Christina Rossetti Poetry - Main links and themes

• 'My heart is link a singing bird' - freedom; romantic image; springtime - new life
• 'Whose nest is in a water'd shoot' - safety and firtility ; growing and nourished by the water; purity
• 'My heart is an apple-tree' - life; Garden of Eden; innocence
• 'thickset fruit' - feels so joyful she can nourish others; joy is in all seasons; her love is natural
• 'My heart is like a rainbow shell' - Gods promise to Noah; new life
• 'Hang it with vair and purple dyes' - killing nature; love it so strong it can be destructive; love has brought more riches to her life
• 'the birthday of my life' - reborn; Second Coming of Christ; her love for Christ is worth more than riches

Main themes:

• Overpowering love - anaphora
• Love is natural and rare
• The riches religion gives you

Links to other poems

•  Soeur Louise de la Misericorde - love of Christ is stronger than all
• Up-Hill - the promise of salvation 
• Twice - the permanent love of Christ

• 'Nor shady cypress tree' - mourning/everlasting
• 'Be the green grass above me' - suggests body and soul remains in grave; eliminates idea of heaven
• 'I shall not hear the nightingale' - bird with a mournful song
• 'And dreaming through the twilight' - barrier between life and death; waiting for Jesus' Second Coming
• 'That doth not rise nor set' - heaven is so bright the sun is not needed
• 'And haply may forget' - blurring of memory; uncertainty of afterlife

Main themes:

• Uncertainty of afterlife
• Ironic poetic imagery
• Loss of memory

Links to other poems:

• Shut Out - unable to connect with religion
• In the Round Tower at Jhansi - uncertainty of death
• Echo - loss of memory
• From The Antique - finality of death
• Remember - ironic poetic imagery

• 'But he was not so pale as you, Nor I so pale as Nell' - foreshadow of doomed marriage
• 'To bless the hearth, to bless the board, To bless the marriage-bed' - stand in the way of domestic life/intimacy 
• 'That day we waded ankle-deep/For lilies in the beck' - phallic imagery; would have been seen as a fallen women in Victorian era; dead love
• ' "Lady" he said - "Maude Clare" ' - cerzura, overcome with emotion; weak male voice who destroyed women
• 'For he's my lord for better and worse' - echoes words of marriage; juxtaopsition of Maude Clare
• 'I'll love him till he loves me best' - limitations of a women's place in society; driven to compete for men's love

Main themes:

• Place of women in society 
• Restraint of free expression - rhyme scheme
• Exposure of society's conventions

Links to other poems:

• Goblin Market - place of women in society 
• Soeur Louise - Victorian standards for women
• Shut Out - cast away for not following societies rules
• In the Round Tower at Jhansi - focus on relationship
• From The Antique - expectation of women
• No, Thank you, John - strong female voice

• 'Now dust and dying embers mock my fire' - previous life wasn't important; intensity of past life; still some desire left over
• 'Oh vanity of vanities, desire!' - liturgical diction, life is empty apart from God; hard to control desires
• 'Longing and love, pangs of a perished pleasure' - plosive, dangers of love and desire
• 'love's deathbed, trickles, trickles' - juxtapostion, destruction love causes; coming down from sexual high
• 'my rose of life gone all to prickles' - innocence was destroyed by past life; Christs' crown of thorns
• 'Stunting my hope which might have strained up higher' - sins made it harder to get to heaven
• 'Turning my garden plot to barren mire' - unable to reach Garden of Eden because of desires

Main themes:

• Comfort in religion
• Destruction that love causes
• The struggle of desires that women have to deal with

Links to other poems:

• Goblin Market and Maude Clare - dangers of desires
• A Birthday - divine love of Christ
• Good Friday - Christ will always have faith even in your doubt
• Echo - lost love
• No, Thank You, John - women are not controlled

• 'The door was shut. I looked between/Its iron bars' - gates to heaven; caesura creates firmness of exclusion as does the iron bars
• 'My garden' - paradise after being washed by Christ
• 'A shadowless spirit kept the gate' - boundary of life and death
• 'Blinded with tears' - inability to percieve God
• 'violet bed' - death
• 'but not the best' - the world is only a shadow of the Garden of Eden

Main themes:

• Exclusion from happiness
• Destruction of the possibility of life
• Liminality 

Links to other poems:

• Song - unable to connect to Christ
• Maude Clare - excluded for not following socities standards
• Soeur Louise - desire causes destruction

• 'Am I a stone, and not a sheep' - questioning faith; innocence of Christ
• 'And yet not weep' - distressing image of Christ who is innocent dying for mans sins
• 'exceeding grief lamented Thee' - women were right to mourn in the way they wanted to
• 'Sun and Moon' - everything was affected by Christ's crucifixtion
• 'hid their faces in a starless sky' - disruptive significance
• 'I, only I' - iambic foot; confined by inability to feel part of something greater than herself
• 'smite a rock' - break her inability to feel; find her religion

Main themes:

• Unable to connect with religion
• Acceptance of crucifixtion
• Permanant love of Christ

Links to other poems:

• Twice - permanent love of Christ
• Up-Hill - God is always there
• Soeur Louise - religion reminds them how to feel

• 'Does the road wind up-hill all the way' - life is hard from birth to death
• 'for the night a resting-place?' - period between death and the Second Coming of Christ 
• 'Then must I knock' - Christian confession before admitted to heaven 
• 'They will not keep you standing at that door' - echoes the Bible; acceptance of Jesus in the human heart
• 'beds for all who come' - echoes what Christ says about heaven

Main themes:

• Journey of life
• Acceptance into heaven
• Faith in Christ no matter what

Links to other poems:

• A Birthday - promise of salvation
• Soeur Louise and Good Friday - Christ will always have belief in you
• Remember - journey of life to resting place

• 'A hundred, a thousand to one; even so' - starts media res; building urgency created by anapaest followed by an iamb
• 'The swarming howling wretches below/ Gained and gained and gained' - patriotic persepective; urcency
• 'Skene looked at his pale young wife' - Pre-Raphelite beauty; turns into mythical story
• 'Young, stong and so full of life' - triad creates sympathy
• 'Close the pistol to her brow' - mixture of love and death; romanticises their situation
• 'God forgive them this!' - presents suicide as heroic - change the church's ideas
• 'Courage, dear, I am not loth' - unattributed dialogue reflected ambiguity of situation
• 'Good-bye' -- 'Good-bye' - uncertainty of voice, merging as though they are one; cycle of life, closure

Main themes:

• Urgency
• Mixture of love and death
• Perspective

Links to other poems:

• Maude Clare - focus on persective of relationship
• Remember - sacrifice of personal desire

• 'Come to me in the silence of the night' - finality of death; echo as there is no one to reply
• 'Come in the speaking silence of a dream' - oxymoron; uncertainty of what she wants
• 'As sunlight on a stream' - movement towards her; wants her lover to return
• 'Where thirsting longing eyes/Watch the slow door' - emotional deprevation, no security of Paradise; unable to reach heaven
• 'Come back to me in dreams, that I might give/Pulse for pulse, breath for breath' - give the lover life through passion, regrets of how she treated lover when they were alive

Main themes:

• Longing
• Echoes
• Exclusion from happiness

Links to other poems:

• Shut Out - unable to reach Paradise 
• Goblin Market - life through love
• Remember - threshold of life and death

• 'It's a weary life, it is, she said' - universal she, write more freely without it being attached to her
• 'I wish and I wish I were a man' - futilily of her desire, pointless, like a fairytale
• 'Not a body and not a soul' - only freedom would come from not existing
• 'Not so much as a grain of dust' - liturgical diction, blasphemes; nihilistic
• 'Still the world would wag on the same' - dismissive, rejects the world in her anger
• 'Still the seasons go and come' - even nature is temporary and short-lived
• 'Would wake and weary and fall asleep' - life has no purpose; if you are not religious then life is empty

Main themes:

• Unfulfilled existence of women
• Uncertainty of faith
• Temporary nature of life

Links to other poems:

• Song - finality of death
• Maude Clare  and No, Thank You, John - expectations of women
• Remember - freedom from society

• 'I never said I loved you, John' - strength of female voice, chooses her own destiny
• 'No fault  of mine made me your toast' - disgust with social conventions of women; always to blame
• 'I dare say Meg or Moll would take' - all passive women are the same; men all see women for just one thing
• 'Who can't perform the task' - women play a role of passiveness; marriage is a chore and not something to enjoy
• 'Song-birds of passage, days of youth' - short-lived relationship; image of joy
• 'I'll wink at your untruth' - pretend the situation never happened; private world exposed
• 'In open treaty' - clinical detachment; ambiguity of what happened behind closed doors

Main themes:

• Empowerment of women
• Reversal of gender roles

Links to other poems:

• From The Antique - expectations of women
• Maude Clare - strong female voice
• Soeur Louise - women can be in control 

• 'I tell my secret? No indeed, not I' - encloses her secret in her own identity
• 'And you're too curious' - danger of curiosity
• 'Suppose there is no secret after all' - general act of concealment
• 'A veil, a cloak, and other wraps' - facade to maintain a perfect women ideal in Victorian Britian; marriage hides who you truely are
• 'And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall' - vunerability if people knew her secret
• 'Come buffeting, astounding me' - destabilise identity and take advantage of vunerability 
• 'And golden fruit is ripening to excess' - pregnancy; growing maturity and able to open up to people

Main themes:

• Identity
• Curiosity 
• Seasons
• Concealment

Links to other poems:

• Goblin Market - dangers of curiosity 
• No, Thank You, John - freeing for women

• 'Gone far away into the silent land' - liturgical diction of ambiguity of after-life
• 'When you can no more hold me by the hand' - free from societies conventions; not controlled by men
• 'Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay' - liminal, theshold of life and death
• 'It will be late to counsel then or pray' - God cannot bring people back, should not pray for the dead, anglican church idea
• 'For if the darkness and corruption leave' - how she views the world she is leaving behind; fear but acceptance of death
• 'Better by far you should forget and smile' - sacrifices her true desire for loved ones to be happy

Main themes:

• Fear of being forgotten
• Liturgical diction - Christs' Second Coming
• Role of women

Links to other poems:

• Song - ironic imagery
• From The Antique - freedom from society 
• In the Round Tower at Jhansi - sacrifice of personal desire
• Up-Hill - journey to resting place
• Echo - threshold of life and death