‘Downstairs I laugh, I sport and jest with all; / But in my solitary room above / I turn my face in silence to the wall; / My heart is breaking for a little love.’ Upstairs, broken-hearted or not, ‘in the fireless top back bedroom on the corner of the cracked washstand, on the backs of old letters Christina sat writing’, according to Ford Madox Ford. Downstairs, a constant and copious stream of old friends from Naples and Rome, and new, English friends, among them Coventry Patmore, William Morris, John Ruskin, came to visit her expatriate father, Professor of Italian at King’s College, London, and her adored Mamma, who presided with immense pride over her brilliant brood: Maria Francesca, who would write an acclaimed study of Dante; painter and poet Gabriel Charles Dante (who would, in a further tribute to the great poet, eventually call himself Dante Gabriel Rossetti); and William Michael, co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was in necessary isolation that Christina ‘shut the door to face the naked truth’ and carved out of the drama of her soul a poetry in which an intensity of feelings and emotions is captured with exquisite, painful precision. ‘My heart dies inch by inch, the time grows old’: the heart laid bare with a verbal scalpel. ‘Nearly every one of her poems was an instance . . . of an emotion’. Her emotional power is not, however, for sentimentalists, as Philip Larkin makes clear. Rossetti’s work, he writes, is ‘unequalled for its objective expression of happiness denied and a certain unfamiliar steely stoicism’. The steely stoicism may have been due less to the bowing of her head in resignation than to the fact that the ‘hope deferred’ was deferred by the spiritually wilful Christina Georgina Rossetti (she very much liked her middle name), who turned away from love. Twice. Why? God, who requires a fine fidelity, would seem to have been responsible. ‘I love, as you would have me, God the most; Would not lose Him, but you, must one be lost . . . / This say I, having counted up the cost’: one of the sonnets from Monna Innominata, which, though written in the voice of Dante’s Beatrice, clearly echoes Rossetti’s own choice.
She settled early on her life’s priority, one of deeply religious observance and passionate love of God. Men came second. Within that dialogue with self, in the battleground between soul and body, Rossetti,
a girl of extreme temperament (she suffered a mental breakdown in early teenage years) and temper – her tantrums when young were formidable – found her poetic inspiration. God, and what Rossetti
interpreted as His demands, inspired much of her poetry – both the love poetry and the devotional pieces, which number in the hundreds. Her first love, James Collinson, RA, whom she met when she was eighteen and who painted a darkly forbidding portrait of his young beloved (unlike Dante Gabriel’s light-filled portrait of his sister as Mary at the Annunciation: Ecce Ancilla Domini) was rather unreliable spiritually. This was a fatal flaw in the eyes of the deeply religious Christina. Collinson changed his religion from that of committed Catholic to Protestant and then back again to Catholic. He was not perhaps a man for the long haul of the soul. Her second, perhaps deeper, affection was for Charles Bagot Cayley, from whom, aged thirty, she eventually received a proposal. Cayley was, alas, untroubled by any belief at all – which, of course, was the trouble. Virginia Woolf commented that if she were ‘bringing a case against God’, Christina Rossetti would be her first witness. Certainly there is something of Francis Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven’ in what Rossetti saw as God’s unending pursuit: ‘But
all night long that voice spake urgently: / “Open to Me / . . . Rise, let Me in.”’ (From the poem ‘Despised and Rejected’.)
Another poem, ‘Dost Thou Not Care?’, ends with Christ’s reminder of His sacrifice, ‘Did I not die for thee? / Do I not live for thee? leave Me tomorrow.’ A line which allows for no escape. Spiritual battles can be
profoundly exhausting. In ‘Weary in Well-Doing’ resignation is a touch resentful: ‘He broke my will from day to day, / He read my yearnings unexpressed / And said them nay . . . But, Christ my God, when will
it be / That I may let alone my toil / And rest with Thee?’
Before she rested anywhere and despite her perpetual internal war Rossetti set about the publication of her work with a pragmatic professionalism, indeed worldliness, which may surprise many who
link her with the nun of Amherst, Emily Dickinson. After the initial rejection of her poems Dickinson, the more fiercely intellectual of the two, declined with disdainful elegance to pursue publication,
while neatly collating one poetic masterwork after another to be discovered after her death. Rossetti, on the other hand, aged only seventeen had two poems, ‘Death’s Chill Between’ and ‘Heart’s Chill Between’ (the titles clear indicators of what was to come), published in the prestigious literary weekly Athenaeum. She was declared the poet in the family, continued to write, upstairs, and was published in various magazines including the bizarrely named The Germ, a shortlived literary publication started by her brothers. Then in April 1862, when she was thirty-two, her debut collection Goblin Market and other poems was published by Macmillan and thus she entered literary history. The acclaim was immediate and deeply satisfying to its author, who, though she would follow it four years later with The Prince’s Progress and other poems, which includes the beautiful hymn, ‘A Christmas Carol’ (‘In the bleak mid-winter’), would never again in her many later collections stun her readers in quite the same way. Almost one hundred and fifty years after publication it stuns us still. It contains one of the most bewildering poems in literature, ‘Goblin Market’, which Edith Sitwell regarded as one of the most perfect poems written by a woman in the English language. Yet the poem which guaranteed its author immortality cannot be read, as she insisted to her less than convinced brother, William Michael, as simply a fairy tale. She was not a prude. Nor was she a nun. Her tragic sibling Dante Gabriel, with whom she shared a house, lived a not so secret life of debauchery. Recent biographies have pointed out that in the years 1859–60, and immediately prior to its publication, Christina Rossetti worked in a house for fallen women in Highgate – and worked so successfully that she was offered and declined the post of Principal.
Though she was to live another thirty-two years and see ‘Goblin Market’ republished she never gave us any further guidance. Why should she? She knew what she’d done.
Christina Rossetti died from breast cancer in December 1894, aged sixty-four. Margaret Reynolds in The Culture of Christina Rossetti sounds a warning bell to all who claim definitive insight into this mysterious poet: ‘Once upon a time Christina Rossetti was simple.’ However, as we have discovered, that was ‘Long ago and long ago’, the last line of her aptly titled ‘Maiden-Song’.