Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet. She wrote poems of love, fantasy, and nature, verses for children, and devotional poetry and prose.
Background
Christina Rossetti was born on December 5, 1830, in London. Rossetti was the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Francesca in 1827, Gabriel Charles Dante (famous under the name Dante Gabriel but always called Gabriel by family members) in 1828, William Michael in 1829, and Christina Georgina on 5 December 1830.
Education
Educated entirely at home, she spoke English and Italian with ease and read French, Latin, and German.
Career
Her first verses were written to her mother on April 27, 1842. Her first published poems were the seven she contributed in 1850 to the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, the Germ, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne. By her sixteenth birthday Christina, who was regarded as the poet in the family, had written more than fifty poems that were transcribed into a notebook by her sister.
In 1847 a collection of her poems, titled Verses, was privately printed by her grandfather Polidori.
In 1850 Rossetti wrote Maude: A Story for Girls (1897), a novella that was not published until after her death. Rossetti has often been depicted as shrinking from worldly concerns, but, in fact, she did engage in humanitarian work.
In 1854, during the Crimean War, she volunteered to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses but was turned down. Her aunt Eliza Polidori did join Nightingale in Scutari, and Rossetti temporarily took over some of Polidori’s district visiting, providing assistance to the sick and poor of the parish.
In early 1859 Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of “fallen“ women. As an “associate” at Highgate, Rossetti was known as “Sister Christina” and wore a habitlike black uniform with a veil. When she was on duty she resided at the penitentiary, probably for a fortnight at a time. By the summer of 1859 Rossetti was devoting a good deal of time to her work at Highgate, and its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal, and illegitimacy, such as “Cousin Kate,” “The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,“ and “From Sunset to Star Rise,” though poems composed before the period of her work at Highgate - “An Apple-Gathering,” “The Convent Threshold,” and “Maude Clare” for instance - demonstrate her prior interest in the fallen woman.
Her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared in 1862, when she was 31. It received widespread critical praise, establishing her as the foremost female poet of the time. Hopkins, Swinburne and Tennyson lauded her work and with the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861 Rossetti was hailed as her natural successor. The title poem is one of Rossetti's best known works. Although it is ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways: seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation; a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency; and a work about erotic desire and social redemption.
Swinburne in 1883 dedicated his collection A Century of Roundels to Rossetti as she had adopted his roundel form in a number of poems, as exampled by her Wife to Husband.
In 1892, Rossetti wrote The Face of the Deep, a book of devotional prose, and oversaw the production of a new and enlarged edition of Sing-Song, published in 1893.
In the later decades of her life, Rossetti suffered from Graves' Disease, diagnosed in 1872 and suffering a nearly fatal attack in the early 1870s. In 1893, she developed breast cancer and though the tumour was removed, she suffered a recurrence in September 1894. She died in Bloomsbury on 29 December 1894 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Achievements
Rossetti's Christmas poem "In the Bleak Midwinter" became widely known after her death when set as a Christmas carol first by Gustav Holst, and then by Harold Darke. Her poem "Love Came Down at Christmas" (1885) has also been widely arranged as a carol. Rossetti is honoured with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Anglican Church on 27 April.
She deeply interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement that developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in Rossetti's life. She was a true religious fanatic. At first, she belonged to the religion of Evangelism but had later converted to the Anglicanism religion.
Views
Quotations:
"What is the beginning? Love. What is the course. Love still. What the goal. The goal is love."
"Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterward remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad."
"Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts, and no one to thank. "
"A man is ever apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings."
"O passing angel, speed me with a song, a melody of heaven to reach my heart and rouse me to the race and make me strong."
"It is not the deed we do Though the deed be never so fair, But the love that the dear Lord looketh for, Hidden with lovely care In the heart of the deed so fair."
"Where innocent bright-eyes daisies are With blades of grass between, Each daisy stands up like a star Out of a sky of green."
"Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, Love Divine; Love was born at Christmas; Star and angels gave the sign."
Personality
Though mild and virtuous, she was frequently anxious about her self-presumed sinfulness. She is said to have pasted strips of paper over the more blasphemous passages in Swinburne's poetry. Yet she remained devoted to her brother, Dante Gabriel, whose life was far from a model of conventional virtue.
Christina Rossetti was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.
Connections
At 18 she fell in love with James Collinson, a minor Pre-Raphaelite painter, but broke off her engagement to him 2 years later, when he became a Roman Catholic.
In 1862 she fell deeply in love with Charles Bagot Cayley. But she again refused to marry, this time because Cayley had no firm religious faith.
