![]() A trochee is the succession of a stressed and an unstressed syllable, and a spondee is the succession of two stressed syllables.The pattern “trochee + spondee”, as in “sing no sad songs” (2) or “be the green grass” (5), makes the text coherent. We find a repetition of the same pattern on different occasions. It’s a ballad stanza form, but the poem itself is not a ballad. Each of the octaves is a complete sentence and pauses often come at the end of the line. The even lines have six syllables, whereas the odd lines have seven or eight syllables. Each octave is made up of two quatrains, and each quatrain has the rhyme scheme abcb. The second half of the poem is an explanation of why the speaker feels the way she does and why it’s not important to remember her.Īs a poetic text, there is rhyme. ![]() In lines 7-8, she is stating her desire not to have any memorial and giving her loved one – “my dearest” – permission to forget her. In a sense, this poem is the speaker’s will. Image (top): Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Wikimedia Commons. Image (bottom): Portrait of Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866), public domain.This is a poem about death and dying, even though it expresses love and affection. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. ![]() The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. You can learn more about Rossetti’s life here. If this rundown of Rossetti’s best poems has you hankering to read more of her work, there’s plenty of it (much of it very good): we recommend the colossal Penguin edition of her work, Complete Poems (Penguin Classics). having an up and a down side), and exotic as well (opium hailing from the Orient). In Victorian Britain, opium-addiction was a real social problem, opium being, like the fruits of Goblin Market, both sweet and bitter (i.e. Some critics have drawn parallels between Laura’s addiction to the exotic fruit in the poem and the experience of drug addiction. It’s a long narrative poem about two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, and how Laura succumbs to temptation and tastes the fruit sold by the goblins of the poem’s title.īut what is Goblin Market about? The fruit in the poem which the goblins sell has been interpreted in various ways: critics have long seen the eroticised description of the exotic fruit as symbolic of (sexual) temptation, with Laura as the fallen women who succumbs to masculine wiles and is ruined as a result (though she is, of course, happily married at the end of the poem). Probably the most famous poem Rossetti wrote. But what secret? Our analysis of the poem, included in the link above, attempts to get to the bottom of the poem’s caginess. The new title immediately piques our interest. She renamed it with its more exciting title when it was published in Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862. Rossetti originally gave ‘Winter: My Secret’ the rather less appealing title ‘Nonsense’. Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell … Its songlike quality shows up its kinship with many of Rossetti’s more celebrated poems, and its emotional power is as great as ‘A Birthday’ or ‘Remember’.īut not today it froze, and blows, and snows, This is not one of Christina Rossetti’s most famous poems, but it deserves to be better known. ‘A Birthday’ is a fine example of a successful poem which celebrates being in love using colourful and majestic imagery. Love poetry is obviously common enough in English literature, but there are actually few truly great poems about being in love (and being happy). Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit The poem is about Rossetti’s struggle to feel close to Christ and the teachings of Christianity, and to weep for the sacrifice he made. This poem was published in Christina Rossetti’s 1866 collection The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss, That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross, ![]() (Or as one anonymous sage once put it, ‘Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’.) We think it might best be viewed as a poem about wanting what we cannot have: as Marcel Proust observed, the true paradises are those we have lost. This poem verges on allegory, though its precise meaning remains elusive. A spirit without a shadow guards the gate, barring her from entering. ![]() Rossetti’s speaker peers between the iron bars of a garden gate and sees a garden full of flowers, and laments that this garden had once belonged to her – but not any more. So begins a poem about a paradise that has been lost. From bough to bough the song-birds crossed,įrom flower to flower the moths and bees ![]()
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