The Face of Christina Rossetti

...he illustrated some of hers, and used her as his model for The Virgin Mary in his art...

...Others were dear, Others forsook me: what art thou indeed That I should heed Thy lamentable need...

...It is hard not to suppose that she meant her rival had consented to settle for conventionality in her husband's shadow, something Christina was never willing to do even for her beloved brothers...

...That her existence was, as she described it, "pared down and subdued and repressed to an intolerable level" kept her writing alive...

...Perhaps this is why Christina's favorite season was spring —the one time of innocence in her scheme of things...

...The illicit "bloom-down-cheek peaches" and "wild free-born cranberries" and the like, with which the goblins tempt the sisters, obviously suggest other forbidden fruits...

...The Rossettis were nothing if not colorful...

...Who is this that calls...

...The worst of it is you cannot lecture on really pure poetry anymore than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water—it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures...

...The point is made explicitly by the girl who, after tasting them, "should have been a bride;/But who for joys brides hope to have/Fell sick and died...

...Devotion to her family and writing came before anything else, and in her teens she had already decided that regret was to be her theme...

...Of the two extremes of unhappiness represented by brother and sister, Christina's was the more profitable artistically...

...Not a feminist in any modern sense of the word, her awareness of her own identity was nonetheless too strong to be quelled for anyone—family or lover...

...They criticized each other's verses...

...Crump's first volume of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Louisiana State, 332 pp., $20.00), which republishes her earliest and finest books: Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), and The Prince's Progress (1866) in a variorum edition...

...nevertheless, this story of a tardy suitor who arrives in time for his bride's funeral manages to avoid the maudlin through laser-like irony coupled with feminine outrage: "The enchanted princess in her tower/Slept, died behind the grate;/Her heart was starving all this while/You made it wait...

...The Prince's Progress" runs slightly too long, and one misses the voluptuous texture of the earlier work...

...The father, an Italian Dante scholar and, like his hero, a political fugitive, was forced to take refuge in London...

...The last is a dialogue in the manner of George Herbert—though perhaps even she did not realize how foreign it was to his spirit...

...Reading these works, it is easy to agree that she was, indeed, one of the outstanding poets of her era...

...While the next two volumes will include a great deal of interest, all her major poems are here, except for the sonnet cycle, "Monna Innominata"?that strangely feminist challenge to Dante and Petrarch...

...Many of her most successful poems are allegorical fantasies in the same vein...

...Although anthologies often include a generous representation of her work, scholars continue to concentrate on the Victorian "heavies," or on her admirer, Gerard Manley Hopkins...

...The imagery sometimes seems to look ahead to the Imagists, and its sensual element is very strong: Laura stretched her gleaming neck Like a rush-imbedded swan, Like a lily from the beck, Like a moonlit poplar branch, Like a vessel at the launch When its last restraint is gone...

...He was generous, easy-going and undisciplined...

...Like the Anglican nuns of her day, whose religious habits allowed them to perform jobs otherwise considered not quite respectable for women, her sharp austerity permitted her to be accepted on her own terms...

...A large part of her poetry, in fact, is haunted by death and loss...

...cried Charles Algernon Swinburne, picturing the success of her Goblin Market as a nail through the head of British philistinism...

...Its prim moral that "There is no friend like a sister . . . /to fetch one if one goes astray," contrasts strangely with the exotic descriptions...

...Gabriel wisely substituted the present title...

...Her dead-pan tone about these matters contrasts starkly with the usual Victorian habit of prettifying or edifying death...

...And the definitive version of her complete poems, compiled by her brother, William Michael Rossetti, has been discredited since it became apparent how much he tampered with the texts...

...Among this robust assemblage, the nun-like face of Christina Rossetti comes as a shock?yet how much more surprising is her sensuously musical verse...

...Christina, the youngest, had a close working relationship with her elder brother, the poet-painter and founder of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

...Her deep bitterness becomes ovenvhelming in this conversation between Christ and the soul: "Friend open to Me...

...It was Art, not Life, that she was after...

...In contrast, she believed that if her contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "had only been unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to bequeath to us, in lieu of the 'Portuguese Sonnets,' [a truer portrait of the female poet] drawn not from fancy but from feeling...

...Her love of animals is slightly reminiscent of Marianne Moore: "One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry . . . /One parrot-voiced and jolly/Cried 'Pretty Goblin' still for 'Pretty Polly.'" The poem's energy is derived from unstated sexual content...

...She renounced games because they made one want to win, broke two engagements with men whom she apparently loved because she wasn't satisfied with their religious views, and, after a blameless life, died at 64 convinced of her hopeless wickedness...

...She shared with the Dark Ages the power to see the skeleton beneath the flesh, and the ability to resist the dazzle of corruption's sheen on the bright surfaces of the world...

...She was thus a truer medievalist than her Pre-Raphaelite brothers, who ornamented their verses with archaic mannerisms...

...She originally called it "A Peep at the Goblins...

...We can be grateful, then, for the appearance of R.W...

...Christina was austere, a painfully devout Anglo-Catholic who thwarted her own passionate nature as resolutely as her brother indulged his...

...When I was dead, my spirit turned/To seek the much-frequented house," she starts one of her poems, only to later reveal her conviction that the dead are easily forgotten: / passed from the familiar room, I who from love had passed away, Like the remembrance of a guest That tarrieth but a day...

...In this unusual cultural atmosphere, all four Rossetti children grew up to be writers (with the least creative, William Michael, outliving the others long enough to become the family biographer...

...Nay, I am deaf as are my walls: Cease crying, for I will not hear Thy cry of hope or fear...

...There he met and married an Englishwoman of Italian descent, the sister of Byron's raffish traveling-companion, John Polidori, famous for a gothic horror story, "The Vampyre...

...Crump's edition makes it clear that some lyrics once thought to refer to real situations were actually extracted from narrative poems that didn't work...

...As with Kafka, it is difficult to believe that she ever could have brought herself to marry...

...c ^^^^ hristtna's imaginative powers can be seen vividly in "Goblin Market," a weird allegorical story-poem...

...Her Christian allegories, "Sleep at Sea" (for Swinburne one of the most exquisite poems in the English language), "From House to Home" and "Despised and Rejected," are equally compelling...

...In the 1880s, the critic Sir Walter Raleigh believed her "the best poet alive" (rating her above Tennyson and Browning) but lamented that this very excellence made it hard to discuss her...

...In "Uphill," she revived the Anglo-Saxon "grave-poem," —a chilling reminder that however homeless we may be throughout our lives, a small earthen room waits for each man at the end...

...She is the Jael of our movement...

...But beneath Christina Rossetti's subdued exterior burned the divine fury of her art...

...To this day, Rossetti has remained at the same time obscure and familiar...

...Aside from a shared love of animals (the family referred to his house in Cheyne Walk, where a wombat was allowed to sleep on the dining room table, as "the Zoo"), no brother or sister could have been more temperamentally different...

...She once compared herself to a girl who has stripped the blossoms from her tree, and so missed out on the ripe fruit, an effective metaphor for the celibate artist...

...An archetype of the self-destructive artist, his unhappy love affairs were prefigured in his poems before they happened, and an addiction to chloral brought about his premature death at 54...

...Such audacity redeems her best devotional poetry from pietism...

...Her shocking emotional directness conveys all too vividly the corrosive effects of deprivation...

...Hence, the reader must always beware of biographers who try to match Christina Rossetti's unfortunate love affairs with her verses...

...On Poetry THE FACE OF ChflSTNA ROSSETTI BV PHOEBE PETTINGELL ^•wn their portraits, Victorian poets always seem to look like overstuffed furniture—monuments to the bourgeois prosperity of their society...