CHRISTIN A ROSSETT I / 145 9 By sea or sky or woman, to one law, The allotted bondman0 of her palm and wreath. slave 10This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise Thy voice and hand shake still,?long known to thee By flying hair and fluttering hem,?the beat Following her daily of thy heart and feet, How passionately and irretrievably, In what fond flight, how many ways and days!
78. Body's Beauty Of Adams's first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
5 And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
io Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair. 1848-80 1870,1881
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 1830-1894
Referring to the title of George Gissing's 1893 novel about women who choose not
to marry, the critic Jerome McGann calls Christina Rossetti 'one of nineteenth-
century England's greatest 'Odd Women.' ' Her life had little apparent incident. She
was the youngest child in the Rossetti family. Her father was an exiled Italian patriot
who wrote poetry and commentaries on Dante that tried to find evidence in his poems
of mysterious ancient conspiracies; her mother was an Anglo-Italian who had worked
as a governess. Their household was a lively gathering place for Italian exiles, full of
conversation of politics and culture; and Christina, like her brothers Dante Gabriel
and William Michael, was encouraged to develop an early love for art and literature
and to draw and write poetry from a very early age. When she was an adolescent, her
life changed dramatically: her father became a permanent invalid, the family's eco
nomic situation worsened, and her own health deteriorated. Subsequently she, her
mother, and her sister became intensely involved with the Anglo-Catholic movement
within the Church of England. For the rest of her life, Rossetti governed herself by
strict religious principles, giving up theater, opera, and chess; on two occasions she
canceled plans for marriage because of religious scruples, breaking her first engage
.
146 0 / CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
ment when her fiance reverted to Roman Catholicism and ultimately refusing to
marry a second suitor because he seemed insufficiently concerned with religion. She
lived a quiet life, occupying herself with charitable work?including ten years of
volunteer service at a penitentiary for fallen women?with caring for her family, and
with writing poetry. Rossetti's first volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), contains
all the different poetic modes that mark her achievement?pure lyric, narrative fable,
ballad, and the devotional verse to which she increasingly turned in her later years.
The most remarkable poem in the book is the title piece, which early established its
popularity as a seemingly simple moral fable for children. Later readers have likened
it to S. T. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and have detected in
it a complex representation of the religious themes of temptation and sin, and of
redemption by vicarious suffering; the fruit that tempts Laura, however, clearly is not
from the tree of knowledge but from the orchard of sensual delights. In its deceptively
simple style Goblin Market, like many of Rossetti's poems, demonstrates her affinity
