Abstract
Is there a difference between Christina Rossetti’s volumes of “poems” and those of “verses” or “nursery rhymes”? Do we—or should we—read her collections of “verses” or “rhymes” differently, or regard skeptically those collections titled “poems”? There is no simple answer, but raising the question may draw our attention to the radical contingency of all Rossetti’s writing as she conceived it. Whether poems or rhymes or verses, her work usually depends on other texts or on real or imagined situations that provide both stimulus and definition. It was only in this way, Rossetti believed, that she could escape that compelling sin of pride she so gently mocked in her early work, Maude. Rossetti’s poems, verses, and rhymes become a form of serious verbal and imaginative play, a gift of praise offered to God, approximations of a perfected lyric singing yet to be.
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Notes
- 1.
Verses (1847) contained 37 short pieces and one longer ballad, “The Dead City.” Verses (1893), her longest collection, contained 333 sonnets, songs, roundels, and other relatively short works. The three volumes of Poems were each anchored by at least one longer poem (“Goblin Market,” “The Prince’s Progress,” and “The Months: A Pageant”) and contained, respectively, 61, 47, and 59 pieces in all (the last volume also included the two sonnet sequences, “Monna Innominata” and “Later Life.”). Sing-Song had 121 very brief “rhymes.” See Verses, Dedicated to Her Mother (London: Privately printed at G. Polidori’s, 1847) http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ab-wpc/id/11449, and The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. Rebecca W. Crump. 3 vols. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979–90), vols. 1 and 2.
- 2.
On the history of the term and its changing meanings, see Virginia Jackson, “Lyric,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Fourth Edition), ed. Roland Green et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 826–34.
- 3.
My thanks to Lee Behlman, Olivia Moy, and Veronica Alfano for their careful readings and comments on this chapter; provocative questions from participants in the NAVSA session in 2019 also contributed to the final version.
- 4.
Christina Rossetti, The Letters of Christina Rossetti, 4 vols., ed. Antony H. Harrison (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997–2004), 4. 301n.
- 5.
Verses (1893) collects and rearranges the sonnets, songs, and roundels from Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), and In the Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). The collection includes 12 pieces from Called to Be Saints, 121 from Time Flies, and 195 from The Face of the Deep. See Crump, ed., Complete Poems, volume 2.
- 6.
Derek Attridge, Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 147–87.
- 7.
See, for example, her June 1867 letter to her brother Dante Gabriel; Letters, ed. Harrison, 1.294.
- 8.
Jackson, “Lyric,” 831–33.
- 9.
Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 81.
- 10.
Birch, “Tennyson’s Retrospective View,” in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 50.
- 11.
On the parallels with other women’s religious poetry of the period, see F. Elizabeth Gray, Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2010), especially chapter 2; and on Rossetti’s use of her drawing for hermeneutic purposes, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002), 28–38. As Kooistra and others have argued, Rossetti’s drawings typically draw out further spiritual meanings from the texts they illustrate (including her own); Kooistra, Rossetti and Illustration, 31–43. For more on Rossetti and the Tractarian doctrines that encouraged her understanding of the visible pointing to the invisible, see Diane D’Amico, “Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for the ‘weary heart’,” Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1987): 36–42; Mary Arseneau, “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 31 (1993): 79–93; Emma Mason, “Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve,” Journal of Victorian Culture 7 (2002): 196–219; and Dinah Roe, “‘Come and See’: Christina Rossetti’s Illustrations for The Christian Year,” in Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, ed., Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 82–107. Veronica Alfano’s essay in this volume offers a finely detailed reading of Rossetti’s use of metrical silences and the connections suggested by rhyme to adumbrate such meanings in Sing-Song and Verses.
- 12.
The London edition contains many fewer poems; the American edition, which was published the same year, includes 14 poems from the original manuscript, 3 of them subsequently published in Goblin Market and Other Poems: “Song: She Sat and Sang Always,” “One Certainty,” and “Symbols”; and one in Verses (1893), “What Is It Jesus Saith Unto the Soul?”. See Maude, ed. W. Rossetti, https://archive.org/details/maudeproseverse00ross, and Crump, Complete Poems.
- 13.
Prefatory Note to Maude, ed. W. Rossetti, enlarged ed., 1. Subsequent references are to this (the American) edition.
- 14.
Maude, 8.
- 15.
Ibid., 9.
- 16.
Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (London and New York: Viking Penguin, 1994), 26.
- 17.
William Rossetti, Prefatory Note, Maude, 2.
- 18.
C. Rossetti, Maude, 116.
- 19.
Ibid., 56.
- 20.
Ibid., 54.
- 21.
Three pieces from Maude were included in Goblin Market (see note 12) and three from Verses (1847) in The Prince’s Progress (Part II of “A Portrait,” “Vanity of Vanities [Ah woe is me for pleasure that is pain],” and “Gone For Ever”). William Michael Rossetti, as already mentioned, called all the pieces in Maude “poems”; he also included all the pieces in Verses (1847) in his 1896 collection of his sister’s hitherto unpublished or uncollected work, New Poems. See Crump, Complete Poems, and W. Rossetti, ed., Maude.
- 22.
The best treatment of the formal and linguistic playfulness of Sing-Song remains Constance Hassett’s in Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2005), esp. pp. 117–53. On the pedagogical impulses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry for children, see Catherine Robson, Heart-Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
- 23.
Rossetti, “Love me,--I love you,” in Complete Poems, ed. Crump, 2.19. Subsequent poems, verses, and rhymes by Rossetti quoted in the text are taken from this edition.
- 24.
Rossetti, “Kookoorookoo,” 2.20.
- 25.
Rossetti, “The horses of the sea,” 2.42.
- 26.
Rossetti, “I dreamt I caught a little owl,” 2.45.
- 27.
Susan A. Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 158. Emphasis mine. Stewart implies what Hugh Haughton states in his introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry: “it might be argued that, far from being a very special case of poetry, nonsense represents what makes poetry itself a special case” (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988) p. 6. Thanks to Lee Behlman for this reference.
- 28.
Stewart, Nonsense, 157.
- 29.
Rossetti, “An exceeding bitter cry,” 2.189–90.
- 30.
Rossetti, “Me and my gift,” 2.197.
- 31.
Rossetti, “Short is time, and only time is bleak,” 2.278–79.
- 32.
Rossetti, “Jerusalem of fire,” 2.281.
- 33.
Rossetti, “Then Shall Ye Shout,” 2.328, lines 11–12. Marion Thain plausibly suggests Swinburne’s roundels resemble “the form of the sung ‘round’ in which different voices sing the same words at overlapping intervals in a ‘follow the leader’ pattern. It is a form, then, whose very essence draws attention to the subject as a multi-layered, multi-vocal one.” See Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 198. Rossetti may have been imagining the roundel as a canon, or—as I have argued elsewhere—she may have been thinking of the unison chants sung in her high Anglican church; in either case the model would be one of multi-voiced song. See Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 139–48.
- 34.
Rossetti, “The goal in sight!”, 2.334–35.
References
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Attridge, Derek. 2013. Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Birch, Dinah. 2009. Tennyson’s Retrospective View. In Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
D’Amico, Diane. 1987. Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for ‘The Weary Heart’. Victorian Newsletter 72: 36–42.
Gray, F. Elizabeth. 2010. Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry. New York: Routledge.
Hassett, Constance. 2005. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Haughton, Hugh. 1988. Introduction. In The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, ed. Hugh Haughton. London: Chatto & Windus.
Helsinger, Elizabeth. 2015. Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Jackson, Virginia. 2005. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Reading. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2012. Lyric. In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Fourth Edition), ed. Roland Green et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Marsh, Jan. 1994. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. London and New York: Viking (Penguin).
Mason, Emma. 2002. Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve. Journal of Victorian Culture 7 (2): 196–219.
Robson, Catherine. 2012. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Roe, Dinah. 2018. ‘Come and See’: Christina Rossetti’s Illustrations for The Christian Year. In Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, ed. Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rossetti, Christina. 1847. Verses, Dedicated to Her Mother. London: Privately printed at G. Polidori's. Accessed 1 January 2021. http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ab-wpc/id/11449
———. 1897. Maude: A Story for Girls. Ed. William Michael Rossetti. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone. Accessed 1 January 2021. https://archive.org/details/maudeproseverse00ross
———. 1979–1990. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. Rebecca W. Crump. 3 vols. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press.
———. 1997-2004. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Ed. Antony H. Harrison, 4 vols. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.
Stewart, Susan. 1980. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thain, Marion. 2016. The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Helsinger, E.K. (2023). Contingent Lyrics: Christina Rossetti’s Verses and Poems. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_5
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