Christina Rosetti
A gifted poet, artist's model, author, and expert on Dante, Christina Rossetti is regarded as one of the finest poets to emerge from the Victorian age.
Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894)
She is among the most important female poets of the 19th century and painted life and death artistically. She was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers. She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings.
HER LIFE:
Christina Rossetti was born in 38 Charlotte Street (now 110 Hallam Street), London, to Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and a political exile from Vasto, Abruzzo, Italy, since 1824 and Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician John William Polidori. She had two brothers and a sister: Dante Gabriel became an influential artist and poet, and William Michael and Maria both became writers. Christina, the youngest and a lively child, dictated her first story to her mother before she had learned to write.
Brought up in a highly intellectual and creative family amid the hustle and bustle of visiting scholars, artists and writers, Christina Rossetti was well-versed from an early age in literature, history, art, theology and politics. At just twelve years old, she began to sign and date her own poems. These initial experiments reflected the style of those poets that she was encouraged to read by her parents: Keats, Petrarch and most of all Dante, after whom her equally-renowned brother was named. Throughout her career, Rosetti’s poetry would continue to display the themes of loss, pain and death featured in her early work, but the Romantic atmosphere these originally evoked soon gave way to a much darker and more melancholic tone.
She was educated at home by her mother and father through religious works, classics, fairy tales and novels. Rossetti delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. The influence of the work of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home and influenced Rossetti's later writing. Their household was open to visiting Italian scholars, artists and revolutionaries.
When she was 14, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Bouts of depression and related illness followed. During this period she, her mother and her sister became absorbed in the Anglo-Catholic movement that developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in her life.
Christina’s promise as a poet was encouraged by her family
It must have been stimulated by a game bouts-rimés she played with her siblings, a race between two of them to compose a sonnet using a set of end rhymes a third came up with. She pleased her mother with her earliest verses.
Maria kept a notebook of her little sister’s poems. Christina first saw her poetry in print when she was seventeen, owing to the adoring insistence and personal printing press of Nonno Polidori. Her brothers often proofread and critiqued her writing, negotiated with publishers, and Gabriel contributed illustrations.
“I’m luckier than some, with a family that encouraged me to do the one thing I’m fairly good at. And long before I could claim any income from it.” (from The Dove Upon Her Branch, A Novel Portrait of Christina Rossetti by DM Denton)
LATER LIFE
Adolescence changed her. Family, friends, and even several doctors couldn’t decide why. Was it because she spent too much time alone with her aging, ailing father, the delay of her monthlies, restricting piety, the strain of her intellect and creativity, or the Victorian go-to for female melancholia and poor health, hysteria?
The little girl of tears and tantrums but also uninhibited playfulness and passion was, if not entirely gone, properly subdued, eventually under the appearance of a disciplined, dutiful, devotional woman.
DEATH
Rossetti suffered from a type of hyperthyroidism – Graves' disease – diagnosed in 1872, suffering a near-fatal attack in the early 1870s. In 1893, she developed breast cancer. The tumour was removed, but there was a recurrence in September 1894. She died in great pain and anguish of cancer on 29 December 1894 and was buried on 2 January 1895 in the family grave on the west side of Highgate Cemetery
HER LEGACY
While far from being a radical herself, her written work has inspired feminists for generations. By the age of sixteen Christina had written more than fifty poems, experimenting with sonnets, hymns and ballads. Her first published poems appeared in the Athenaeum, a prestigious literary magazine, and under the pen name “Ellen Alleyne,” she contributed to The Germ, a periodical of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
She focused primarily on religious and romantic themes, drawing inspiration from the Bible. Rossetti did not just write poetry; she also composed hymns based on her studies and religious fervor. Though she was haunted by an ideal of spiritual purity that demanded self-denial, Christina resembled her brother Dante Gabriel in certain ways, for beneath her humility, her devotion, and her quiet, saintlike life lay a passionate and sensuous temperament, a keen critical perception, and a lively sense of humour. Part of her success as a poet arises from the fact that, while never straining the limits of her sympathy and experience, she succeeded in uniting these two seemingly contradictory sides of her nature. The transience of material things is a theme that recurs throughout her poetry, and the resigned but passionate sadness of unhappy love is often a dominant note. From a poetic point of view, her Italian verses were every bit as good as her English verses.
A Christmas Carol
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.
Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a manger full of hay;
Enough for Him, whom Angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and Archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air;
But only His Mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
REMEMBER
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
SONG
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
Sapessi pure ( If only You knew)
Che fai lontan da me,
che fai, cor mio?
Quel che facc’io
È ch’ognor penso a te.
Pensando, a te sorrido,
Sospiro a te:
E tu lontan da me
Tu pur sei fido?