Rossetti, Christina. (1830 - 1894).
W o r k
- uses a distinctively female voice, opposes the conventional representation of women in the Pre-Raphaelite art (“In An Artist’s Studio”)
- combines sensuousness and her religious severity in ‘an aesthetics of renunciation’ = a poetry of negation, denials, and constraints
- reduces the self with a coy playfulness and sardonic wit x but: preserves for it a secret inner space (“Winter: My Secret”)
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862):
> “Goblin Market”:
- a seemingly simple moral fable x but: in a deceptively simple style
- accumulative in imagery, restless in rhythm, both rhymed and half-rhymed
- embroiders the spiritual message with the Romantic element of strangeness
- concerned with temptation, sin, and redemption by suffering
- climax: goblins force Lizzie to eat their seductive fruit, not from the Tree of Knowledge, but from an orchard of sensual delights, she resists
Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872):
- rhymes of direct simplicity, for children
The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866):
- poems of alliteration and assonance
> “The Prince’s Progress”:
- an allegory of the unhappy uncertainty of emotional commitment
A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
Quote
"When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me; / Plant thou no roses at my head, / Nor shady cypress tree: / Be the green grass above me / With showers and dewdrops wet; / And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget."
"Song: When I am dead" (1862).
Basics
(Picture: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Christina Georgina Rossetti. (1830 - 1894). British. -
Work
Poet. Author of Goblin Market (1862). -
Genres
Romanticism. Children's poetry. Devotional poetry. Personal poetry. Verse fable. Allegory.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.