with the early aims of the Pre-Raphaelite group, though her work as a whole resists
this classification. A consciousness of gender often leads her to criticize the conven
tional representation of women in Pre-Raphaelite art, as in her sonnet 'In an Artist's
Studio' (1896), and a stern religious vision controls the sensuous impulses typical of
Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting. Virginia Woolf has described the distinctive com
bination of sensuousness and religious severity in Rossetti's work: Your poems are full of gold dust and 'sweet geraniums' varied brightness'; your
eye noted incessantly how rushes are 'velvet headed,' and lizards have a 'strange
metallic mail'?your eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite inten
sity that must have surprised Christina the Anglo-Catholic. But to her you owed
perhaps the fixity and sadness of your muse. . . . No sooner have you feasted on
beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty
passes. Death, oblivion, and rest lap round your songs with their dark wave. William Michael Rossetti wrote of his sister, 'She was replete with the spirit of
self-postponement.' Christina Rossetti was a poet who created, in Sandra M. Gilbert
and Susan Gubar's phrase, 'an aesthetics of renunciation.' She writes a poetry of
deferral, of deflection, of negation, whose very denials and constraints give her a pow
erful way to articulate a poetic self in critical relationship to the little that the world
offers. Like Emily Dickinson, she often, as in 'Winter: My Secret' (1862) uses a coy
playfulness and sardonic wit to reduce the self but at the same time to preserve for it
a secret inner space. And like Dickinson, she wrote many poems of an extraordinarily
pure lyric beauty that made Virginia Woolf compare Rossetti's work to that of classical
composers: 'Your instinct was so sure, so direct, so intense that it produced poems
that sing like music in one's ears?like a melody by Mozart or an air by Gluck.'
Song
She sat and sang alway
By the green margin of a stream,
Watching the fishes leap and play
Beneath the glad sunbeam. I sat and wept alway
Beneath the moon's most shadowy beam,
Watching the blossoms of the May
Weep leaves into the stream.
.
A FTER D EATH / 146 1 10 I wept for memory; She sang for hope that is so fair: My tears were swallowed by the sea; Her songs died on the air. 1848 1862
Song
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:1
5 Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows,
io I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set, 15 Haply0 I may remember, perhapsAnd haply may forget.
1848 1862
After Death
