highly developed sensitivity to language, its force, directness, instantaneousness, its subtlety, indirectness, longevity. A person though may speak three languages fluently and read at least nine languages with ease, as he does, and still not engage with language in the way we are looking at here. Because Rowan is unquestionably someone with a poetic gift. By that I don’t just mean he writes poetry, I mean he engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours, their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his that delibe...
Post a Comment
Read more