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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Since C.H. Sisson's ground-breaking Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1984), Christina Rossetti's readership has burgeoned. Almost a century ago Ford Madox Ford claimed her as 'the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced', and - as Valentine Cunningham recently declared - she now sits at top table with Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Barrett Browning. Feminist and queer scholars have since laid claim to Rossetti; but her Anglo-Catholic faith was never incidental to the power of even her most secular poems and is at the heart of her imaginative work. As an Anglican priest and poet, Rachel Mann in her selection appreciates Rossetti's ambition while attending, too, to recent scholarship that focuses on the religious, feminist and fantastical elements in her work.
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iii
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
New Selected Poems
edited byrachel mann
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
C.H. Sisson, editor of Carcanet’s 1984 Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems, opens and closes his introduction with a brace of striking claims. He begins by affirming Ford Madox Ford’s 1911 statement that ‘Christina Rossetti seems to us the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced.’ He closes by asserting that ‘in her sobriety she is the most naked of poets.’ Sisson was a formidable critic and his analysis is difficult to gainsay over thirty years on from his Selected. Indeed, it is tempting to re-baptise Christina Rossetti ‘the great naked Victorian poet’. In our rather more (social) media-obsessed times, it would surely make an eye-catching tagline.
Sisson’s selection was ground-breaking. If the 1970s and ’80s signalled a specifically feminist recovery of Rossetti’s reputation, thanks, in part, to scholars of the stature of Cora Kaplan, Angela Leighton, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar et al, the critical revolution was far from complete. Sisson’s assertion that, by the 1980s, Rossetti’s high reputation was ‘hardly questionable’ strikes me as a little bold. Even if Rossetti’s poetics – clean, simple and often unexpectedly strange – had been reclaimed as subversively feminist, the brilliant work of critics like Isobel Armstrong arguably risked providing a new set of critical constraints for Rossetti’s works. With hindsight, there is something strangely bracing about Sisson’s patrician, masculine voice offering leaven to the ‘(re-) discoveries’ of feminist theorists.
Sisson’s Carcanet selection includes Rossetti’s long-unavailable children’s story Maude: A Story for Girls, a piece of juvenilia written when she was about eighteen. Published in 6a short-run by her brother William Michael nearly fifty years after it was written, Sisson takes Maude as ‘undoubtedly a self-portrait, and a highly critical one’. It represents a fascinating study of an upper middle-class adolescent girl’s sensibility and, as William Michael notes, even by 1897, Christina’s religiously motivated self-abnegation came over as a little priggish. He says that the ‘worst harm’ Maude seems to have done ‘is that, when she had written a good poem she felt it to be good’. Unsurprisingly, Maude hardly represents the peak of Rossetti’s powers, but it is revealing and earns a reprint here, not least because of its religious seriousness. While biographers such as Frances Thomas and, supremely, Jan Marsh have taken recent biographical studies of Rossetti to the level of fine art, Sisson brought new focus to Rossetti’s poetics through his insistence that ‘with any poet the starting-point, social as well as literary, is worth finding out about’.
The facts of Rossetti’s life are well-known. She was born on 5 December 1830, into a prominent Anglo-Italian family. In 1824, her poet-father Gabriele fled the kingdom of Naples for London with a price on his head, and in 1826 he married Frances, daughter of Gaetano Polidori. Polidori was formerly secretary to the poet Alfieri, and father of John, briefly famous as Byron’s physician. Gabriele taught Italian and published, by subscription, a commentary on the Inferno during a period when Dante’s works were relatively unknown. He was appointed Professor of Italian at King’s College, London in 1830/1.
Christina was the youngest of four children. Maria Francesca, who became a nun, was born in 1827, while art-superstar Dante Gabriel (born at the height of Gabriele’s Dante obsession) was born in 1828. William Michael, career civil servant and Christina’s literary executor, came along in 1829. Of the new-born Christina, her father wrote to her aunts, ‘She is considered to be the very picture of Maria, but more 7beautiful. She … looks with that round face of hers, like a little moon risen at the full.’ Family accounts of the children’s life in the Rossetti home indicate a tellingly un-English milieu. In his introduction to Christina’s Collected Poems (1904), William Michael writes:
The children were constantly with their parents; there was no separate nursery, and no rigid lines drawn between the big one and the little ones. Of English society there was extremely little – barely one or two families…; but of Italian society – in the sense of Italians who hunted up and haunted our father as an old acquaintance or as a celebrity – the stream was constant… there were exiles, patriots, politicians, literary men, musicians… fleshy and good-natured Neapolitans, keen Tuscans, emphatic Romans… all this – even apart from our own chiefly Italian blood – made us, no doubt, not a little different from British children in habit of thought and standard of association.
Having said all this, their mother – half-English and a former governess to an English family – undertook the entire education of the girls. Furthermore, all four children were baptised and brought up in the Church of England, and it was in the emergent world of Anglo-Catholicism that Maria and Christina found the habitus of their adult lives.
Arguably, during the late twentieth-century peak of feminist critical interest in Rossetti’s poetry, the intensely religious tenor of Christina’s life was seen, at best, as irrelevant to her significance and, at worst, an embarrassment to be minimised. Sisson himself, not driven by any doctrinaire consideration, is honest enough to admit that he finds much of her specifically devotional and ecclesiastical verse and writings ‘largely unreadable’. His Selected contains rather fewer of these poems than mine. I do not aim to sport with modern readers’ sensibilities. I recognise that European 8culture travels ever further away from the kind of biblical literacy that Christina (and even Sisson) assumed. The Book of Common Prayer and the King James’ Bible no longer supply a common literary substrate between writers in English, if they ever did. In offering a wider selection of her poems shaped by her Anglo-Catholicism – by turns, lavish in its devotion and, yet, austere and reserved in what it might say of the Sacred – I hope to invite readers to make faithful, yet daring readings of both her most seemingly secular as well as her vast oeuvre of devotional writings.
However, before treating with Rossetti’s faith and religion, there is a dimension that simply cannot be ignored: the impact on reading Rossetti generated by the ‘Pre-Raphaelite …’ – choose your metaphor here – ‘… Juggernaut’, ‘… Industry’, ‘… Behemoth’ and so on. Despite the relative brevity of its existence, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which her brother Dante Gabriel was the most famous member, continues to exercise a significant grip on ideas about midto- late nineteenth century art and culture. For good or ill, any kind of study of Christina’s poetry – certainly the poetry of her most-famous phase, which includes 1862’s Goblin Market and other poems – needs to wrestle with the curious shadow cast by Dante Gabriel, the Pre-Raphaelites and their advocates into the twenty-first century. While there has been some fascinating critical push-back recently, in which women artists like Evelyn de Morgan and critics such as Joanna Boyce have been ‘recovered’ from the long, sometimes unappealing shadows of Millais and Burne-Jones, ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ aesthetics continue to operate predominantly through a male gaze, constructing women as tragic muses.
It is always risky to load too much significance on a single poem. However, In an Artist’s Studio, written in 1856 but only published after Christina’s death, is a genuinely fascinating text. It both offers some suggestive ways to delineate Rossetti’s 9relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and indicates fruitful directions for reading her work post-Sisson (who didn’t include the poem in his Carcanet selection). William Michael’s note on the poem in the 1904 Complete Poems says that this Petrarchan sonnet refers ‘apparently to our brother’s studio, and to his constantly-repeated heads of the lady whom he afterwards married, Miss Siddal’:
One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; – every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
Clearly, given its Petrarchan form, it displays Christina in argumentative mood. The opening octave serves to set up the argument or proposition of the poem, while the closing twin tercets or sestet serves to offer a resolution. Within this structure the volta in the ninth line presents ‘a turn’ in the argument. If the sonnet form is, by convention, a poem of love, In an Artist’s Studio perhaps offers an insight into the feminist edge present in Christina’s poetry: for it constitutes a cutting critique of the ways in which the female model is painted, ‘framed’ and controlled by the male artist. In its repeated use of ‘one face’, ‘one selfsame figure’ and ‘same one meaning’ 10Rossetti presents a female form vampirised by her brother’s male gaze.
The model – and it is worth remembering that Christina herself was the model for Dante Gabriel’s first completed oil, 1849’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin – is reconstructed as a series of ciphers and female icons (‘queen’, ‘saint’, ‘angel’) or merely as ‘nameless girl’. The Pre-Raphaelite obsession with constructing genericised feminine beauty denudes the female body of its particularity. At the beginning of the sonnet’s sestet, the artist appears as a kind of vampire-king who ‘feeds upon her face by day and night’. The model is drained of life so that the artist can gratify his fantasies. In an Artist’s Studio suggests that the ‘saint’ in the picture is as fixed by the male gaze as the Blessed Virgin ever was. The artist makes a dream woman for himself. She exists to look only on the artist who made her, not at herself or at the world. She embodies – as queen, as saint, as angel – ‘the same one meaning, neither more nor less’.
This might strike some readers as just too much Theory, but any serious contemporary treatment of Rossetti’s poetry cannot simply plot a line around it and expect to be credible. When a relatively conservative critic Valentine Cunningham says the following, it’s only fair to acknowledge the force of theorised readings of Rossetti’s work:
What’s striking in recent times is how post-Theory reading has opened up Victorian poetry so convincingly, and (in the best sense) as never before. […] [T]heorized re-readings of the canon have brought in from the cold many otherwise neglected men and women […] Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, now in the Top Team, jostling hard against the Top Three of Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Hopkins.1
11For all the definition brought by theorised readings of Rossetti’s poetry, I don’t think it is absurd to ignore the curious tenor of her life and what it indicates about both her finest and most modest verse. If she was part of a genuinely interesting and cultured family, it is also true that there are specific features of Rossetti’s life which remain fertile territory for understanding the mood and obsessions of her poetry, not least the repeated offers of marriage, all turned down, and her experience of ill-health, notably Graves’ Disease and breast cancer. Theoretical obsessions with the Text do not simply triumph over Biography, though only a fool would deny that biographical details resist the critical gaze.
One tempting and certainly suggestive line through the details of Rossetti’s biography is to unite it around ‘isolation’ and ‘self-abnegation’. This line acknowledges her early formation in a sophisticated cultural milieu,2 but reads her as being ever more directed towards her private and isolated concerns; her inner, spiritual life, as it were. This is the Christina working alongside her sister Marie Francesca (at least until her profession of vows) in service of the poor and fallen, and devoting her increasingly ill body to devoted care for her mother, who lived until 1887. This is the Christina who – despite the fame conferred by her two best known collections Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866) – negotiated her inner poetic concerns without celebrity and in relative poverty.
There is evidence for this mode of reading Rossetti. Christina had her suitors, including the painter and Pre-Raphaelite Brother, James Collinson, to whom she was introduced when she was seventeen. Collinson had converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism and when he proposed she 12declined his offer. He reverted to Anglicanism and she accepted him. Finally, he reconverted to Catholicism and Christina had had enough. According to William Michael, her refusal of Collinson was ‘a staggering blow… from which she did not fully recover for years.’ In 1866, Christina received another proposal from linguist Charles Bagot Cayley. Insofar as we know her objections to him, they were based importantly on his agnosticism. A final offer reputedly came from the painter John Brett, who is the probable subject of her forthright poem, No, Thank You, John: ‘I never said I loved you John: / Why will you teaze me day by day.’
The themes of isolation and self-abnegation – partly generated by her religious seriousness, partly by a severe self-awareness – finds a further bolster in Christina’s repeated encounters with ill-health. Her father characterised his children as two storms – Gabriel and Christina – and two calms – Maria and William Michael. The latter recalled in 1904 how her ‘temperament, naturally warm and free, became a ‘fountain sealed’ … impulse and elan were checked, both in act and writing.’ Her ever deepening faith was a factor, but also surely ill-health. At fifteen she experienced a temporary collapse of health. She became ill again in 1849, before negotiating the debilitating effects of Graves’ Disease and cancer in later life. The lack of contemporary details about her early collapses has been a biographer’s delight, offering space for psychosexual and psychodynamic speculation. It is difficult to disagree, at this point with Sisson’s insistence that the final guide to Rossetti lies in her poetry. Certainly, there is power in the opening lines of her poem dedicated to one of her poetic mothers, Leticia Landon:
Down-stairs I laugh, I sport and jest with all:
But in my solitary room above
I turn my face in silence to the wall;
My heart is breaking for a little love. (L.E.L.)
13Rossetti’s faith was real, fervent and intense, even by Victorian standards. From as early as 1844, Rossetti attended Christ Church, Albany Street, whose minister, William Dodsworth, was a dedicated follower of the Tractarian movement (and who later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1851). Here she would not only have imbibed the centrality of the Eucharist for Christian faith but also been exposed to a vision of the liturgical year charged with meaning and power. The most transformational encounter came during Advent 1848. Rossetti heard the Apocalyptic sermons – ‘The Signs of the Times’ – preached at Christ Church, Albany Street, by Dodsworth. Their impact was such that the poet never lost that sense of wonder and the expectation of the Second Coming of Christ. Her 1893 commentary on the Apocalypse of John, The Face of the Deep, reflects the abiding impact of her early, formative experiences.
Running alongside her encounter with Dodsworth’s sermons was another with John Keble’s poetry and writing. In 1827, John Keble had published a book of poems which traced his devotional response to the liturgical year, The Christian Year. While William Michael claimed that his sister thought nothing of Keble as a poet, Christina’s copy The Christian Year was heavily annotated and arguably taught her much about the way time and space can be constructed very differently from the mercantile, secular and consumerist world emerging in the nineteenth century. Though Rossetti’s poetry outmatches Keble’s verse at almost every point – contrast her poems for St Peter with his poems for St Peter in The Christian Year – she was surely influenced by Keble’s ‘poetry of reserve’ which held that poetry was especially fit to speak of God, and, in essence, is the ‘handmaid’ of Christian belief.
A gift for simplicity, elusiveness and discretion may be, for Keble, a theological virtue, but it is a characteristic marker of much of Rossetti’s best ‘secular’ poetry as much as her devotional verse. A poem like Winter: My Secret, included 14in her first major collection Goblin Market and Other Poems, arguably presents a repeated modus operandi for Rossetti, in which she eludes as she reveals, teasing her reader with promise and promise spurned:
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.
The promised (strip-)tease does not end there, but is reformulated and reconfigured:
Suppose there is no secret after all
[…]
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.
The secret could be many things – the writer’s ‘winter’, her frigidity or virginity or the ‘golden fruit’ of fulfilment. If one is tempted by Theory again, it may be the writer’s subjectivity, locked in by the ‘I’ which is performed at both the beginning and the end of the opening line. As the poem later claims, ‘I wear my mask for warmth’. The speaker in the poem also wears ‘a veil, a cloak, and other wraps’. Rossetti’s speaker is then both allusive, elusive and fundamentally doubled – a mask wearer whose ‘secret’ seems to be structurally locked up.
In this mode, Rossetti is almost disconcertingly contemporary; disconcerting because she embodies a kind of tantalising confessional mode that has (with considerably less success) marked out a fair deal of contemporary poetry. In Rossetti’s hands, however, the confessional remains always 15slightly out of sight. She models flagrant reserve. The notion of confessional, of course, has both a religious and a poetic connotation. The Latin root, confiteri, has implications of acknowledgement, especially acknowledgement together with another. In its early religious senses, it referred to martyrs who acknowledged, held to and admitted to their faith in the face of persecution or danger. It is a making public of a private truth, belief or fact.
Insofar as Rossetti operates in confessional mode, she does so with a teasing, tempting playfulness. Thus, in The Heart Knoweth Its Own Bitterness, she writes:
To give, to give, not to receive,
I long to pour myself, my soul,
Not to keep back or count or leave
But king with king to give the whole:
I long for one to stir my deep –
I have had enough of help and gift –
I long for one to search and sift
Myself, to take myself and keep.
There is a potent longing in these lines, a desire to both give and receive (with all of the religious and sexual connotations that has); there is an acknowledgement of desire and yet it is not clear that Rossetti ever quite expects to be in a position to ‘let go’ and be ravished, at least in this life.
Rossetti’s ability to be discrete in a paradoxically garrulous way saves her from stumbling into that habit which can poison the most talented poet: earnestness. It is always a risk of those who are religious and, perhaps, in some of the later poems she cannot quite resist it enough. However, there is surely, in both her early and later work, a suppleness and simplicity which even in those poems can feel most familiar, as with A Christmas Carol – which is quite ravishing: 16
In the bleak mid-winter,
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.
Of course, this capacity for ravishment is also found in occasional, quite devastating flourishes of excess. The poem Goblin Market has rightly been lauded, not only for its thematic richness, but its capacity to generate critical and sensuous pleasure. Notably, Rossetti herself indicated that the poem should be read as a children’s fable – and, indeed, her gift for the childlike simplicity of nursery rhyme is shown in 1872’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book – but Goblin Market very clearly indicates how poems can escape the stated intention of the poet. It is a poem which affords a plethora of critical readings, from creative accounts of the Eucharist, lesbian love, through to economic and sociological readings. It is also a poem with an exceptionally modern approach to line and rhythm, in which dactylic metre jostles with iambic. Indeed, John Ruskin’s comment on the poem in 1861 (having been shown it by Dante Gabriel) was that it would never get published because of its ‘irregular metre … the calamity of modern poetry’. Whatever else it is, Goblin Market’s story of two women, Lizzie and Laura tempted by the ‘fruits’ of goblin-men is mouth-watering:
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
‘Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces, 17
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries; –
All ripe together
In summer weather, –
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy …’
Christina Rossetti’s reputation has gone through a number of iterations. Leaving the visionary Ford Madox Ford’s claims aside, Diane D’Amico suggests that, at the turn of the twentieth century, Rossetti was seen as a writer whose poetry revealed the invisible world of her faith; however, by the 1990s, Rossetti was read ‘as a highly intelligent woman in a patriarchal society whose poetry reveals both victimisation and subversive feminism’.3 Writing at the turn of the millennium, Cynthia Scheinberg suggests that, typically, feminist analyses of Victorian poets assume that ‘women writers who actively supported religious institutions and affiliations were necessarily didactic, submissive, unenlightened, and uncreative reproducers of male religious hierarchy’.4 There may be strong 18evidence for that. Outside of her work as a poet, Christina and her sister Maria were involved in the St Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women in Highgate. The very idea of ‘saving’ women from ‘fallenness’ may strike post-modern sensibilities as a token of patriarchal ideas about gender and sexuality.
Rossetti’s social, cultural and political ‘time’, of course, was one in which the mercantile and the mechanical was the emergent king. In Victorian times, the pressure was on to make and sell things as quickly as possible; this was the age of high-speed movement symbolised by the triumph of the train. By the time, Rossetti died in 1894, the telegraph, telephone and the combustion engine were beginning to reshape time yet again. The world had become small and humanity’s place within it – knocked by emergent evolutionary ideas and often read as part of a mechanical, manufacturing process – seemed to be becoming very insignificant. Identity was increasingly being defined by mass production and mass consumption. Mass production techniques made cheapish but well-made consumer goods available to the British middle-classes for the first time; Rossetti’s refrain in Goblin Market – ‘Come buy, Come buy!’ – echoed around middle-class lives (and increasingly working-class ones too) like never before.
Through this prism it may seem that Rossetti’s turn, later in life, ever more towards the devotional and religious represents a reactionary, retrograde turn. Certainly, her late obsessions with the Second Coming of Christ and exclusive focus on devotional poetry may strike many as reactionary and lacking in the suppleness of her early work. However, that is a little unfair. In her 1857 poem, A Better Resurrection, she writes:
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone; 19
I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.
Her handling of religious desire in this early poem certainly has a tenderness and intimacy that is lacking in a later poem, like Vigil of the Presentation:
Long and dark the nights, dim and short the days,
Mounting weary heights on our weary ways,
Thee our God we praise.
Scaling heavenly heights by unearthly ways,
Thee our God we praise all our nights and days,
Thee our God we praise.
However, the shift from first-person singular to first-person plural is not necessarily a signal of failure or decay. It signals a shift in intention and a concentration on community a little alien to our fetishisation of the individual.
Nonetheless, to return to Sisson and Madox Ford at the close: if my gloss, ‘Christina Rossetti is the great naked Victorian poet’, is to have real traction, there is simply no doubt that it finds its grip in those magnificent intimacies of her earlier phases of writing. With perhaps the exception of Emily Dickinson, no one else has quite defined the power of the personal and the elusive in poetry. Certainly no one quite rivals her capacity to generate almost simultaneous reserve and excess. Rossetti’s reputation is now secure, and part of what secures it is the way her finest poems create unequalled effects of intimacy that keeps her readers at a distance just at the moment they feel invited in. 2021
22
1 Valentine Cunningham, Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. ix.
2 Including members of the Brotherhood, Italian revolutionaries, as well as Coventry Patmore, Ruskin, Swinburne, among others.
3 Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 1.
4 Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 9.
