Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in
nineteenth-century England, was born in London 5 December 1830. Her father was the
poet Gabriele Rossetti; her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti also became a poet and a
painter. Rossetti’s first poems were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her
grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems
to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which had been founded by her brother William
Michael and his friends. 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.
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 to 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). By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves’
disease, a thyroid disorder, made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a
governess. While the illness restricted her social life, she continued to write poems. In
1891, Rossetti developed cancer, of which she died in London on 29 December 1894.
Rossetti’s brother, William Michael, edited her collected works in 1904, but the
Complete Poems were not published before 1979.
Christina Rossetti is increasingly being reconsidered a major Victorian poet. She
has been compared to Emily Dickinson but the similarity is more in the choice of
spiritual topics than in poetic approach, Rossetti’s poetry being one of intense feelings,
her technique refined within the forms established in her time.
 Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Winter: My Secret (1857)

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.