Christina Rossetti: Poems

Recognition

Rossetti's popularity in her lifetime did not approach that of her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but her standing remained strong after her death. Her popularity faded in the early 20th century in the wake of Modernism, but scholars began to explore Freudian themes in her work, such as religious and sexual repression, reaching for personal, biographical interpretations of her poetry.[3]

Academics studying her work in the 1970s saw beyond the lyrical sweetness to her mastery of prosody and versification. Feminists held her as symbol of constrained female genius and a leader among 19th-century poets.[1][3] Her writings strongly influenced writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin. The critic Basil de Sélincourt called her "all but our greatest woman poet... incomparably our greatest craftswoman... probably in the first twelve of the masters of English verse."[3][29]

The year stood at its equinox,   And bluff the North was blowing. A bleat of lambs came from the flocks,   Green hardy things were growing. I met a maid with shining locks,   Where milky kine were lowing. She wore a kerchief on her neck   Her bare arm showed its dimple. Her apron spread without a speck   Her air was frank and simple.

From "The Milking-Maid" poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti[30]

Rossetti's Christmas poem "In the Bleak Midwinter" became widely known in the English-speaking world after her death, when set as a Christmas carol by Gustav Holst and later by Harold Darke.[31] Her poem "Love Came Down at Christmas" (1885) has also been widely arranged as a carol.[32][33]

British composers receptive to Rossetti's verse included Alexander Mackenzie (Three Songs, Op. 17, 1878), Frederick Cowen, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57, 1904), Hubert Parry, Hope Squire,[34] and Charles Villiers Stanford.[35] In 1918, John Ireland set eight poems from her Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book to music in his song cycle Mother and Child. The poem "Song" was an inspiration for Bear McCreary's composition When I Am Dead, published in 2015.[36] Two of Rossetti's poems, "Where Sunless Rivers Weep" and "Weeping Willow", were set to music by Barbara Arens in her All Beautiful & Splendid Things: 12 + 1 Piano Songs on Poems by Women (2017, Editions Musica Ferrum). Rossetti's "Love is Like a Rose" was set to music by Constance Cochnower Virtue;[37] "Love Me, I Love You," was set to music by Hanna Vollenhoven;[38] and "Song of the Dawn" was set to music by Elise Fellows White.[39]

In 2000, one of many Millennium projects across the country was a poetry stone placed in what had been the grounds of North Hill House in Frome. On one side is an excerpt from her poem, "What Good Shall My Life Do Me": "Love lights the sun: love through the dark/Lights the moon's evanescent arc:/Same Love lights up the glow-worms spark." She wrote about her brief stay in Frome, which had "an abundance of green slopes and gentle declivities: no boldness or grandeur but plenty of peaceful beauty".[40]

In 2011, Rossetti was a subject of a Radio 4 programme, In Our Time.[41][42]

The title of J. K. Rowling's novel The Cuckoo's Calling (2013) follows a line in Rossetti's poem A Dirge.[43]

Christina Rossetti is commemorated in the Church of England calendar on 27 April.[44]


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