This document covers the major characteristics of Victorian Poet Christina Rossetti. It highlights the poetic influences and his writing style as well.

1. Muhammad Mohsin Atta
Victorian Poet
Poetic Characteristics
Christina Rossetti

2. Overview
 Rossetti is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious
lyrics.
 Her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling. She
excelled in using words to invoke the particular aesthetic of the
movement.
 She based some of her work on her own life experiences and
observations of nature, but more commonly, Rossetti wrote
about about her thoughts on mortality and spiritual existence.

3. Symbolism
In “Uphill” Rossetti uses the device of an allegory which uses an
abstract idea or "pictorial device" to represent "a deeper symbolic
meaning."
 The inn = Heaven
 Uphill= the difficulties encountered along the way
 The dark hours=death
Rossetti discusses the difficulties that a person faces in life. She is
hopeful that after the hard travail there will be a place peace and
solace when she gets to the end of her life.

4. By using the image of hand-holding in Remember, Rossetti suggests a
kind of possession. By indicating that her lover will no longer be able to
hold her by the hand the speaker suggests that he will no longer have
any part in her or be able to possess her in the same way as he was
perhaps used to.
‘Come buy' – Goblin Market opening words echo a famous invitation in
the Bible from God to his people:
Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

5. The Natural World
 Gardens
 Flowers
 Fruits
Most of her poetry is based upon the natural environment and
these are the most occurring natural elements in her poetry.

6. Fruits
Fruits are featured in many of the poems:
 In A Birthday, the description of the ‘apple tree / Whose boughs
are bent with thickset fruit' (lines 3-4) reflects the speaker's joy
 In Goblin Market, the goblin men attempt to lure Laura and
Lizzie with a long list of their produce which they describe as ‘All
ripe together / In summer weather' (lines 15-16).

7. Flowers
In many of Rossetti's poems, flowers convey the fragility of life. For
instance:
 In Winter: My Secret, the speaker laments that in May it
takes just one frost to wither flowers (lines 26-7)
 The association of flowers with fragility is also suggested by the
scentless and colourless rose in Summer is Ended.
 The violets in Shut Out are fragile and far inferior to the violets
that bud within the enclosed garden.

8. Gardens
Gardens are a feature of many of Rossetti's poems. In some, she
uses the image of the garden to symbolise the human soul. In
others, she looks back to the Garden of Eden as she contemplates an
eternity in Paradise:
In Shut Out, Rossetti positions her speaker on the outside of an
enclosed garden. This is a feature that is central to
many Renaissance texts and paintings.
Drawing on this heritage, Rossetti utilises the image of the
enclosed garden to teach her readers about God's love, the soul's
existence and the state of the fallen world.

9. Religious Poetry — Sexual Frustration and
Infertility
After the publication of Sing-Song and the recovery from her illness,
Christina Rossetti turned almost exclusively to devotional writing.
Although Sing-Song marks a good-bye to the possibility of having a
child, the longing for a child and husband did not end.
As a deeply religious woman she was afraid somebody "could come
between a woman and her love of God“[Flowers, 165].
After her disappointments with "worldly men," she now turned to
the love of God.
Longings and cravings are ever present in Christina Rossetti's poetry,
especially in poems such as "Goblin market".

10. How much she struggled with "unfocused dissatisfaction" can be seen in a
poem like "Roses on a Brier"
Roseson a brier,
Pearls from out the bitter sea,
such is earth's desire
However pure it be.
Neither bud nor brier,
Neither pearl nor brine for me:
Be stilled my long desire;
There shall be no more sea.
Be stilled my passionate heart;
Old earth shall end, new earth shall be:
Be still and earn thy part
Where shall be no more sea.

11. The speaker of the poem is dissatisfied with "earth's desire" even if it was
"pure." She compares the desire to wild roses and to pearls.
While the roses grow outside the garden and thus may be unprotected,
the pearls come out of a "bitter sea," which might be a metaphor for life.
Though both are rare and beautiful, they are also surrounded by a hostile
environment.
Therefore the speaker refuses both of them in the second stanza. She
speaks to herself when she says "Be stilled my long desire/ There
shall be no more sea," then asking her own desire to stop longing for
something which she cannot have. "Sea" seems to be a metaphor for
the emotional upheavals of life.
The meaning becomes clearer in the third and final stanza. Again the
speaker demands her heart to be still. Death ("old earth") will be a
turning point. In heaven ("new earth") there will be a fulfilment to what
the speaker longs for ("earn thy part/where shall be no more sea").

12. Rossetti's Substitute Love for Jesus
Christina Rossetti's "unfocused dissatisfaction" had now found a focus
and a relief. Rossetti's turn to devotional writing is depicted by
Dorothy Mermin in the following way:
"Christina Rossetti stopped trying to
rebel: in her devotional writings she
finds an appropriate place for a
conventional woman's voice“.
Her "desire for Christ, the ideal lover and "visions of fulfillment in all-
embracing love in Paradise" helped her to find a new sense of
purpose in her life and inspired her to 'new' poetry.

13. Christ had become "the ideal lover "and the only one to satisfy her needs.
These needs are expressed in the same sensual descriptions that highlight,
for example "Goblin Market."
The desire and lusting for Jesus becomes evident in a poem such as
"Like as the desireth the water brooks", which opens:
"My heart is yearning:
Behold my yearning heart,
And lean low to satisfy,
Its lonely beseeching cry,
For Thou its fullness art. . . . " [231
In this poem the lyrical self expresses her "yearning" for Jesus. As the
title (taken from a psalm) already indicates, she is longing for Christ as
a deer longs for "water brooks."

14. These water brooks are a place where one is safe. They also deliver water,
which is the source of all forms of life on earth.
Just as she could not exist without the life-giving water, she could not exist
without the life-giving spirituality of Jesus. He is described like a protector,
who should "behold" her heart.
At the same time he should also "satisfy" this heart, which is begging
("beseeching") to him, for he is "its fullness," all this heart needs to be
fulfilled.