on the stroke of midnight christina rossetti

As her brother William recalls: ‘Her temperament and character, naturally warm and free, became a fountain sealed ’ (‘Memoir’, p. From this point on, she saw relatively little of society beyond her immediate circle of family and close friends, and adhered strictly to the tenets of her Anglican faith which was such a dominant influence on her life and work. She decided she would give up all pleasurable pastimes and amusements because she felt she delighted in them too much. Yet sometime during her mid-teens, she suffered an emotional or spiritual trauma that resulted in the permanent alteration of her character. She had a ‘passionate temper’ which during one quarrel with her mother resulted in her seizing a pair of scissors and ripping up her arm to vent her anger (Packer, p. Rossetti’s sister Maria, who entered the order of the All Saints Sisterhood in 1873, shared their father’s passion for Dante and their mother’s unswerving commitment to her Anglican beliefs, an inheritance which Christina, though outwardly no less pious, found more troubling.Ĭhristina was by all accounts a warm-hearted and outgoing, if somewhat temperamental, child, given to outbursts and tantrums. Her brothers, the editor and critic William Michael Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti the famous poet and painter, were founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Christina, born in 1830, was the youngest of the Rossetti’s four precocious children. Her mother, a governess, was the sister of Dr John Polidori, Byron’s physician-companion and author of The Vampyre (1819). Her father escaped from Naples in 1821 following the failure of a political uprising that sought to gain a constitution for the kingdom. Rossetti was the daughter of Gabriele Rossetti, patriotic poet, scholar and professor of Italian, and his half-Italian wife Frances Rossetti. Rossetti’s poems are rarely as straightforward as their simple surfaces might suggest and her use of traditional literary forms is frequently challenging and innovative. Her poetic output, which includes lyrics, narrative poems, ballads and sonnets, displays the range of a poet of considerable talent and ambition. As well as poetry and devotional prose, Rossetti wrote a number of stories for children. Yet this apparently self-effacing poet, who published her first work at the age of seventeen, was the first of the writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement to win critical attention.

Seemingly inward-looking, sentimental and deeply religious, Rossetti was presented for much of the twentieth century as a writer whose poems dealt primarily in private emotion, and who shunned the publicity of fame.

In the memoir which prefaced his 1904 edition of her poems, Rossetti’s brother William recalled that her social reticence and reserve was matched by an abhorrence of ‘display’: ‘Upon her reputation as a poetess she never presumed, nor did she ever volunteer an allusion to any of her performances: in a roomful of mediocrities, she consented to seem the most mediocre as the most unobtrusive of all’ (‘Memoir’, p. A devout and pious Anglican, she lived quietly and wrote over five hundred religious poems and several devotional prose works. Throughout her life Christina Rossetti cultivated an image of herself as a reclusive poetess. ‘When My Heart is Vexed, I will Complain’Īlphabetical List of First Lines Introduction ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children’ Song (‘Two doves upon the selfsame branch’)

On the stroke of midnight christina rossetti