Abstract
In Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), Christina Rossetti uses abruptly shortened lines to enforce intrapoetic pausing, thus creating ambiguous memorial spaces for dead children. On the one hand, these spaces call for devastated remembrance; on the other, they cue readers to imagine the life of the world to come. Just as the speechlessness imposed by truncated lines can signal both heartbroken deprivation and fullness of possibility, so the silences of small children in Sing-Song both ennoble mothers and underscore maternal isolation, resentment, and even rage. Moreover, Rossetti’s treatment of rhyme—which associates the dead or silent child with the first half of a couplet, encoding the promise of redemptive futurity—hints that a seemingly restricted domestic position lends mothers powerful authority. Deploying a decorous feminized aesthetic, this volume subtly confounds expectations related both to maternity and to the formal conventionality that links Rossetti’s work to humble verse rather than ambitious poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls, xiv.
- 2.
Unsigned review of Sing-Song, 294; Colvin, review of Sing-Song, 23; Rossetti, Poems and Prose, 400; Arseneau, “Introduction,” xx. On Rossettian smallness, see Tricia Lootens, Antony H. Harrison, and Veronica Alfano. This essay, however, will refer to the contents of Sing-Song as “poems.”
- 3.
Lila Hanft reads this title as ironic (“Maternal Ambivalence,” 226). In general, my concern is with rhythmic drop-offs more precipitous than those found in the mix of three- and four-beat lines usually associated with nursery rhymes.
- 4.
Rossetti, Complete Poems, 243. Subsequent citations to this edition (hereafter CP) are given parenthetically.
- 5.
Patmore, “English Metrical Law,” 23. Patmore is describing the silences generated within (say) catalectic pentameter, but I focus on the pauses that result when (for instance) pentameter suddenly becomes dimeter or trimeter. See also George Saintsbury on Patmore’s “pause-foot or ‘silence-foot’” (English Prosody, 440) and Derek Attridge on “virtual beats” (Moving Words, 106).
- 6.
Prins, “Patmore’s Law,” 264, 265, 275; Helsinger, Thought of Song, 68–69.
- 7.
Hassett, Patience of Style, 129. Yet Hassett also sees the darker side of Rossetti’s metrical reductions. Noting that “Why did baby die?” reflects adult silence, she adds that the poem “admits its own muteness as well, tapering down to a single foot […] and showing how little it has to say” (142).
- 8.
Hassett believes that one “performs the last line by stretching ‘bring’ into a disyllable,” creating a trimeter line (Patience of Style, 152). To my ear, though, the tick-tock regularity of “Its wind and dew, its night and day” cues a brisk two-syllable “Bring up.”
- 9.
For Helsinger, Rossetti’s metrical foreshortenings mean that “we are prodded, suspended, to think of the not-said” (Thought of Song, 137). Although Helsinger sees the truncated final line of “A baby’s cradle” as a symptom of the “impoverished world,” she makes a point related to my own when she notes that this poem uses “lyric minimalism” to “condense the agonizing tedium of subjectively experienced time bounded by mortality, while imaginatively reaching beyond it” (138). And Virginia Sickbert contrasts “Why did baby die” (in which “No comforting divine purpose […] fills the absence”) with “A baby’s cradle” (in which hope emerges despite a palpable absence) (“Maternal Challenge,” 396).
- 10.
Rossetti, Time Flies, 112; The Face of the Deep, 505, 36.
- 11.
Alfano, The Lyric in Victorian Memory, 2.
- 12.
Gillian Beer considers rhyme’s connections to both memory and puerility (“Rhyming as Resurrection,” 191).
- 13.
Noble, “Philosophy of Rhyme,” 586; Hunter, “Seven Reasons,” 186 (Hugh Kenner provides the “dust / must” example [“Unfinished Monograph,” 380]); Hassett, Patience of Style, 127; “Does Rhyme Connect Ideas?”, 390. According to Susan Stewart, however, “rhyming show[s] that proximity in sound has little consequence for proximity of semantics,” and thus it highlights “the arbitrary nature of the sign” (“Rhyme and Freedom,” 42). Henry Lanz, too, maintains that the sound of rhyming words “acquires an independent artistic value which is largely indifferent to the meaning or the sense” (Physical Basis, 172). On rhyme and semantics, see also Roman Jakobson, Simon Jarvis, Donald Wesling, Andrew Welsh, and Matthew Campbell.
- 14.
Rossetti, Seek and Find, 180, 24, 203. “Heavenly meanings” reflect the Tractarian concept of analogy, according to which “everything visible is a symbol of some attribute of God” (Maria Keaton, “Analogical Theodicy,” 148). Likewise, the doctrine of reserve elucidates Rossetti’s formal and thematic interest in silence. For Anglo-Catholic perspectives on Sing-Song, see, for example, Sharon Smulders (Christina Rossetti Revisited), Serena Trowbridge, and Kirstie Blair. Blair mentions that “clear end-rhymes tend to be the norm” in “didactic religious poetry” (“Religion and Reserve,” 139); perhaps this indicates rhyme’s capacity for moral instruction.
- 15.
Indeed, such symbols are not always stable for Rossetti. Elsewhere in Sing-Song, the rose signifies not shame but love, beauty, and delight.
- 16.
Adela Pinch, discussing rhyme and poetic temporality, notes that varying line-lengths “exploit the conjunction of metrical brevity with reverberating sound to heighten our subjective experience of duration” (“Rhyme’s End,” 485–486). And considering the pleasures of rhyme, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra remarks that “In the short lines of nursery songs, fulfillment follows expectation so rapidly that the possibility of loss or negation is immediately foreclosed” (“Poetry of Sensation,” 116).
- 17.
On this monorhyme, see Hassett: “euphony’s coherence softly acknowledges a profound incoherence” (Patience of Style, 142). Peter McDonald, however, maintains that the insistent monorhyme of “Passing away, saith the World, passing away” (CP 83) uses sonic sameness to reward patience with transcendent change (Sound Intentions, 238).
- 18.
Leighton, Hearing Things, 79.
- 19.
However, “How many ages in time? / No one knows the rhyme” (CP 238) highlights the disjunction between pleasant chiming and a more substantial form of fulfillment. Smulders says of this Sing-Song couplet that “Rossetti achieves closure through a rhyme that calls attention to the inability to complete endless time except through a poetic contrivance” (“Sound, Sense, and Structure,” 7–8). Roderick McGillis, too, explains that these linked words “remind us that neither completes anything […] paradoxically, time and rhyme perform this coupling which the poem says is impossible” (“Simple Surfaces,” 224). And Hassett writes that Rossetti here plays the “arbitrariness” of rhyme against “the assumption that rhyme provides access to deep semantic linkages” (Patience of Style, 149).
- 20.
Sickbert, “Maternal Challenge,” 386.
- 21.
While infants do communicate via cries and coos and facial expressions, I describe them as silent or unresponsive because they cannot speak. In fact, the word “infant” derives from Latin for “one unable to speak.”
- 22.
I am inclined to disagree with Sickbert, who speaks of the “intimate, egalitarian relation between mother and child” and the suggestions of dialogic exchange in “Love me,—I love you” (“Maternal Challenge,” 389–390). Smulders, however, concludes that this poem “articulates an unrealized ideal” of mutual love (Christina Rossetti Revisited, 106). Both critics notice the Monna Innominata echo.
- 23.
Hanft, “Maternal Ambivalence,” 216–218. Hanft, who shares my interest in “the maternal voice” rather than “the infantine ear” in Sing-Song (217), is of course not the first to notice undertones of aggression in lullabies. Lucy Rollin, for instance, draws on the work of Adrienne Rich and Nicholas Tucker as she points out that a lullaby can become “an exercise in controlled hatred” (Cradle and All, 84). See also Lee O’Brien on the subversive conflation of sleep and death (Romance of the Lyric, 66), Barbara Johnson and Susan Rubin Suleiman on maternal rage, and Anna Jane Barton on the “incomprehensible infant cry” as a “threat to Victorian optimism” (“Nursery Poetics,” 493).
- 24.
See R. Loring Taylor (“Preface,” xi) and Hanft (“Maternal Ambivalence,” 224).
- 25.
Leighton, Writing Against the Heart, 258–259. Dante Gabriel Rossetti associates Sing-Song with “the merest babyism”—but also with “Blakish wisdom and tenderness” (Letters, 2.797).
- 26.
As Janzen Kooistra suggests, Rossetti’s sonic patterns “open an imaginative space for the ineffable” (“Poetry of Sensation,” 117). Here my analysis intersects with that of many critics who detect stubborn defiance in Rossetti’s seemingly self-abnegating silences: see, for instance, Harrison, Lootens, Dolores Rosenblum, and Emily Harrington.
- 27.
Rollin, Cradle and All, 83–84; Hanft, “Maternal Ambivalence,” 219; Chapman, Afterlife, 112.
- 28.
G. S. Fraser, Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse, 60.
- 29.
Fried, “Rhyme Puns,” 87; Kenner, “Unfinished Monograph,” 399; Derrida, Dissemination, 277; Stewart, Reading Voices, 98; Hunter, “Seven Reasons,” 186.
- 30.
McDonald, Sound Intentions, 230.
- 31.
Chapman combines these devotional and domestic perspectives, identifying paradise itself as a “utopian and feminine space of union […] that recalls the primary and pre-oedipal relationship of the child with the mother” (Afterlife, 117–118). For likeness and contrast in rhyme, see also John Hollander (Vision and Resonance, 120–121) and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Ventures into Childland, 343).
- 32.
Helsinger, Thought of Song, 117.
- 33.
Rossetti, Time Flies, 65; Seek and Find, 203–204; Called to be Saints, 376, 335.
- 34.
Rossetti, Seek and Find, 304; Time Flies, 251.
- 35.
Smulders, “Sound, Sense, and Structure,” 18. For McGillis, Sing-Song depicts “death as one point in a larger pattern” (“Simple Surfaces,” 222); Carolyn Steedman comments on the “immanence of death in growth” that children embody (Strange Dislocations, x).
- 36.
Rossetti, Called to be Saints, 109; Time Flies, 172, 2.
- 37.
Rossetti, Seek and Find, 281, 268.
- 38.
Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration, 108; Rossetti, Letters, 2.158.
- 39.
Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 312. Dinah Roe confirms that in Rossetti’s eyes, “motherhood has nothing to do with biology” (Faithful Imagination, 103). Lootens argues that assigning the childless Rossetti a “sacred maternal” position undercuts her artistic aspirations (Lost Saints, 174); given the spiritual influence that Rossetti associates with mothers, however, this may also be empowering. Indeed, Sickbert—who notes the satisfying balance of the “Motherless baby” couplet—believes that “the social sanction of motherhood compelled women to seize power with cultural and religious approval” (“Maternal Challenge,” 396, 398). See also Arseneau on Rossetti’s devout version of feminism (Recovering Christina Rossetti, 1), Emma Mason on motherhood in Sing-Song (Poetry, Ecology, Faith, 107), Diane D’Amico and Elizabeth Ludlow on Rossetti and the “maternal divine” (D’Amico, Faith, Gender, and Time, 142), and Smulders on “literary maternalism” and Christ’s motherliness (Christina Rossetti Revisited, 103).
- 40.
See Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues, 66.
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Acknowledgments
In addition to Lee Behlman and Olivia Moy, I would like to thank the colleagues who responded to this paper when I presented it at the 2019 North American Victorian Studies Association conference: Erik Gray, Meredith Martin, Monique Morgan, Joseph Bristow, Kirstie Blair, Elizabeth Helsinger, Matthew Rowlinson, Sarah Weaver, and Elizabeth Macaluso all offered insightful comments. Alexis Harley, Claire Knowles, and Tom Ford also provided helpful feedback after a talk I gave in 2019 at La Trobe University.
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Alfano, V. (2023). Silence, Rhyme, and Motherhood in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_11
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