Summary
The speaker explains that she used to be a simple innocent girl, living a rural lifestyle and unaware of her own beauty. She asks, lamentingly, why a "great lord" discovered her and praised her for her blonde hair before inviting her back to his grand house, ultimately ending her carefree childhood. She ruefully remembers how happy she felt about his attention at the time. Now, she is ashamed of the life she lives. She is now a sexual plaything for the lord, who treats her like a glove or tie—putting her on as he pleases and then rejecting her. She reflects that she could have been like a dove, an emblem of peace and purity.
Analysis
This poem was published in the mid-nineteenth century, but Christina Rossetti, opting for a Gothic mood, uses language evocative of a loosely medieval setting. Importantly, that medievalesque language still doesn't tap into a specific historical era. Instead, in the manner of many works of Victorian Gothic literature, it treats the medieval as a mood linked to fantasy, drama, and authenticity—and wholly unshackled from the strictures and safeties of middle-class life in the nineteenth century, We can discern Rossetti's evocation of the Gothic by examining the poem's diction, which seems drawn straight from a fairytale. Her speaker refers to herself as "fair," and to her hair as "flaxen"—itself a subtle reference to a material associated with preindustrial settings. Her conflict plays out in a feudal dynamic. She is at first a peasant of sorts, living in a "cottage," before being taken away to a "palace." The protagonist and antagonist of the situation are a "maiden" and a "lord." Even the metaphors used keep the poem's focus at once vaguely premodern and undefined: Rosetti refers to a "silken knot," a "glove," and a "dove," so that even these metaphorical comparisons do not jolt the reader out of the fairytale setting that has been evoked.
There's another element of this poem that nods to the premodern: its form. The work is a ballad, which is both a type of narrative folksong and a specific formal structure. Thematically, traditional ballads, passed down through oral tradition, tend to tell emotionally intense tales like this one, either tragic, comic, or suspenseful. They usually feature an ABCB rhyme scheme, at least in English, meaning that the first and third lines of each four-line stanza (or quatrain) rhyme. Rossetti follows just such a rhyme scheme, although she uses longer eight-line stanzas (octets) composed of two ABCB quatrain structures pushed together. For instance, stanza one features the ending words "maiden," "air," "mates," and "fair." Ballads typically use a meter with either three or four stressed syllables per line. Rossetti alternates. She mostly uses iambic meter, meaning that each line is made up of a series of two-syllable segments, the second syllable of which is stressed. Some of her lines include three iambs, adding up to a total of three stressed syllables. Other lines include four iambs.
The ballad form is highly readable and musical, but that's not the only reason its use is significant here. As mentioned above, ballads aren't only a written poetic form. Rather, they are a very old oral form used to pass down traditional stories, especially in preliterate societies. By using this form, Rossetti strengthens her poem's associations with a medieval milieu in which folklore is more prominent than written narrative. She even suggests that the poem is itself a work of oral folklore, passed on to the reader through the conduit of print but not constructed for the page. By using so many tools to situate her poem in a distant past, Rossetti simultaneously softens and intensifies what is already (even after two stanzas) a rather brutal story of lost innocence, inequality, and sexual exploitation. It becomes easier and less distressing to read, since it is so remote from the modern reader. At the same time, the nonspecific grandeur of a setting filled with palaces and maidens somewhat raises the narrative stakes, removing mundanity and heightening drama.
