Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints 9781472512321, 9781472593948, 9781472514769

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Place of Waiting
1. Attuned to the Voices of the Saints: Rossetti’s Devotional Heritage
2. Grace, Revelation and Wisdom: Early Poetry Including Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
3. Developing a Theology of Purpose: Poetry of the 1860s and Early 1870s, Including The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866)
4. Shaping a Poetics of Affect in A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
5. Maternity and Vocation: The Devotional Prose
6. ‘O hope deferred, hope still’: Shaping the Self through Verses (1893)
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Christina Rossetti and the Bible

Also Available from Bloomsbury Christina Rossetti’s Gothic, Serena Trowbridge Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare, Josie Billington Victorian Parables, Susan E. Colon

Christina Rossetti and the Bible Waiting with the Saints Elizabeth Ludlow

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Elizabeth Ludlow, 2014 Elizabeth Ludlow has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1232-1 PB: 978-1-350-00372-9 ePDF: 978-1-4725-1476-9 ePub: 978-1-4725-1095-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: The Place of Waiting 1 2 3 4 5 6

Attuned to the Voices of the Saints: Rossetti’s Devotional Heritage Grace, Revelation and Wisdom: Early Poetry Including Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) Developing a Theology of Purpose: Poetry of the 1860s and Early 1870s, Including The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866) Shaping a Poetics of Affect in A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) Maternity and Vocation: The Devotional Prose ‘O hope deferred, hope still’: Shaping the Self through Verses (1893)

Bibliography Index

vi vii 1 23 59 97 137 173 211 245 255

Acknowledgements I would first of all like to thank the staff at Bloomsbury Academic for seeing this book into print. Thanks also go to Emma Mason and Mark Knight for their input in this process. The ideas for this book come from my PhD and I am incredibly grateful to Emma Francis for her guidance as a supervisor and for her continued encouragement. I would also like to thank the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick for their support and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my postgraduate research. I am particularly grateful to the University of British Columbia for a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship, which enabled me to work with the Angeli-Dennis Collection and to complete some of the research that has gone into this book. Over the past year I have benefitted immensely from the encouragement of Karen Laird. I am also very grateful to Karl Persson for his helpful input and advice. Others I wish to thank include Katie Calloway, Jo Carruthers, John Holmes, James Houston, Gwyneth Jenkins, Paisley Mann, Kate Nichols, Mark Vessey, Emily Wingfield, Madeleine Wood and Danae Yankoski. I owe the biggest thanks of all to my parents, Sandra and Gordon Ludlow, to whom I dedicate this book. Completing it would not have been possible without their continued love and support. In Chapter 4 I include revised portions of work from my article ‘Christina Rossetti’s Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets (1881): Exploring the Fearfulness of Forgiveness’, which is published in Literature Compass, 11.2 (2014): 84–93. In Chapter 6 I include portions from my chapter ‘Christina Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Tractarians’, which is published in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, eds Jonathan Baker, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). I gratefully acknowledge the publishers for permission to reuse the material.

Abbreviations AD

Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year (London: James Parker & Co., 1874).

CP

Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump, notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers (London: Penguin, 2001).

CS

Called to Be Saints, The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (London: SPCK, 1881).

FD

The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (London: SPCK, 1892).

Letters

The Letters of Christina Rossetti, 4 volumes, ed. Antony H. Harrison (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997–2004).

LS

Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (London and Brighton: SPCK, 1883).

SF

Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (London: SPCK, 1879).

TF

Time Flies: A Reading Diary (London: SPCK, 1885).

WMR

The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with Memoir and Notes, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan & Co., 1904).

Following the pattern of Rossetti’s devotional prose, all the biblical passages I have quoted are, unless stated otherwise, taken from the King James Version and the Psalms are taken from the Book of Common Prayer.

Introduction: The Place of Waiting

‘The Lord,’ he says, ‘thus speaks by His prophet, My people shall hang on My return. It is well and properly said; shall hang, as it were, between heaven and earth. They are neither able to ascend to heavenly things, nor willing to descend to earth. The common proverb tells us, “It is ill waiting while one is hanging.” But I say, it is well waiting while one is so hanging. My soul chooses this suspension of its own free will, and only desires to hang on such a cross till it shall depart from the body.’ (John Mason Neale, Medieval Preachers and Medieval Preaching, 1856)1     Lord give us grace to tremble with that dove   Which Ark-bound winged its solitary way   And overpast the Deluge in a day,     Whom Noah’s hand pulled in and comforted: For we who much more hang upon Thy Love     Behold its shadow in the deed he did. (Christina Rossetti, ‘Seven vials hold Thy wrath’, 1892)2 But to wait is the most profound truth […] Existentially we see what to us is invisible, and therefore we wait. Could we see nothing but the visible world, we should not wait: we should accept our present situation with joy or with grumbling. (Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 1932)3

Through a devotional corpus that consists of hundreds of poems and six volumes of prose, Christina Rossetti’s concern that readers approach the biblical text with ‘fear and trembling’ is made manifest (2 Cor. 7.15). As a frequent participant in Anglo-Catholic ritual, Rossetti would have prayed the collect ‘help us to hear [the Scriptures], to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them’.4 In her first book of devotional prose, Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year (1874), she echoes these words in a collect of her own when she entreats Christ to ‘fill’ herself and her readers with ‘reverence […] for Thy most holy written Word’ (prayer 314). She asks that he would ‘give us grace to study and meditate in it, with prayer and firm adoring faith: not questioning its authority, but obeying its precepts and becoming imbued by its spirit’ (ibid.). By

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indicating the need to be ‘fill[ed]’ with ‘reverence’ and ‘grace’, she implies that it is only through the process of ingesting and ‘becoming imbued’ with the words of Scripture that she is able to write at all. Working with the conception that the main characteristic of the Tractarian approach to theology is that it is ‘practical’ rather than speculative, in that it calls people to salvation and a new life in Christ, Nicholas Lossky suggests how, for the leaders of the Oxford Movement, the precept of godly obedience takes precedence over any form of theological study.5 For them, there is no distinction between theology and spirituality. Mapping out how Rossetti enters into dialogue with the practical theology of Tractarianism, this book details her repudiation of the individualist enterprise that, she perceives, imprisons individuals in the material dimensions of the world and alienates them from the Communion of Saints, which is comprised of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. With an emphasis on her increasing investment in the interface between worship and writing, it also reveals her commitment to the doctrine of Apostolic Succession and to the past and present interpretative community in which she believes the Bible is best encountered and personhood understood. Detailed readings of the poetry and devotional prose that she produced between 1847 and 1893 reveal her engagement with classics that include Augustine’s Confessions (398 ce), Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitations of Christ (c. 1418–27), George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). My analysis also considers the resonances that emerge from a comparative survey of Rossetti’s theology alongside works by female medieval mystics including Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (1393) and St Teresa’s Interior Castle (1477). As the subtitle indicates, a key focus is on Rossetti’s treatment of waiting. As will become clear, an understanding of waiting as expectant hope shapes Rossetti’s vision of personhood and remains at the heart of her understanding of what it means to participate with and in the divine life. The first epigraph cited above is an extract from an Advent sermon by Guarric, Abbot of Igniac, a man described by Tractarian theologian John Mason Neale as a ‘common-place pious writer of the twelfth century’.6 Drawing on an everyday proverb, Guarric gives voice to the process that the saints undergo as they find their identity in Christ. By incorporating these words into his address to mid-nineteenth-century readers, Neale encourages them to enter the long tradition of meditating on what it means to wait attentively on God. The sestet of Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Seven vials’ articulates one such meditation. By figuring herself ‘with’ the dove (9) and by typologically interpreting Noah’s



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hand as Christ’s arms stretched out on the cross (12–14), the speaker conveys the dynamic relationship between man and God. While the imagery recalls the long tradition of interpreting the Ark allegorically, the speaker’s posture implies that faithful waiting involves an ongoing motion toward God and trembling awe in the recognition that Christ ‘hang[s]’ in her place (13).7 This is the kind of waiting that the early twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth describes as ‘the most profound truth’. Invoking an expansive apprehension of past devotional practices, Rossetti conceives of personhood in terms of this kind of existential waiting. For her, to read the Bible with the saints is to understand what it means to ‘hang upon’ Christ’s love and to enter the ‘new dimensional plane’ that, according to Barth, is ‘the boundary of our world and the meaning of our salvation’.8

Rossetti’s hermeneutic of piety Introducing Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Rossetti voices her hope that an acknowledgement of how ‘indebted’ she is ‘to the spoken or written works of many’ will shelter her from ‘charges of rashness and of plagiarism’ (CS, p. xvii). Her fear of ‘rashness’ corresponds with the Anglo-Catholic emphasis on the recognition that ‘no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation’ (2 Pet. 1.20) and on the warning given in Ecclesiastes that chasing after worldly knowledge is vanity (1.18).9 In exploring how an existential encounter with Scripture denotes awareness of the limit of human knowledge, she looks back to the Augustinian tradition of confessing ‘ignorance’ to the hidden things of God.10 Warning that interpreters of Scripture who are ‘puffed up’ are liable to self-destruction, she rehearses Augustine’s application of Paul’s warning that ‘knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth’ (FD, p. 549; 1 Cor. 8.1). Throughout his Confessions, Augustine records that his past self was too ‘swoln [sic] with pride’ to heed the way of Christ (III.v.9, p. 33) and too ‘puffed up with the novelty’ of Manichaeism to profit from the Bishop’s teaching (III.xii.21, p. 43). Taken up by medieval mysticism, this Augustinian insistence on the ignorance of the subject foregrounds Rossetti’s question ‘what is knowledge duly weighed?’ and her figuration of the self as a ‘royal cup’ or ‘nest’ waiting for divine occupation.11 As the chronological survey of this book reveals, Rossetti’s emphasis on the shaping of the self becomes increasingly accentuated throughout her writings. In her final and most ambitious book of devotional prose, The Face of the Deep:

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A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892), she draws on the precept of ‘meditative ignorance’ (FD, p. 286) in order to repudiate the late nineteenthcentury concern with the individualist enterprise and the project of Higher Criticism that sought to investigate the composition of the Bible through establishing dates, authors and sources. I contend that this repudiation can best be understood in the light of her engagement with the hermeneutic tradition that finds its touchstone in Augustine’s theology. In his book On Christian Teaching Augustine stresses the danger of valuing the Scriptures over the virtues of ‘faith and hope and charity’.12 Following his pattern of reasoning, Rossetti insists that ‘adding knowledge to knowledge’ is fruitless if ‘the one thing needful (see St. Luke x. 41, 42)’ is ignored (SF, pp. 197–8). Building on Augustine’s recognition of the words of Scripture as signs that a fallen humanity must interpret existentially rather than literally, she repeatedly stresses that what is ‘needful’ is a trembling spirit that obediently waits on God’s revelation of love. Although not perceiving the signifying words as holy in themselves, her writings invite believers to meditate carefully on the instruction given in Scripture and to respond in the context of the trans-historical and universal church community. Throughout Annus Domini, Rossetti foregrounds a Marian ‘prostration of heart and intellect’ (prayer 92) and warns against seduction ‘by miscalled reason, or apparent facts of science, or wit and learning of misbelievers, or subtilties [sic] of Satan’ (prayer 234). In Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879), she takes this warning further when she instructs: ‘let us not exercise ourselves in matters beyond our present powers of estimate, lest amid the shallows (not the depths) of science we shipwreck of our faith’ (p. 29). On a similar note, in her fourth volume of devotional prose, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883), she writes: ‘It is, I suppose, a genuine through not a glaring breach of the Second Commandment, when […] we protrude mental feelers in all directions above, beneath, around it, grasping, clinging to every imaginable particular except the main point’ (p. 85). Instead of ‘clinging to every imaginable particular’ and concerning themselves with such things as the ‘precise architecture of Noah’s Ark’ or the ‘astronomy of Joshua’s miracle’ (p. 86), she suggests that Christians should discern in the Bible a springboard for a revelatory encounter with the divine. By rejecting readings that are focused on grammatical and historical details, she indicates the hopelessness of knowledge compared with the power of revelation. Her Augustinian-inflected recognition of the allegorical and typological depth that can be garnered and applied to lived-experience resonates strongly with the Tractarian enterprise of reviving neglected aspects of Christian spirituality.



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Promoting a hermeneutic of piety, Rossetti repeatedly insists that reading the Bible with ‘fear and trembling’ means prayerfully acknowledging the centrality of ‘Jesus Christ, and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2.2). John Henry Newman expresses the characteristics of this approach in his comment that Christians should receive the Bible in a posture ‘altogether different from that critical and argumentative spirit which sitting and listening engender’.13 In Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), Rossetti’s suggestion that the Psalms should be read in ‘the light of Gospel perfection’ foregrounds the encounter with Christ that, like Newman, she sees as possible for the reader who adopts a posture of piety (p. 69). In The Face of the Deep she indicates how the hermeneutic of piety that she encourages enables recognition of ‘a thread of perfect sequence’ running throughout ‘the Divine Revelation, binding it into one sacred and flawless whole’ (p. 174). George Landow defines the Christological stress of the unity of Scripture in terms of biblical typology and typological symbolism. He explains: a type is an anticipation of Christ. Thus Samson, who sacrificed his life for God’s people, partially anticipates Christ, who repeats the action, endowing it with a deeper, more complete, more spiritual significance.14

Adding nuance to Landow’s assumption that the widespread use of typology throughout the nineteenth century is a result of Evangelical influence, G. B. Tennyson indicates that for the Tractarian leaders Isaac Williams and John Keble typology ‘was attractive precisely because it was patristic’.15 For them, he argues, it ‘was a department of Analogy’ and held as a ‘warrant for various kinds of non-Scriptural symbolism’.16 While there can be no doubt that the apostolic and patristic typological models of typology and analogy that the Tractarian leaders advocate shape Rossetti’s own hermeneutics, this book contends that an understanding of her engagement with how these models have been mediated over time needs to be taken into account if her theological acumen and her gestures beyond her immediate historical milieu are to be fully appreciated. To this end, the discussions that follow hold the apparent immediacy of Rossetti’s approach to devotional classics in tension with recognition of her commitment to a long devotional tradition of interpretation and appropriation. They also indicate how her engagement with biblical typology informs her treatment of temporality, divine revelation, personhood and the natural environment. In charting what he describes as the ‘eclipse of biblical narrative’ Hans W. Frei traces the epistemological shifts that radically altered hermeneutic practice from the late seventeenth century onwards. He argues that a straightforward

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imitation of the kind of typology that is based on moving through temporal structures is complicated following the recognition of ‘a logical distinction and a reflective distance between the [biblical] stories and the “reality” they depict’: This logical and reflective distance between narrative and reality increased steadily, naturally enough provoking a host of endeavours to bridge the gap. Not only did an enormous amount of inquiry into the factual truth (or falsity) of the biblical stories develop, but an intense concentration as well on their meaning and religious significance, whether factual or of some other sort.17

Frei’s contention is that, as a result of literal and historical interpretations, narrative-based typology ‘became discredited both as a literary device and as a historical argument’.18 Concurrent with this shift in epistemology, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski demonstrates how, whereas the account of ‘Israel saved from the Red Sea and led through the wilderness to Canaan was traditionally identified as a type of Christ’s deliverance of mankind from Satan through baptism’, the influence of John Calvin’s focus on typology and on elements of religious significance meant that in seventeenth-century devotional poetry the emphasis was instead on the Israelite’s experience as a correlative of the Christian’s.19 Considering how Rossetti engages with the continuation of these debates, this book details how her imaginative integration of the subjective self into the biblical schema dialogues with the long trajectory of Christian spirituality. In Medieval Preachers and Medieval Preaching (1856), John Mason Neale turns to seventeenth-century theology as a guide to approaching earlier writings. He encourages his readers to try for themselves whether ‘by a little study’ of the patristic and medieval writers whom the seventeenth-century divines ‘Andrewes, and Donne, and Cosin, had in their hearts and memories, their own discourses would not be improved’.20 Throughout the book, he criticises the detached approach to the Bible that developed in eighteenth-century Europe when the model of these men was forsaken. He remains adamant that the calendar of the church ‘is not the mere reciter of events which happened centuries ago, nor their expounder, nor, as the Puritans would have it, their improver’.21 Extending this argument, he explains how ecclesiastical ritual serves to set the events of Christ’s life forth before the eyes of man as if they were now happening; as if they were scenes in which we ourselves were taking a part; as if they were events occurring in our own times, and in which we bore a living interest. The Church would not represent to us the cycle of events in our LORD’S Life and Death, as if they had occurred, once for all, eighteen centuries ago; but would have us regard them as



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if they happened again and again every year, and were occurrences to which we should look forward, rather than look back.22

Investigating the renewed practice of looking forward together as a church community, Neale compares typical examples of early nineteenth-century exegesis with the mystical hermeneutical practices of medieval theologians. He notes that whereas With Bishop Horsley […] the Nativity is regarded as an event which occurred many centuries ago, in order that it might be ‘improved,’ and made matter of edifying discourse now; with Abbat Guarric it is a present reality; as present to himself as to the shepherds to whom the angels first announced the glad tidings of great joy which should be to all people.23

While we know that Rossetti read Neale’s volume and participated in AngloCatholic worship (see n.1, p. 18), her poetic vision often stands at odds with his emphasis on imagining oneself as a particular biblical character. A comparative reading of her poetry alongside the re-workings of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa in the Lyras and Tractarian hymnbooks accentuates this difference; rather than pray as the Virgin Mary or the shepherds, I suggest that she turns to God after the pattern they exemplify by their obedience. As a result, she re-envisions the contours of the subjective self. By registering her engagement with the forms of meditative engagement established by the Reformed Protestant tradition of finding biblical events and symbols located and re-enacted within the self (rather than locating the self within the biblical narrative), my discussion reveals how Rossetti moves beyond the pre-critical focus on the temporality of biblical narrative in a way that nonetheless maintains a commitment to the doctrine of divine inspiration.24 Offering detailed analysis of a number of her poems that focus on the scene of Christ’s crucifixion, I suggest how her concern is with the incorporation of the Passion into an understanding of personhood rather than with the incorporation of the self into the scene of the Passion. Lona Mosk Packer identifies aspects of the type of Protestant existentialism that is found in the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ‘peculiarly characteristic of Christina Rossetti’s religious outlook’.25 She describes these aspects in terms of an awareness of ‘the need for total commitment’ and a focus on the ‘relationship between faith and personal identity’.26 Over forty years later, Mary E. Finn’s book offers a reading of Rossetti’s lyric voice from a Kierkegaardian perspective. Extending the arguments of both Packer and Finn, this book suggests how the existentialist motifs that run through Rossetti’s

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writings can be understood to have more in common with Barth’s Trinitarianinflected vision of personhood and of the community waiting on God in the liturgy than they do with Kierkegaard’s focus on the existential crises of the lone individual. Rossetti’s understanding of the self-in-communion emerges throughout her composition of scriptural harmonies that conflate persons, temporalities and images. Tractarian cleric and theologian Isaac Williams’s A Harmony of the Four Evangelists (1850) provided her with a model.27 She rehearses Williams’s insistence that ‘our way of interpretation should come from Christ’ in her ‘Harmony on First Corinthians XIII’ by reading Paul’s elucidation of faith, hope and love alongside Christ’s words.28 She published this harmony in the parish magazine New and Old in 1879 and later revised it for inclusion in Letter and Spirit.29 In their discussion of its three-column structure, Mary Arseneau and Jan Marsh highlight ‘Rossetti’s characteristic attention to the ways in which the individual parts of a larger whole, in this case various books of the New Testament […] elucidate and illustrate each other’.30 They also observe that its attentiveness to structure foregrounds ‘evidence of a similar arrangement in Rossetti’s volumes of poetry’.31 Just as the New Testament comments on Christ’s fulfilment of the promises of the Old Testament, so too, they argue, does Rossetti use one text to comment on another, thereby encouraging readers to consider how, within her volumes of poetry, ‘individual poems, as well as the two sections of poetry, echo, explicate, and critique each other’. Terming this ‘intratextuality,’ they situate it as a branch of the intertextuality theorised by Genette.32 Arseneau extends the argument regarding Rossetti’s intratextual strategies further in her monograph Recovering Christina Rossetti (2004). This work has helpfully informed my own approach to both Rossetti’s investment in Incarnationalist theology and her engagement with the female community of which she was a part. Throughout this book, I return to Arseneau’s insights in the area of intratextuality as I explore the dialogue that is generated when Rossetti’s work is incorporated in and interpreted alongside accompanying pieces in devotional anthologies and contemporary periodicals. Alongside Arseneau’s monograph, Constance W. Hassett’s Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (2005) provides another astute piece of Rossetti scholarship. Throughout, Hassett registers how Rossetti ‘is always in conversation with work she admires’ and considers how her poems ‘often seem to be in patient conversation with themselves, considering their aesthetic options’.33 While Hassett focuses largely on Rossetti’s ongoing poetic conversation with Dante, Petrarch and her nearer contemporaries: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth



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Barrett Browning, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, my approach differs in its focus on Rossetti’s participation in the ongoing debates enacted in the devotional classics and the Tractarian anthologies with which she was familiar. It builds on Hassett’s recognition of the conversational tendencies of Rossetti’s poetics as it considers the dialogue she enacts with other texts and the interfaces that are established between her lyrics and the pieces alongside which they were published. In addition to considering the place of her devotional verse in journals including The Germ, The English Woman’s Journal, Macmillan’s Magazine and The Athenæum, I consider the dialogue it invokes when it is incorporated in edited collections of ancient and modern poetry and hymnody. These include Robert H. Baynes’s Lyra Anglicana (1864) and The Illustrated Book of Sacred Poetry (1867), and Orby Shipley’s Lyra Eucharistica (1863), Lyra Messanica (1864) and Lyra Mystica (1865). Introducing Lyra Apostolica (1836), the first Lyra and the model of the others that were to follow, Newman considers its objective ‘of startling, of rousing, of suggesting thought, and of offering battle, in the case of the Ancient Church’.34 G. B. Tennyson highlights the central place of verse for the Tractarians and reveals that the poetry of the leaders was ‘as much cause and symptom’ of the Oxford Movement as result.35 In her recent monograph, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (2012), Kirstie Blair takes this recognition further. Signalling the significance of poetry in ‘shaping and reflecting ritualist debates’, she describes how the Lyra Apostolica ‘set in motion a tradition whereby poetic anthologies were understood as weapons in a religious cause’.36 Keeping in mind their return to medieval models, my argument offers nuance to this idea of how the anthologies set a tradition ‘in motion’ and highlights the cross-historical conversations and past practices that they enact. Registering the lack in scholarship on Rossetti’s involvement with Tractarian anthologies, Blair demonstrates how a consideration of her poems that are included in ‘Orby Shipley’s firmly Anglo-Catholic collections’ reveals her ‘engagement with controversial issues central to Catholic understandings of form in faith, namely a reverence for the sacraments, expressed primarily through ritualistic structures’.37 While Blair’s monograph is groundbreaking in its interrogation of the interface between ritual and poetic form, its breadth allows for a close analysis of only two of the poems that Rossetti contributed to Lyra Eucharistica (1863). Extending these analyses, my study responds in detail to the ‘fundamental differences in attitude and technique’ that Linda Schofield perceives between Rossetti’s confessional poetry and the Tractarian poems found in both John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) and the Lyra Apostolica (1836).38 Moreover, by

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offering the first substantial analysis of Rossetti’s poems that were included in devotional anthologies, it investigates how she nuances Tractarian precept and raises interest in ‘the case of the Ancient Church’. As she engages with the long tradition of pious interpretation, Rossetti gestures out from the ritualist space of the ornately bound Lyras and from the intratextual structures of her own volumes to question the foundations of lived experience. Her gesture to the reader in sonnet 17 of Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets provides a particularly striking example of how she devises a theological aesthetic that situates the reader in the place of shared existential encounter. The speaker here abruptly stalls her lament over the ‘weary impatient patience’ of her lot with the question ‘Thus with myself: how fares it, Friends, with you?’ (CP, pp. 346–59: 17.14). This startling interruption not only alters the dynamic of the other sonnets in the sequence, but reaches beyond the page. The movement outwards is repeated again in the closing lines of the sequence when the speaker contemplates the possibility that ‘The dead may be around us […] Brimful of love for you and love for me’ (28.9, 14). Notwithstanding Isobel Armstrong’s recognition of the difficulties in assimilating Victorian poetry to the Bakhtinian model, Rossetti’s sonnet can be seen in part to gesture towards Bakhtin’s description of ‘living conversation’: ‘The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer and word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction.’39 Alongside the words of one pilgrim challenging her ‘Friends’ on their journey of faith, Rossetti’s incorporation of the words of Christ in her devotional poetry gives an added dimension to this ‘living conversation’. Sara Choi attends to this when, in reading Rossetti’s devotional poetry through the lens of the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, she draws attention to its creation of a ‘two-way, dialogical model of communication between speaker and listener – intertext and text’.40 When Rossetti’s words are incorporated into the different print mediums of secular periodical and devotional anthology, new interfaces emerge that push the boundaries of Bakhtinian dialogism still further and accentuate the difficulties that Armstrong identifies. In addition to taking forward Arseneau and Marsh’s comments on Rossetti’s intratextual interpretative strategies, the chapters that follow build on both Kathryn Ledbetter’s recognition of how poems in periodicals become ‘cultural commodities enmeshed in contexts that create meanings for their readers’ and Linda Hughes’s call for an expansion of the Bakhtinian confines ‘as concerns the binary between the novel as artistic genre and other artistic genres’.41 Adding to the helpful insights that Lorraine Janzen Kooistra offers in Christina Rossetti and Illustration (2002), my analysis



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pays particular attention to Rossetti’s engagement with different audiences including Anglican clerics and theologians, the discriminating middle-class readership targeted by The English Woman’s Journal and the working-class readers that the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) hoped to reach with its cheaper publications.42

Negotiating the ‘Up-Hill’ path Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come. (CP, pp. 59–60)

Rossetti composed ‘Up-Hill’ in 1858. In Hughes’s estimation, it reached over 20,000 readers when it was first published in Macmillian’s Magazine in 1861.43 It was afterwards incorporated as the final item in the series of non-devotional poems that Rossetti included in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Within the next three months, it appeared in several review articles including ones in The English Woman’s Journal, The Saturday Review and The Eclectic Review.44 Unsurprisingly, Rossetti became tired of the numerous requests for the poem and, in a letter to her brother Dante Gabriel, expressed pleasure at being asked for something that is ‘mine [i.e. over which she held copyright], instead of for Uphill or the Birthday’ (Letters 249: 18 January 1865). As an introduction to the concerns of this monograph, the paragraphs below investigate how the

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible

‘living conversation’ of ‘Up-Hill’ resonates with its different print contexts and considers how its intimation of the dialogic movement foregrounds Rossetti’s approach to the Bible. Considering the poem’s momentum, I explain how its question-and-answer structure works as a helpful lens through which to consider Rossetti’s devotional corpus. In 1895 Christabel Coleridge wrote a review of Rossetti’s writings for the young Anglican readers of The Monthly Packet, a journal she had recently begun to edit. As the ‘one poem that stands alone’, she praises ‘Up-Hill’ for ‘its strong and patient voice [that] appeals to many who see no open vision, and for whom the Love Angel still wears his pilgrim’s garb’.45 More recent criticism of ‘Up-Hill’ considers the lack of ‘open vision’ as less of an inclusive gesture than as an obstacle. While Armstrong points to the ‘dogged, trudging exhaustion’ that emerges out of the poem’s insistence on seeing ‘the process of life […] rigorously in terms of its termination’, Hassett focuses on its haunting qualities.46 She suggests that, along with ‘Winter: My Secret’, the success of ‘Up-Hill’ is grounded in how Rossetti’s apparently artless questioners ‘manage to perplex the issues they raise and keep interest alive long after their poems have closed’.47 Responding to a number of diverse readings, Arseneau comes closest to echoing Coleridge’s emphasis on the poem’s provision of a helpful, if not positive, message. She argues that the ‘doubleness of the poem’s meaning, its suggestive evocation of what is finally unstated an unknowable, is the direct product of Rossetti’s practice of reserve’.48 As practised by the Tractarians, this principle promotes an understanding that God reveals himself to the committed seeker through indirect means.49 Extending Arseneau’s reading of ‘Up-Hill’ as an embodiment of this principle, I suggest that, in addition to communicating its truth ‘according to the capacity of the individual’, 50 the poem’s power comes from its acute awareness of the difficulties of living in a fallen world and from the gestures it makes beyond its own immediate frame of reference. Just as it resonates in diverse ways in different individuals, so too do different print contexts inform particular interpretations. In her introduction to The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010), Hughes argues that, when ‘Up-Hill’’s aptitude in keeping the reader’s interest alive is mapped on to a consideration of its first appearance in the periodical press, new interpretative spaces are opened up. She writes: ‘the relentless secularism surrounding the poem challenges the primacy it allots to mystery and eschatology, and introduces competing visions of what matters most in existence’.51 Extending this assessment, I contend that attention to a wider publication context challenges the apparent ‘secularism’ of the single journal issue and brings the uncertain questions of ‘Up-Hill’ into the ongoing



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religious debates with which Macmillan’s Magazine was concerned. With this wider framework in mind, the poem can be understood to offer not only ‘competing visions’ but also input into the increasingly antagonistic arguments regarding the nature of truth. In 1863, Alexander Macmillan agreed to print Charles Kingsley’s denouncement of John Henry Newman that brought their decade-long argument to a head and set in motion the process leading to the publication of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). As the chapters that follow reveal, Rossetti’s continued engagement with the long battle between the two clerics over questions of celibacy, ecclesiastical tradition and sainthood can be traced in her treatment of martyrdom and early church practices. What has not yet been fully appreciated is that, by contributing poems to high-profile periodicals that provided a space where theologians could address issues of truth and revelation, she brings her poetic voice into contact with the huge range of perspectives that the periodical press brings together. If the debates that the poem enters into in its periodical form are to be appreciated, then the effect of formatting needs to be taken into account. Of all the different publication contexts of ‘Up-Hill’, the version in Macmillan’s Magazine is the only one to use double columns. Consequently, the poem’s questions and answers are linked together by their spatial proximity. Running across the page, the final lines of the first and third and the second and fourth verses are associated. The reader’s eyes are drawn especially to the final lines of the second and fourth verses. In the second verse, the addressee – whether it be Christ, a guiding angel or a fellow pilgrim – responds to the speaker’s anxious enquiry by reflecting the question and offering the terse and enigmatic reply ‘You cannot miss that inn’ (8). In the penultimate line of the fourth verse, the object of the speaker’s anxiety is modified. Instead of expressing a concern about herself only (‘Shall I meet’ [9]; ‘Then must I knock’ [11]; ‘Shall I find’ [13]), she incorporates a concern for the other wayfarers: ‘Will there be beds for me and all who seek?’ (15). By reflecting the question in the affirmative, ‘Yea, beds for all who come’ (16), the addressee gestures to the community and overlooks the questioner’s own distinction between ‘me’ and ‘all’. While Jerome McGann’s project of bringing to Rossetti scholarship a restored ‘historical perspective’ is important, his reading of the speaker’s desire for ‘beds’ in terms of Rossetti’s commitment to the Anabaptist doctrine of ‘soul sleep’ is not so convincing.52 By using the imagery of beds, I suggest it is more likely that Rossetti is simply extending the symbolic environment. For the ‘travel-sore and weak’ up-hill climber, what can be more necessary than sleep? Moreover, in the context of its central place in Goblin Market and Other Poems, the reference to

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible

beds recalls Dante Gabriel’s title page, which depicts Lizzie and Laura sleeping in each other’s arms while the dream bubble in the background offers a vision of the steep hill populated by the dangerous goblin men. The significance of McGann’s 1983 article is witnessed by the flurry of contextualisations of Rossetti’s devotional verse that it initiated. Over the last thirty years, the tensions and the unsettling and ambiguous elements of ‘Up-Hill’ have been repeatedly analysed. Little, however, has been done to consider the different resonates that the biblical echoes and allusions carry when the poem is read in diverse contexts. Notwithstanding the ambiguity of the poem, the biblical echoes of ‘Up-Hill’ provide entry into an interpretative frame that reveals the eschatological comfort in the uncertain promise: ‘Of labour you shall find the sum’ (13). In addition to invoking Revelation’s promise of rest from labour (14.13), the poem recalls the book’s image of the open door (3.20). In her reading, Hughes registers other biblical references. These include Jesus’s promise ‘Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you’ (Matt. 7.7) and the bleak question and answer in Ecclesiastes where the response to the question, ‘What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun’, is ‘nothing’ (1.3).53 Keeping in mind the poem’s halting movement from a concern for the individual to a concern for the community, I contend that, while the content invokes various biblical allusions, the dynamics of the form can be aligned with George Herbert’s dialogue poems. Rossetti’s admiration of Herbert can be traced back to the manuscript note of 1844 where she records that her poem ‘Charity’ is ‘imitated from the beautiful little poem “Virtue” by George Herbert’ and from the inscription of two of Herbert’s poems, ‘Misery’ and ‘Virtue’, in her mother’s commonplace book in 1845.54 Diane D’Amico records that at this time Rossetti ‘may also have been familiar with Herbert’s “Peace” since, in December 1844, her brother William gave her his copy of The Sacred Harp, a collection of religious verse that includes this poem’.55 Also considering Rossetti’s early reading of Herbert, David A. Kent indicates how ‘his influence on her was seminal and formative’.56 The continued presence of Herbert’s poetry in the formation of Rossetti’s theology and poetic practice is, nonetheless, a subject that continues to be largely overlooked in favour of a focus on the Tractarian influence. Revealing how Rossetti approaches issues of temporality, I argue that the dialogue in her poetry can be understood in a framework of diachronic movement rather than merely synchronic linearity. Although I maintain the importance of situating Rossetti within the long devotional tradition of interpretation and appropriation, I also reveal how Wai Chee Dimock’s recognition



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of literature as unsettling – in that ‘it holds out to its readers dimensions of space and tie so far-flung and so deeply recessional that they can never be made to coincide with the synchronic plane of the geopolitical map’ – is particularly applicable to kind of devotional reading in which she participates.57 As Chapter 1 reveals, Rossetti renders the 200-year time difference between Herbert and herself secondary to recognition of their shared fellowship in the Communion of Saints. Throughout her poetry, Rossetti imitates Herbert’s recognition of the Psalter as a blueprint for devotional poetry. Theologian Harold Fisch argues that Psalms should not be read as monologues but ‘insistently and at all times [as] dialoguepoems, poems of the self but of the self in the mutuality of relationship with the other’.58 The closing lines of ‘Up-Hill’ fit this description and point to Rossetti’s devotional verse, which chimes with the Psalms and their poetic legacy more fully. As a participant in Anglo-Catholic worship, Rossetti would have read through the Psalter each month and participated in the liturgical chanting of antiphons. This liturgical practice brings to the fore the dialogic basis of the Psalter and the place of the individual in a community that reads together. As the later chapters of this book demonstrate, Rossetti’s devotional writings are particularly timely in their intervention into this community which, after the publication of The Christian Year, maintained a hunger for texts that foster personal devotion. Reviews in the periodical press indicate how publications of Rossetti’s books were significant for groups of Victorian readers both inside and outside of the church. The reviewer of Goblin Market and Other Poems in The English Woman’s Journal accentuates the elements of dialogue of ‘Up-Hill’ when she places it alongside another question-and-answer poem, ‘A Bruised Reed Shall He Not Break’. She distinguishes the two poems by noting that the first is from the ‘earlier or “profane” half ’ of Goblin Market and Other Poems and the other ‘from what are called Devotional Pieces’.59 Translating Nicholas Dames’s comment that the reviewer’s inclusion of a long excerpt from the Victorian novel ‘offers a reading experience in miniature’ on to a consideration of poetry reviews means recognising how the inclusion of the two poems call upon the intratextual interpretative strategies that the volume in its entirety demands.60 This dynamic is completely altered in The Eclectic Review when the reviewer cites five poems from the volume out of order. By inserting ‘Up-Hill’ after two devotional poems and by framing it by his own comments, he calls for recognition of the ‘serious intensity’ that, he claims, permeates the ‘fanciful little thing’.61 Moreover, by altering the formatting, he removes from the poem some

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible

of its uncertainty. His decision to print ‘Up-Hill’ with italics and speech marks is curious considering that these features are used neither in the first published version of ‘Up-Hill’ in Macmillan’s Magazine nor in Goblin Market and Other Poems. While the italics exemplify the shifting metrical pace of the poem, they also represent the disjunction between the different voices. The opening and closing speech marks distance the content of the poem from what comes before or after and thereby establish, along with the reviewer’s comments, an entirely different interpretative space. Encountering the poem within the intratextual economy of the volume means recognising that, while its final lines invoke the finality of death, they simultaneously point forward to the renewed vision of personhood offered throughout the ‘Devotional Pieces’ that follow. In this context, the transitional ‘up-hill’ movement towards spiritual apprehension that the poem represents recalls the Psalter’s dynamic structure. Investigating this structure, Fisch responds simultaneously to the indications of cultic practice that formalist theologians Sigmund Mowinckel and Hermann Gunkel find in the Psalms and to the Protestant focus on aspects that speak of a personal relationship with God. Bridging the two approaches, he suggests that the Psalms not only ‘move from the “I” to the “We” [but they] also move back again, thus preserving the full interior quality of the “I”’.62 Locating Rossetti’s poetry within this dynamic means recognising how the apparently simple dichotomy between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ is complicated. Continuing to interrogate how Rossetti echoes the syntax and cadences of the Bible, the analysis in each of the chapters that follow reveals her acute awareness of translation practices and linguistic instability.

Chapter synopsis Continuing to investigate Rossetti’s approach to issues of temporality, Chapter 1 of this book surveys how her hermeneutic of piety is informed by ancient, medieval, seventeenth-century and contemporaneous devotional classics. Paying particular attention to her treatment of the doctrines of the Real Presence and Apostolic Succession, it indicates how Rossetti situates her approach to the Bible within a broad awareness of the practices of Christian worship. Through close readings of a number of poems, I draw attention to her use of the Psalms as a model of poetry and outline the influence of metrical Psalters and seventeenth-century Protestant poetics on her deployment of the lyric voice. Concluding, I extend an awareness of Rossetti’s poetic delineations



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of the historical church through an analysis of the influence of Augustine on her conception of personhood. The five subsequent chapters build on the first chapter’s analysis of how Rossetti’s theological vision is rooted in a long devotional heritage. Chapter 2 uses Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) as the basis for a reading of Rossetti’s early engagement with the expressions of desire in the Solomonic books of the Old Testament and with the monastic tradition that prioritises the role of contemplation. After analysing how she treats the process of re-ordering desire in the poems of her adolescence, I suggest how she articulates an increasingly appreciative understanding of the created world in her contributions to the second of the four issues of the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ (1850). I conclude the chapter by indicating how her convent poems engage with aspects of medieval and early modern theology, hagiography and Continental Roman Catholicism. In Chapter 3, I continue to trace Rossetti’s engagement with medieval devotion in both an analysis of the inclusion of her poetry alongside ancient and patristic pieces in seminal Tractarian anthologies and a discussion of her poetic delineations of the doctrine of theosis or ‘divinisation’. I argue that throughout The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), her insistent message is that a purposeful life comes as a result of embracing the grace-driven movement from selfishness to self-possession and then from self-oblation to glory. Chapter 4 extends recognition of Rossetti’s engagement with the dynamic process of moving from life to eternity as it considers the theological vision of A Pageant and Other Poems (1881). After discussing her representation of the re-alignment of desire in Monna Innominata, I focus on how the poems that Rossetti includes in the second half of the volume appropriate the parable of the prodigal son and affirm its relevance for an understanding of female experience. Through a loosely chronological reading of Later Life, the final part of the chapter considers how Rossetti experiments with the formulae of the sonnet sequence in order to assess the emptiness and apathy of the ‘later life’ of the nineteenth-century from a perspective of hope. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the devotional writings of Rossetti’s maturity. The first part of Chapter 5 begins by discussing how her devotional prose treats issues of femininity and vocation. Adding to previous criticism, I focus particularly on how Rossetti contributes to the Tractarian project of recovering the voices of the Caroline Divines Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor. Taking this focus forward, I situate Rossetti’s assessment of the place of the Virgin Mary in the context of her engagement with the principles of Apostolic Succession

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible

and with the doctrine of theosis. Chapter 6 focuses on Verses (1893) and traces how Rossetti’s mature poems detail an awareness of what it means to find an authentic personhood in Christ. Focusing particularly on her astute awareness of her growing audience, I suggest how Rossetti enacts the movement out from church liturgy and into issues of lived Christian experience. Concluding, I suggest how the volume exemplifies her vision of what it means to wait with the saints for a revelatory encounter with God.

Notes John Mason Neale, Medieval Preachers and Medieval Preaching (London: J. & C. Mozley, 1856), p. xlix. Rossetti indicates her familiarity with this volume in Time Flies (1 December: pp. 229–30). 2 Christina Rossetti, ‘Seven vials hold Thy wrath,’ CP, pp. 389–90: 9–14. 3 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns [1932] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 314–15. 4 ‘The Second Sunday in Advent: The Collect’, The Book of Common Prayer (1662), http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp (accessed 5 August 2013). 5 Nicolas Lossky, ‘The Oxford Movement and the Revival of Patristic Theology’, in From Oxford to the People, ed. Paul Vaiss (Hertfordshire: Gracewing, 1996), pp. 76–83 (77–8). 6 Neale, Medieval Preachers, p. xxiv. 7 For instance, see St Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. G. R. Evans (London: Penguin Books, 2003), XV, 26, pp. 643–4. 8 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 45. 9 For instance, see John Henry Newman’s warning against the abuse of ‘private judgment in matters of doctrine’. ‘The Apostolic Christian’, Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day [1843] (2nd edn; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902), pp. 275–92 (292). Newman Reader. National Institute for Newman Studies, http://newmanreader.org (accessed 2 September 2013). 10 The Confessions of St Augustine Revised from a Former Translation, trans. Edward Pusey (Oxford: John Henry Parker; London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1843), XI [XXII].28, p. 240. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text as Confessions, followed by book, part, section and/or page number. 11 ‘The Convent Threshold’, ‘A Better Resurrection’, ‘After Communion’, CP, pp. 55–9, 62, 222. 12 St Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1.39.43, p. 5. 1



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13 John Henry Newman, Letters and Diaries, V: Liberalism in Oxford: Jan 1835–Dec 1836, ed. Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 46. Newman Reader. National Institute for Newman Studies, http://newmanreader.org (accessed 10 September 2013). 14 George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought (Boston, MA and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 22. 15 G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 146. 16 Ibid., pp. 146, 147. 17 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermenutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 6. 19 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 134. 20 Neale, Medieval Preachers and Medieval Preaching, p. lxxvii. 21 Ibid., italics in the original. 22 Ibid., pp. lvii–lviii. 23 Ibid., p. lx. 24 The distinction that I make between applying the self to the subject and the subject to the self is outlined in Chapter 3 and based on the argument given in Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 149. 25 Lona Mosk Packer, ‘The Protestant Existentialism of Christina Rossetti’, Notes and Queries, 209 (1959): 213–15 (213). 26 Ibid. 27 In her prefatory note to Seek and Find, Rossetti records, ‘In writing the following pages, when I have consulted a Harmony it has been that of the late Rev. Isaac Williams’ (SF, p. 3). 28 Isaac Williams, Thoughts on the Study of the Holy Gospels, Intended as an Introduction to a Harmony and Commentary (London: Rivingtons, 1842), p. 146. 29 New and Old, 7 (January 1879): 34–9. The commentary is reprinted in full in Mary Arseneau and Jan Marsh, ‘Intertextuality and Intratextuality: The Full Text of Christina Rossetti’s “Harmony on First Corinthians XIII” Rediscovered’, Victorian Newsletter, 88 (1995): 17–26 (23–5). 30 Arseneau and Marsh, ‘Intertextuality and Intratextuality’, p. 21. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Constance W. Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), pp. 1, 2.

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34 Lyra Apostolica, ed. John Henry Newman (2nd edn; London: Rivingtons, 1879), p. vii. 35 Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, p. 8. 36 Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 214. 37 Ibid., p. 211. 38 Linda Schofield, ‘Being and Understanding: Devotional Poetry of Christina Rossetti and the Tractarians’, in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 301–21 (301). 39 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 14; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michel Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 280. 40 Sara Choi, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Dialogical Devotion’, Christianity and Literature 53:4 (2004): 481–94 (486). 41 Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 1; Linda K. Hughes, ‘Media by Bakhtin/Bakhtin Mediated’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 44.3 (2011): 293–7 (295). 42 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 147. 43 Linda K. Hughes, ‘What the Wellesley Index Left Out: What Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 40.2 (2007): 91–125 (93); Macmillan’s Magazine, 3.16 (February 1861): 325. 44 ‘Goblin Market and Other Poems’, The English Woman’s Journal, 9 (May 1862): 206–8 (207); ‘Goblin Market and Other Poems’, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 13.343 (May 1862): 595–6; ‘II. Miss Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862)’, The Eclectic Review, 2 (June 1862): 493–9. 45 Christabel Coleridge, ‘The Poetry of Christina Rossetti’, The Monthly Packet, 89 (March 1895): 276–82 (281). 46 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, p. 363. 47 Hassett, Christina Rossetti, p. 57. 48 Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 111–12. 49 The principle is explored in Isaac Williams’s discussion, ‘On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge’ (1838–9), published in Tracts 80 and 87 of the Tracts for the Times. 50 Ibid. 51 Linda K. Hughes, The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 11.



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52 Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti’, Critical Inquiry, 10.1 (1983): 127–44 (131, 133). 53 Hughes, The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry, p. 9. 54 Diane D’Amico, ‘Reading and Rereading George Herbert and Christina Rossetti’, John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne, 4:2 (1985): 270–89 (275). 55 Ibid. 56 David A. Kent, ‘“By Thought, Word, and Deed”: George Herbert and Christina Rossetti’, in Kent (ed.), The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, pp. 250–73 (257). Offering an overview of the renewed interest in Herbert in the 1850s, Kent explains the different editions of his poetry that were available and notes that ‘it was the [William] Pickering edition that found its way into the Rossetti household’ (p. 255). 57 Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Literature for the Planet’, PMLA, 116.1 (2001): 173–88 (175). 58 Harold Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 108. 59 ‘Goblin Market and Other Poems’: 206. 60 Nicholas Dames, ‘On Not Close Reading: The Prolonged Excerpt as Victorian Critical Protocol’, in The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), pp. 11–26 (13). 61 ‘II. Miss Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862)’: 495. 62 Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose, p. 115.

1

Attuned to the Voices of the Saints: Rossetti’s Devotional Heritage

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. (Rom. 8.15–17)

Christina Rossetti’s ‘aesthetic mysticism’ forms the subject of an essay that Alice Law contributed to the Westminster Review in 1895.1 Law claims to perceive ‘in all’ Rossetti’s work ‘the medieval heroine herself looking out at us, from an almost cloistered seclusion, with sad patient eyes’; she is, Law writes, ‘consciously or unconsciously […] her own medieval heroine’.2 This image of Rossetti as a secluded mystic whose musings on the world emerge from an otherworldly vantage point characterises the reviews of her poetry in the late Victorian periodical press. In the 1888 piece that she wrote for Oscar Wilde’s Woman’s World, Amy Levy uses the imagery of ‘A Birthday’ to convey the impression that Rossetti ‘is at one moment intensely human, intensely personal; at another, she paddles away in her rainbow shell, and is lost to sight as she dips over the horizon-line of her halcyon sea’.3 William Michael Rossetti perpetuates this popular image of Rossetti composing poetry that flits between expressions that are ‘intensely personal’ and ineffable when, in the 1904 preface to his edition of her poetry, he describes her work more in terms of emotional outpouring than with any intellectual engagement with sources: Theology she studied, I think, very little indeed: there was the Bible, of which her knowledge was truly minute and ready, supplemented by the Confessions of Augustine and the Imitation of Christ. She also knew and liked Pilgrim’s Progress. I question whether, apart from this one book of Augustine, she ever read any ‘Father’, Latin or Greek, or desired to read him. (WMR, p. xlix)

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While Antony Harrison recognises that William Michael was ‘simply wrong – or at least significantly misguided’ when he describes his sister’s lack of critical acumen in poetic composition, this book demonstrates that he was also wrong or misguided in equating her meditative approach with mystical otherworldliness rather than with theological aptitude.4 From Rossetti’s devotional writings and letters, we learn that she did study significantly more than a ‘little’ theology and that she not only ‘liked’ but engaged intellectually with St Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397–8), Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418–27), and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Building on the scholarship of the last thirty years, my analysis reveals that, rather than a ‘medieval heroine’, Rossetti can more appropriately be described as a creative theologian concerned with bringing her perception of God’s love and justice to an ‘arrogant England’ that she perceived as increasingly enmeshed in consumerism and imperialism (FD, p. 422). Commenting on Rossetti’s ‘cultural literacy’, Mary Arseneau draws attention to her scholarly acumen: she read in English, Italian, German, and French; knew Italian poets […] and read the important poets, novelists, and critics of her century including Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Scott, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Barrett Browning, Browning, Tennyson, and many more. Her letters also make clear that she was a tireless reader of periodicals […] As an adult she approached Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenser as a scholar, spending innumerable afternoons at the British Museum.5

Although it is not clear how many ancient and patristic texts Rossetti read in their entirety, we know that anthologies and collections such as John Mason Neale’s Medieval Preachers and Medieval Preaching (1856) provided her with knowledge of various forms of ancient and medieval exegesis. In addition to contributing to and possessing several of the Lyras, Rossetti wrote for other collections and anthologies. The popularity of these volumes meant that they were central to the consolidation and dissemination of Tractarian precept. The interpolation of poetry with exegesis indicates the central place of verse in the Movement’s self-articulation. Chapter 3 of this book considers Rossetti’s significant contribution to one such volume: John Mason Neale and Richard Frederick Littledale’s four-volume Commentary on the Psalms (1869–83). Despite the recent surge in Rossetti scholarship, this contribution has not previously been registered and, apart from the analysis offered in Kirstie Blair’s recent monograph, her affinity with anthologised collections remains largely neglected.6 Notwithstanding



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the helpful article by Andrew Maunder and book by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, more work on the periodical publication of Rossetti’s verse needs to be done in light of the recent wave of scholarship in this area and the new digital accessibility of the journals and volumes for which she wrote.7 Responding to critical gaps and bringing to light the key place of religious debates in the periodical press, this chapter explores Rossetti’s intervention into Victorian literary and devotional spaces and highlights her strong awareness of different audiences. Rossetti’s devotional writings are particularly timely in their contribution to the second phase of the Oxford Movement, which saw a greater (and less contentious) emphasis on ritual and the publication of anthologies that included ancient, medieval and modern poetry. By using the devotions offered in the Lyras as a springboard for her own developing hermeneutic, I suggest how Rossetti not only disseminates but also helps to shape what A. M. Allchin terms the Tractarian ‘perception that we need to be freed from the temporal parochialism which shuts us up in the assumptions of our own particular era.’8 E. Milner-White comments on this perception in his recognition that, by ‘freely accepting’ the outputs of ‘St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales, [and] Augustine Baker’, the Tractarian leaders were able to revive and transform the prayer life of England.9 An examination of what it means for ancient and medieval texts to be ‘freely accepted’ in the Victorian era opens up insights into the kind of trans-historical dialogue Rossetti sets up in her devotional writings and reveals the alternative perceptions of temporality that contemporaneous reading practices promote. The gestures across time that Rossetti makes in her poetry can be understood as indicative of a kind of existential apprehension. Following George Herbert’s sonnet ‘Prayer [1]’ – which speaks of how ‘Christ’s side-piercing spear’ (5) opens up the possibility of prayer in ‘The six-days world-transposing in an hour’ (6) – Rossetti articulates through poetry a vision of the a-temporal space in which she perceives the praying community.10 Echoing ‘Prayer [1]’s recognition of ‘Heaven in ordinary’ (11), she suggests – in Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets – ‘it may be that | This spot we stand on is a Paradise | Where dead have come to life and lost been found, | Where Faith has triumphed, Martyrdom been crowned’ (CP, p. 346–56: 10.2–4). Contemplating the possibility of incarnate grace entering the present temporal order, she repeatedly indicates that the human condition is best felt in the rhythms of liturgical practice. As Karen Dieleman demonstrates, liturgy shapes perceptions of personhood. Registering the ‘intersections between an individual’s participation in communal worship practices and his/her practices of writing’, she applies to

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her investigation Liam Corley’s recognition that ‘though directed toward the Other’, devotional reading involves ‘intense scrutiny of self and critical thinking about the actual world’.11 The discussion I offer in the first section of this chapter responds to Dieleman’s article and her recent monograph Religious Imaginaries (2012) as it investigates how Rossetti details intersections between liturgy and poetry. Assessing what it means for Rossetti to write in a devotional way, it details her engagement with the work of John Keble and demonstrates how she re-orientates the worshipper and investigates the nature of personhood. The next section then extends an appreciation of Rossetti’s engagement with the interface between liturgy and personhood with a close reading of two sonnets, ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ (1847) and ‘After Communion’ (1867). The third part details Rossetti’s poetic delineations of the historical church and considers the influence of Augustine, her foremost theological mentor. The remainder of the book builds on the overviews offered here and approaches each phase of Rossetti’s development as a theologian with full awareness of the interface between her devotional writings, the tradition of liturgical practice and the growing demand for material for personal devotion in the mid to late nineteenth-century print culture.

The lived experience of the liturgy My recognition of Rossetti’s engagement with Tractarian liturgical practice builds on the work of recent scholarship and continues to extend the path of enquiry that was consolidated thirty years ago by G. B. Tennyson in his project of aligning Rossetti’s poetry with ‘not Freud’s theory of art but Keble’s’.12 In their 2006 article, Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent discuss the breadth of scholarship that has arisen in the wake of Tennyson’s Victorian Devotional Poetry (1981) and consider how the illumination of Rossetti’s engagement with the doctrines of reserve and analogy has affected an understanding of her theology.13 As Rossetti scholarship continues, they suggest that her response to ‘other specific aspects of Tractarianism might also be explored’.14 To this end, they recognise the need for more work on her engagement with the ‘doctrine and debate within the Anglican Church regarding the Real Presence’ and on her ‘treatment of the Virgin Mary within the context of the Oxford Movement’s response to the mother of Jesus’.15 Heather McAlpine responds to their call for more work on Rossetti’s approach to the Real Presence in her article on aspects of the sacred and the grotesque in ‘Goblin Market’ when



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she considers how the poem treats sensory experience.16 Taking a different angle, I respond by indicating how Rossetti’s representation of the presence of the Real Presence, or of Christ’s resurrected body in the Eucharist, is predicated on her commitment to the doctrine of Apostolic Succession and to the teachings set out by the Church Fathers. I suggest that a deeper understanding of the interface between poetry, the liturgy and theological writings would mean that work on Rossetti’s engagement with Eucharistic doctrine could be undertaken with an increased sensitivity. As the discussion that follows reveals, establishing Rossetti’s investment in the liturgy involves attentiveness to how the central placing of the communion altar provides a context for interpreting the orientation of worship adopted by the speakers of her devotional verse. It also involves recognition of her awareness of the increasing demand for material for personal devotion that, after John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827), carries the rhythm of liturgy forward into lived experience. As I argue in Chapter 5, Rossetti perceives that a right devotional orientation that is shaped by obedience counters what she perceives to be the misdirection of Roman Catholic Mariology. Rossetti opens Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883) by calling on believers to adopt a devotional orientation before God and, in consequence, a hermeneutic of piety rather than a concern with doctrinal or historical controversy. Registering the potential for erroneous judgement, she emphasises that ‘our magnet’ of faith should yet point ‘aright’ (p. 11).17 To avoid disorientation, she underlines the importance of remaining within the church body. For her, this involves regular participation in liturgy and adherence to the doctrine of Apostolic Succession: ‘Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is One Lord.’ While ‘the Christian verity’ declares to us the Mystery of the All-Holy Trinity, ‘the Catholic religion’ asserts the inviolable Unity of the Godhead [Athanasian Creed]. And touching these two Mysteries, it seems that to grasp, hold fast, adore the Catholic Mystery leads up to man’s obligation to grasp, hold fast, adore the Christian Mystery; rather than this to the other. What is Catholic underlies what is Christian: on the Catholic basis alone can be Christian structure be raised; even while to raise that superstructure on that foundation is the bounden duty of every soul within the reach of the full Divine Revelation. (LS, pp. 8–9)

In accordance with Tractarian teaching, these lines voice the belief that it is only as a part of the sacramental communion of the universal and historical church that the possibility of ‘Divine Revelation’ can be realised. As this book

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demonstrates, Rossetti’s emphasis on reading the Bible prayerfully alongside the Communion of Saints – who exemplify the ‘Catholic Religion’ – is formative to her conception of the existential dimension of the liturgical practice into which she invites her readers to enter. According to Tennyson, devotional poetry is ‘that subset of religious poetry’ that exhibits ‘orientation toward worship and a linkage with established liturgical forms’.18 If this definition is extended to include Rossetti’s prose, then her contribution to the project of enabling readers to ‘grasp, hold fast, adore the Christian Mystery’ can be better understood. Rossetti’s description of the stability of faith that a commitment to the Athanasian Creed engenders chimes with a poem that Keble wrote for the Lyra Apostolica (1836). In this, he addresses the creed and stresses its propensity to orientate desire toward God: ‘Who knows but myriads owe their endless rest | To thy recalling, tempted else to rove?’19 Several years earlier, he had considered the importance of a disciplined approach towards the ecclesiastical communion in Tract 4 of the Tracts for the Times, ‘Adherence to the Apostolical Succession the Safest Course’ (1833). Newman rehearses and extends the lessons of this in Tract 74. Introducing the ‘Testimony of Writers’, he begins the Tract by clarifying the subject with which he is dealing: The doctrine in dispute is this; that CHRIST founded a visible Church as an ordinance for ever, and endowed it once for all with spiritual privileges, and set His Apostles over it, as the first in a line of ministers and rulers, like themselves except in their miraculous gifts, and to be continued from them by successive ordination […] to adhere to this Church thus distinguished, is among the ordinary duties of a Christian, and is the means of his appropriating the Gospel blessings with an evidence of his doing so not attainable elsewhere.20

Signalling the continuity of church teaching over time, Newman takes passages from the writings of Christian divines ranging from Bishop Bilson in the sixteenth century to Bishop Mant in the nineteenth. Later, in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), he fleshes out the apostolic basis for the coherence between these divines and the church of the present day. Evidence of Rossetti’s familiarity with many of the writers whom he cites, both in the Tract and the Apologia, is evident from a survey of her devotional prose. For instance, in Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), she draws on Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity to stress the significance of saints’ days (p. x), and refers to ‘[Charles] Taylor’s [1814] edition of ’ Augustin Calmet’s ‘vast elucidatory work’ (p. 320). In Letter and Spirit, she witnesses to the authority of other Anglican divines when she refers readers to Bishop Milman’s ‘The Love of the



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Atonement’ (p. 80) and to Bishop Moberley’s sermon on the First Beatitude (p. 116). As I demonstrate in Chapter 5, Time Flies and The Face of the Deep indicate her engagement with the theology of the foremost Caroline Divines, Jeremy Taylor and Lancelot Andrewes. Rossetti’s commitment to the Anglican Divines was fostered by her active membership of Christ Church, Albany Street (1843–76) and Christ Church, Woburn Square (1876–94). It is through these church connections that she established a close friendship with Henry W. Burrows (the perpetual curate of Christ Church, Albany Street between 1851 and 1878) and acquired a familiarity with contemporary ecclesiastical debate. Rossetti began attending the newly established church in Albany Street as a twelve year old, with her sister and mother. Situated at the heart of the Oxford Movement’s territory in London, it witnessed the changes that accompanied the most turbulent years of Tractaranism. William Dodsworth, the perpetual curate from 1837 until his secession to Roman Catholicism in 1850, was among the first of the clergy to promote full adherence to the doctrines set out by Tractarian leaders Newman, Keble and Pusey. In an account of the church in its early days, Burrows describes Dodsworth’s ‘zealous earnestness’ and outlines the changes that he initiated; many involved introducing aspects of ritualism that were counter-cultural, if not controversial, to an early Victorian audience.21 Along with Rossetti’s letters, unpublished material reveals the extent to which the Rossetti women were influenced by ritualist precept, and charts their response to the sermons that they heard at Christ Church and that they read in published form.22 Maria Rossetti’s letters provide testament to the keen engagement of the Rossetti women with Tractarian discourse. In one she wrote to her mother, Maria records her reaction to Newman’s discourse on God’s guiding presence in his 1836 volume of sermons and to Keble’s The Psalter; or, Psalms of David in English verse (1840): I have read part of Mr. Newman’s third volume; I pursued yesterday a sermon entitled ‘On a Particular Providence as revealed in the Gospel,’ which I am sure will please you as much as it does me. – Keble’s Version of the Psalms is truly excellent; I think I shall copy the 46th Psalm to shew [sic] you.23

Christina Rossetti’s copy of a rare first edition of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius (1866) and her composition of a memorial sonnet entitled ‘Cardinal Newman’ in The Athenæum following his death in August 1890 – where she remembers him as a ‘weary Champion of the Cross’ who ‘Chose love not in the shallows but the deep’ – indicates her ongoing engagement with his theology (CP, p. 584:

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1, 6).24 In the sermon Maria recommends, Newman focuses on the character of Hagar and demonstrates how the Scriptures reveal ‘God’s providential regard for individuals’.25 Aligning himself with his hearers, he concludes with the encouragement: ‘Let us endeavour, by his grace, rightly to understand where we stand, and what He is towards us; most tender and pitiful’.26 Rossetti’s own meditation in Called to be Saints on God’s ‘minute care’ for each individual, and her comment that ‘Hagar in need of comfort is as much Hagar to Him as to herself ’ indicates that she shared Newman’s concern with promoting a greater awareness of ‘God’s providential regard’ (CS, pp. 397–8). As Newman calls for believers to ‘endeavour’ to understand their identity in relation to God, so too does Rossetti’s work usher readers into an appropriate posture for adoration. An element of what Owen Chadwick describes as the ‘recognisable features’ of the ‘mind of the Oxford Movement’ can be glimpsed in reading Keble’s poetic translation of Psalm 46 alongside Newman’s sermon.27 In the preface to his metrical Psalter, Keble writes of his attempt to ‘throw light on the holy and divine Psalms themselves, and help us to read them in their Christian and practical sense’.28 This sense, he argues, is only available to the obedient since God’s ‘communications to mankind […] disclose, rather than exhibit, His dealings and His will’ and ‘keep Himself, to the generality, under a veil of reserve’.29 Emma Mason explains that according to the doctrine of reserve ‘God’s word, as evinced through the scriptures and related exegesis, should be available only to the faithful, and not to either unbelievers ill prepared to understand religious knowledge, or to Evangelicals who were considered too familiar with the mysteries of faith’.30 Keble’s Psalter reveals a commitment to this belief through its accentuation of God’s indirect disclosure of himself through liturgical practice. One of Keble’s main sources for his poetic renderings of the Psalms was the Coverdale Psalter, which is used in the Book of Common Prayer. In this, the final two verses of Psalm 46 are terse: ‘Be still then, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathen, and I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.’ Keble’s expansive rendering of these words into poetry draws on the pattern of the dialogic exchanges that are invoked in liturgical worship: “Silence—for th’ Almighty know Me;     “O’er the heathen thron’d am I, “Thron’d where earth must crouch below Me” – Lord of Hosts, we know Thee nigh:    God of Jacob, Thou art still our Rock on high.31



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By placing emphasis on the posture of adoration that God’s revelation of himself calls for, Keble fosters a sense of ‘fear and trembling’ at approaching his throne and stresses the relative littleness of man (2 Cor. 7.15). Moreover, by adapting the final verse in order that the worshippers address God rather than one another, he highlights the ‘Christian sense’ of the Psalm in its foreshadowing of the relationship with God that is made possible through Christ, the ultimate ‘Host’ and ‘Rock’. His poetic translation exemplifies how the Psalms provide a model for devotional verse in that they call on believers to re-assess their orientation towards a God who is ‘nigh’ and ‘high’. Keble’s Psalter emerges from a huge outlay of new metrical translations of the Psalms. Discussing the liturgical practices at Christ Church, Burrows speaks of the use of the new collections of Psalms and hymns in worship: ‘Mr. Dodsworth published one collection of Psalms and Hymns for Christ Church, and I another.’32 The edited volumes that Dodsworth and Burrows produce extend the type of communal worship promoted by the Old Version of the metrical Psalter by Sternhold and Hopkins (1562) and the New Version by Tate and Brady (1698). Dodsworth’s 1837 collection volume begins with an explanation that the Psalms that have been selected are those that that ‘seem best adapted to congregational singing’.33 Ending with a section entitled ‘Hymns Chiefly for Private Use’, he sets up an intratextual dynamic in order to establish an interface between public congregational worship and private devotional reading.34 Although Burrows’s 1864 hymnal is structured after the pattern of the church seasons and has the avowed purpose of congregational use, it also emphasises the transformation of the individual through private devotion. Its concern with bringing the lived experience of the individual into harmony with the liturgical calendar can be associated with what a fellow cleric described as Burrows’s tendency to foster ‘private devotional reading’.35 Throughout his sermons, Burrows looks back to the objectives of Keble’s The Christian Year and frequently cites verses and lines from the volume. With their emphasis on personal meditation and sacramental living and their interpolations of verse, Rossetti’s books of devotional prose share similarities with Burrows’s sermons and also register the interface between public and private models of devotion.36 The sermons that Dodsworth preached at Christ Church reinforce the place of liturgy in transforming the devotional imagination of the congregation. Arseneau notes that his 1847 sermon, ‘The Connection between Outward and Inward Worship’, ‘provides a sample of his teaching about sacrament and symbol which likely had a direct influence on Rossetti’s poetry’.37 Through this sermon,

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Dodsworth suggests what the contemporary church can learn from the Jewish Temple and the Temple service. He argues that, since the substance represented by Jewish ritual ‘is present to us and present with us’, believers should use outward ritual to embody an ‘outward expression of their inward perceptions of God’.38 He thereby authorises ritual while at the same time correcting the misapprehension that a concern with symbolism replaces a commitment to the amendment of individual lives. In Chapter 6, I reveal how Rossetti’s final volume, Verses (1893), engages with ongoing debates regarding the symbolism of the church space. Here, I want to survey how she draws on the liturgical and ritual practices of the 1840s as she enters into dialogue with her devotional heritage and with some of the most controversial aspects of Tractarianism. Tennyson suggests that the best way to understand Keble’s The Christian Year as a Tractarian work ‘is to see it in relation to the worship it was designed to enhance’.39 Blair does this with particular astuteness when she links its poetic dynamics to the outward ritual of the worshipper in the Tractarian church. She suggests that in ‘Trinity Sunday’ movement through time is ‘elided with movement through space, as the progress of the Christian year becomes metaphorically linked to the progress of a worshipper in a church towards the shrine’.40 In appropriating this movement inwards, the reader turns her heart towards the communion altar as she re-experiences the message of the Incarnation daily through verse. From her poetry of the 1840s, Rossetti enacts this movement of the heart’s fraught journey towards the altar, but also nuances Keble’s perspective. Rather than prescribing where the worshipper should direct her heart, she attends to the existential struggle of re-orientation and explores the circularity of religious experience and desire. In his ‘Advertisement’ to The Christian Year, Keble considers how the penitent re-orientates his heart towards communion with God and voices the hope that his readers will be enabled to bring their ‘own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with those exemplified in the Prayer Book’.41 The clear message that he and the other Tractarian leaders were disseminating in their Tracts, sermons and poems was that adherence to the Prayer Book was not simply a matter for public worship but was formative in shaping both ‘thoughts and feelings’ and an appreciation of the centrality of Scripture to lived experience. In the preface to Lyra Messianica (1864), Orby Shipley documents this concern with fostering personal devotion and notes how The Christian Year had engendered a ‘literary craving’ for religious poetry and had received ‘world-wide acceptance, wherever the English language is spoken’.42 The huge popularity of The Christian Year cannot be overemphasised; Edward



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Pusey notes that 109 editions were in existence by the end of the year following Keble’s death.43 Commenting on its status as a ‘runaway bestseller’, F. Elizabeth Gray draws attention to the fact that ‘as the nineteenth century – and the literary influence of Tractarianism – progressed, Keble himself became a poetic Father for countless women poets, a guarantor of the moral correctness of that poetry fashioned closely after his.’44 As the trajectory of this book demonstrates, Rossetti’s increasing confidence as poet and theologian meant that she was able to move a step further than many of Keble’s other poetic daughters and draw on aspects of the medieval breviaries upon which the Prayer Book was based, and which many, including her sister Maria, were translating during the second half of the nineteenth century.45 Through this, she extends Keble’s emphasis on disciplined pilgrimage in a way that legitimises feminine subjectivity and resonates with the concerns of the second phase of Tractarianism. Accounting for the widespread demand that Keble’s volume met, Joshua King surveys the concurrent changes that were happening in the literary marketplace and considers the increasing hunger for material for private reading. He suggests how The Christian Year ‘provided a means for imagining private and domestic acts of reading as ways of participating in a print-mediated, national religious community’.46 Detailing how the volume worked to train habits of interpretation and counter the ‘feverish thirst after knowledge’ that resulted from the increasing circulation of periodicals, he considers its attempt to ‘translate into the private reading of poetry the typological disciplines of the Prayer Book and Church fathers (or Keble’s versions of them)’.47 Responding to the new Victorian print culture, Rossetti’s writings repeatedly accentuate this dialogical movement between individual and community, and gesture towards common reading experiences. In her discussion of the annotations and illustrations that mark the 1837 edition of The Christian Year owned by Rossetti, D’Amico signals how Rossetti ‘was following Keble’s advice in that she was using The Christian Year to assist her in making her “thoughts and feelings” conform to the dictates of her faith’.48 Bearing in mind its intervention in the burgeoning demand for material to foster an engagement with the forms of liturgy, I suggest that the publication of Rossetti’s poetry in Tractarian anthologies, periodicals and individual volumes can be seen to extend Keble’s project and to participate in the wider religious debates. In addition to recovering an appreciation of Rossetti’s intervention in the Victorian press, recognition of her active engagement with Keble’s legacy from the 1860s onward adds to an understanding of her contribution to the

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increasing appreciation of the transformative and sacramental potential of poetry. Rossetti reveals her life-long affinity with The Christian Year and her astute awareness of its huge community of readers when, in The Face of the Deep, she quotes several of Keble’s poems. While D’Amico comments on her incorporation of lines from Keble’s ‘Easter Eve’ in a discussion of renewal and hope, I want to underline how a reference to ‘Fourth Sunday in Lent. The Rosebud’ indicates her recognition of the transformative properties of the private devotion that she insists should accompany ritual and sacrament.49 Reflecting on Revelation 22:4, she suggests what it means to be restored to personhood through grace: If the Name in the forehead do indeed (amongst whatever else) express the consummation of a gift conferred in Baptism, then surely day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, the Divine Likeness should be developing, augmenting, deepening in each of us. The progressive work may be hidden, –

“Who ever saw the earliest rose first open her sweet breast?” –

and well it is that from our too self-conscious eyes it is hidden! but none the less line upon line, here a little and there a little, the transfiguring process must be going on: or else, woe is us! the latent likeness is inevitably weakening, diminishing, even if not yet ready to vanish away. (FD, pp. 525–6)

In its emphasis on what is hidden, this passage demonstrates Rossetti’s conformity to, and dissemination of, the Tractarian principle of reserve. In his poem ‘Fourth Sunday in Lent’ Keble outlines this principle when he invites readers to contemplate the ‘still and secret’ growth of heavenly ‘Love’ through the symbol of the rose.50 While man is in exile on earth, Keble stresses that it is ‘God only, and good angels’ that ‘look | Behind the blissful screen’. Focusing on the scriptural encouragement to develop faith in lieu of sight (Heb. 11.1), he then inserts an instructive warning and rebukes the saints who are too ready to bare ‘to the world’s withering view | Their treasure of delight.’ In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti follows her observation that eyes that are ‘too self-conscious’ might do violence to the ‘transfiguring process’ with a roundel that encourages readers to avoid the trap of self-destruction. It concludes: Saints fall a-weeping who would have joyed,     Sore they weep for a glory that was, For a fullness emptied in the void,    Alas, alas! (FD, p. 526)



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The lament here is for those ‘saints’ who previously knew the ‘glory that was’ but who lost it as a result of self-destruction. By turning the process that Keble’s poem describes inward, Rossetti makes the lesson less instructive and more affective. The danger she perceives is not so much in careless souls bearing to the ‘rude world’s withering view | Their treasure of delight!’ but in the kind of dangerous self-scrutiny that directs eyes inward rather than upward. Ultimately, her reflection indicates that a lack of reserve distorts the right posture of the worshipper and subverts orthodox devotion.

Devotional orientations and the sonnet form Throughout her adult life, Rossetti used the sonnet form to interrogate the interface between the poetical and the spatial and to orientate the reader towards worship. Analysing one sonnet that she wrote at seventeen, ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’, and one that she wrote at thirty-six, ‘After Communion’, the discussion below considers how she maintains a commitment to the long devotional and literary tradition of using the Psalms as a model of poetry and promotes a hermeneutic of piety. As a reader of John Donne’s work at a time when it was heading toward something of a revival, it is likely that Rossetti was influenced by his experiments with the sonnet form if not by his theology.51 In the second of the nineteen Holy Sonnets that Henry Alford groups together in his 1839 collection, Donne likens the form of the sonnet to the ‘little room’ (II.13) of Christ’s birth and, by extension, to the Virgin Mary’s body. The poem’s closing refrain, which is carried over to the next sonnet, ‘Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb’ (II.14; III.1), can be read as indicative of the possibility of Christ bursting through the devotional language of ‘prayer and praise’ (I.1).52 Through the other Holy Sonnets, Donne continues to express anxieties about creating a vehicle through which to express divine possibility and to exemplify the fearfulness that accompanies a recognition of the inseparability of God’s forgiving compassion and his ‘stern wrath’ (XII.8). This recognition informs both Rossetti’s ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ and ‘After Communion’. However, as is characteristic of the body of her devotional poetry, both sonnets add nuance to the severe anguish of Donne by rehearsing the quiet reassurance of Herbert. In 1847 Rossetti began to draw on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetic practice of using the Psalms as a model of lyric poetry. In ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ she re-works the syntax of several Psalms to convey a sense of

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eschatological anticipation. Her speaker recalls a night of transformation that moves her from despair to stillness. All thro’ the livelong night I lay awake Watering my couch with tears of heaviness. None stood beside me in my sore distress; – Then cried I to my heart: If thou wilt, break, But be thou still; no moaning will I make, Nor ask man’s help, nor kneel that he may bless. So I kept silence in my haughtiness, Till lo! the fire was kindled, and I spake Saying: Oh that I had wings like to a dove, Then I would flee away and be at rest: I would not pray for friends, or hope, or love, But still the weary throbbing of my breast; And, gazing on the changeless heavens above, Witness that such a quietness is best. (CP, p. 677)

From the start, Rossetti situates the sonnet in the long history of the poetic translation of the Psalms. The opening recalls the mid section of Psalm 6: ‘I am weary of my groaning; every night wash I my bed, and water my couch with my tears. My beauty is gone for very trouble, and worn away because of all mine enemies’ (Ps. 6.6–7). Rossetti’s poetic re-working omits this mention of faded beauty. In addition, rather than detailing the cause of ‘sore distress’ (3), her speaker’s desire for heavenly peace indicates recognition of the insufficiency of the world and of the transience of human relationships. Mapping on to the Psalm the New Testament lesson that ‘we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’ (Eph. 6.12), Rossetti invokes existential rather than physical distress. Moreover, by adopting the Augustinian approach of interlinking words from the Psalms with introspective dialogue, she throws the figure of the bounded and individualist self into question. The volta of the sonnet exemplifies the porosity of the individual when it describes the breaking of the speaker’s willed and haughty ‘silence’ only after the ‘fire’ of her soul is ‘kindled’ into speech (7, 8). If this shift from prideful silence to inspired speech is understood in terms of the movement described in Psalm 32, then the speaker’s anguish can, in part, be accounted for by unacknowledged sin. It is when the Psalmist finally confesses his ‘transgressions’ that he comes to know God’s deliverance (Ps. 32.5). The cry of Rossetti’s speaker begins with words



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from Psalm 55.6: ‘Oh that I had wings like a dove’ (9). Throughout this Psalm, David cries out for isolation only after the shock of a devastating betrayal by ‘my companion, my guide, and mine own familiar friend’ (Ps. 55.13). By joining her own voice with his, Rossetti’s speaker both indicates solidarity with his suffering and rehearses the liturgical practice of chanting the Psalms. In comparing Rossetti’s ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ with Felicia Hemans’s poem ‘The Wings of the Dove’, D’Amico draws attention to the gender issues at play when Rossetti’s speaker takes on the voice of the male Psalmist. She suggests that, while Hemans has her speaker reject David’s complaint and express ‘a willingness to return to woman’s lot, with all its tears’, Rossetti’s continued ‘mingling of biblical texts and intonations associates her speaker with Old Testament voices’ and enables her to transcend the usual sphere of the Victorian woman poet.53 In a recent article, Karen Laird nuances the interpretations of Hemans’s poems that highlight a prioritisation of the domestic and demonstrates how, in Records of Woman (1828), the ‘deliberate use of the sacred as an emotive space that bridges the domestic and political realms’ offers innovative revisions to the hagiographic genre.54 Keeping Laird’s argument in mind and reading ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ alongside other poems of Rossetti’s adolescence means recognising that the boundary between the sacred and the domestic and, by implication, the difference between the perspective of the two poets, is less straightforward than it first appears. Looking beyond how Rossetti draws on the work of her immediate poetic predecessors, her engagement with the women writers who influenced Donne and Herbert can be detected. While female devotional expression in English reaches back to medieval mystics including Julian of Norwich (whose Revelations of Divine Love were published by two Victorian clerics: George Hargreave Parker in a re-issue of Serenus Cressey’s 1670 edition of the Long Text in 1843 and Henry Collins in the first printed edition based on the Sloane Manuscript in 1877), its continuous presence can be traced through from the Early Modern period to the Victorian. In light of recent scholarly revisions to our understanding of Early Modern devotional poetry, an awareness of the weight of tradition that shapes Rossetti’s decision to write sonnets after a Christological reading of the Psalter is fostered. It means that, rather than being representative of the struggle of the minority prophetic voice on the Petrarchan-inflected poetic landscape, her devotional voice can be understood to emerge from the long inclusive literary narrative of Christian solidarity. It is likely that Rossetti would have been aware of The Sidney Psalter (1594) and would have recognised its influence on Herbert and Donne. Commenting

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on the prefatory poem to the volume that Donne composed, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski considers how Donne finds the art of the Sidney Psalms ‘to be virtually on a par with the Psalmist’s originals’: for him ‘the new psalms are […] not so much translations as re-revelations of God’s Spirit’.55 The first print publication of The Sidney Psalter was in 1823 and, in his 1843 anthology of metrical Psalters, John Holland speaks of ‘voluminous commentaries’ on Mary Sidney’s translation of Psalm 119 and brings to light her important contributions to the volume she compiled with her brother Philip.56 Although contemporary periodical reviews indicate that Holland’s history was well received, Mary’s part in the process of completing the translations was not fully recognised and appreciated by critics until the twentieth century.57 Throughout her poetic translations of the Psalms, Mary Sidney reveals similar concerns to those of Rossetti when she uses conversational syntax and explores the possibility of mapping the lived experience of the individual on to the words of the Psalm. Fleshing out the emotional experience of the Psalmist’s cry for escape, the second verse of her translation of Psalm 55 begins: Then say I, oh, might I but cut the wind, Borne on the wing the fearful dove doth bear:    Stay would I not, till I in rest might stay.    Far hence, oh, far, then would I take my way   Unto the desert, and repose me there, These storms of woe, these tempests left behind.58

In these lines the tight measure contains the emotion that, in the Coverdale version, appears to overwhelm the speaker.59 Shaped after the form of wings, the form itself conveys the shaping of self through prayer and serves as a precursor to Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’. Changing ‘And I said’ (Ps. 55.6) to ‘Then say I’, Sidney gives an immediacy to the Psalmist’s circumstances and invites the reader to enter the place of tension that is imagined. This tension is accentuated with the line ‘Stay would I not, till I in rest might stay.’ The mid-line chiastic pause represents the place of waiting from which the speaker cries out to God. Refusing to ‘stay’ in the present, she looks forward to the safe haven in which she might eventually ‘stay’ with God and rest. In the final verse of the poem, the same rhyme sounds are repeated as the speaker imagines heaven’s safe haven of rest and brings to the Psalm intimations of Christological typology. In his reading of Philip Sidney’s translation of Psalm 6, Louis Martz considers how he manages to ‘change a ritual poem into a poem of intimate, personal lament’.60 It is through this turn to ‘personal lament’ that The Sidney Psalter in its



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entirety informs later poetic practice. Herbert was a distant cousin of the Sidneys and the seminal influence of their Psalter on his poetry has been established by Coburn Freer in Music for a King: George Herbert’s Style and the Metrical Psalms (1972). In an important article, Martz considers how Herbert’s phrase ‘silent tears’ (‘The Family’) ‘suggests a basic concept of expressive control that lies at the center of [his] poetic – and, no doubt, at the center of his conception of the Christian life’.61 Along with the architectural imagery that structures The Temple, this expressive control finds a touchstone in The Sidney Psalter. In tracing how it permeates Rossetti’s poetry, a look back to Mary Sidney via Herbert means broadening an understanding of her relationship with Tractarian poetics and adding another interpretative context to the reticence and silence with which she closes many of her devotional lyrics. In spite of her familiarity with Herbert, Rossetti only makes one direct reference to his poetry. This occurs in The Face of the Deep when she explores what it means to take on the ‘holy’ and ‘humble’ characteristics of ‘the servants of our God’ (Rev. 7.3). Calling for personal reform, she weaves the closing line of his poem ‘Misery’ into a prayer: ‘“My God I mean myself,” said holy George Herbert. God grant us a like self-knowledge and humility’ (FD, p. 226). While her focus on Herbert’s holiness and humility finds a basis in Izaac Walton’s The Life of Mr George Herbert (WP, i, xliv), her use of the collective pronoun ‘us’ invites readers into the pilgrimage of faith that is expressed in The Temple where a love for God increases as sin is exposed and repudiated. Invoking the Psalmist’s deployment of double address, Rossetti indicates that, although her prayer is directed to God, it is predicated on the awareness of being overheard by the worshipping community. In the final verse of ‘Misery’, the speaker recognises in himself the ‘foolish man’ (49) who ‘lets his humours reign’ (62) and who is so far removed from God that he cannot catch a ‘glimpse of bliss’ (74) (WP, ii, pp. 100–3). Rossetti’s allusion to the poem’s tone of self-­deprecation highlights what she perceives to be the right posture for the reception of divine grace. The dialogue between the uncertain speaker and a compassionate God in the closing poem of The Temple, ‘Love’ [3], anticipates the dialogic exchange that structures ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ and many of Rossetti’s other devotional poems. Commenting on the concluding words ‘You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: | So I did sit and eat,’ D’Amico notes how the voice of Love switches from past to present tense, thereby indicating that ‘a past event represents a universal and timeless truth: Love waits on us and nourishes us daily.’62 The major emphasis, she argues, is ‘on the present human experience, and there

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is nothing of anticipation or anxiety in this experience; all is certain’.63 She suggests that the certainty that Herbert reveals indicates that he has already answered the anticipatory questions that the speaker of Rossetti’s sonnet ‘After Communion’ is asking.64 Extending D’Amico’s reading, the analysis of ‘After Communion’ that follows explores how Rossetti draws on the language of Herbert’s delineation of the personal relationship between man and God in order to cultivate the personal devotional practices of her readers. While her emphasis remains on the beloved of the Song of Solomon who waits for the fulfilment that is yet to come, attention to Herbert’s delineation of the fulfilled desire informs her perspective on present affliction. ‘After Communion’ was first published in Robert H. Baynes’s volume, The Illustrated Book of Sacred Poetry (1867); it was later included in Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1875). Since it was composed in 1866 and works as an integral part of the anthology, it is possible that it was written at Baynes’s request for material. Baynes was the editor of a religious monthly entitled The Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and Rossetti’s contribution of fiction to its early issues in 1867 signals an affinity with his purported aim of disseminating Anglo-Catholic theology to a wider public.65 Baynes’s preface to the Illustrated Book recalls both The Christian Year and the Lyra volumes in its stress on the significance of personal devotion. Registering the ‘favourable way’ in which the ‘ever-multiplying collections of hymns and songs that issue from the press’ are received, it acknowledges the role of devotional poetry: And if it be true in regard to all real Poetry that it directly tends to elevate the mind, and to fill it with new images of beauty and fresh thoughts of truth, it is especially the case with Sacred Poetry that while it soothes it strengthens, and effectually helps us in the work and warfare of our daily life. The object of the present Collection is to supply new material for the solace and the help of Christian hearts.66

Several pages after these words and between two long poems in common metre, Rossetti’s sonnet offers a startling account of a revelatory experience. Why should I call Thee Lord, Who art my God? Why should I call Thee Friend, Who art my Love? Or King, Who art my very Spouse above? Or call Thy Sceptre on my heart Thy rod? Lo, now Thy banner over me is love, All heaven flies open to me at Thy nod: For Thou hast lit Thy flame in me a clod,



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Make me a nest for dwelling for Thy Dove. What wilt Thou call me in our home above, Who now hast called me friend? How will it be When Thou for good wine settest forth the best? Now Thou dost bid me come and sup with Thee, Now Thou dost make me lean upon Thy breast: How will it be with me in time of love? (CP, pp. 221–3)

The language and imagery of these lines recalls the Song of Solomon. By reading the Old Testament wisdom book in a Christological framework, Rossetti identifies Christ as divine spouse and ‘Dove’ (Song of Sol. 2.14) and the space of the church as the ‘banqueting hall’ where the ‘banner over me is love’ (Song of Sol. 2.4). Moreover, by using the image of the ‘flame’ (7) to speak of the lifegiving properties of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist, she invokes the ‘vehement flame’ of love described at the climax of the union between lover and beloved (Song of Sol. 8.6). As her friend and spiritual mentor Richard Frederick Littledale would later demonstrate in his Commentary on the Song of Songs (1869), the connections between the Eucharist and the Old Testament love song are rooted in ancient and medieval models. By incorporating these connections into her sonnet and by using them as structural devices to carry the characteristic compression and release of the form, Rossetti is able to offer what Baynes describes as the ‘solace and the help’ that goes beyond precept. Whereas Littledale’s volume describes the process where the soul, as the beloved, partakes in the ‘sacramental reception of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist’, Rossetti’s sonnet imaginatively enacts it by dialogue.67 Moreover, she brings to it an intense stress on self-scrutiny. Rossetti participated in Holy Communion twice a week. Considering that this meant she was engaged with the liturgy of the service upward of 3,000 times in her life, Dieleman explores the inevitable effect on her religious imagination.68 Describing the dynamics of the liturgy outlined in the prayer book, she stresses how the ‘threefold movement [from Word to Sacrament] of the historic liturgy […] lent itself to the possibility of viewing Communion as the chief end of the service, the point toward which all other elements led’.69 The words of thanksgiving that conclude the service and with which the congregation is invited to participate offer an affirmation of God’s kingship and glory: O Lord, the only begotten Son Jesu Christ; O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us […] For

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible thou only art holy; thou only art the Lord; thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father. Amen.70

It is from these words that Rossetti’s sonnet takes its initial impetus. Beginning with the question ‘Why should I call Thee Lord, Who art my God?’ (1), the speaker grapples with the repeated emphasis on Christ as ‘Lord’ and questions what it means to fully appreciate His existence as a full part of the Trinity, as ‘God’ and as her heavenly ‘Spouse’ (2). Looking back to Herbert’s ‘Antiphon [1]’ – where he translates Thomas’s cry, ‘My Lord and my God’ (Jn 20.28), into the chorus’ repeated cry, ‘My God and King’ – she registers the convergence of the private with the liturgical (WP, ii, p. 48). Keeping in mind Herbert’s concern with creating poetic structures that carry theological implications, ‘Antiphon [1]’ can be aligned to ‘After Communion’ by virtue of both its positioning and its form. In The Temple it is placed directly after the meditation on the Eucharist in ‘The Holy Communion’. In his discussion of how Herbert develops ‘Antiphon [1]’ from the liturgy of Morning and Evening Prayer, P. G. Stanwood considers its structure and suggests that ‘perhaps Herbert stretches to contain this jubilant poem in the sonnet form, for it may seem to burst out of such constriction’.71 With the structure of the sonnet in mind, Stanwood points to how ‘the end speaks to the beginning – the whole being a unity in the Trinity that moves circumferentially and without end’.72 In its own formal integration of the conversational dynamics of the liturgical antiphon, ‘After Communion’ extends Herbert’s poetic practice and enacts the experience of encountering a vision of God after participating in the Eucharist. The speaker’s insistent questions reach out from the confined and measured structure to find their locus in the intense moment of experience after the consumption of the bread and wine and as the communicant catches a glimpse of the transcendental: ‘All heaven flies open to me at Thy nod’ (6). This glimpse offers the perception that, upon receiving Holy Communion, identity is in the process of being recast into the shape of a ‘nest for dwelling of Thy Dove’ (8). As such, it exemplifies Dieleman’s recognition that the elements of the Anglican Communion ‘encourage the believer toward communal, contemplative, and receptive modes of shaping and being’.73 The tension that the poem enacts between the present and future shift the speaker’s self-perception and understanding in the affective moment of communion. In the sestet, her orientation heavenward is consolidated as she learns to define herself solely in relation to God. In a discussion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s use of the sonnet form, Isobel Armstrong persuasively argues that the prologue to The House of Life (1870)



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can be read in terms of ‘an account of the photograph which physically monumentalizes a moment’.74 Linking the linguistic to the corporeal, she suggests that the language of the sonnet is embodied to the extent that it demands the commitment of the interpretative eye as it figures the pattern of print; ‘the poem’s small scale calls out for a corresponding intensity’.75 This articulation of a particular intense moment is central to the speaker’s temporal awareness in ‘After Communion’. Here, the sonnet works in the same way as Herbert’s ‘Antiphon [1]’ as it gestures beyond its small form by witnessing to the transformative effect of the Real Presence. Anticipating her later allusion to how the substance of the sacrament has far-reaching effects in bringing ‘us in heavenly places with His own Self ’ (FD, p. 245), Rossetti uses the poem to capture a momentary photographic-like image of the far-reaching effects of the transformative process. Within the space of fourteen lines, the speaker’s investigative questioning brings an existential apprehension into focus. With this apprehension, she can return to the terms of the opening quatrain and call Christ ‘God’, ‘Love’ and ‘King’ with all the confidence and expressive devotion of Herbert. While her words gesture beyond language, the intensity of the poetic form serves as an embodied reminder of the bounds of present experience. The image of the chalice that accompanies the sonnet in Baynes’s volume underlines these bounds and points to the liturgical act of communion: an act that the body of the sonnet does not specify. Working out on a personal level what it means that ‘the heart | Must bear the longest part’ (‘Antiphon [1]’), ‘After Communion’ identifies the tension that is experienced in reading the scriptures, participating in the heavenly community and sensing God’s presence. It is in the process of touching the threshold of the heavenly that the typological implication of dwelling ‘in the rock’ like ‘the dove that maketh her nest in the sides of the hole’s mouth’ is understood (Song of Sol. 2.14; Jer. 48.28; Job 39.28;). It is here also that the speaker is able to glimpse heaven’s equivalent of the feast in which Jesus serves the ‘best’ divinely created wine (Jn. 2.10). The suggestion that the ‘best’ wine is yet to be served reinforces that the experience of watching as ‘heaven flies open’ can only be momentarily glimpsed after receiving the bread and wine (6), rather than fully enjoyed as it will be in eternity. In this way the sonnet and, by implication, the liturgy, leaves the communicant with an awareness that her earthly existence is shaped by waiting and longing after heaven. As the premise of this book reveals, Rossetti’s devotional writings never lose sight of how this waiting enmeshes the individual in the wider Communion of Saints. The movement that ‘After Communion’ enacts – towards full union with Christ – is predicated on a Eucharistic-inflected understanding of how the divine ‘flame’

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ignites the human and earthly ‘clod’ (7). In an article that purports to ‘bridge the gap between’ the erotic and scripturally allegorical imagery in ‘Goblin Market’, Marylu Hill explores the background to Rossetti’s belief in the Real Presence as she considers the influence of Edward Pusey’s and William Wilberforce’s articulations of Eucharistic doctrine in the 1840s.76 She focuses on Rossetti’s engagement with the principles that Pusey derives from Augustine and outlines in his sermon ‘The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist’ (1853). Returning to the transformative restoration in ‘Goblin Market’, described by Hill in terms of ‘Laura’s initial hunger [being] overcome by a deeper regenerative flame’, ‘After Communion’ can be understood to gesture to the doctrine of the Real Presence that had, by the 1860s, become integrated into Anglo-Catholic practice. In 1853, Anglo-Catholic cleric William J. E. Bennett was forced out of his London parish, St Barnabas in Pimlico, by opponents of his ‘extreme ritualism’ and appointed to a church in Frome-Selwood, Somerset.77 That same year, Rossetti and her mother Frances joined him to run the church school. Having written a book on the Eucharist in 1837, Bennett remained committed to promoting the doctrine of the Real Presence. In an essay he contributed to Shipley’s The Church and the World, Bennett comments that although Pusey’s 1843 sermon ‘Holy Communion a Comfort for the Penitent’ ‘startled the world’ upon its initial publication, when it was continued ten years later in ‘The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist’, its lessons were well received.78 In the later sermon, Pusey authorises his position through detailing the Apostolic and Patristic precedents for his interpretation of Scripture. One instance of this occurs in his typological reading of 1 Kings 18:30–39 when he cites St Ephraim’s (a fourth-century Syrian exegete) conflation of the story of the burning of Elias’s sacrifice with the symbolism of the Eucharist. He explains: S. Ephrem often speaks of our Lord’s Presence, under the image of ‘fire in the bread […] Instead of that fire which devoured men, ye eat the fire in Bread and are quickened.’ ‘In the Bread and the Cup are the fire and the Holy Ghost.’ ‘We have eaten Thee, we have drunken Thee […] that we might have life in Thee.’ ‘Thy garment covered Thy feebler nature: the bread covereth the fire which dwells therein.’79

In Shipley’s first Lyra, Lyra Eucharistica (1863), the symbolism that Pusey draws from the writings of St Ephrem, is repeatedly evoked.80 Rossetti’s emphasis in ‘After Communion’ on the fiery properties of communion and the shaping of an appropriate response extends the gestures that many of the poems in the anthology make. Building also on the insights she offered in the three poems



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she had contributed to the Lyra (‘Come unto Me’, ‘The Offering of the New Law’, Conference between CHRIST, the Saints and the Soul’ and ‘JESUS, do I love Thee?’), Rossetti embodies the revelation that it is only in ‘lean[ing] upon [Christ’s] breast’ (13), as John had done, that the penitent can experience the life that participation in the Eucharist can bestow. Whereas in ‘Come unto Me’ Rossetti represents Christ’s ongoing persistence in calling to himself the faltering communicant who had ‘half forgot[ten]’ (10) his grace, in ‘After Communion’ she focuses more on the exchange that occurs in the affective moment after receiving the Sacrament.81 The emphasis that St Ephrem places on the hiddenness of the Sacrament is taken up repeatedly in medieval devotions. One such example comes in The Imitation of Christ when à Kempis writes ‘I have Thee in the Sacrament truly present, though hidden under another form.’82 Rossetti’s contemplations resonate with these words. In Annus Domini: A Prayer For Each Day of the Year (1874) she prays that Christ may ‘Help us here […] discern Thee hidden in Thy Blessed Sacrament’ (AD, prayer 17). In a letter of 1891, she substantiates her brother’s suggestion that The Imitation had supplemented her Bible reading and notes how she had been reading the volume ‘popularly ascribed to Thomas à Kempis’ since the age of eighteen (Letters 1817: 17 August 1891). With this in mind, the allusions that she makes in her devotional writings to the practice of reserve can be seen to exceed the Tractarian commitment to the doctrine. In the preface to Called to be Saints, Rossetti reveals her familiarity with the debates regarding the sacraments and the festivals of the church that are set out in Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. It is likely that this text contributes to her commitment to the principle of reserve and informs her focus in ‘After Communion’ on the right orientation of the communicant. Two years after writing a poem for the Lyra Apostolica celebrating Hooker’s words to the church as ‘conquering, soothing charms’, Keble produced an abridged edition of Book V of the Polity.83 Introducing this, he details his objectives in making the theology of the sixteenth-century bishop accessible to a wider readership. His priority is with sharing the passages in Hooker’s work that offer ‘the principles’ upon which the Sacraments could be understood.84 In the passages that Keble selects, Hooker’s emphasis on communicants adopting the right receptive posture of worship and adoration in the partaking of the Eucharist is clear. Insisting that the bread and wine ‘are life in particular by being particularly received’, Hooker argues that the orthodox recipient should apprehend the ceremony ‘through faith’.85 By enacting this apprehension in her poetry, Rossetti indicates a concern with disseminating the lessons that Hooker sets out. Adopting a pastoral

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rather than a strictly pedagogical objective, she gestures outward in her later devotional poems to those Christians that Baynes addresses who remain in need of ‘solace’ and ‘comfort’.

Confessing with Augustine One of the texts that had the greatest influence on Rossetti’s sacramental understanding is of Scripture St Augustine’s Confessions. While she does not quote from Augustine directly, she incorporates his theology into her own devotional writings by paraphrasing, citing passages from the writings of other readers and making implicit allusions. The discussion that follows reveals how Rossetti’s ongoing engagement with Augustinian theology forms the basis of her understanding of how personhood is predicated on an awareness of one’s place among the Communion of Saints. Of the 50 volumes of Ancient, Patristic and Early Modern writings that were translated and edited by the Tractarians between 1838 and 1881, the first was the Confessions. Stating that his intention in translation was to ‘preserve as much as possible the condensed style of St. Augustine’, Pusey asks ‘that the reader might be put, as far as possible, in the position of a student of the Fathers’. (Confessions, p. xxx). Concluding his preface, he calls for a deeper understanding of holiness and asks that readers might learn from Augustine ‘how to sanctify things common, by first sanctifying the vessel, wherein they are received, our own hearts’ (p. xxxi). Rossetti is the ideal ‘student’ that Pusey describes, as is evidenced by her careful reading of Hooker’s doctrines of right reception. Responding to Pusey’s call to make Augustine’s ‘holy and solemn thoughts’ accessible to a wider audience, her devotional corpus extends his vision of Trinitarian personhood and enacts the practical application of the Confessions that he recommends. My recognition that Rossetti’s writings are shaped by Augustine’s theology is not a path of enquiry entirely absent from scholarship. Lona Mosk Packer was the first to note the similarities between ‘Goblin Market’ and the Confessions in a discussion of how Rossetti draws on motifs such as the pear-stealing episode.86 In his later contextual survey, Antony Harrison reinforces the influence of the earlier books of the Confessions on Rossetti’s poetry. He suggests that, in addition to the parallels that can be drawn between the Confessions and poems such as ‘Three Nuns’ and ‘Memory’, ‘there exist a number of methodological similarities’ between the two writers and proposes that Rossetti uses Augustine



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as a ‘sanction for her vocation as a writer’.87 In the work of both Packer and Harrison, there is an underlying assumption about the immediacy of Augustine’s narrative on Rossetti’s own situation. Although this assumption has a legitimate basis, the ways in which Rossetti’s encounters with Augustine’s theology are mediated through seventeenth-century English poetry and theology, as well as through the Tractarian writings of Newman, Pusey, Neale and Littledale, have been given little attention. In the wake of Hill’s article, which offers the most nuanced reading of Rossetti’s response to Augustine, more work needs to be done if Rossetti’s engagement with, and intervention in, the long devotional Augustinian history is to be fully appreciated. The discussion here extends previous scholarship by focusing on how Rossetti draws on aspects of the ongoing literary translations of Augustine’s theology in order to explore the contours of the transient and mutable subject who is a participant in the ongoing process of conversion. In his discussion of the Tractarian adherence to the patristic conception of personhood, Nicholas Lossky writes of the perception of ‘the very important difference which exists between the person understood as an individual and what patristic theologians would be tempted to call ‘true personhood’.88 He suggests that whereas ‘in the Evangelical perspective, an individual, as the very term indicates, is an atom of humanity, a self sufficient being defined by his or her limits’, In the patristic perspective […] ‘personhood’ does not belong to the natural experience of the human being (By ‘natural’ I mean a human being in his or her autonomous self, without reference to God). Personhood for the Fathers – and this is what the Tractarians rediscovered – is revealed by God to humankind. The revelation comes from Jesus Christ when He speaks of His relation with the Father and with the Spirit (in particular in the Gospel according to John: 14–17).89

Increasingly through her work, Rossetti’s delineation of the fractured and disintegrating ‘I’ who is earth-bound yet in possession of an indestructible spirit corresponds to this patristic model of personhood as a being in communion, and adheres to Augustine’s conception of the transient and mutable subject. Several years after having her speaker in ‘The Thread of Life’ emerge triumphant from the ‘prison’ of selfhood to affirm ‘I am not what I have nor what I do; | But what I was I am, I am even I’ (CP, pp. 330–1: sonnet 2.13–14), Rossetti offers a meditation on personhood in The Face of the Deep: Concerning Himself God Almighty proclaimed of old: ‘I AM THAT I AM,’

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible and man’s inherent feeling of personality seems in some sort to attest and correspond to this revelation: I who am myself cannot but be myself. I am what God has constituted me: so that however I may have modified myself, yet do I remain that same I; it is I who live, it is I who must die, it is I who must rise again at that last day. I rising again out of my grave must carry on that very life which was mine before I died, and of which death itself could not altogether snap the thread. Who I was I am, who I am I am, who I am I must be for ever and ever. (p. 47)

The claim ‘I am what God has constituted me’ serves as the embryonic basis for the celebration of God-ordained personhood that runs through Rossetti’s writings of the 1880s and 1890s. She speaks of this affirmation as ‘inherent’ because she believes that it is inbuilt in each individual by God and imparted gradually through an Incarnation-inflected engagement with Scripture. This belief has its touchstone in the very way that Augustine interprets his past experiences as he reads the Bible: it is only through an awareness of God’s disclosure of himself that he is able to make sense of his own personhood. In Book 13 of the Confessions, Augustine recalls his struggle to interpret temporal experience. As he develops his allegorical hermeneutic, he learns that what is divine exists outside of time (XIII.xxix.44, p. 309). Through the account of his conversion, he indicates that it is only with the help of the Holy Spirit that he is able to make sense of his experiences and, as a consequence, come to an understanding of his own personhood. The most startling occurrence of this occurs at the climax of his conversion experience. After hearing a child’s voice repeat the words ‘pick up and read’, he takes up Romans 13.13–14 and believes that through these verses God leads him to affirm his faith. Although his conversion might have lifted his ‘darkness of doubt’ (VIII.xii.29, p. 154), it results in a sense of his divided selfhood. As a professed Christian, he finds in Romans 7.15–17 a reflection of his own struggle whereby he perceives in himself a constant battle between his ‘two wills, one new, and the other old, one carnal, the other spiritual’ (VIII.v.10, p. 141). Rossetti’s delineation of the individual in ‘The Thread of Life’ – which articulates the battle between the ‘I’ which is imprisoned by fleshly bounds and the ‘I’ which is individual’s ‘sole possession’– corresponds to this Augustinian reading of Paul’s letter whereby the imprisoned ‘I’ is mastered by the old, carnal will and the ‘I’ who chooses to give herself over to Christ is mastered by the new, spiritual will. This second ‘I’ is the basis of the immutable self who, in The Face of the Deep, Rossetti recognises ‘must be for ever and ever’. Considering Augustine’s delineation of his two wills, German–Jewish



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philosopher Hannah Arendt perceives in his writings a discourse of a mode of existence in a state of ‘transit’ and describes how the realisation of the new, God-given will leads him to a state ‘when his whole existence has become “loving”’.90 Taking this further, she suggests that ‘by anticipating eternity (the absolute future) man desires his own future self and denies the I-myself he finds in earthly reality’.91 With this suggestion in mind, Rossetti’s own declaration in The Face of the Deep, ‘who I was I am, who I am I am, who I am I must be for ever and ever’, can be better understood. As with ‘The Thread of Life’, the movement that Rossetti describes here is from the imprisoned and earthly self and toward the eternal self. Through both texts, she invokes an anticipation of the transformed self as a lever to lift the reader towards an increasingly patristicinflected perception of personhood. Throughout the Confessions, the language of the Psalms enables the ongoing and free conversation between the person whom Arendt describes as in ‘transit’ and God. Augustine declares how interiorising the words of the Psalter enable him to be ‘kindled towards Thee, and on fire to rehearse [the Psalms] through the whole world, against the pride of mankind’ (IX.iv.8, p. 161). Turning away from the Manichee practice of appropriating Scripture to meet individual desire, he demonstrates how the Psalms break down the sinful man in him and enable true communication. Expressing his passionate hope that others would know God as he has come to know him, he considers how reading ‘the fourth Psalm […] wrought upon me’ (ibid). Charting the changes that the Psalm describes, he records how the experience of reading it causes him to be ‘inwardly pricked’ and to realise ‘the purpose of a new life’ (IX.iv.10, p. 163). This recognition that the Bible breaks-down and ‘pricks’ the reader, who exists as a being in community, into repentance and into a realisation of the eternal ‘I’ of God-given personhood stands at the core of Rossetti’s hermeneutical method. As in ‘After Communion’, her writings indicate that it is God’s disclosure of himself to the individual that enables her to respond to his Passion. In the first direct reference to Augustine that Rossetti makes in her writings, she invokes the belief that personhood is bestowed on the creature by God. She suggests that by ‘cherishing’ the ‘revealed truth’ of Romans 8:28, we shall learn neither to trust in any creature nor to despair of any soul, but doing what lieth in us to leave the result to that Master to Whom each servant standeth or falleth (Rom. xiv. 4); we shall ‘in every thing give thanks’ (1 Thess. v. 18), and shall intercede all the more earnestly for our dear brethren because we know that some who were darkness have been made light (Eph. v. 8). And

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible indeed wherein differ we from them? if by God’s grace so great a mercy is true of us as that we be children of light and not of darkness (1 Thess. v. 5). St Augustine has illustrated a kindred lesson: One prayed, Lord, take away the ungodly man: and God answered him, Which? (SF, p. 79)

Calling on her readers to recognise the possibility that the most unlikely individual can, with ‘God’s grace’, undergo the seemingly impossible transformation from darkness to light after the pattern of Augustine, Rossetti’s message has the practical purpose of encouraging perseverance in intercession. In Time Flies, she repeats the call to intercessory prayer when she acknowledges the part that Augustine’s mother Monica played in her son’s conversion. In spite of his faults, she then suggests why Augustine can be held up as a saint: Divine grace […] responding to his mother’s prayer’s for his soul, proved at length stronger than his evil will and ways: he cast off his vices as the serpent casts its skin, professed the Catholic Faith and was baptised on Easter Eve in the year 387 by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Thenceforward, allowing for human frailty, he retained of the serpent only its wisdom, and put on harmlessness as a dove: yet not, alas! without putting it off under provocation. In 391 he was ordained priest; and he submitted to Episcopal consecration at an uncertain date, perhaps in the year 395. In controversy he opposed both Manicheans, Donatists, and Pelagians; yet incurred suspicion of himself holding unsound views as to the doctrine of predestination: nevertheless he is looked up to as a Doctor of the Church. Despite the Spirit of Love which ordinarily ruled him, he seems to have indulged a cruelly harsh temper against the Donatists. Yet need we not cavil at the blemishes of a saint who of his own free choice died the death of a penitent: – ‘He ceased not to preach and work, till in August he was prostrated by fever; and as he used to say that even approved Christians and priests ought to die as penitents, he excluded his friends from his room, except at certain hours, caused the penitential psalms to be written out and fixed on the wall opposite his bed, and repeated them with many tears; thus by his last acts throwing over the consequences, and with them the principles, advanced in his later dangerous treatises.’ (28 August: pp. 166–7)

The final paragraph of this discussion is taken directly from Sabine BaringGould’s The Life of the Saints (1872–89), a seventeen-volume encyclopaedia that was still in the process of completion as Rossetti was writing.92 Rossetti acknowledges Baring-Gould’s influence on her comment: ‘My “black letter Feasts” have



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been studied mainly from “The Lives of Saints,” by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould; from which interesting work most of my quotations, whether at first hand or at second hand are taken’ (1 March: p. 43). This admission of familiarity with another’s work is unusual for Rossetti. Nonetheless, it is more than warranted in a consideration of her entry that celebrates Augustine’s feast day. In addition to taking from Baring-Gould the final paragraph of her meditation, she also takes from his writings the judgement of the doctrine of predestination as ‘unsound’ and the description of Augustine’s temper against the Donatists as ‘cruel’. In his discussion of Augustine’s ‘maxims of predestination’ that, he writes, would be ‘destructive to morality’ if carried to their logical conclusion, Baring-Gould’s recognition of the operation of divine grace foregrounds Rossetti’s sympathy towards the shortcomings of the saint. Her allusion to Augustine’s ‘blemishes’ corresponds to the recognition throughout Time Flies of the human frailty of the saints of history. These include: Pope Gregory the Great whose ‘one stain’ on his glory is his complacency over the murder of the Emperor Phocas (12 March: pp. 51–2), St Augustine of Canterbury whose history does not ‘shine’ in ‘all points’ (26 May: p. 100), St Jerome who was ‘not altogether without flaw’ (30 September: p. 189), and St Nicolas who acts disobediently when he is ‘carried away with zeal’ (6 December: p. 234). In her discussion of St Edward the Confessor, Rossetti goes so far as to admit that she can only take it ‘on trust’ that he deserves the name of ‘Saint and Confessor’ since nothing in his history points to his virtue (13 October: pp. 197–8). It is against such comments that her critique of, and admiration for, Augustine is best understood. Significantly, it is his humanity rather than any supernatural virtue that she celebrates and uses as a basis for self-understanding. In addition to receiving Augustine’s teachings through Baring-Gould, it is likely that Rossetti was also familiar with Joseph Milner’s The History of the Church of Christ (1816). In the preface to his translation of the Confessions, Pusey assumes a familiarity with the ‘copious extracts’ ‘given in Milner’s Church History’ (Confessions, p. xxviii). Milner’s influence helped forge the shared ‘mind of the Oxford Movement’ that Chadwick identifies (see p. 30 above). Newman records his indebtedness to Milner’s Church History when he notes that he was ‘nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there’.93 According to Stephen Thomas, Milner served as the model for Newman’s response to antiquity ‘not by the attempted extinguishment of his personal perspective, but existentially, imaginatively, and polemically’.94 While recognition of the extent to which Milner’s History influenced both Pusey and Newman nuances the long-held

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belief that the Tractarians ‘re-discovered’ the Fathers, it also helps to situate Rossetti’s writings within a wider theological context. Recognition that Rossetti was responding to Augustine via the diverse sources in which she encountered his theology calls for a re-assessment of the assumption that her encounter with the Confessions was primarily immediate. As the extracts from Seek and Find and Time Flies reveal, Rossetti follows the pattern of both Baring-Gould and Milner in seeking to redeem the saint from the dismissal that could arise from recognition of his ‘blemishes’. Although she works with the assumption that her readers would be familiar with devotional and ecclesiastical sources beyond the remit of Tractarianism, her meditations avoid doctrinal and Higher Critical debates and occupy the interface between liturgy and devotional reading in that they encourage self-scrutiny and a re-visioning of the nature of the personhood rather than enter into historical analysis. Moreover, they seek to foster charity in those prepared to re-assess their understanding of the ‘ungodly’ and to encounter each individual as a potential Augustine about to be transformed by God.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9

Alice Law, ‘The Poetry of Christina G. Rossetti’, Westminster Review 143 (1895): 444–53 (447). Ibid., p. 499. Amy Levy, ‘The Poetry of Christina Rossetti’, The Woman’s World, I (1888): 178–80 (180). Antony H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Brighton: Harvester, 1988), p. 3. Mary Arseneau, ‘Introduction’, in The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, eds Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999), pp. xiii–xxii (x). Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 85–121. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002); Andrew Maunder, ‘The Effects of Context: Christina Rossetti, “Maude Clare,” and Once a Week in 1859’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 8 (1999): 34–49. A. M. Allchin, The Dynamic of Tradition (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), p. 7. E. Milner-White, ‘Modern Prayers and their Writers’, in Liturgy and Worship: A



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Companion to the Prayer Books of the Anglican Communion, eds W. K. Lowther Clarke and Charles Harris (London: SPCK, 1932), pp. 749–62 (749–50). 10 The Works of George Herbert in Prose and Verse, 2 vols (2nd edn; London: William Pickering, 1841), ii, p. 46. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text as WP, followed by volume and page number. 11 Karen Dieleman, ‘The Practices of Faith: Worship and Writing’, Christianity and Literature 58.2 (2009): 260–5 (260–1); Liam Corley, ‘The Jouissance of Belief: Devotional Reading and the (Re)Turn to Religion, Christianity and Literature, 58.2 (2009): 252–60. 12 G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 198–200. 13 Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent, ‘Rossetti and the Tractarians’, Victorian Poetry, 44.1 (2006): 93–103. 14 Ibid., p. 101. 15 Ibid. 16 Heather McAlpine, ‘“Would Not Open Lip from Lip”: Sacred Orality and the Christian Grotesque in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”’, Victorian Review, 36.1 (2010): 114–28. 17 MS note: Quoted from a sermon I heard preached by the Rev. J. E. Snowden, Incumbent of Hammersmith. Quoted in Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, eds David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 389. 18 Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, p. 6. 19 John Keble, ‘Athanaisan Creed’, in Lyra Apostolica, ed. John Henry Newman (2nd edn; London: Rivingtons, 1879), p. 156. 20 John Henry Newman, ‘Catena Patrum No. 1: Testimony of Writers in the later English Church to the Doctrine of Apostolical Succession’, Tract 74 of the Tracts for the Times. Project Canterbury, http://anglicanhistory.org (accessed 10 October 2013). 21 Henry W. Burrows, The Half-Century of Christ Church (London: Skeffington & Son, 1887), p. 14. 22 Maria’s letters to her mother recommend various published sermons and discuss the effect of several she heard. For instance, she discusses the message contained in a sermon by Burrows on John xiii. University of British Columbia, Rare Books and Special Collections, Angeli-Dennis Collection, Box 3, file 3; Box 3, file 9. Other letters by the Rossetti women contain references to Burrows’s association with the family. The letters by Eliza Polidori to Frances Rossetti reveal that he regularly visited and prayed for their mother in her last illness. Similarly, Maria speaks of his visits to her dying aunt, Margaret Polidori (Box 27 [unsorted]; Box 3, file 8). 23 A–D Collection, Box 3: file 3. Maria wrote this letter while working as a governess in August 1843. Mary Arseneau also cites from this letter in a discussion of how ‘the female Rossettis were intensely engaged with worship, with current Tractarian

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writings, and with popular literature’. Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 32. 24 Books from the Libraries of Christina, Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman (London: Bertram Rota, 1973). 25 John Henry Newman, ‘A Particular Providence as Revealed in the Gospel’, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), iii, pp. 114–27 (119). Newman Reader. National Institute for Newman Studies, http://newmanreader.org (accessed 10 September 2012). 26 Ibid., p. 127. 27 The Mind of the Oxford Movement, ed. Owen Chadwick (London: A. & C. Black, 1960), p. 31. 28 John Keble, The Psalter or the Psalms of David; in English Verse (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1839), p. x. 29 Ibid., p. xi. 30 Emma Mason, ‘Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve’, Journal of Victorian Culture 7 (2002): 196–219 (196). 31 Keble, The Psalter or the Psalms of David, pp. 86–7. 32 Burrows, The Half-Century of Christ Church, pp. 63–4. 33 William Dodsworth, A Selection from the Old and New Versions of the Psalms to Which are Added a Few Hymns, Chiefly Ancient (London: James Burns, 1837). 34 Ibid., pp. 51–77. 35 Henry William Burrows, Hymns for Use in Church (4th edn; London: William Skeffington, 1864), p. ii; Elizabeth Wordsworth cites the observation of Burrows’s fellow cleric Dr Goulburn that his sermons ‘are emphatically rather sermons for the closet than for the pulpit, better suited for devotional reflection than for oral delivery’. Henry William Burrows, Memorials (London: Kegan Paul, 1894), pp. 165–6. 36 Rossetti’s MS notes reveal her engagement with Burrows’s sermons. In a note in the MS of Letter and Spirit, she writes, ‘See I sermon I heard preached by the Rev. H. W. Burrows […], and which has also been published.’ Quoted in Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, eds Kent and Stanwood, p. 391. 37 Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti, p. 100. 38 William Dodsworth, The Connection between Outward and Inward Worship: A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of New Shoreham on Thursday January 21st 1847, on the occasion of offering a new organ for the service of Almighty God (London: F. & J. Rivingtons, 1847), pp. 8, 9. 39 Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, p. 75. 40 Kirstie Blair, ‘Church Architecture, Tractarian Poetry and the Forms of Faith’, in Shaping Belief: Culture, Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writing,



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eds Victoria Morgan and Clare Williams (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 129–45 (133). 41 John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year (new edn; New York: White, Stokes & Allen, 1887), p. vi. 42 Lyra Messianica: Hymns and Verses on the Life of Christ, Ancient and Modern; with Other Poems, ed. Orby Shipley (Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1864), pp. iv, xviii. 43 Occasional Papers and Reviews by John Keble, MA, ed. Edward Pusey (Oxford & London: James Parker and Co., 1877), pp. v–xxii, viii. 44 F. Elizabeth Gray, ‘“Syren Strains”: Victorian Women’s Devotional Poetry and John Keble’s The Christian Year’, Victorian Poetry, 44.1 (2006): 61–76 (63). 45 For more on the Tractarian approach to Breviary services see John Henry Newman, ‘On the Roman Breviary as Embodying the Substance of the Devotional Services of the Church Catholic’ (1836), Tract 75 of the Tracts for the Times. Newman Reader. National Institute for Newman Studies, http://newmanreader.org (accessed 10 October 2013). In her memoirs, Sister Caroline Mary recalls that ‘Mother Foundress gave [Maria Rossetti] the work of translating a Latin Breviary and our Office book’ ‘Memories of Sister Caroline Mary’, All Saints Sisters of the Poor: An Anglican Sisterhood in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Susan Mumm (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 3–64 (25). 46 Joshua King, ‘John Keble’s The Christian Year: Private Reading and Imagined National Religious Community’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40.2 (2012): 397–420 (397). 47 Ibid., p. 402. 48 Diane D’Amico, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for “the Weary Heart”’, Victorian Newsletter, 72 (1987): 36–42 (40). 49 Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith Gender and Time (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 41. 50 Keble, The Christian Year, p. 61. 51 Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), pp. 415, 483. For more on the reception of Donne at the time Rossetti was writing see Dayton Haskin, John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 52 The Works of John Donne, ed. Henry Alford, 6 vols (London: John W. Parker, 1839), vi, pp. 443–50. 53 Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith Gender and Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), pp. 28–9. 54 Karen E. Laird, ‘Adapting the Saints: Hemans’s Records of Woman’, Women’s Writing, 20.4 (2013): 496–517 (497).

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55 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 275. 56 John Holland, ed., The Psalmists of Britain (London: R. Groombridge, 1843), i, p. 198. 57 For instance, see the review in The Athenæum (16 September 1843, pp. 835–6). 58 The Sidney Psalter (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 102–4, lines 13–18. 59 The Coverdale text reads, ‘Lo, then would I get me away far off: and remain in the wilderness. I would make haste to escape: because of the stormy wind and tempest’ (Ps. 55.7–8). 60 Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (Yale: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 276. 61 Louis L. Martz, ‘Donne and Herbert: Vehement Grief and Silent Tears’, John Donne Journal (1988): 21–34 (28). 62 Diane D’Amico, ‘Reading and Rereading George Herbert and Christina Rossetti’, John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne, 4.2 (1985): 270–89 (281). 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., p. 280. 65 Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 364. 66 The Illustrated Book of Sacred Poems, ed. Robert H. Baynes (New York, London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1867), p. vii. The volume also includes Rossetti’s previously published poems ‘Advent’ (p. 46) and ‘Good Friday’ (p. 346). 67 Richard Frederick Littledale, A Commentary on the Song of Songs: From Ancient and Mediaeval Sources (New York: Pott & Amery, 1869), p. 129. 68 Dieleman, ‘The Practices of Faith’, p. 105. 69 Ibid., p. 103. 70 Book of Common Prayer (1662), http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/ england.htm (accessed 10 September 2013). 71 P. G. Stanwood, ‘The Vision of God in the Sonnets of John Donne and George Herbert,’ John Donne Journal 21 (2002): 89–200 (199). 72 Ibid. 73 Dieleman, ‘The Practices of Faith’, p. 106. 74 Isobel Armstrong, ‘D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti as Sonnet Writers’, Victorian Poetry 48.4 (2010): 261–473 (461). 75 Ibid., p. 463. 76 Marylu Hill, ‘“Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me”: Eucharist and the Erotic Body in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”’, Victorian Poetry 43.4 (2005): 455–72 (455, 457). 77 Dominic Janes, Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 54–76 78 William J. E. Bennett, ‘Some Results of the Tractarian Movement of 1833’, in The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day in 1867 by Various Writers,



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ed. Orby Shipley (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1867), pp. 1–26 (13). 79 Edward B. Pusey, ‘The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist’ (Oxford, 1853; repr. Kessinger Publishing Co., 2004), p. 40. 80 Lyra Eucharistica, pp. 41, 177, 199. 81 Ibid., p. 5; CP, p. 566. 82 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Richard Challoner [1737] (New York: Tan, 1989), p. 383. 83 Lyra Apostolica 1879, p. 128. 84 Selections from the Fifth Book of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. John Keble (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1839), pp. iv–v. 85 Ibid., p. 259. 86 Lona Mosk Packer, Christina Rossetti (Berkley: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 142–3. 87 Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context, p. 99. 88 Nicolas Lossky, ‘The Oxford Movement and the Revival of Patristic Theology’, From Oxford to the People, ed. Paul Vaiss (Hertfordshire: Gracewing, 1996), pp. 76–83 (77). 89 Ibid., pp. 77–8. 90 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, eds Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 3. 91 Ibid., p. 30. 92 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, 16 vols (London: John Hodges, 1882), viii, pp. 373–4. 93 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Ian Ker (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 27, 94 Stephen Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 46.

2

Grace, Revelation and Wisdom: Early Poetry Including Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. (Eccl. 3.11)

In Christina Rossetti’s earliest poetry, revelatory experiences promote orientation towards the eschatological and, in the manner of the aphoristic theology of The Cloud of Unknowing (c. 1375) and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418–27), invoke a profound dissatisfaction with the material world. By the time she came to write ‘Goblin Market’ in 1859, Rossetti’s approach to the world was becoming more nuanced. Unlike the poems that she composed in the 1840s, her later work reflects the possibility of appreciating and learning from sensory experience after the pattern of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (1393) and George Herbert’s The Temple (1633). Along with her shift in focus came attentiveness to the re-alignment of desire and to the adoption of an appropriate response to divine revelation. Discussing some of the work that Rossetti produced between the late 1840s and the late 1850s, this chapter focuses on her increasing engagement with the Song of Solomon, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, and with the long devotional tradition that prioritises the role of contemplation in the transformation of the self. In medieval religious thought, the term ‘contemplation’ means ‘the activity whose goal is the union of the soul with God in this life’.1 It is with this definition that my argument is concerned. Throughout Rossetti’s early poetry, the initial renunciation of worldly and sensory pleasure that the speaker of Ecclesiastes makes is exemplified by the figure of the cloistered nun. After the pattern of the five wise virgins of Matthew 25, the nuns in her early convent poems exercise

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holy desire and prepare for what lies beyond temporal bounds. As the later portion of this chapter demonstrates, Rossetti repeatedly uses the figure of the nun to highlight how contemplation brings the individual penitent into solidarity with the Communion of Saints. Her engagement with the wider Trinitarian communion enables her to draw associations between the virgin martyrs of the early church, the contemplatives of the monastic orders, the novices of Counter-Reformation Italy, and the contemporary Christian. Throughout, her poetic meditations stress the urgency with which, she perceives, each believer must overcome her individuality in order to come to an understanding of her God-ordained personhood in the dynamics of an earthly and heavenly holy community. Tractarian writings on contemplation and the role of Solomonic literature in the education of desire repeatedly recall the writings of the Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–95). Although the editors of the Library of the Fathers made preparations to publish Gregory’s theology, their focus remained largely on the Latin texts. Nonetheless, citations of and allusions to his Homilies on Ecclesiastes 1–3.13 and the Song of Solomon permeate volumes of Tractarian devotion and exegesis; John Mason Neale and Richard Frederick Littledale’s four-volume Commentary on the Psalms (1869–83) provides one such example. For Gregory, the Solomonic books all work differently to cultivate desire in the individual. In tracing typological connections between these texts and the New Testament, Rossetti follows the allegorical pattern that he establishes in his insistent association of Solomon with Jesus.2 Littledale considers the long tradition of this association in his commentary on the Song of Solomon. Here, he outlines Gregory’s incarnation-inflected reading of the meeting of the Bride with her heavenly Bridegroom: ‘as the Bride cannot reach the Most High unless He condescend to her lowliness; she, while soaring to the utmost limit of her power, intreats [sic] Him to meet her, by coming down from His majesty to earth’.3 Through the citation of similar expressions by later writers including Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Littledale recognises how the monasticism of the High Middle Ages extends Gregory’s startling vocabulary of desire and of Trinitarian personhood. Rossetti’s insistence that the contemplative experience is predicated on recognition of the grace of the Incarnation can be traced back to this heritage. The discussion below introduces Rossetti’s early commitment to the training of desire with close readings of her early sonnets ‘Vanity of Vanities’ (1847) and ‘One Certainty’ (1849). In these, the stress on the renunciation of sensory experience recalls the lessons of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.



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Tracing her development as a poet and theologian, the next section considers how Rossetti treats the orientation of desire in her contributions to the second issue of the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ (1850) and indicates how she adapts the structural and dialogical properties of Solomonic literature to challenge an outright rejection of the created world. The third section then reveals her profound and ongoing engagement with Christological approaches to the Song of Solomon and with the reception of ancient and monastic theology. An analysis of her convent poems of the 1850s indicates how she responds to mystical interpretations of Solomonic literature as well as to literary and hagiographic texts that affected her thinking about the monastic life.

Echoes of Ecclesiastes: The early poems In her concordance, Nilda Jimenez comments on Rossetti’s poetic treatment of the verse ‘Vanity of vanities: all is vanity’ (Eccl. 1.2). She suggests that ‘like the Koheleth’ her poetry ‘puts forth one long drawn lament of pain and disappointment, for she looks for escape from present misery and finds it not’.4 Rather than conceive of Rossetti’s poetry as a self-contained unit offering unremitting lament, my analysis indicates how she moves from expressions of complete dissatisfaction with the present to a more nuanced approach that appreciates but remains wary of idolising the created world and its inhabitants. Adding to the work of Mary Arseneau, Diane D’Amico and Lynda Palazzo – who identify a similar shift – I trace its basis in the long devotional reception of Solomonic literature and indicate how it is fostered by Rossetti’s increasingly astute awareness of her audience. Rossetti includes her sonnet ‘Vanity of Vanities’ in the booklet of poetry, Verses Dedicated to My Mother (1847), that her maternal grandfather Gaetano Polidori arranged to have printed with a private press. She later incorporates it into the non-devotional section of The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), where its positioning above ‘L.E.L.’ warns of pride in literary endeavours. Ah woe is me for pleasure that is vain, Ah woe is me for glory that is past: Pleasure that bringeth sorrow at the last, Glory that at the last bringeth no gain! So saith the sinking heart; and so again It shall say till the mighty-angel blast Is blown, making the sun and moon aghast,

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible And showering down the stars like sudden rain. And evermore men shall go fearfully Bending beneath their weight of heaviness; And ancient men shall lie down wearily, And strong men shall rise up in weariness; Yea, even the young shall answer sighingly, Saying one to another: How vain it is! (CP, p. 147)

From the start of this sonnet, the speaker acknowledges a complete loss of desire. The opening quatrain reflects humanity’s tendency to look for ‘pleasure’ and ‘glory’ in things that are insubstantial and fade with time (1, 2). The use of only four rhyme sounds and the insistent expressions of descent (‘sinking’ [5], ‘down’ [8], ‘bending’ [10]) counter the sense of development and resolution that the form of the Petrarchan sonnet leads the reader to expect. All men can do, the speaker feels, is to live in a life of ceaseless repetition, to ‘lie down wearily’ and ‘rise up in weariness’ day after day (11, 12). All they can say, ‘one to another’, is ‘How vain it is!’ (14). Ultimately, knowledge of God remains obscure and life exists as an oppressive and weighty burden. The thrice-repeated pronoun ‘men’ in the sestet accentuates the exclusion of the female figures that feature in other poems in Verses (9, 11, 12). The avowedly male voice not only establishes a distance between poet and speaker, but also invites critique. Palazzo registers this type of critique in ‘A Testimony’ (1849) when she argues that to see Rossetti as having adopted the voice of Qoheleth is to misread the poem’s message.5 While Palazzo’s reading is helpful in establishing the creation of poetic distance, Rossetti’s engagement with the paradox of man’s situation as he is trapped between an apprehension of eternity and his apparently vain and repetitive existence should not be overlooked. Rather than a straightforward challenge to the kind of ascetic disciplines that Edward Pusey was promoting, I suggest that Rossetti’s critique of the Qoheleth figures that she imagines is nuanced by gestures to Isaiah as well as to the expressions of spiritual struggle by figures from St Augustine to John Keble. Reading the sonnet’s expressions of weariness in light of God’s promise in Isaiah, that although ‘the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall […] they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength’ (Isa. 40.30–31), invites critical assessment. Rather than ‘mount[ing] up with wings as eagles’, as Isaiah prophesies (40.31), the men of Rossetti’s sonnet sink downward. Nonetheless, the pain that they express reveals dissatisfaction with what is material. The ‘woe[s]’ (2, 3) of their vaporous existence are represented



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as palpable and their posture of waiting ‘till the mighty-angel blast’ (6) ushers in the Kingdom of God indicates a movement beyond the world rather than simple resignation. As Rossetti’s other writings suggest, the heaviness of the soul is mitigated when it engages in acts of devotional contemplation. In her later work, Rossetti stresses that the union between the soul and God is predicated on grace and should therefore invoke an awe that causes the ‘wise [to] send their hearts before them to | Dear blessed Heaven’ (Later Life, CP, pp. 346–58: 24.1–2). Following Augustine’s reasoning that, just as fire and stones are ‘urged by their own weight’, we are carried by desire, she stresses how the waiting for God in a place of weariness should inflame believers and take them ‘onward and upward’ (‘As the sparks fly upwards’, CP, pp. 390–1: 11; Confessions, XIII.ix.10, p. 282). Keeping in mind this emphasis on the rising soul means encountering the ‘sinking heart’ (4) of ‘Vanity of Vanities’ not so much as an object of critique as of paradox and of spiritual crises. The approach to worldly things that Rossetti offers in ‘Vanity of Vanities’ can be partly accounted for by the influence of Platonism. While Rossetti writes to Dante Gabriel in 1864 that she ‘lugged […] a 6 vol. Plato’ on holiday with her to Hastings, (Letters 233: 23 December 1864), William Michael notes that she ‘read his Dialogues over and over again, with ever renewed or augmented zest’ (WMR, p. lxx). From her representations of this world as shadowy, it might be argued that she adopts the kind of ‘residual Platonism’ that Tom Wright suggests ‘has infected whole swathes of Christian thinking and has misled people into supposing that Christians are meant to devalue this present world’.6 However, Rowan Williams’s recognition that it is an error to suppose that ‘Platonism of any sort simply devalues the finite’ complicates any straightforward labelling of Rossetti’s early expressions of renunciation.7 A survey of the development of her theology reveals her increasingly nuanced response to different strands of Platonism and a commitment to an approach to worldly things that has a close affinity to the theology of the Patristic Fathers. In a meditation on Ecclesiastes 1.7 in Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879), Rossetti attends to the dangers of the type of ‘residual Platonism’ that Wright describes and that Williams distinguishes from what he perceives as more authentic Platonist philosophies. Maintaining a firmly Christological approach, she challenges the sense of despondency she had given voice to in ‘Vanity of Vanities’. “Vanity of vanities,” as “Solomon in all his glory” (see St. Matt. iv. 29) states and restates it, amounts to so exquisite a dirge over dead hope and paralysed effort

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible that we are almost ready to fall in love with our own desolation; and seeing that “man walketh in vain shadow” (Ps. xxxix. 7, Prayer-Book version) to become vain as that shadow, and to drift through life without disquietude, because without either aim or aspiration. Yet such a tendency in ourselves finds no permanent parallel in the Preacher’s sermon. He gropes along dim paths […] but at last he emerges into the broad unequivocal light of day: “Let us hear,” says he, “the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His Commandments” (Eccles. xii. 13). A Greater than Solomon is with us, and has deigned to instruct us by things new and old (St. Matt. xii, 42; see xiii, 52). […] He has rekindled human hope and aspiration. (pp. 272–3)

While witnessing to the reality of the ‘dim paths’ along which the Preacher travels, this passage brings to the fore the illuminative presence of Christ that, Rossetti believes, re-directs ‘hope and aspiration’. Although the experience of the speaker of the sonnet ‘Vanity of Vanities’ might be a reality for a time, the underlying message here is that it should not be a permanent condition in this life. Recognising Christ’s light, Rossetti encourages the reader to look upwards rather than inwards and, in so doing, offers a reminder that the spiritual life is one of hope and aspiration. This reminder recalls both the perception of the Greek Fathers who describe human nature as ‘essentially restless, precarious, mobile and variegated, because of its orientation towards a reality outside of itself ’, and of the Augustinian vision that ‘to be at home is […] to rediscover the eternal, patient, faithful love of our creator, who made us to enjoy him, so that “our hearts are restless till they come to rest in [God]”’.8 Rossetti’s recognition that the path to hope involves patient struggle, renunciation and purgation echoes the narrative trajectory of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Although not a text that was embraced enthusiastically by all the leaders of the Oxford Movement, it exemplifies a landscape and a vision which, according to Mary Arseneau, Rossetti ‘must had absorbed into her own consciousness’.9 As an allegorical space representative of the experiences of the speaker of Ecclesiastes, Bunyan’s description of Vanity Fair testifies to the allure of the worldly. While it is necessary that Christian and Faithful pass through the fair, their firm gaze ‘upwards, signifying that their Trade and Traffick [is] in Heaven’, prevents spiritual stasis.10 Faithful’s recognition that Christianity and the customs of Vanity Fair are ‘diametrically opposite’ indicates that the town is not the place in which to look for lasting joy.11 By holding on to their hope in Heaven, and by blocking their senses from temptation, the two



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men are able to encounter vanities without damaging their faith. Nonetheless, it is immediately following Faithful’s martyrdom in the fair that Christian, with his new companion Hopeful, loses his way and finds himself trapped in the castle of the Giant Despair. With Hopeful’s help, Christian is ultimately saved from succumbing to what Rossetti describes as the temptation to ‘fall in love with [his] own desolation’ when he holds his despair in tension with the hope Christ offers. His experience reveals the psychological anguish that results from escaping the vanities of the worldly only to launch straight into the self-made prison of paralysing desolation. Rossetti explores the tension between despair and hope in her novella Maude (1850). Initially composed around a series of poems, the prose narrative considers possible paths for young women: to write, to marry or to enter the convent. Asking her cousin Agnes to read her sonnets aloud, the religiously scrupulous heroine Maude listens as her own words of spiritual crisis are read back to her. 12 In them, her sense of desolation resounds. Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith, All things are vanity. The eye and ear Cannot be filled with what they see and hear. Like early dew, or like the sudden breath Of wind, or like the grass that withereth, Is man, tossed to and fro by hope and fear: So little joy hath he, so little cheer, Till all things end in the long dust of death. Today is the same as yesterday, Tomorrow also even as one of them; And there is nothing new under the sun: Until the ancient race of Time be run, The old thorns shall grow out of the old stem, And morning shall be cold and twilight grey.

As with ‘Vanity of Vanities’, this sonnet cites from Ecclesiastes and Isaiah in tandem. Incorporated among references to the Qoheleth’s opening meditation (Eccl. 1.2, 8, 9) is a recollection of Isaiah’s description of people as ‘the grass that withereth’ (5; Isa. 40.7–8). Throughout, Rossetti reworks the imagery of wind, dust and thorns that recur through Isaiah to describe the desolation of Israel and Judah. By bringing the restoration that Isaiah describes into an overtly Christological framework, she has her speaker express the tension involved in longing after the divine. Rather than invite criticism, the inclusion of the sonnet in the narrative indicates that despondency with the world is a legitimate part of

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the spiritual journey whereby the believer comes to recognise humanity’s urgent need for grace. A second sonnet, which Maude comments was ‘written like a postscript’, follows the first (RC, p. 51). In this, the more abstract Old Testament allusions are given personal and temporal meaning. The sonnet begins by imagining the Anglo-Catholic space of St Andrew’s Church, Wells Street, with its ‘antheming’ (1), ‘organ’ (3) and ‘white-robed’ (4) male choir (RC, p. 51). The speaker then laments her inconstancy as she waits on God. To watch and pray, false heart? It is not so: Vanity enters with thee, and thy love Soars not to Heaven, but grovelleth below. Vanity keepeth guard, lest good should reach Thy hardness; not the echoes from above Can rule thy stubborn feelings or can teach. (9–14)

The representation of vanity as a ‘guard’ (12) that closes off the heart from God’s healing touch can be reflected back on to ‘Vanity of vanities, the Preach saith’. Here, the inability to receive what is good is revealed to be part of the condition of a sinking humanity; the implication is that it is only grace that can re-kindle the heart and enable it to rise above the confusion of earthly experience. Applying this lesson to Maude’s personal circumstances, this second sonnet registers the allurement of the ‘shadows of this sanctuary’ (7) that threaten to block the flight to heaven rather than guide desire. The dilemma that Maude encounters recalls Augustine’s emotional anguish in protecting himself from the vanity of sensory things. Admitting that his severity ‘err[ed] in too great strictness’, he remembers that he wished ‘the whole melody of sweet music which is used to David’s Psalter banished from my ears, and the Church’s too’ (Confessions, X.xxxiii.50, p. 210). By drawing on the terms of this episode of struggle, Rossetti locates Maude’s weariness in the place of uphill struggle rather than at the peak of a grace-inflected understanding. By including the first of the two sonnets (‘Vanity of vanities, the Preacher Saith’) among the devotional pieces that conclude Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and by giving it the new title ‘One Certainty’, Rossetti accentuates its call to contemplation. Reading it in the context of the spiritual struggles that the volume delineates illuminates its allusions to Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Since the sonnet was composed during the same year that Rossetti was supplementing her Bible reading with The Imitation, it is



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unsurprising that it recalls its stress on the dangers of sensory things (Letters 1817: 17 August 1891). The Imitation opens with a chapter entitled ‘Of the Imitation of Christ, and the Contempt of All the Vanities of the World’. After conflating Ecclesiastes 1.2 with Deuteronomy 6.13 in the suggestion ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity […] besides loving God and serving Him alone’, the meditation considers the vanities that afflict humankind’s condition. It concludes with the observation that ‘it is vanity to love that which passeth with all speed, and not to hasten thither where everlasting joy remaineth’.13 Rossetti extends this emphasis on the ‘speed’ with which the vanities flee in her stress on temporal rhythms. Recognising that ‘today’ (9), yesterday [and] tomorrow’ (10, 12) will all be the same, her speaker considers how the ‘ancient race of Time’ will speed away and floundering man will be caught up in eternity. Although recognising that the endless repetition of life means that the ‘morning shall be cold and twilight grey’ (14), the ‘one certainty’ that we are invited to contemplate is that ‘all things [will] end’ (8) and a new temporality will be ushered in. In The Imitation, the inability to enter into ‘divine contemplation’ is shown to be the result of humanity’s bondage to ‘passions and lusts’.14 Thomas à Kempis’s response to this bondage is to ‘bewail the burden of the flesh’.15 Unlike Augustine, he does not move beyond this place of bewailing into an appreciation of the sensory. Instead, he remains focused on its potential to block the heart from receiving grace. While Rossetti removes Maude from the burden that she so strongly feels by the untimely death that follows her accident and has her friend Magdalen Ellis renounce all that is earthly upon entering a newly established Anglo-Catholic convent, her representation of Agnes and Mary offers the possibility of a less severe response. While their responses will be discussed in more detail in the third part of this chapter, the discussion below considers how, throughout the late 1840s and early 1850s, Rossetti continues to explore the paradox between celebrating the beauty of creation and repudiating idolatrous obstacles.

Contributions to The Germ (1850) In 1901, only two years after he had seen Maude into print, William Michael Rossetti reprinted The Germ. Although it ran to only four issues in 1850 and was not financially profitable, by the end of the century the reputation of the Pre-Raphaelites was soaring and it found a receptive audience. In the preface that he appends to the reprint of The Germ, William Michael notes that his

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brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem ‘My Sister’s Sleep’ characterises the journal’s emphasis on the ‘intimate intertexture of a spiritual sense with a material form’ that guided the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its early stages.16 Dante Gabriel’s designation of his early poems and paintings as ‘Art Catholic’ suggests that this emphasis was informed by the Tractarian preoccupation with ancient and medieval hermeneutics.17 However, such a straightforward understanding of Tractarian influence is complicated by his removal of religious motifs in an attempt to ‘secularise’ his poem in 1870, and by William Michael’s disavowal that the Brotherhood ‘had anything whatever to do with particular movements in the religious world – whether Roman Catholicism, Anglican Tractarianism, or what not’.18 Although William Michael’s comment indicates his brother’s movement towards a more ‘fleshly’ aesthetic, it should not detract from recognition of the initial concern of the Brotherhood with delineating ‘spiritual sense’. The discussion below considers Rossetti’s engagement with this avowed objective of early Pre-Raphaelitism in the three poems that she includes in the second issue of The Germ: ‘A Pause of Thought’, ‘Song’ and ‘A Testimony’. A letter that Rossetti wrote to William Michael when he was editing the second issue of The Germ indicates her concern with the journal’s commercial marketability: Do you know, I seriously urge on your consideration the increase of prose and decrease of poetry in the Germ, the present state of things strikes me as most alarming. Should all other articles fail, boldly publish my letters; they would doubtless produce an immense sensation. (Letters 22: 31 January 1850)

In spite of softening her ‘alarm’ with humour, Rossetti’s concern that the February issue would be too poetry-heavy and lacking in sensation is well founded. The previous issue had not sold well and the changes that William Michael decided to introduce, such as the inclusion of author’s names, were designed to seek favour with potential readers. With Rossetti’s comments about the literary marketplace in mind, Alexis Easley challenges William Michael’s representation of her as ‘a passive and somewhat reluctant contributor’. She suggests that evidence of ‘professional seriousness […] makes it doubtful that Rossetti played a strictly passive role in determining which of her poems would appear in The Germ’, albeit conceding that ‘her level of artistic control was probably very limited’.19 While the part that Rossetti played in editing The Germ remains uncertain, her concern that the journal should include more prose certainly reveals ‘professional seriousness’. Rossetti remained attentive to public taste and popular



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reading practices throughout her writing career; to have Verses (1847) printed at sixteen and two poems published in The Athenæum at seventeen was an unusual achievement and one that speaks more of literary ambition than a fear of appearing in print.20 As The Germ’s only female contributor, she was alert to her precarious situation on the edge of the Brotherhood.21 Like Charles Dickens’s Household Words that was issued in March 1850, the unanimous anonymity of the first issue of the The Germ obscures her identity from scrutiny. However, the issue of gender becomes apparent in the second issue when names and pseudonyms are given on the wrapper. William Michael records that it was Dante Gabriel who gave Rossetti the pseudonym Ellen Alleyn. Under this name, the narrative personae of her contributions are associated; the reader looking to speculate about biography would undoubtedly associate the poems published under the same name. ‘A Pause of Thought’ is the second of Rossetti’s poems included in the second issue of The Germ. It appears as pause-like in view of its place as a meditative piece, following James Collinson’s etching and his accompanying typological verse-narrative ‘The Child Jesus’, and preceding Frederic George Stephens’s essay, ‘The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art’. Throughout, Rossetti’s lyric speaker voices an inability to let go of her desire for an unspecified ‘object’ (6) that eludes her grasp. The first verse takes for its starting point Proverbs 13.12, a verse that Rossetti cites repeatedly throughout her poems. I looked for that which is not, nor can be, And hope deferred made my heart sick, in truth; But years must pass before a hope of youth Is resigned utterly. (TG, ii, p. 57; CP, pp. 45–6)

In its entirety, Proverbs 13.12 moves from hope to fulfilment: ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is the tree of life.’ By adapting this verse in order to offer a meditation on misplaced desire, Rossetti’s lyric stylises a self-critique from the struggle to let go of what is transitory. It thereby moves the reader away from the kind of objective approach to symbolism and typology that had been given in Collinson’s narrative poem ‘The Child Jesus’, and towards the interiority of a psychological and lyric contemplation. In the preface to his 1904 edition of Rossetti’s poetry, William Michael records that ‘A Pause’ was written two years before its publication. Recalling that ‘it was at first named “Lines in Memory of Schiller’s Der Pilgrim”’, he suggests it

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should be taken as a ‘personal utterance’ that reveals Rossetti’s aspiration ‘after poetic fame, with a keen sense of “hope deferred”’ (WMR, p. 21). His reasoning is based on the fact that it had been taken from the first part of the threepart poem ‘Three Stages’ that Rossetti had composed over the span of seven years (14 February 1848–25 July 1854; CP, pp. 1129–30). He argues that this triptych remained unpublished in its entirety because of its ‘intimately personal character’ (WMR, p. 477). While a biographical reading of ‘A Pause’ situates the Proverbs reference in the secular context of literary merit and locates the ‘empty name’ (13) that is looked to as a symbol of the hollow nature of fame, a consideration of the lyric’s gestures to Scripture and to Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Blake reveal other possibilities. Tennyson’s influence on Rossetti’s early poetry has been well documented by Dinah Birch and Dinah Roe.22 ‘A Pause’ not only indicates its debt to Tennyson by recalling the futile journey of ‘The Lady of Shallot’ but also replicates his deployment of the stanzaic form. Notwithstanding the shift from cross to envelope rhyme, it imitates the metrical schema of the quatrains in ‘The Palace of Art’. As Tennyson uses repetition to indicate emotional stasis in his female figures such as Mariana – who expresses her imprisonment with the words ‘I am aweary, aweary | I would that I were dead’ – Rossetti uses insistent repetition throughout in ‘A Pause’ to indicate the speaker’s inability to shape her desire heavenward.23 I watched and waited with a steadfast will: And, tho’ the object seemed to flee away That I so longed for, ever, day by day, I watched and waited still. (5–8)

From the first stanza, the ‘object’ (6) that remains undefined is associated with the ‘hope of youth’ (2–3). Here, the suggestion that it ‘flee[s]’ away signals that it is unattainable. The speaker’s desire is thus shown to be misdirected as she looks back to the past rather than forward to heaven. Both the third and fourth stanzas of ‘A Pause’ continue to critique the futility of looking to the past rather than the future. The speaker’s isolation is accentuated with the increasing repetition of personal pronouns: Sometimes I said, – ‘This thing shall be no more; My expectation wearies, and shall cease; I will resign it now, and be at peace:’ Yet never gave it o’er



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Sometimes I said, – ‘It is an empty name I long for; to a name why should I give The peace of all the days I have to live?’ – Yet gave it all the same. (9–16)

The passion and anxiety that is expressed here reveals the futility of yearning after what is transient; they do not promote the extreme renunciation of all sensory things in the manner of The Imitation of Christ. The possibility of enjoying ‘peace’ in life (15) gestures toward the kind of joy that Blake considers in his short lyric ‘Eternity’. While he acknowledges that beauty and joy can be appreciated, he stresses that the more you try and bind them up, the more you destroy them: He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.24

Keeping in mind the ongoing concern with Blake that Dante Gabriel and William Michael shared – which resulted in their involvement in the purchase of Blake’s Notebook in 1847, and their assistance in the completion of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of Blake in 1863 – it is unsurprising that they would choose for inclusion in The Germ a poem of their sister’s that expresses a Blakean-inflected sense of double vision. As the final part of this chapter indicates, Blake’s lesson that the fragile and transitory should be held lightly rather than inopportunely grasped resonates not only with ‘A Pause’ but also gives shape to the narrative poems in Goblin Market and Other Poems. Blake’s representation of the fragility of earthly beauty in terms of ‘winged life’ echoes the rendering of the world as beautiful and bubble-like in seventeenth-century texts including those by Ezekiel Hopkins, Francis Quarles and George Herbert.25 These foreground Rossetti’s warning regarding the dangers of trying to ‘grasp’ beauty, and provide her with a basis from which to nuance Blake’s theology. It is because her speaker begins her journey by looking in the wrong direction, ‘for that which is not, nor can be’ (1), that she struggles to extricate herself from misplaced desire. The insistence on clinging on to passing joys rather than simply kissing them as they fly is revealed as ‘foolish’ in the final stanza of ‘A Pause’. This stanza works as a postscript in that it takes a step back from the voice of experience to offer a lament on the failure that has been described:

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Unlike the frame narrative in Ecclesiastes that extracts meaning from personal experience, the speaker of these lines expresses regret at the failure to follow Qoheleth into what Rossetti describes as ‘the broad unequivocal light of day’ (SF, p. 273). In anticipation of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), the envelope rhyme embodies the inability to break free of the futile chase. Added to this, the absence of referents offers a heightened awareness of divided selfhood. Appearing in The Germ after ‘A Pause’, Stephens’s essay on Italian art defines the objectives of Pre-Raphaelitism. Delineating how the early Italian painters mistook the object of their search and retreated to the ‘undisturbed silence and humility’ of the monastery, he cites from Robert Browning’s monologue ‘Pictor Ignotus’ (TG, ii, p. 59). Stephens praises the ‘consciousness of purpose’ of the artists that are described, in spite of what he perceives as their misdirection in taking themselves to the cloister (ibid.). His reference to Tennyson’s (Proverbsinflected) lines ‘My strength is as the strength of ten, | Because my heart is pure’ (from ‘Sir Galahad’) accentuates his insistent message that ‘without the pure heart, nothing can be done worthy of us’ (p. 63). This message grates against the sense of divided identity that the speaker in ‘A Pause’ articulates as she struggles to give up her futile chase for the elusive object and finds the result of her struggle ‘useless’ (19). It also stands at odds with the sense of fractured identity that is articulated in Rossetti’s ‘Song’ that follows. After Collinson’s focus on childhood in his etching and his poem, and Stephens’s call to youthful readers to shape the destiny of the nation (TG, ii, p. 64), the experience of premature ageing and death that is voiced in ‘Song’ is rendered particularly jolting. Oh! roses for the flush of youth, And laurel for the perfect prime; But pluck an ivy-branch for me, Grown old before my time. Oh! violets for the grave of youth, And bay for those dead in their prime; Give me the withered leaves I chose Before in the olden time. (TG, ii, p. 64; CP, p. 34)



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The mirror effect that is caused by mapping the form and language of the first stanza onto the second creates further uncomfortable juxtaposition. The apparent space between the ‘flush’ of youth and the ‘grave’ is closed by the recognition that the ‘perfect prime’ exists in the shadow of death and the possibility of dying in one’s prime offers the glaring reminder that perfection cannot last (1, 5, 2). Added to this, the lyric reveals that while it is possible to grow old early, is also possible that a choice made in youth can reverberate in later life. In an important article, Heather McAlpine considers Rossetti’s investment in floriography and suggests how ‘Song’’s ‘organisation as a list of various plants or flowers along with their associations recalls that of many contemporary handbooks to flower language’.26 Of most significance to this discussion, she considers Rossetti’s treatment of ivy in Called to be Saints and suggests how an intratextual reading of Rossetti’s corpus means carrying over to ‘Song’ overtones of the joy that ‘may be found in accepting one’s frailty and surrendering to the divine’. It also, McAlpine argues, conveys ‘the hidden resources of strength as well as the possibility of eternal life that accompany such a surrender in the stress on ivy’s perennial greenness’.27 Expanding this idea of surrender, I suggest that the poem’s momentum can be read in terms of Ecclesiastes whereby the Preacher recognises the limitations of the pleasures he experienced in youth and chooses eschatological wisdom rather than worldly vanity. An awareness of ageing and death is carried through from the ‘ivy-branch’ (3) and ‘withered leaves’ (7) of ‘Song’ to the rhetorical voice and the sage voice of lived experience in ‘A Testimony’. As the third poem attributed to Ellen Alleyn in the second issue of The Germ, it invites comparison with ‘A Pause’ and ‘Song’ as well as with the pieces that appear under the same name in the subsequent two issues of the journal. Rossetti composed ‘A Testimony’ in August 1849, just over two months after she had written ‘One Certainty’. Twelve years after its inclusion in The Germ, she incorporates it in the devotional section of Goblin Market, and thereby has it resonate with ‘One Certainty’’s typological reading of Ecclesiastes and its anticipation of the ‘one certainty’ that ‘all things [will] end’ (8) and a new temporality will be ushered in. ‘A Testimony’ recalls the tight sesta rima structure of Rossetti’s first published poem, ‘Death’s Chill Between’. However, rather than simply repeating the patterning, it substitutes the expected cross-rhymed quatrain with the enveloperhyme of ‘A Pause’. Translating the narrative of the wise Preacher of Ecclesiastes into a series of thirteen stanzas, each consisting of this envelope-rhymed quatrain followed by a rhyming couplet, Rossetti accentuates the sense of enclosure and looking back that her earlier poems had established. This is amplified further by

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the overlap of rhyme sounds across consecutive stanzas. Her departure from the standard stanzaic form indicates her concern with the tension between recurrence and forward-movement. Anticipating the typological connection that she would make in Seek and Find between Qoheleth’s ‘dirge’ and Psalm 39.7 (‘For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them’), the second stanza weaves both passages into a coherent whole: Man walks in a vain shadow; he Disquieteth himself in vain. The things that were shall be again: The rivers do not fill the sea, But turn back to their secret source; The winds too turn upon their course. (TG, ii, pp. 73–5; CP, pp. 71–3: 7–12)

After having the first two lines recall Psalm 39.7, the third comes as a surprise to the biblically engaged reader. Expectation is jolted when, instead of relating how the unhappy man ‘heapeth up riches’, the world-weary expression of Ecclesiastes is introduced and nuanced. The final three lines enact the turning back of the winds and the rivers by a re-working Ecclesiastes 1: while Qoheleth considers the ‘winds’, the ‘rivers’ and then ‘the thing’ (1.6, 7, 9), the speaker reverses the order to indicate the ongoing circularity of man’s existence. However, the reference to the ‘secret source’ of the rivers adds a further eschatological dimension in its implication of a secret joy that cannot be seen ‘under the sun’ (Eccl 1.3). This allusion to an unobserved source echoes Christ’s statement that he draws strength from where it is hidden: ‘I have meat to eat that ye know not of ’ (Jn 4.32). With this in mind, doubt is thrown over the perception that what is visible can be taken as representative of life in all its fullness. Verses 3 and 4 enact a transition from generalised meditations on ‘man’ and ‘things’ to more specific inferences through the use of personal pronouns and the reference to the ‘one man’. Throughout, typological connections are made between the narrative of Ecclesiastes and the parables of the Gospels. Our treasures moth and rust corrupt, Or thieves break thro’ and steal, or they Make themselves wings and fly away. One man made merry as he supped, Nor guessed how when that night grew dim His soul would be required of him.



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We build our houses on the sand Comely withoutside and within; But when the winds and rains begin To beat on them, they cannot stand: They perish, quickly overthrown, Loose from the very basement stone. (13–24)

The initial description of the loss of earthly treasure recalls both the warning in Proverbs not to lust after riches that will ultimately ‘make themselves wings [and] fly away’ (23.5) and the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus instructs his disciples to ‘lay up for [themselves] treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal’ (Matt. 6.20). Preceding his account of this instruction, Luke recounts the parable that Jesus tells of the ‘certain rich man’ who lived by the precept, ‘eat, drink, and be merry [before] God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall these things be, which thou hast provided?’ (Lk. 12.16, 19–20). In tracing connections between Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and these New Testament passages, Rossetti follows the interpretative pattern detailed by Gregory of Nyssa and taken forward by the affective mysticism of the High Middle Ages in the association of the Ecclesiast with Jesus. The account in verse 4 of the poem emphasises the futility of building ‘houses on the sand’ (19) and uses the plural ‘we’ to bring a self-accusatory tone to the parable of the foolish man and the wise man that both Matthew and Luke include in their Gospels (Matt. 7.24–7; Lk. 6.47–9). The use of the word ‘perish’ (23) in the account of the destruction further signals the symbolic value of the houses and accentuates the urgency of preparing the soul for the time when an account will be ‘required’ by God (18). By bringing to mind the parable, the verse calls on the reader of The Germ to look back to ‘A Pause’ and to associate herself with the ‘foolish man, which [sic] built his house upon the sand’ (Matt. 7.26) and with his precursor, the speaker of Ecclesiastes, who, looking on all the works he built, found that ‘all was vanity and vexation of spirit’ (2.11). The shift from interpreting the world with Qoheleth to becoming the subject of interpretation by the parable is further consolidated by the ongoing and insistent use of personal pronouns in verses eight and nine. Here, ‘the eye’ and ‘the ear’ (Eccl. 1.8) become ‘our eyes’ and ‘our ears’ (43, 44). After incorporating this implied reading community into the vision of generations that

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‘come and go’ (60), the poem closes with a reflection on the transience of lived experience. The earth is fattened with our dead; She swallows more and doth not cease: Therefore her wine and oil increase And her sheaves are not numbered; Therefore her plants are green, and all Her pleasant trees lusty and tall. Therefore the maidens cease to sing, And the young men are very sad; Therefore the sowing is not glad, And mournful is the harvesting. Of high and low, of great and small, Vanity is the lot of all. A King dwelt in Jerusalem; He was the wisest man on earth; He had all riches from his birth, And pleasures till he tired of them; Then, having tested all things, he Witnessed that all are vanity. (61–78)

In her reading of these verses, Palazzo detects a critique of the Tractarian-inflected doctrine of renunciation.28 I want to question Palazzo’s reading by suggesting that, for Rossetti, the act of renunciation is not necessarily negative or mournful. More than simply refusing to celebrate the beauty of the earth, it denotes for her the process of re-orientating desire heavenward. While the verses above might critique the silence and sadness of the ‘maidens’ and ‘young men’ (67, 68), they are more concerned with misguided desire than with renunciation. Rossetti indicates that, taken aright, Qoheleth’s conclusion that ‘all [things] are vanity’ is meant to lift desire heavenward (78). While this means renouncing obstacles to devotion, it does not necessarily involve a condemnation of the created world. Reading the poem in terms of Rossetti’s commitment to the message of Blake’s ‘Eternity’, the cause of the mourning that is described can be understood in terms of the temptation to ‘bind’ up what brings joy. By clinging what is ‘dead’ (61), Rossetti suggests that the harvesters blind themselves to the beauty of the ever-renewing earth. Invoking the parabolic, she does not preach, but instead invites the reader to respond to the overwhelming sense of vanitas mundi with which the poem ends.



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Mid-century monasticism: The early convent poems Continuing to investigate Rossetti’s engagement with Solomonic literature, the analysis below indicates how her early convent poems draw on monastic, medieval and early modern approaches and use lyric, monologue and dialogue forms to convey theological insight. Focusing particularly on ‘Three Nuns’ (1849–50) and ‘The Convent Threshold’ (1858), I reveal how Rossetti turns to past devotional encounters with biblical precept as she offers an implicit critique of the new aesthetic direction that her brother Dante Gabriel and others were taking after the dispersal of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As Dante Gabriel was moving towards a more ‘fleshly’ conception of art, Rossetti’s Tractarian commitment was leading her to an increased engagement with ecclesiastical tradition. Keeping in mind their interrogative treatment of worldly things and desires, I argue that her convent poems are best considered in the context of Rossetti’s diachronic engagement with the long history of the life of the contemplative and with the histories of the virgin martyrs that John Mason Neale, John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey were introducing to the Anglo-Catholic church. Under the management of Pusey, the first Anglican sisterhood was established at 17 Park Village West in 1845. Raymond Chapman writes that it was this ‘which seized Christina’s imagination and brought the figure of the nun out of the realm of sensational historical fiction and into reality’.29 Rather than the realism that characterises the mid-nineteenth-century novel, the realism of ‘Three Nuns’ and ‘The Convent Threshold’ is more akin to the ‘firm attachment to [psychological] truth’ that Stephens describes in ‘The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art’ (TG, ii, p. 59). Unlike Maude, which speaks of Magdalen Ellis’s entry into a nineteenth-century ‘Sisterhood of Mercy’, there is nothing in either poem that makes explicit reference to the establishment of Anglican sisterhoods. The speakers to whom Rossetti gives lyric expression treat the convent as a place of escape from the temporalities of the world where inhabitants wait on death. Distinguished from their counterpart Magdalen in Maude, they are neither ‘calm [nor] happy’ in the sense of finding their vocation in social action: ‘teaching children, or attending the sick, or making things for the poor, or something’ (RC, p. 43). As D’Amico explains, Rossetti’s decision to invoke the contemplative rather than the active lives of nuns emerges from her concern with exploring and articulating the spiritual struggles that occur in ‘looking forward beyond this life and beyond the end of time’.30 Building on D’Amico’s helpful contextual survey of Rossetti’s investment in the space of the

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convent as the place of renouncing worldly pleasures in anticipation of the joys that are to come in eternity, my discussion reveals how the first-person lyrics of the convent poems synthesise elements from ancient, medieval and continental sources. Newman’s historical theology was formative in the development of Anglican convents. Thomas Jay Williams and Allan Walter Campbell consider the influence of his volume The Church of the Fathers (1840) on the establishment of the Park Village Sisterhood and record that it was ‘read by at least two young women in whom it awakened a desire to dedicate themselves to God in the virgin state.’31 In it, Newman comments on the expediency of sisterhoods in the Church of England and contends that ‘monasteries and monastic life’ would enable believers to ‘serve God without distraction’.32 Five years after writing these words, his vision took shape when three female aspirants entered the house in Park Village West. Few could have anticipated then the huge surge in sisterhoods that would take place over the next two decades. Rossetti’s experience, first with the small community who made up the Foundation of St Katherine in Regent’s Park, and later with All Saints Sisters of the Poor where her sister Maria was professed, undoubtedly shaped her poetic reflections on the contemplative place and on spiritual vocation.33 In the early days of overseeing the Park Village Sisterhood, Pusey was particularly engaged in exploring early church and monastic accounts of convent life. In assessments of his influence on Rossetti, his work on grace and on the communal nature of Christian faith has been obscured by a repeated emphasis on his masochistic asceticism. Considering that the diagnosis of ‘religious mania’ in the fifteen-year-old Rossetti came only a month after the inauguration of the novices at the Park Village, Jan Marsh comments that ‘the time and place were evidently conducive to an adolescent crisis taking a religious cast’.34 Scholarship that casts Rossetti as a Puseyite continues to focus on the expression of guilt, unworthiness, suffering and self-denial in her devotional writings. Diverging from this focus, I look to the influence on Rossetti of Pusey’s endeavours to make ancient and medieval devotional accounts of mystical experience widely accessible. In the case of interpreting her convent poems, I argue that a more balanced understanding of Pusey’s influence needs to take into account his concern that contemporary believers learn from the ‘older mystics’ and imitate the avowed ‘humility’ of the lives of the Saints.35 The rituals that shaped the daily experiences of the early Anglo-Catholic nuns were predicated on models taken from the breviaries and medieval prayer books that had been used for hundreds of years by the Roman Catholic enclosed



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orders of continental Europe. Taking forward Pusey’s earlier teachings, Neale’s sermons to St Margaret’s sisterhood in 1857 indicate the ‘living connection’ that the nineteenth-century nun has with her ‘happy Sisters’ of the past.36 Offering an account of the first sisterhood that was founded in fourth-century Palestine by a Roman widow, S. Paula, and her daughter, S. Eustochium, he explains how ritual practice reinforces the connection: ‘Now, dearest Sisters, when we say Matins here, we say the very same Psalms on the very same days, said by them, 1450 years ago, under that bright moon of Palestine. There is not one, not the slightest difference’.37 That this sermon to the sisterhood was incorporated into a series and made available for public perusal is indicative of the Tractarian concern with disseminating knowledge of medieval devotional practices. This concern is manifested in Neale’s earlier volume, Annals of Virgin Saints (1846). Here, he voices his ‘hope of interesting […] by Primitive and Medieval example’ the minds of women seeking their vocation.38 In its entirety, the volume recalls how various saints from Thecla (68 ce) to Queen Isobel (1336 ce) set a precedent through their selfless acts of devotions and renunciations of worldly things. The chronological survey of the saints that Neale offers gestures to a mid-nineteenth-century female readership and closes the space between past and present: the message that all are bound in the same Communion of Saints is insistent. Rossetti’s ‘Three Nuns’ takes a similar diachronic approach to temporality and spatial bounds to that offered in Neale’s volume as it combines aspects of convent life from different times and continents. By associating the voices of the three nuns with one another and with the speakers of the epigraphs, Rossetti focuses on the shared psychological pressures that result from the severe selfscrutiny that immolation calls for. After writing the poem, Rossetti inserted it into Maude. Here, it is enclosed by Maude in a letter to Agnes and described as the result of her efforts to compose an Epithalamium for Mary’s forthcoming marriage to the aptly named Mr Herbert: ‘not much to the purpose, we must admit’ (RC, p. 60). Maude identifies the speakers as follows: The first Nun no one can suspect of being myself […] the second might be Mary had she mistaken her vocation. The third is Magdalen, of course. But whatever you miss, pray read the mottoes. Put together, they form a most exquisite little song which the nuns sing in Italy. One can fancy Sister Magdalen repeating it with her whole heart. (RC, p. 60.)

The translations that William Michael gives the ‘mottoes’ (or epigraphs) read: ‘This heart sighs, and I know not wherefore,’ ‘It may be sighing for love, but to me it says not so’ and ‘Answer me, my heart, wherefore sighest thou? It answers:

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I want God, I sigh for Jesus’ (WMR, p. 460). Sharon Smulders suggests that ‘These mottoes serve to translate the solitary experience of each nun into a communal form of religious expression.’39 Read in this way, they can be understood to gesture to the inclusivity of the Communion of Saints. By having Maude draw particular attention to the mottoes, by keeping them in Italian and by using them to associate each of the voices, Rossetti accentuates the kind of attention to deliberate shaping that E. Warwick Slinn terms the Victorian poem’s ‘own linguistic action’.40 The insistent repetition of the word ‘sigh’ in the mottoes draws attention to the experience of waiting that the poem describes. Chapter 1 described how Rossetti’s sonnet ‘After Communion’ nuances the vision that George Herbert offers in ‘Love [3]’ by its focus on the significance of anticipation and longing. Adding to this, I suggest how Rossetti’s ongoing concern with holy aspiration finds resonance in the writings of Herbert’s continental counterparts. A recent article by Abigail Brundin draws attention to the practice in Early Modern Italy of celebrating the entry of a woman into a convent with lyric poems ‘composed by male friends and would-be friends of the woman’s family, and, on occasion, by the woman herself ’.41 In the appendix to her article, Brundin includes an example of a poem written by a nun on the occasion of taking her vows.42 It shares some remarkable similarities with ‘Three Nuns’ in terms of imagery and narrative progression. As the speaker of the Italian poem asks that her veils ‘climb up to crown me’, Rossetti’s first nun asks that the convent shadows ‘Rise and cover up my head | Be my stainless winding sheet’ (9–10). Similarly, as the Italian nun forsakes her ‘jewelled rings’ and vain ‘treasure’ and embraces ‘the poverty of my cell’, Rossetti has her third speaker repudiate the world’s ‘gems and gold’ (153) for ‘vigils, fasts and prayer’ (185). The repeated reference to hair in both poems is significant in terms of locating Rossetti’s intertextual dialogue. Brundin suggests that the poet’s likening of her hair to chains, ‘now binding her to the earth, which must be cast off if she is to be bound to God’ serves as a ‘notably feminine rewriting of the Petrarchan trope’.43 For Rossetti’s first nun, the shorn golden hair represents what is ‘left behind’ in the world (26). Responding to the Petrarchan fetish with hair in the tradition of this seventeenth-century Italian ode, Rossetti accentuates the poem’s gestures toward communal expression. Not only do her three nuns speak in solidarity with one another and with contemporary European sisters but they overstep temporal boundaries and find kindred spirits in the medieval and Renaissance world. In the Italian ode, the ‘disloyal mirror’ serves to represent worldly vanity and is an ‘obstacle of the soul’. From the start of ‘Three Nuns’, Rossetti invokes a similar sentiment. Noelle Bowles comments on how the trochees of the first



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verse emit the same passion as the famous declaration ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall’ in Snow White. She suggests that in these lines Rossetti offers a kind of ‘anti-fairy tale’; she ‘rejects the invidious gaze of the tale’s original antagonist and replaces feminine competition with a desire to escape from the “intruding eyes” of those who see, not what she is but what they wish to project upon her’, namely the mistaken ideal of fulfilment in erotic love and worldly success.44 Notwithstanding this recognition, it is misleading to focus solely on the nun’s desire to conceal herself from the intrusive eyes of the world and from the men who ‘saw and called [her] fair’ (23). Alongside her desire for concealment, it is significant that the speaker voices a need for ‘shelter’ and isolation away from tactile encounters in the world that threaten to mar purity (2). The emphasis on shadows in the first two stanzas of ‘Three Nuns’ recalls Tennyson’s depiction of the ‘shadows of the convent-towers’ that ‘creep’ over his heroine in ‘St Agnes’ Eve’ (5, 7). Rossetti also looks back to Keats’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, a poem she had spoken of in her 1849 sonnet ‘On Keats’, where she had imagined the enclosed-garden scene of the poet’s grave and envisaged the space where ‘chilly shadows flit |  Of sweet Saint Agnes’ Eve’ (CP, p. 700). Writing with the avowed intention of edification, Neale’s treatment of St Agnes distances itself from Romantic aestheticism and presents the saint as ‘the especial pattern and model of Virgin purity’ and emphasises her determination in ‘set[ting] her face like a rock to withstand [the] solicitations’ of her proposed suitor and his family.45 It is Neale’s representation of St Agnes that best corresponds to Rossetti’s treatment. Striving to extinguish her past identity, the first of her ‘Three Nuns’ does not, like Tennyson’s St Agnes, simply watch her breath rise to heaven as a vapour in a meditative contemplation of her appropriating martyrdom. Rather, she struggles, with determination and force, to empty herself of the taint of worldly preoccupation. Shadow, shadow on the wall Spread thy shelter over me; Wrap me with a heavy pall, With the dark that none may see Fold thyself around me, come: Shut out all the troublesome Noise of life; I would be dumb. Shadow, thou hast reached my feet, Rise and cover up my head: Be my stainless winding sheet,

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The formal patterning of these two stanzas continues through the other six that constitute the first nun’s narrative. In each, Rossetti introduces a departure from the standard form of the sesta rima: while the opening quatrains use the expected cross-rhyme, they close with rhyming triplets rather than couplets. This highlights the theme of enclosing and enwrapping. The emphasis on being swaddled as a means of cutting oneself off from the distresses of the world chimes with the imagery that runs through Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Expressing her perception of God as loving mother, Julian recognises that ‘he is our clothing, that for love wrappeth us, and windeth us, halseth us, and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender love, that he maie never leave us [sic]’.46 In her request that she be wrapped in the convent shadows, the nun of Rossetti’s poem combines this concept of wrapping as God’s motherly protection with her determined wish for an obliteration of the burden of feeling: she would be ‘dumb’ to the pain of her heart (7). Beyond the gestures to the accounts of St Agnes and the mysticism of Julian, the motif of the protective shadow that runs through the monologue finds a type in Gabriel’s words to Mary, ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee’ (Lk. 1.35), the Psalmist’s petition, ‘Hide me under the shadow of thy wings’ (17.8) and the beloved’s words in the Song of Solomon, ‘I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste’ (2.3). In Annus Domini, Rossetti associates these verses with what is described in Isaiah as the redemptive ‘branch’ of the Lord: ‘For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall’ (Isa. 25.4). Consolidating her typological approach, she prays: O LORD Jesus Christ, our Shadow from the heat when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall, save us, I implore Thee, under all stress of terrible temptation. Deliver us from rebellion of passion, seduction of the flesh, allurements of the world, provocations of the devil: deliver us from siege and from surprise, from our foes and from ourselves, O Lord. Amen. (Prayer 103)

The urgency of these words recalls the dangers of the world from which the



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women of ‘Three Nuns’ seek shelter. Having spoken of how the ‘vanity and care’ of the world had wearied her and how the shadows of the convent offer protection, the first expresses a need for deliverance from her aching heart more than from the ‘men’ who ‘called [her] fair’ (25, 23). Choosing to make herself ‘dumb’ to the world as a ‘bride’ of Christ (7, 28), she sickens as she awaits ‘the flush of Paradise’ (32). Thus, she translates the heavenly union that is experienced by Tennyson’s St Agnes into the psychological ‘reality’ of the nun’s contemplative experience: it is long in coming and the wait is painful. While the convent shadows that she invites to cover her can be seen to represent the tree of her childhood, her ‘aching worse than pain’ exemplifies her recognition that the ‘dream’ of complete oneness with the natural world ‘can never be’ (41, 63). Like the speaker of ‘A Pause’, she is forced to re-interpret the basis of her identity and give up the futile chase for perfection in this world. The nun is repeatedly distracted by the sound of a bird’s song. Her desperation is heightened by the thought of the song coming to an end, cutting her dream short and accentuating her heartache. The motif of listening to a bird song from inside the confines of the convent walls echoes the accounts of St Elizabeth of Hungary, with which Rossetti was familiar. Sabine Baring-Gould’s account of Elizabeth’s final illness includes the tale of how the sound of a little bird alleviated the pain of her immolation and ‘stirred in her a musical chord’.47 Similarly, the Count de Montalembert’s Life of St. Elizabeth – a volume that Rossetti read in French – cites an ‘ancient narrator’ who recounts that a guardian angel came to Elizabeth ‘under the form of a little bird to announce the approach of eternal joy’.48 By having the birdsong invoke memories of childhood, Rossetti’s nun reveals her distance from St Elizabeth’s holier aspiration and indicates that her desires are still in the process of being aligned toward God. Through the monologue of her second nun, Rossetti continues to explore the liminal space between life and death. The nun expresses her anguish at being torn between romantic and divine love, and asks that her hearers gather around her deathbed to pray that she ‘may wake again | After His Likeness’ (120–1). The form of the stanzas, with their quatrains of envelope rhyme and rhyming couplets, anticipates ‘A Testimony’, which Rossetti wrote only six months later. As in this, the recurrences and enclosures of the form are used to convey weariness with the existential probing that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes models. Throughout, the convent is envisaged as a place of waiting, and the language of the Old Testament is incorporated into lyric form. In Genesis, God appears to Abram and reassures him: ‘Fear not […] I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward’ (15.1). He then promises him his inheritance in the form of

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descendants. Claiming her part in this inheritance, Rossetti’s nun looks for her own ‘exceeding great reward’ in death. Oh sweet is death that bindeth up The broken and the bleeding heart. The draught chilled, but a cordial part Lurked at the bottom of the cup; And for my patience will my Lord Give an exceeding great reward. (94–9)

By re-working lines from Genesis, Rossetti indicates her opposition to the Victorian prioritization of maternity over a life of dedicated service to God. Throughout her poems, the ‘exceeding great reward’ that God promises to Abram is typologically re-worked to indicate the promise of eternity. It this promise that enables her speakers to confront an awareness of how earthly existence is painfully divided. The first two stanzas of the third nun’s monologue extend the significance of the bird imagery as they express the painful division between divine vocation and ties to earth. Throughout, the narrative trajectory of the Bible continues to be eclipsed by an existential perspective that encounters the whole of Scripture simultaneously as the living word that has transformative power. My heart is as a freeborn bird Caged in my cruel breast, That flutters, flutters evermore, Nor sings, nor is at rest. But beats against the prison bars, As knowing its own nest Far off beyond the clouded West. My soul is as a hidden fount Shut in by clammy clay, That struggles with an upward moan; Striving to force its way Up, through the turf, over the grass, Up, up into the day, Where twilight no more turneth grey. (124–37)

The struggle to align knowledge of her ‘own [eternal] nest’ with an acute awareness



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of the limitations of lived experience in a fleshy and worldly ‘prison’ proves impossible without the grace that remains so elusive from a perspective that is bound to a particular temporality (128). In the second verse, the nun’s desperation to ‘force’ her way ‘Up, up into the day’ of revelation is revealed through the analogy of the fountain (134, 136). This is rooted in the language of the Song of Solomon where, following the description of the Beloved as ‘a fountain sealed,’ the lover describes her as ‘a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon’ (4.12, 15). Typologically understood as anticipatory of Jesus’s promise of ‘living water’ and, ultimately, the ‘blood and water’ that flowed from his side after his crucifixion (Jn. 4:10; 19.34), the lover’s description hints at the prospect of eternal life void of pain where, according to Rossetti’s nun, ‘twilight no more turneth grey’ (137). The notion that, until that day, the believer must remain as ‘a fountain sealed’ both exemplifies the Tractarian preoccupation with the principle of reserve and highlights the importance of the convent enclosure which, although figured as an extension of the ‘prison’ of the world (128), protects and guards those inside from being negatively transformed by external influence. The third nun’s refusal to even ‘look upon a rose’ (166) corresponds to the emphasis of Tennyson’s 1842 poems on the disjointedness of humans with regard to the natural world, and to an existential dissatisfaction with the twilight that ‘turneth grey’ (137).49 Recalling the speaker of ‘One Certainty’, who reflects that she has nothing to look forward to in this life but the ‘morning [that] shall be cold and twilight grey’ (14), the nun contemplates the paucity of the sun compared to the shining crowns in the ‘courts of Heaven’ (175). While she reveals that the renunciation of the world had once given her pain, and that the ‘desperate strife’ involved in shutting herself away from visible beauty had almost destroyed her (199), her monologue concludes with an affirmation of her determined choice of the contemplative. Here, the nun recalls that she ‘prayed, as one who prays for life’ until she was transformed: Until I grew to love what once Had been so burdensome. So now when I am faint, because Hope deferred seems to numb My heart, I yet can plead: and say Although my lips are dumb: ‘The Spirit and the Bride say, Come.’ (201–7)

While these lines look beyond the first nun’s wish to be wrapped in the ‘heavy pall’

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(3) that would shut out the ‘noise of life’ and make her ‘dumb’ (7), they express a new perspective. Rather than dissatisfaction, the numbness that the speaker experiences renders her spiritually alert to the possibility of union with Christ. Having her ‘hope deferred’ in the present means that her vision turns to the eschatological (204). Ultimately, her waiting is rooted in the convergence of the beloved’s cry in the Song of Solomon, ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away’ (2.10), and the proclamation of Revelation 22.17, ‘The Spirit and the Bride say, Come.’ In her early novella, by having Maude associate the second nun with her cousin Mary and the third with the newly professed nun Magdalen, Rossetti gestures to the long devotional tradition of identifying Mary Magdalene with the contemplative. As ‘the representative of all sinners who are called to the contemplative life’, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing describes how Mary Magdalene ‘hung her love and her longing’ on to what she could only perceive spiritually.50 Teresa of Avila takes the association of the Magdalene with the professed nun further when she identifies with her in a moment of contemplation.51 This move of identification is replayed in the Italian lyric that is discussed above: here, the speaker considers Mary’s place at Jesus’s resurrection and draws on the imagery of the garden to describe how her soul is cultivated by his love; upon entering the convent, she imagines how she will ‘tread the path of penitence’ after the pattern of the Magdalene.52 In ‘The Convent Threshold’, Rossetti returns to an exploration of the Magdalene-like repentance that an encounter with divine love engenders. Written one week before ‘Up-Hill’, and appearing directly before it in Goblin Market and Other Poems, this dramatic monologue considers the pain of the spiritual journey. Throughout, it has the speaker address her lover and persuade him to look beyond the transitory: ‘When once the morning star shall rise, | When earth with shadow flees away’ (141–2). Just as the third of the ‘Three Nuns’ recalls the pain as her ‘feet bled’ as she stepped into the convent (192), the speaker of this later poem expresses the unearthly suffering involved in negotiating the threshold that leads beyond the world. The poem begins by setting out her determination: There’s blood between us, love, my love, There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood; And blood’s a bar I cannot pass: I choose the stairs that mount above, Stair after golden skyward stair, To city and to sea of glass. My lily feet are soiled with mud,



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With scarlet mud which tells a tale Of hope that was, of guilt that was, Of love that shall not yet avail; Alas, my heart, if I could bare My heart, this selfsame stain is there: I seek the sea of glass and fire To wash the spot, to burn the snare; Lo, stairs are meant to lift us higher: Mount with me, mount the kindled stair. (CP, pp. 55–9: 1–16)

In these opening lines, Rossetti combines biblical, cultural and literary reference. The speaker’s determination is indicated by the active verbs ‘I choose […] I seek’ (4, 13). Whether she is a potential nun on the threshold of the convent as Lona Mosk Packer suggests, or a fallen woman entering a house of reclamation as Scott Rogers proposes, is not so important to my discussion as the poem’s participation in the adaptations and literary re-workings of the figure of contemplation.53 Diverging from the usual practice of using the dramatic monologue form to establish ‘specificity in space and time that undercuts the atemporal quality of pure lyricism’, the poem renders temporal boundaries of little importance compared to what is eternal.54 From its address to an absent lover and its references to writing, it is apparent that the monologue is to be interpreted as a letter. As such, its voice of revelation and reticence recalls the twelfth-century letters that Heloise and Abelard exchanged. Suggesting the poem combines ‘something of the idea of an Heloise and Abelard with something of the idea of a Juliet and Romeo’, William Michael signals a familiarity with these letters (WMR, p. 482). As my discussion reveals, it is likely that her encounter with the medieval letters of spiritual and amatory crises came through Alexander Pope’s heroic epistle ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717). By opening ‘The Convent Threshold’ with the motif of climbing a heavenbound staircase, Rossetti recalls the motifs of spiritual ascent in Jacob’s dream of the ladder resting on the earth and leading up to heaven (Gen. 28.12), and the devotional texts that use the metaphor of the ladder (e.g. Gregory of Nyssa’s The Life of Moses and St John of the Cross’s The Dark Night of the Soul). While she has chosen to ascend the ladder of her spiritual ancestors, Rossetti’s speaker nonetheless remains in the early stages of her climb. As a figure at the foot of a steep staircase, she has a referent in the initial sketch that Pre-Raphaelite brother John Everett Millais made to accompany ‘St Agnes’ Eve’ in Edward Moxon’s

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edition of Tennyson’s poems (1857). In this, he shows the saint ‘stopping to climb the Convent Staircase’.55 Rossetti’s speaker also has a referent in Tennyson’s poem itself. Just as Tennyson describes St Agnes watching as ‘All heaven burst her starry floors’ to welcome her in her martyrdom (27), the speaker of ‘The Convent Threshold’ imagines how the martyrs received the interruption of the eschatological as ‘the heaven of starry heavens unfurled’ (28).56 Despite these startling similarities, Rossetti’s subject-based description of the suffering of the martyrs of the Early Church, as they are ‘Racked, roasted, crushed, wrenched limb from limb’ (26), departs from Tennyson and Millais in its unflinching gruesomeness. In her brief allusion to the thematic dependence of ‘The Convent Threshold’ on Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, Jan Marsh explains that ‘like Christina’s nameless protagonist, Eloisa is disturbed by shameful visions of her beloved: “father, brother, husband friend,” and struggles with guilty memories.’57 More, however, is at stake in the association between Rossetti’s poem and Pope’s re-working of Heloise’s letters to her teacher/lover/husband Peter Abelard. Most significantly, it is from Heloise’s expression of divided selfhood that Rossetti’s poem takes its momentum. Abandoned in love and forced to enter a convent, the portrait of Heloise that emerges from her letters reveals a tragic figure divided between desire and renunciation and haunted by the past. Articulating her anguish as she is torn between Heaven and the hold of ‘rebel nature’ (26), Pope’s poem explores the psychological intensity that her position brings her to.58 In her discussion of ‘Eloisa and Abelard’, Gillian Beer suggests how Pope uses and transforms generic tropes to create his own heroic epistle. Uncovering how the codes of the genre inform the female gothic, she details how they ‘permit Ann Radcliffe and writers such as Eliza Parsons and Eleanor Sleath [to] communicate sexual forces without attributing them to any specific source’.59 While we know that Rossetti read Radcliffe’s novels and engaged with aspects of the Gothic genre, interpreting ‘The Convent Threshold’ alongside Pope’s poem reveals its engagement with wider web of influence.60 Throughout ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ Pope represents the horror of his heroine’s dreams and stresses the extent to which she is disturbed by ‘provoking Deamons’ (231). The three dreams that Rossetti’s speaker experiences replay this sense of anguish and probe the boundaries between the real and the imagined. The first, in which she watches a shrieking phantom whose insatiable appetite for knowledge destroys him, looks beyond Pope in its recollection of the key theological debate of the High Middle Ages: between Bernard of Clairvaux’s doctrine of love and Peter



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Abelard’s scholasticism. The lesson of the dream echoes the outcome of their debate: ‘For what is knowledge duly weighed? | Knowledge is strong but love is sweet’ (105–6). As Abelard had been held up by Bernard as a model ‘to symbolise the vice of intellectual arrogance’, or of learning for its own sake, so Rossetti imagines that the knowledge of the once-powerful phantom is brought to dust.61 In doing so, she anticipates Karl Barth’s diagnosis of the problems that occur if God is made into a subject of scholasticism rather than the object of desire and love. Her engagement with the writings of Neale and Littledale, which repeatedly draw on Bernard’s commentary of the Song of Solomon, indicate that she had at least some awareness of the twelfth-century theologian. Moreover, that her choice of epigraph for Sonnet 13 of Monna Innominata comes from the lines that Dante Alighieri has Bernard speak as his final guide in his Divine Comedy indicates her sympathy for his ongoing emphasis on love over knowledge. ‘The Convent Threshold’’s emphasis on the mystical and trans-historical over the temporal manifests itself in the anaphora of the speaker’s repetition ‘I tell you what I dreamed last night’ (85, 110). This is described by Mary E. Finn in terms of ‘non-sequence [and] anti-progression’.62 Finding herself in the intermediate space between death and life, the speaker’s second dream accentuates the poem’s temporal confusion as it signals the effects of personal appropriations of love. Existing on an entirely different temporal and spatial plane than her lover, the speaker stresses their disparity: ‘You wrung your hands; while I like lead | Crushed downwards through the sodden earth’ (122–3). The ‘cold dews’ that soak her hair (112), and the blood that reddens her sheets (117), identifies her with Christ at the moment of his crucifixion and distances her from the space where ‘young men and women come and go’ (37). The tactility she foregrounds renders her dream haunting in its intensity and closes boundaries between internal and external reality. The imagery in the third dream, of ‘frozen blood […] on the sill’ (135), recalls the ghostly tactility of Lockwood’s nightmare in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and contributes to the continued blurring of boundaries between waking and sleeping. The speaker’s struggle with speech in this verse reveals the crux of her agony. Describing her anguished night of disturbed sleep and anguished prayer, she points to what is left unsaid: I cannot write the words I said, My words were slow, my tears were few; But thro’ the dark my silence spoke Like thunder. […] (130–3)

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Finding upon waking that her ‘face was pinched’ and her ‘hair was grey’ (134), she looks to death. It is only here that she is safe from the extremities of her earthly passion. Resonating with one another, giving shape to the volume and bringing an intratextual layer of significance to ‘The Convent Threshold’, ‘From House to Home’ and ‘Goblin Market’ exemplify how the extremities of desire find release and fulfilment in the anticipation of redemption rather than in escapist contemplations on the refuge of death. Both narrative poems reveal a perception that is absent from, yet forged on to, ‘The Convent Threshold’: namely that grace can be experienced in this life. Rossetti wrote ‘From House to Home’ in November 1858, only five months after ‘The Convent Threshold’. Here, her speaker enacts the posture of the Hebraic exiles as she re-orientates herself ‘toward’ the heavenly city of ‘Jerusalem’ (212). As the exiles that Isaiah describes receive ‘beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning [and] the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness’ (Isa 61.3), so too does Rossetti’s speaker receive these things (217–19). By repeating the words of Isaiah verbatim, Rossetti accentuates the typological extension that she gives to the second part of the verse. In Isaiah, this reads: ‘that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified’ (ibid.). The extended meditation on this outcome in ‘From House to Home’ expresses the strength that the long waiting period calls for: Altho’ today He prunes my twigs with pain, Yet doth His blood nourish and warm my root: Tomorrow I shall put forth buds again And clothe myself with fruit. Altho’ today I walk in tedious ways, Today His staff is turned into a rod, Yet I will wait for Him the appointed days And stay upon my God. (221–8)

With Christ’s ‘blood nourish[ing] and warm[ing]’ her soul, the speaker is able to locate herself in the Passion and hang on to the ‘rod’ that, while a cross ‘today’, will eventually be transformed into the ‘staff ’ of the Holy of Spirit. Her declaration that she waits on God as she ‘walk[s] in tedious ways’ and trusts in his ‘staff ’ and ‘rod’ resonates with the imagery of Psalm 23 and, thus, identifies her with the suffering woman of her vision who sings out the words of the Psalm (154).



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Writing ‘Goblin Market’ a year after ‘From House to Home’, Rossetti extends her vision of what self-possession and holiness mean. The choice of the name Lizzie for the sister who saves resonates with Rossetti’s interest in the life of St Elizabeth of Hungary.64 St Elizabeth’s refusal to consume any food that might be morally tainted foreshadows Lizzie’s insistence on purchasing the wares of the goblin men on her own terms, and her acts of giving away food to the poor and nursing the sick chime with her Eucharistic redemption of Laura. Moreover, the saint’s unusual combination of marriage with sainthood – the feature which inspired Charles Kingsley to write The Saint’s Tragedy (1848) – can be mapped on to the trajectory of Rossetti’s narrative poem and can be described in terms of St Elizabeth saving the Petrachan Laura from imprisonment in the courtly love tradition. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that the stories that have accumulated around St Elizabeth focus on the tale that, after her death, ‘her body oozed healing oil’.65 Linking this oil to the goblin juices that Lizzie attains in order to save her sister means registering Rossetti’s investment in what Bynum defines as the medieval perception of the body as porous, and of the body on the cross as, in some sense, female. 66 After braving the goblin glen in order to purchase the antidote that will cure her sister, Lizzie utters what is the most critically discussed line of Rossetti’s entire corpus: ‘Eat me, drink me, love me’ (471). Rather than perceiving Lizzie to be morally superior to Laura, I suggest reading the two sisters in terms of the painful disjunction of personhood with which St Elizabeth battles. While the physical and emotional proximity of Lizzie and Laura is stressed through descriptions of ‘two blossoms on one stem’, ‘two flakes of new fall’n snow’ and ‘two wands of ivory’ (188–90), it is not until the climactic Eucharistic scene that their porosity of being is brought to the fore. Simon Humphries notes that a key model for the process of countering the forbidden fruit with a purge can be found in the opening sequence of the second half of The Pilgrim’s Progress, where Matthew is cured from the poison of the fruit of Beelzebub’s orchard by the physician’s ‘purge pill’.67 Extending his recognition of how Bunyan’s allegory informs Rossetti’s poem, I propose that, while the goblin market finds an antitype in the space of Vanity Fair, the porosity between Laura and Lizzie recalls the relationship that exists between Bunyan’s pilgrims, Christian and Faithful. Bunyan’s description of how Faithful is brutally tortured and killed in Vanity Fair foregrounds Rossetti’s description of how the goblins attack Lizzie: ‘Scratched her, pinched her black as ink, | Kicked and knocked her, | Mauled and mocked her’ (427–9).68 However, the fact that Lizzie lives on indicates

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that a different type of martyrdom is being exemplified. It is the type of ‘daily martyrdom’ that Henry Burrows discusses in a sermon in which he calls for his hearers to exhibit the sacrificial love of ‘a martyr spirit’.69 In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti treats the concept of ‘daily martyrdom’ when she recognises that ‘One who cannot be martyr in deed may yet be martyr in will’ (FD, p. 465). At a time when the martyrs of the ancient and medieval world were an object of religious and literary scrutiny, Rossetti’s focus on what it means to be a ‘martyr in will’ is indicative of the practical basis of her theology. As the next chapter explains, it is this focus that forms the basis for her suggestion that the contemporary Christian is able to emulate the virtues of the virgin martyrs and, by so doing, experience divine grace in this life.

Notes The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, ed. A. C. Spearing (London: Penguin, 2001), p. x. 2 For more on this association see Eric S. Christianson, Ecclesiastes through the Centuries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 94. 3 Frederick Richard Littledale, A Commentary on the Song of Songs: From Ancient and Medieval Sources (London: Joseph Masters, 1869), p. 197. 4 Nilda Jimenez, Christina Rossetti and the Bible: A Concordance (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. x. 5 Lynda Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 9. 6 Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK, 2011), p. 25. 7 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (2nd rev. edn, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990), p. 55. 8 Ibid., pp. 66, 80. 9 Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 102. For more on the dislike of The Pilgrim’s Progress by the men of the Oxford Movement – namely J. A. Froude and John Mason Neale – see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970–2), ii, p. 467. 10 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress [1678], ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 75. 11 Ibid., p. 77. 12 Christina Rossetti, Maude: Prose and Verse, ed. Rebecca. W. Crump (Hamden: 1



13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

22

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Archon Books, 1976), p. 51. Crump notes that ‘although Maude was not published during Christina’s lifetime, her brother William Michael Rossetti had it published three years after her death, in 1897, first by Herbert S. Stone in Chicago and then by James Bowden of London […] The English edition is a greatly abridged version; eleven of the poems, and the sentences relating to those poems, are omitted due to copyright problems which William Michael Rossetti encountered’ (pp. 23–4). All subsequent page references to Crump’s edition of Maude will be given parenthetically in the text as RC, followed by page number. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. Richard Challoner [1737] (New York: Tan, 1989), p. 4. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 291. The Germ. Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art. Being a Facsimile Reprint of the Literary Organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Published in 1850, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Elliot Stock, 1901), Preface, p. 8. All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text as TG, followed by issue and page number. Elizabeth Prettejohn, After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 45. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters with a Memoir, 2 vols, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1895), i, p. 134. For a discussion of ‘My Sister’s Sleep’, its religious iconography and its revisions, see Herbert Sussman, ‘Rossetti’s Changing Style: The Revisions of “My Sister’s Sleep”’, Victorian Newsletter, 14 (1972): 6–8. Alexis Easley, ‘Gender and the Politics of Literary Fame: Christina Rossetti and The Germ’, Critical Survey, 13.2 (2001): 61–77 (64). Rossetti had two poems published in The Athenæum in 1848, ‘Death’s Chill Between’ (14 October 1848, p. 1032) and ‘Heart’s Chill Between’ (21 October 1848, p. 1056). It was not until after the publication of her work in Once and Week (from 1859) and Macmillan’s Magazine (from 1860) that she submitted poems to The Athenæum again. Easley suggests that ‘the inclusion of Christina Rossetti’s feminine pseudonym on the list of contributors – along with Frederick Stephen’s pseudonym “Laura Savage” in number three’ – complicated the gendering of the periodical (p. 71). Dinah Birch, ‘Tennyson’s Retrospective View’, in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, eds Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 39–56; Dinah Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). The Collected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), pp. 6–7.

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24 The Selected Poems of William Blake, ed. Bruce Woodcock (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2000), p. 153. 25 For a discussion of the popularity of the bubble motif in seventeenth-century texts, see Christianson, Ecclesiastes through the Centuries, p. 118. 26 Heather McAlpine, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in The Germ’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 20 (2011): 5–24 (17). 27 Ibid., p, 18. 28 Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology, p. 9. 29 Raymond Chapman, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), p. 178. 30 Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith Gender and Time (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 52. 31 Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (London & New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 4. 32 John Henry Newman, The Church of the Fathers, in Historical Sketches, 3 vols, (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), ii, p. 63. 33 For more on the Anglican Church at St Katherine’s see Dinah Roe, The Rossettis in Wonderland: A Victorian Family History (London: Haus Publishing Ltd, 2011), p. 53. Maria Rossetti joined the community at All Saints Sisters of the Poor as an outer sister in 1860 and was fully professed in 1875. Sister Caroline Mary’s memoirs reveal the extent to which the sisterhood was active in local social alleviation and sent nuns out to nurse casualties in the Franco-Prussian war (1870) and to take up work in the Cape (1875–6). ‘Memories of Sister Caroline Mary’, All Saints Sisters of the Poor: An Anglican Sisterhood in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Susan Mumm (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 3–64, 26, 27). 34 Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), p. 58. 35 Père Jean-Joseph Surin, The Foundations of The Spiritual Life: Drawn from the Book of the Imitation of Jesus Christ, ed. and trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey (London: John Henry Parker, 1847), p. 11. For a recent re-assessment of Pusey and a critique of ‘blanket condemnations’ of his ‘ascetic extremism’, see Ian McCormack, ‘The History of the History of Pusey’, in Edward Pusey and the Oxford Movement, eds Rowan Strong and Carol Engelhardt Herringer (London: Anthem Press, 2012), p. 23 (pp. 23–4). 36 John Mason Neale, Deaconesses and Early Sisterhoods: Two Sermons Preached in The Oratory of S. Margaret’s, East Grinsted, Advent, 1857 (London: Joseph Masters, 1869), p. 3. 37 Ibid. 38 John Mason Neale, Annals of Virgin Saints (London: Joseph Masters, 1846), pp. vii–ix.



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39 Sharon Smulders, ‘“A Form that Differences”: Vocational Metaphors in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins’, Victorian Poetry, 29.2 (1991): 161–73 (163). 40 E. Warwick Slinn, Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 68. 41 Abigail Brundin, ‘On the Convent Threshold: Poetry for New Nuns in Early Modern Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65.4 (2012): 1125–65 (1125). 42 Ibid., pp. 1158–60. 43 Ibid., p. 1153. 44 Noelle Bowles, ‘A Chink in the Armour: Christina Rossetti’s “The Prince’s Progress”, “A Royal Princess”, and Victorian Medievalism’, Women’s Writing, 12 (2005): 115–26 (118). 45 Neale, Annals of Virgin Saints, p. 74. 46 XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Servant of our Lord, called Mother Juliana, An Anchorete of Norwich, ed. R. F. S. Cressy; repr. G. H. Parker (Leicester: John S. Cossley, 1843), p. 11. 47 Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, 16 vols (London: John Hodges, 1882), ii, p. 450. 48 Charles Forbes Montalembert, The Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Duchess of Thurigia, trans. Mary Hackett (New York: Sadlier, 1888), p. 336. In a letter to William Michael in 1850, Rossetti writes: ‘Lady Bath was discussing [Charles Kingsley’s] The Saint’s Tragedy with me the other night, and she has lent me a very interesting Life of St Elizabeth by Montalembert’ (Letters 21: 25 January 1850). 49 Isobel Armstrong indicates how Tennyson accentuated his social critique in his re-writing of his 1832 poems for publication in 1842. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 77–94. 50 The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Spearing, pp. 40–1. 51 St Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle; or, The Mansions, trans. John Dalton (London: T. Jones, 1852), p. 197. This was the second translation of the book into English and the one that was most widely available in the Victorian period. For more on the influence of St Teresa on Rossetti, see Chapter 4 of this book. 52 Brundin, ‘On the Convent Threshold’, p. 1159. 53 Scott Rogers, ‘The Edge of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold”’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 14 (2005): 30–43 (35). 54 E. Warwick Slinn, ‘Dramatic Monologue’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, eds Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony Harrison (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2008), pp. 80–98 (81). 55 This sketch is held by Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. See www.bmagic. org.uk/objects/1906P662 for more information (accessed 28 October 2013). 56 The Collected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, p. 101.

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57 Marsh, Christina Rossetti, p. 214. 58 Eloisa to Abelard. By Alexander Pope (Manchester, 1794). Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, www.jisc-content.ac.uk/collections/eighteenth-centurycollections-online-ecco (accessed 28 October 2013). This poem often features as the introductory piece to nineteenth-century volumes of the letters. For example, see Letters of Abelard and Heloise: With Particular Account of Their Lives and Misfortunes (London: Dean and Munday, 1815). 59 Gillian Beer, ‘“Our Unnatural No-voice”: The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women’s Gothic’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 12 (1982): 125–51 (151). 60 In 1883, Rossetti considered writing a biography on Ann Radcliffe for John Ingram’s Eminent Women series. She abandoned this project after struggling to find enough information. Marsh, Christina Rossetti, pp. 91–2. 61 Constant J. Mews, Abelard and Heloise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 238. 62 Mary E. Finn, Writing the Incommensurable: Kierkegaard, Rossetti, and Hopkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 164. 63 Ibid. 64 See D. M. R. Bentley, ‘The Meretricious and the Meritorious in Goblin Market: A Conjecture and an Analysis’ in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 57–81. In a footnote, he indicates the significance of Lizzie’s name (Elizabeth meaning oath of God) and suggests that a gesture is being made ‘towards Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, whose renunciation of the world in favor of the cloister provided the subject for several artistic works, sympathetic and hostile, in the decade prior to Goblin Market’ (p. 72). 65 Caroline Walter Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 136. 66 Ibid., p, 70. 67 Simon Humphries, ‘Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Bunyan’s Orchard of Beelzebub’, Notes and Queries, 55.1 (2008): 49–51 (50). 68 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 75–6. 69 Henry William Burrows, Lenten and Other Sermons (London: W. W. Gardner, 1880), p. 175.

3

Developing a Theology of Purpose: Poetry of the 1860s and Early 1870s, Including The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866)

And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another. (Gal. 5.24–26)

Published four years after Goblin Market and Other Poems, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866) returns to the themes of desire, relational personhood and lived-out martyrdom. As she was collating poems for this volume, Christina Rossetti resurrected a sonnet she had written nineteen years earlier as a memorial for Lady Isabella Howard (1827–45) and placed it alongside another she had written on St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31).1 Inviting readers to approach the two pieces as a double sonnet, she conflates them under the title ‘A Portrait’ (CP, p. 116). Despite noting his sister’s ‘ardent admiration’ for Isabella, the young noble woman who had been a pupil of their maternal aunt Charlotte Polidori, William Michael Rossetti reveals his ambivalence about the sonnet pairing and questions whether ‘some of the expressions [about St Elizabeth] are wholly applicable to this young lady’ (WMR, pp. 466, 477).2 Rather than an uncomfortable pairing of two very different women living seven centuries apart, I suggest that, by removing names in order to associate the medieval with the contemporary, Rossetti expresses the solidarity between the Church Triumphant and Church Militant and critiques the suggestions that Charles Kingsley had made – in The Saint’s Tragedy (1848) and Hypatia (1852–3) – that the severe ascetic of the virgin martyr is outdated and misguided. Following the Augustinian-inflected hermeneutic of Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman, she emphasises how re-directing desire away from the temporal and towards God associates the ‘[crucifixion of] the flesh’

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(Gal. 5.24) with a glimpse of the ecstatic union to come. It is precisely because the speaker in the first sonnet of ‘A Portrait’ takes the path of severe asceticism, choosing ‘the bitter truth’ (4), and ‘hate[s] all for love of Jesus Christ’ (14), that she can be associated with the speaker of the second, who looks up from her deathbed as ‘Heaven opens’ and ‘the Bridegroom calls’ her home (20, 21). As the analysis below indicates, the concern in the double sonnet with how an ecstatic focus on salvation overrides temporal anguish is symptomatic of the devotional impulse that runs through The Prince’s Progress and the poems added in Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1875). By offering Augustinian-inflected meditations on holy aspiration, Rossetti challenges the values of what Noelle Bowles terms ‘the cultural framework of Victorian neo-feudalism and its authoritarian, patriarchal philosophy’.3 Writing at a time when the battle scenes of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85) were hugely celebrated and when Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris were engaging with the intense eroticism of medieval literature and art, Rossetti’s refusal to bend to the idolisation of the imagined medieval past is indicative of her counter-cultural stance. Focusing on the process of being made in the likeness of God through grace, the glory with which she is concerned can be understood in terms of theosis. Theologian A. M. Allchin describes theosis as ‘the doctrine not only that God has come down to be where we are, in our human mess, but that he has lifted us up to be where he is in his divine splendour.’ He writes that to understand this ‘requires a small revolution in our way of looking at things’.4 Rowan Williams considers the doctrinal basis of this doctrine in the work of Origen, Athanasius and their successors. He argues that for them ‘it did not mean a sharing in the divine “substance” […] but enjoying the divine relation of Son to Father, sharing the divine life’.5 He then considers what the principle meant for the Cappadocian Fathers and suggests how Gregory of Nyssa revised the notion ‘so as direct attention to participation not in what God is, but in what he does’ (ibid., p. 63). Concurrent with the Tractarian resurgence of interest in patristic theology came both engagement with these patristic debates and a renewed vision of personhood. Allchin suggests how the doctrine of theosis suddenly came to new life with unexpected power in the middle of nineteenth century England. It is as if there were a veritable epiphany of patristic spirituality and theology in the midst of our divided western Christendom, an epiphany which would draw together into new possibilities of reconciliation elements of the Reformation heritage and elements of the continuing tradition of the churches in continuation with Rome.6



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It is significant that this mid-century ‘epiphany of patristic spirituality and theology’ coincides with both the pervasive cultural interest in the Middle Ages and the new debates of Higher Criticism that were throwing doubt on the divine basis of the Scriptures. Situating Rossetti’s work among the mid-century demand for devotional aids, my argument reveals how she draws on the principle of theosis in her insistence that the possibility for radical transformation transcends situational bounds. The synchronic model of criticism whereby Rossetti is read simply as an inheritor of the Oxford Movement cannot sufficiently account for her engagement with ancient and medieval representations of spiritual movements from nature to grace and then to glory. Her vision of the pilgrim as one who emerges from exile to take ‘up [her] part’ in the heavenly ‘Hallelujahs full of rest […] All blent in one yet each one manifest’ (‘After This the Judgement’, CP, pp. 178–80: 13, 14) indicates a prioritisation of the existential. Exploring Rossetti’s perception of the trans-historical Communion of Saints further, I contend that her poems contribute to the ‘epiphany’ that Allchin describes, blur the temporal bounds between the medieval St Elizabeth and the contemporary Lady Isabella, and critique the Victorian idolisation of the Middle Ages and the concerns of Higher Criticism. The experiential and affective inflections of Rossetti’s devotional poetry are tied to the practice of moving the reader towards participation in the ‘Hallelujahs’ of the everlasting sacred choir. Her perception that the path from grace to glory can be experienced in this life and can shape the believer’s orientation in worship is repeatedly indicated through the vision of participating with the angels and saints in music and song. Building on my earlier suggestion that Rossetti’s approach to the Bible can be read in the framework of holy aspiration that is detailed by Augustine in the West and Gregory in the East before being consolidated by the twelfth-century Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, my argument reveals how her lyrics treat desire, and stress the possibility of an embodied encounter with God. Throughout The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, the insistent message is that a purposeful life comes as a result of embracing the grace-driven movement from selfishness to self-possession and then from self-oblation to glory. The first section of this chapter suggests how, in ‘The Prince’s Progress’ and ‘The Royal Princess’, Rossetti adopts the motifs of the fairy tale, the epic romance and the allegory in order to map out the contours of this process. Extending my earlier delineation of how Rossetti’s representations of personhood enter into intertextual dialogue, the second part investigates the dynamic that is set up

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by the inclusion of Rossetti’s devotional poetry alongside ancient and patristic reflections in Tractarian anthologies. The chapter concludes by suggesting how ‘By the Waters of Babylon/ B.C. 570’ and ‘The German–French Campaign/ 1870–1871’ tie theology with emotional inflection and integrate aspects of the felt experience of grace into the language of domestic and national experience.

‘The Prince’s Progress’ and ‘A Royal Princess’: Christian allegory and self-critique In 1860 Rossetti wrote a short story entitled ‘Case 2, Folio Q’. According to her brother William Michael, it dealt with ‘some supernatural matter – I think, a man whose doom it was not to get reflected in a looking glass (a sort of alternative form, so far, of Peter Schlemihl)’.7 A year after offering the story to the Cornhill Magazine, Rossetti wrote to Alexander Macmillan claiming that the tale had ‘become such a subject of annoyance to me, that I burned it’ (Letters 132: 12 February 1861). In spite of her dissatisfaction with the piece, she continued to use the trope of the looking glass to explore the conditions of selfhood and identity and to suggest that the mirror image must be cast aside in the process of a subject’s self-recovery. In her poems of the early 1860s, she repeatedly delineates how a preoccupation with surface appearance can prevent the individual from reaching an understanding of herself as an integrated member of the faith community. Written within eleven days of one another, ‘The Prince’s Progress’ and ‘A Royal Princess’ deal with the difficulties of looking beyond surface appearances as they engage in issues of self and cultural critique.8 That Rossetti’s poetic vision offers up a man who is weak in purpose and a woman who exemplifies self-possession and self-oblation subverts gender norms to indicate how the quest for fulfilment goes beyond the terms of the medieval chivalry of the Victorian imagination. Following the trajectory of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), whereby the subject negotiates the treacherous journey from vanity to life in the Spirit, Rossetti stresses the radical nature of Christian living and explores what it means to ‘crucif[y] the flesh with the affections and lusts’ (Gal. 5.24). Although heavily influenced by John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), I suggest that Rossetti’s increasing affinity with Spenser overrides her earlier imitation of the trajectory where the movement is from this life to the next. Unlike the speakers of her earliest convent poems, the speakers of her more mature lyrics aspire to overcome the perils of lived experience not simply through death but through a lived-out Christian martyrdom.



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Rossetti composed the final stanzas of ‘The Prince’s Progress’ in 1861 and entitled them ‘The Fairy Prince Who Arrived Too Late’. She published them in Macmillan’s Magazine in May 1863. Her title gestures ironically to the Arthurian ‘Faery Land’ of England that Spenser imagines and that Tennyson takes up in his Idylls of the King. It also responds to the surging popularity of the fairy tale in mid-Victorian Britain. Six months after its publication, Rossetti describes the poem in a letter to fellow poet Dora Greenwell as ‘my reverse of the Sleeping Beauty’ (Letters 199: October 1863). Noting that ‘except in fairy land such reverses must often occur’, she writes that the allegorical pilgrimage of her prince is a portrait of everyday romance. At her brother Dante Gabriel’s suggestion, Rossetti added 480 lines to the start of the poem and re-titled it ‘The Prince’s Progress’ (WMR, p. 461). Alongside the extended revelation of character and the creation of suspense, the longer narrative poem situates its action in the spaces delineated by Dante, Bunyan and Spenser. While the dark cave of the old magician recalls both the hidden hermitage of The Faerie Queene’s Archimago and the cave of Bunyan’s Pope, the loitering milkmaid with her ‘shining serpent coils’ recalls the flattery of Wanton who, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, attempts to divert Faithful from his journey (CP, pp. 89–104: 175–246, 94).9 After considering its additional allusions to Dante’s Inferno, Mary Arseneau registers how its recurrent intertextual gestures offer ‘touchstones by which [Rossetti] comments on and measures the achievement of her protagonist’.10 Throughout, the allusions to the Red Crosse Knight and Christian draw attention to the prince’s comparable ‘feeble sight’ (232). Unlike his allegorical counterparts, it is because he ‘loiter[s] on the road too long’ (483) that he arrives at the palace of his sleeping beauty too late. Even if, as Simon Humphries argues, he is not – as an inhabitant of Fairyland – culpable himself, then his characterisation nonetheless reinforces the huge cost of loitering.11 In Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), Rossetti writes that ‘the Bible bids us go on unto perfection, and press toward the mark’ (p. 204). Recognising possible hindrances, she warns against forgoing ‘perfection within’ for ‘smoothness without’, and claims that ‘Beautiful things and comfortable things tempt one to loiter, if not absolutely to stand stock still’ (ibid.). In a later contemplation on the church year in The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892), she describes each Christian’s life as ‘one continuous Advent season’; earth is not the place for loitering in so much as it is the ‘race-course’ not the ‘goal’ (p. 289). In the context of these prose passages, ‘The Prince’s Progress’ can be understood as a critique of both the loitering prince and the princess who prioritises romantic over divine love. After the death of the

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princess, her maids report: ‘we think her white brows often ached | Beneath her crown’ (517–18). With ‘no hurry in her feet’ (527), she waits for her prince in passive inactivity. Weighed down by her royal crown, a synonym for her royal position and a motif used in Psalms 8 and 22 to indicate the dignity that God has bestowed on humankind, there is no indication that she even starts on the journey to obedient submission that characterises the lives of the saints. While the prince is tempted to ‘loiter’ (293), she is ‘frozen’ in her waiting (497). After charting the biblical echoes that recur through ‘The Prince’s Progress’, Dawn Henwood suggests that, although the princess appears ‘on one level’ as the ‘female representation of Christ, the patient, grieving lover of the pilgrim soul’, on another, she is not so praise-worthy: ‘Biblical echoes within the text actually suggest that the apparent self-sacrifice of her retreat from self-fulfilment may contribute toward the formation of just as cowardly and as disloyal a personality as that of the wandering prince.’12 Contrasting the inactivity of the princess with the activity of the Bride of the Song of Solomon and the wise virgins of Jesus’s parable (Matt. 25.1–13), she highlights the complexities of the poem’s ethics. Noelle Bowles treats the bride differently. Recognising the poem’s critique of restrictive gender roles, she suggests that her passivity is ‘pitiable rather than reprehensive’.13 Reading this comment in a theological framework, while keeping in mind that, as a fairy-tale figure, the bride cannot be judged by the usual standard for her interpretation of Scripture, means recognising the faults that of society. In this sense, to interpret the bride as ‘pitiable’ is to place the responsibility for her decline and demise on the community that disseminates the fairy tale myth that a woman’s ultimate goal is to marry. This reading not only locates the poem among the critique of patriarchal structures that Rossetti offers in her earlier convent poems but also fits in with her later conviction that Victorian England, ‘full of luxuries and thronged by stinted poor’ (FD, p. 422), needs to reassess its priorities and awake to the ‘foolish[ness]’ of its appropriation of Rachel’s cry ‘Give me children, or else I die’ (ibid., p. 312). With some minor alterations, ‘The Fairy Prince Who Arrived Too Late’ becomes the coda of the longer narrative poem.14 Its message is brought to the fore by Dante Gabriel’s accompanying woodcuts. While Sharon Smulders describes the woodcuts as the ‘veil or screen through which [Rossetti] encounters readers [and] allowed her to bring her poetic ambitions into line with a need for womanly modesty’, they can also be understood as the veil through which the first readers encountered the text (ibid.). The frontispiece is entitled ‘You should have wept her yesterday.’ This line is from the final verse, where the princess’s attendants rebuke the prince for his dalliance:



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You should have wept her yesterday, Wasting upon her bed: But wherefore should you weep today That she is dead? Lo, we who love weep not today, But crown her royal head. Let be these poppies that we strew, Your roses are too red: Let be these poppies not for you Cut down and spread. (531–40)

Discussing the narratological role of the illustration, Smulders details its ‘significant deviations’ from this verse as well as its additional biblical resonances. She suggests that the seven lamps at the top of the design, which correspond to each of the attendants, ‘burn in readiness for the bridegroom’s arrival and so constitute a pictorial allusion to the parable of the wise virgins (Matt. 25.1–13)’.15 The addition of the lamps also coheres with the prince’s earlier association of himself with the bridegroom of the parable and his ‘veiled bride’ as one beyond his vision who waits and watches ‘asleep and awake’ (22). In her interpretation of the illustration, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra notes how ‘Dante Gabriel responds to his sister’s suggestive narratives in his own approved manner: by allegorizing on his own “hook”.’16 One aspect of this hook meant bringing the attendants from the background to the foreground and accentuating their cry. In effect, this pushes the prince to the sideline of his own story and gives priority to the interpreters. Readers familiar with Goblin Market and Other Poems would perhaps associate Dante Gabriel’s gesture to the biblical parable of the wise virgins to Rossetti’s poem ‘Advent’. Here, after narrating the cry of the ‘patient virgins’ who stand ‘year after year’ with their lamps burning and become increasingly ‘heartsick with hope deferred’, Rossetti invites a contemplation of the joy that is to come (CP, pp. 62–4: 18, 3, 6). Approaching ‘The Prince’s Progress’ through the veil of the illustration and associating the words of the wise virgins in ‘Advent’ with its song-like interpretive coda invites a comparison between the prince’s dalliance and the faithfulness of the attendants. The palpable presence of these female attendants jolts the prince into self-recognition in a way that the male ‘touchstones’ of Bunyan, Dante and Spenser could not. With their ‘bride-song’ (479) they have the last word and the white poppies that they strew round the bride, symbolising death, serve as the closing vision.17

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Investigating how the principles of music give shape to the volume in its entirety, Smulders reads the coda of ‘The Prince’s Progress’ alongside the ‘polyphonic variations’ of the other poems. She suggests that because these pieces show a marked preoccupation with ‘vocal music’ that […] was for Rossetti ‘the highest form of so high an art’ [TF, p. 29], their self-­ reflexivity serves valuably to elucidate her aesthetic concerns. Working against the masculine ethos of romantic individualism, Rossetti constructs in the female singer, often singing in concert with others, a type for the woman poet that is, in turn, a type for the Christian saint. 18

While the inability to sing ‘in concert with others’ causes the prince to lag behind in his journey, it holds the heroine of ‘The Royal Princess’ captive and threatens the speakers of the devotional poems that conclude the volume. According to Linda Peterson, what associates the female singers of Rossetti’s lyrics is their faithfulness in reading the scriptures, ‘finding relevant types in them [and in] repeat[ing] biblical patterns in their own lives’.19 The inclusion of ‘A Royal Princess’ in this assessment points to the assumption that the princess’s avowed intention to surrender all and declare publically an association with her Old Testament counterpart Esther provides a model of female self-assertion. In November 1862, Rossetti sent ‘A Royal Princess’ to fellow poet Isa Craig in response to her request for a ‘little piece’ for a volume that was to raise charitable funds for the distress in Lancashire’s cotton districts (Letters 172: 13 November 1862). It was printed several months later in the volume as the second piece after a sonnet by Emily Taylor that calls for the breaking down of barriers and stresses that rich and poor stand ‘one in spirit- one for evermore!’20 That Rossetti’s contribution attracted attention from The English Woman’s Journal where it is praised alongside George Macdonald’s ‘The Three Horses’ indicates its appeal to those actively involved in alleviating the widespread oppression of women.21 Later in the century, Amy Levy testifies to its continued appeal to those who shared the same concerns.22 Rossetti registers its interventionist impulse as she describes it as ‘rather a spite of mine’ (Letters: 13 March 1865). In writing this, she was perhaps anticipating the response she would receive from Dante Gabriel to her proposal that it be included in the new volume she was assembling. Acknowledging ‘truth’ in what she terms his ‘Isa [Craig] and Adelaide [Anne Procter] taunt’, she indicates an awareness of how it responds to and dialogues with the work of those contemporaries in the Langham Place Circle while remaining acutely aware of some key differences (ibid.). While Craig’s own contribution to the volume, ‘Brothers’ (pp. 44–57), locates the struggle of



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the oppressed mill workers in the allegorical landscape of The Pilgrim’s Progress and imagines the success of the drive toward solidarity, Rossetti’s poem stops short of revealing the outcome of her princess’s sacrifice. Her jest to Greenwell that ‘Bessie Rayner Parkes’ last volume, with its healthy cheerfulness, has rebuked me’ (Letters 199: October 1862) indicates her reluctance to figure joy in terms apart from the eschatological. Parkes’s own contribution to Poems: A Collection for Lancashire accentuates the differences between the two poets. While ‘A Royal Princess’ considers the oppressive regimes that operate under feudalism, Parkes’s ‘The Mersey and the Irwell’ (pp. 31–3) looks back fondly to ‘The England of our slow paced sires’ (35), Rossetti’s avowed pessimism perhaps comes as a result of a deeper historical consciousness: she remains acutely aware that the inequities that she is fighting are long-standing. By including ‘A Royal Princess’ in The Prince’s Progress, Rossetti draws attention to the themes that it shares with the parabolic title poem. Although she imagines the palace as another space of artificial luxury, unlike the silent princess of ‘The Prince’s Progress’ who is represented on the title page as reminiscent of Tennyson’s Mariana looking out for her prince as ‘the long hours come and go’, her second princess turns from her languish and resolves to act. Rossetti uses the poetic devices of the dramatic monologue to trace the psychology of her speaker as she experiences a revelation. Once it came into my heart and whelmed me like a flood, That these too are men and women, human flesh and blood, Men with hearts and men with souls, tho’ trodden down like mud. (CP, pp. 143–6: 34–6)

It is only after recognising this shared humanity that the princess is moved from self-interest to empathy. The fact that this movement is not immediately forthcoming and occurs only at the moment of crisis is indicative of her life in a glass cage. Although she begins her monologue by declaring that she ‘would rather be a peasant with her baby at her breast’ (2), it is only gradually that she realises the extent of the struggles that the life of the peasant entails. Her words reveal the huge barriers that need to be shattered in order to allow for empathetic identification across class divides. From the start, Rossetti has her speaker describe her surroundings: All my walls are lost in mirrors, whereupon I trace Self to right hand, self to left hand, self in every place, Self-same solitary figure, self-same seeking face. (10–12)

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The superficial and flat images that the princess perceives around her as she observes the world from her ‘ivory throne’ force her to acknowledge a lack of interiority (14). As her image is reflected, she confuses her personhood with the ‘face’ that she sees (12). Tracing her image in the mirrors, she fails to distinguish her own ‘self ’ from the building that houses her (11). Like the loiterer that Rossetti describes in Time Flies, who is hampered by the ‘ivory smoothness’ of her surroundings (p. 204), it is almost impossible for the princess to break out of her self-enclosed bubble and recognise her own subjectivity beyond the palace walls. It is only when the crowds ignite a fire and curse the oppressive rule of her father the king that she resolves to ‘stand face to face’ with the people (101). This resolution is suggestive of breaking out from the maze of mirrors that foster self-indulgence, exposing the domestic effects of exploitation and recasting individuality in terms of a new awareness of community. The princess’s use of the words of her biblical counterpart, Esther, to authorise her self-expression is complex because, unlike Esther, she is an outsider to the community she seeks to rescue. Indeed, she has only just been jolted into an awareness of shared ‘human flesh and blood’ (35). Set in the period of the Babylonian Captivity, the book of Esther recounts the act of the Queen who put her own life at risk by approaching the King unannounced in an attempt to redeem her own Judaic community from destruction. Preparing to act, she calls for a fast and declares her intention: ‘so I will go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish’ (Est. 4.16). Rossetti’s princess finds in these words a model to emulate: They shall take shall take all to buy them bread, take all I have to give; I, if I perish, perish; they today shall eat and live; I, if I perish, perish; that’s the goal I half conceive: Once to speak before the world, rend bare my heart and show The lesson I have learned, which is death, is life, to know. I, if I perish, perish; in the name of God I go. (103–8)

Responding to the citation of Esther’s famous line in sonnet 8 of Monna Innominata, Cynthia Scheinberg suggests that Rossetti’s speaker ‘can never really be Esther at all’.23 Arguing that ‘identifications with Hebraic women were fraught with contradictions for Christian women’, she uncovers the distance between the courtly lady of the sonnet and the Jewish heroine.24 Mapping Scheinberg’s identification of the contradictions that emerge in Monna Innominata on to ‘A



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Royal Princess’, the utterance ‘I, if I perish, perish’ (104, 105, 108) can be seen to betray the distance between Esther and the princess. Nonetheless, I suggest that this distance is not wholly rooted in tensions between Jewish and Christian patterns of understanding, but occurs as the words of Scripture work to expose and challenge human weakness. Scheinberg maintains that the associations Rossetti makes between the Christian lady of Monna Innominata and the Hebraic figure of Esther are loaded with contradictions because, as a ‘devout Anglican woman’, Judaism troubles her (ibid, p. 145).25 Challenging this assumption, I argue that, the uncomfortable disjunctions deliberately expose the Old Testament as ‘the word of God’ that divides ‘asunder the thoughts and intentions of the heart’ (Heb. 4.12) and reveals the fractured nature of community. Understanding Scripture as divinely inspired means appreciating that any association between the self and a biblical personage is predicated on a precarious basis. With this in mind, the decision that the speaker of ‘A Royal Princess’ makes as she incorporates the words of Esther into her own speech act, is indicative of how she is allowing the words of Scripture to break her egotism and transform her weakness. Although it is not in her power to be Esther, she can nonetheless call on God’s grace to associate with her as she allows her words to engender an attitude of compunction and obedience. Whereas the Tractarian leader Isaac Williams links Esther to the woman who triumphs over the dragon in Revelation, Rossetti never describes her as exerting miraculous powers.26 Instead, she stresses her willingness to rely entirely on God for strength. Understood in this way, the closing declaration of ‘A Royal Princess’, ‘in the name of God I go’ (108), provides the key to the speaker’s posture. It is only in God’s ‘name’ and with his authority that she is able to forego life, ‘speak before the world’ (106) and participate in the re-formation of a community. In Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883), Rossetti includes Esther among those persons included in the Bible ‘for our encouragement’ who ‘needed to overcome themselves in the first place’ (p. 35). Later, she proposes that ‘modern wives would do well to copy’ Esther’s humble and prayerful demeanour (p. 58). Her ongoing suggestion is that, while Esther’s obedience might be copied, it is only by God’s intervention that it is possible to finally ‘overcome’ self-interest. The reason that no one else can be Esther is because Esther becomes nothing: her ‘I’ is overcome completely and subsumed in the ‘name of God’. This kind of participation is for Rossetti what the path towards theosis entails.

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The devotional poems in their publication contexts Nine devotional pieces conclude The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. They connect intimately with one another and resonate with the lessons of interpretation, obedience, self-possession and self-oblation that are offered in ‘The Prince’s Progress’ and ‘A Royal Princess’. As the penultimate poem of the volume, ‘Good Friday’ illuminates the theme of overcoming sterility as it narrates the process of transformation made possible through grace. The discussion below opens with an analysis of how the poem’s original publication context in Lyra Messianica (1864) gives a particular nuance to its theology. It then considers how the opening poem of the devotional series in The Prince’s Progress, ‘Despised and Rejected’, reveals the influence of the Lyras on Rossetti’s poetic practice. Continuing to trace Rossetti’s intervention into the space of Tractarian devotion, the second part of this discussion situates ‘After This the Judgement’ and ‘Martyrs’ Song’ in their different publication contexts: Lyra Mystica (1865) and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866). Concluding, I suggest how the theological messages of ‘Martyrs’ Song’ are significantly altered when Richard Frederick Littledale incorporates an extract from the poem into the seminal Tractarian text that he compiled with John Mason Neale, Commentary on the Psalms (1869–83). Chapter 1 considered the creation of a community of readers who were eager for material to foster private devotion and attuned to the sacramental potential of engaging with poetry. Consisting of 353 pieces presented in a small and elaborately bound volume, Orby Shipley promotes Lyra Messianica as a vehicle that will enhance the private meditations of this expansive community. Building on the success of Lyra Eucharistica (1863), he describes it as, a second experiment to ascertain how far the Ancient and Medieval Hymns of the Church, translated into the language of the day, and associated with a selection from the Works, or specimens of the abilities of some of the first Writers of Religious Poetry of the present age, may become popular, when chosen for the purposes of private and devotional reading at home, and not with the view of public use in Church.27

Outlining his principle of selection, he records that, alongside the translations of ancient and medieval hymns, he approached authors whose works have been ‘published within the last thirty of forty years’ and which convey the sentiments of ‘early Hymnology’ and the style of ‘a higher, purer, and more truly Christian



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order of Sacred Verse’.28 He incorporates the work of these more modern authors into the sections of volume that invite meditation on different aspects of Christ’s life. The medieval-like font, the capitalisation and the elaborate poem initials that run throughout bring the contemporary verses into visual uniformity with the ancient and medieval pieces. The lines between the modern and ancient are blurred even further by Shipley’s decision not to reference authors names in the main body of the volume. Lyra Messianica includes five poems by Rossetti: ‘I Know You Not’ (p. 28), ‘Before the Paling of the Stars’ (p. 63), ‘Good Friday’ (p. 236), ‘Easter Even’ (p. 251) and ‘The Love of Christ Which Passeth Knowledge’ (p. 269). The last three feature in the fourth section, ‘The Passion: The Betrayal, Passion, Crucifixion, and Entombment’. Their positioning brings Rossetti’s speakers into dialogue with ancient and medieval meditations on the Passion narratives. ‘Good Friday’ offers a particularly startling intervention through its internalisation of typological motifs. It remains committed to expressing the unity of the Bible as it brings together the crucifixion, the two episodes that involved Moses striking a rock in order to provide water for the Israelites in Exile (Exod. 17.16; Num. 20.11), the description of the divine shepherd in Psalm 23 and Jesus’s declaration that Peter is the ‘rock’ upon whom he ‘will build [his] church’ (Matt. 16.18). Am I a stone and not a sheep That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross, To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss, And yet not weep? Not so those women loved Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee; Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly; Not so the thief was moved; Not so the Sun and Moon Which hid their faces in a starless sky, A horror of great darkness at broad noon – I, only I. Yet give not o’er, But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock; Greater than Moses, turn and look once more And smite a rock. (CP, p. 181)

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In addition to capitalising the nouns that run through ‘Good Friday’ (‘Sheep’, ‘Thief ’, ‘Sun’, ‘Moon’), Shipley uses his prerogative as editor to capitalise the words that invoke the Passion. The line ‘To number Drop by Drop Thy Blood’s slow loss’ (3) is particularly striking in the way it engenders a slow iambic momentum that promotes a meditation that remains attentive to the agony of the Passion. After linking ‘Good Friday’ to Isaac Williams’s poem ‘The Cross Dropping Blood’, which he includes in The Altar (1847), Emma Mason considers how Rossetti’s representation of Christ as ‘beaten and bloodstained martyr’ reinforces the ‘bloodiness enactive of the ritualized communion of Anglo-Catholic ceremony’.29 In an earlier discussion of ‘The Cross Dropping Blood’, G. B. Tennyson suggests that Williams’s inspiration was ‘Continental Catholic piety’.30 This was also an inspiration for the Anglo-Catholic introduction of crucifixes in worship. Shipley’s edited anthologies and devotional volumes exemplify the increased concern with meditation on the Passion as the Oxford Movement entered its second phase and emphasised the ritual basis of worship. Based on a Latin work of the seventeenth century that, in turns, looks back to models of ancient devotion and Continental Catholic piety, his threevolume collection of Daily Meditations (1861) purports to offer meditations for different seasons. The second volume, which focuses on the Passion, has on its frontispiece an illustration of Jesus on the cross with this blood falling to the ground. This is the same illustration that he includes in his devotional manual, The Daily Sacrifice. Here, Shipley specifies that it is ‘from a portion of one of a series of Engravings on the Passion, after Albert Durer’.31 It resonates with the meditations on the crucifixion that both volumes contain. In one that he writes for Passion Week, readers are asked to imagine themselves in the scene: ‘Hear the hideous sound of the hammers, knocking the nails into His Sacred Hands & Feet. See the streams of Blood running upon the ground.’32 Choosing to introduce Rossetti’s devotional poems with an elaborate illustration of Christ on the cross, artist Florence Harrison highlights her use of the crucifix as a central symbol.33 Although ‘Good Friday’ testifies to its centrality, the speaker’s inability to identify with the saints in their response illuminates some key characteristics that pertain to Rossetti’s approach to the Passion. When Rossetti’s ‘Good Friday’ is read alongside the poems and hymns with which it was first published, its difference in focus is accentuated. Archer Gurney’s ‘Good Friday’ opens the sequence of poems in the Lyra that comprise ‘The Passion’ with an invocation of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, a Franciscan hymn traditionally attributed to Jacopone da Todi (c. 1230–1306).34 The invitation of Gurney’s poem, ‘let us with them pray’, brings the reader into the imaginative



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space of the Marys as they ‘linger ’neath the Cross | Where hangs the Lord of Life’ (pp. 166–8). The second piece in the series is a translation of a matins hymn from the Breviary by Edward Caswall, an Anglican clergyman who entered the Roman Catholic Church along with John Henry Newman. Published originally in his own Lyra Catholica: Containing all the Hymns of the Roman Breviary and Missal (1851), the translation invokes the space of watching under the cross and concludes with the accusatory cry ‘O heart more hard than iron, not to weep | At this’ (p. 168). In the poems and translations that follow Caswell’s piece, the Marys are repeatedly held up as the model of an appropriate response to the Passion. In contrast to Roman Catholic meditations based on the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, where the subject is called to apply self to subject as she participates in Mary’s sorrows, the move that the speaker of Rossetti’s ‘Good Friday’ makes recalls the Reformed Protestant appropriation of the Passion narratives to individual spiritual development. The identification that Rossetti establishes between her speaker and Peter gestures to this form of appropriation through an interiorisation of the narrative of Matthew 16. Following the same structure of recognition and affirmation, Rossetti suggests that authentic transformation only occurs after a personal, rather than mediated, identification with Jesus as the ‘true Shepherd’ (14). The subsequent prayer that Christ, being ‘Greater than Moses’ might ‘turn and look once more | And smite a rock’ (15–16), expresses recognition that he is able to transform individual hearts. However, it also carries with it an echo of the disobedience of Moses. Forty years after God had enabled Moses to strike the rock at Horeb and bring forth water (Exod. 17.1–7), the Israelites had once again reached the border of the Promised Land. Here, as a response to the prayer of Moses and Aaron, God gave the instruction, ‘speak ye unto the rock before their eyes […] and thou shalt bring forth to them water’ (Num. 20.8). Out of anger at the groaning of the Israelites, Moses struck the rock instead. The result of this rash act meant that both Moses and Aaron were forbidden to enter Canaan. Reading ‘Good Friday’ with this episode in mind means recognising how the speaker’s lack of trust resonates with Moses’s disobedience. The intimation subsequently given is that, as a presence ‘Greater’ than Moses (15), Christ is not to be directed by humans. In the context of The Prince’s Progress, the resonance is accentuated by the disobedience expressed in ‘Despised and Rejected’ and by the sense of lack expressed in ‘After This the Judgement’. Situating ‘Good Friday’ in the Reformed Protestant tradition – whereby the Passion narratives are worked out in the spiritual journey of the individual – means recognising the theology at stake in the interpretation of the Pentateuch. Psalms 78, 105 and 114 translate into liturgical lyrics the memory of God’s

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provision for the ancient Israelites in Horeb and in Kadesh and invite the worshipper to remember God’s mighty acts and persistent faithfulness. Psalm 78 opens by stating its intention to ‘declare the mysteries of ancient times’ (2) before recollecting how God ‘split the hard rocks in the wilderness and gave […] drink as from the great deep’ (15). By referring to this Psalm as a prophecy of Jesus’s teaching in parables, Matthew offers a precedent for a Christ-centred understanding of Old Testament history (Matt. 13.35). With this typological precedent in mind, the description that closes the psalm, of David shepherding Israel ‘with a faithful and true heart’ (72), can be understood as the basis of Rossetti’s subjective interpretation. This interpretation endows the final existential plea of ‘Good Friday’, that God would ‘smite a rock’ (16), with the Christological awareness that the Kingdom of God has already arrived with the breaking in of the ‘true Shepherd’ (14). The structural patterning of Psalm 114 provides a further model upon which Rossetti hangs her description of encountering the disruption of the Incarnation. At its conclusion, the ‘earth’ is called to ‘tremble’ when the saving act that ‘turned the hard rock into a pool of water’ is remembered (7–8). While the Psalmist calls worshippers to approach God with awe, the repetition of the word ‘turned’ indicates the special relationship that the Israelites share with him (Ps. 114.3, 5, 8). By invoking the earth’s trembling encounter with the divine in the description of the sun and moon hiding ‘their faces in a starless sky’ (10), and by articulating the plea that Christ would ‘turn and look once more’ (15), ‘Good Friday’ continues to re-work the evocative language of national memory that runs throughout the fifth book of the Psalter into a Christological and existential framework. In the context of the Lyra, its typological allusions extend the cry of Dora Greenwell’s poem, ‘Schola Crucis, Schola Lucis’, that Jesus would ‘turn and look and me’, and stress the cosmic implications for the individual’s encounter with God.35 Rossetti’s illumination of the significance of the Passion for the individual means that the grieving women, the apostle Peter and the good thief are all introduced as subjects for the reader to locate in herself. The message given is that it is only in the place of existential trembling and ‘horror’ (11) that the transformation from a ‘stone’ into a ‘sheep’ can occur (1). That this triumphant transformation affects the entire ‘flock’ (14) is indicative of Rossetti’s concern with mapping the narrative of redemption onto a liturgical presentation of the radical disruption of the crucifixion for each individual. George Landow comments that the force of the poem emerges from the ‘generating conceit’ of the stone. He comments that when we finally realise its typological significance



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‘it detonates, releasing us into a new universe and a new law- greater than that of Moses’.36 Keeping in mind the force with which its typological image is conveyed, he suggests how ‘Good Friday’ contrasts favourably with Keble’s more diffuse poems such as his ‘Sixth Sunday After Trinity’, which also deals with the figure of the ‘smitten rock’.37 In a chapter on the Tractarian inflections in Rossetti’s devotional poetry, Linda Schofield argues that the disruptive force of ‘Good Friday’ ‘derives its power from its thematic compression’ and from the speaker’s decision to keep the ‘riddle of the stone a mystery until the last moment’.38 With the poem’s focus on the spiritual journey of the individual in mind, she delineates some ‘fundamental differences in attitude and technique’ between Rossetti’s poetry and the verses composed by her Tractarian contemporaries.39 Comparing ‘Good Friday’ to Richard Hurrell Froude’s ‘Trembling Hope’, a poem first published in Lyra Apostolica (1836), she recognises that, while Rossetti’s focus is on the individual, Froude’s is on instruction in Tractarian precept.40 Regrettably, however, Schofield does not mention Rossetti’s inclusion of ‘Good Friday’ in Lyra Messianica or the influence of the Lyra poems on her poetic practice. Keeping these aspects in mind, I want to suggest how the new interfaces generate new dialogic meaning and complicate the fundamental differences that Schofield describes. Shipley’s decision to print Henry Nutcombe Oxenham’s poem ‘The Heavenly Stranger’ directly after Rossetti’s ‘Good Friday’ extends its theme of Christ’s compassion in the face of the believer’s own spiritual alienation.41 Considering the resonances between this poem and ‘Despised and Rejected’, I call for a more nuanced understanding of Rossetti’s deployment of popular devotional motifs. ‘The Heavenly Stranger’ begins: A Stranger in the pale moonlight, Before the door He stood, His Locks are drenched with dews of night, His Raiment stained with Blood.

The imagery of the stranger standing knocking at the door in the moonlight recalls both Christ’s cry ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock’ (Rev 3.20) and the description that the beloved gives in the Song of Solomon of her lover standing outside and calling to be allowed in: ‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night’ (5.2). A typological connection is made between the lover and Christ in the imagery that follows of the ‘nail-pierced Hand’ and the ‘cruel cincture o’er His Brow, | Woven of thorns’. In the poem, in spite of standing

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outside and knocking through ‘the livelong night’, Christ receives no reply from those inside. We are told that, like the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, ‘His loved Ones slept | And left Him all alone’. The regular ballad metre and simple language give the piece a haunting effect: The sheep will hear the shepherd’s cry, The hen can call her brood, Yet to His Voice came no reply, Shepherd, whose Name is Good.

After lamenting the refusal of those inside the house to respond to the stranger’s call, the final verse repeats the first almost verbatim. Although Oxenham’s poem witnesses to the passing of the night, its circular narrative detracts from the Song of Solomon where we read that, after the hesitancy of the beloved, the lover ‘had withdrawn himself and had gone’ (5.6). The absence of movement in ‘The Heavenly Stranger’ becomes more apparent when it is compared to ‘Despised and Rejected’. Here, Rossetti uses a lyric structure consisting of uneven lines that are driven forward by rhyming couplets. Rather than describe the scene as Oxenham had done, Rossetti focuses in on the response of the uncertain speaker and implies, rather than states, the biblical grounding. She begins the poem with the speaker’s insistence of her own individuality: My sun has set, I dwell In darkness as a dead man out of sight; And none remains, not one, that I should tell To him mine evil plight This bitter night. I will make fast my door That hollow friends may trouble me no more. (CP, pp. 172–4: 1–7)

The speaker’s resolute decision to ‘make fast’ the door remains unshaken despite the warnings that invoke both God’s words in Ezekiel that he will ‘set [His] face against’ the unrepentant nation (15.7) and Jesus’s parable of the stranger (Matt. 25.35). Her determination to isolate herself from the needs outside recalls the speaker of her earlier poem, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’. Published in The English Woman’s Journal in 1861, this poem warns of God’s judgement to come if opportunities to help others are forsaken: ‘Thou wast as a princess, rich and at ease, | Now sit in dust and howl for poverty’ (CP, p. 559: 35–6).



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Throughout ‘Despised and Rejected’, Rossetti repeats the momentum of her earlier poem as she apostophises Christ’s call with increasing urgency: […] Open, lest I should pass thee by, and thou One day entreat My Face And howl for grace, And I be deaf as thou art now. Open to Me. (25–9)

After ignoring the urgent voice that pleads ‘all night long’, the speaker hears retreating ‘footsteps echoing like a sigh’ (38, 52). Nonetheless, hope is not lost. She sees, along with the bloody footprints, ‘on my door | The mark of blood for evermore’ (58). Although Christ might be gone, the Old Testament image of the ‘mark of blood’ indicates the promise of salvation. As the Israelites who had marked their doors with the blood of a sacrificial lamb were saved when God killed the firstborn children of the Egyptians, a typological interpretation points to an understanding of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb (Exod. 12.13). In spite of this allusion, Christ’s retreating physical presence at the end of the poem is haunting. The blood and dew that Oxenham describes in ‘The Heavenly Stranger’ remain for Rossetti’s speaker not as the abstract description of ballad but as signs of the tangible and felt presence of the lover that marks her heart ‘for evermore’. In The Prince’s Progress the positioning of ‘Despised and Rejected’ indicates that, in spite of disobedience, hope remains. By following it with ‘Long Barren’, Rossetti offers the message that the offer of life remains open to one who has, up until now, only ‘put forth thorns’ (CP, p. 174: 8). The speaker’s invitation to Christ ‘Feed Thou my feeble shoots’ (15) models the response of dependency that is lacking in ‘Despised and Rejected’. After three subsequent poems that entreat Christ to provide subsidence and rest for a broken spirit, ‘Martyrs’ Song’ and ‘After This the Judgement’ enact the process of joining in with the songs of holy longing and aspiration. In a letter she wrote to Dante Gabriel while assembling poems for The Prince’s Progress, Rossetti expresses her uncertainty regarding her choice of devotional material: Again, I am much inclined to put in one terza rima; though whether my Judgment or Captive Jew I am not resolved; the Judgment is already published in one of Mr Shipley’s books: and Martyrs’ Song (in the same volume) was so honourably mentioned in a review we saw, that that seems to constitute some

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claim on reprint. I will try not to spoil my volume or deal a deathblow to my reputation, however. (Letters 255: 3 March 1865)

Several days later, she suggests that the high praise of her pieces in the Lyra poems from ‘Mr Cayley, and a review (I forget which)’ justifies their reprinting (Letters 256: 6 March 1865). The Lyra volume that Rossetti refers to is Orby Shipley’s third, Lyra Mystica. After her deliberations, she decides to go ahead and reprint ‘After This the Judgement’ and ‘Martyrs’ Song’, and saves her other terza rima, ‘By the Waters of Babylon/ B.C. 570’ (originally ‘Captive Jew’), for Macmillan’s Magazine. Out of Shipley’s three Lyras, Lyra Mystica has the least formal structure. In the preface, Shipley describes the volume as a ‘miscellaneous’ collection of poems written by ‘the contributors who had secured the popularity of the former Lyræ’.42 In addition to ‘After This the Judgement’ (pp. 33–5) and ‘Martyrs’ Song’ (pp. 427–9), he includes a poem that Rossetti had published as a devotional piece in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), ‘The Three Enemies: A Colloquy’ (pp. 199–200). All three recall the Tractarian engagement with the long history of devotional song. In the Lyra, ‘Martyrs’ Song’ features as the penultimate piece and is enveloped by two hymns by Anglican divines, Archdeacons Mant and Churton. In addition to reflecting a sense of the musicality of worship onto ‘Martyrs’ Song’, the hymns embed Rossetti’s expressions of struggle into the cry of the Church community. The division of the lines into couplets throughout accentuates the momentum of the piece. This is altered in The Prince’s Progress where it is printed in eight distinct verses. Entitling her poem ‘Martyrs’ Song’ rather than ‘Martyr’s Song’, Rossetti draws attention to its association with the hymn and to the move that she is making away from a lyric ‘I’ towards a more inclusive and communal understanding of the baptised community. In this way, she imitates the pattern established in George Herbert’s ‘Affliction [5]’ where the movement is from an individualised speaker in the first stanza to a collective voice in the second.43 Discussing the dynamics of Herbert’s reconfiguration of personhood throughout the five ‘Affliction’ poems, A. E. Watkins suggests that the shift to the collective ‘rhetorically performs the speaker’s abandonment of his previous conceptions of an isolated, discrete self ’.44 Rehearsing this shift, ‘Martyrs’ Song’ extends Herbert’s vision in its culturally astute repudiation of self-contained individuality. ‘With open arms and hearts of love’ (10), the martyrs of history model the spiritual porosity among the Communition of Saints that the



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speaker of ‘Despised and Rejected’ lacks. It is through an emphasis on participating in their joy that Rossetti roots the worship of the Church in the Psalter’s movement between the personal and collective and represents the relational basis of personhood. Rossetti’s practice of beginning devotional poems with a lyric articulation that reveals the speaker’s momentary position in her spiritual journey can be detected by a cursory glance at the opening of the poems that, in The Prince’s Progress, precede ‘Martyrs’ Song’: ‘My sun has set, I dwell | In darkness’ (‘Despised and Rejected’), ‘Thou who didst hang upon a barren tree, | My God, for me’ (‘Long Barren’), ‘I love and love not: Lord, it breaks my heart’ (Dost Thou not Care?’) and ‘I would have gone; God bade me stay’ (‘Weary in Well-Doing’). While these openings suggest that theological insights will emerge from a feeling, desiring and thinking subject who seeks an understanding of her position before God, the titles are indicative of existential and experiential discovery through lament. By following the pattern of Herbert’s ‘Affliction’ poems and offering a sudden, albeit unpronounced, switch from the individual to the communal lyric, ‘Martyrs’ Song’ nuances the individualised speaker of the preceding poems and the apparently singular ‘I’ whose anguish reverberates in the closing poems, ‘Good Friday’ and ‘The Lowest Place.’ Its gestures to the Psalms indicate that communal articulation does not necessarily exclude scouring the depths of interiority. The opening lines of ‘Martyrs’ Song’ offer reassurance by echoing biblical promises: We meet in joy, tho’ we part in sorrow; We part tonight, but we meet tomorrow. Be it flood or blood the path that’s trod, All the same it leads home to God: Be it furnace fire voluminous, One like God’s Son will walk with us. (CP, pp. 176–8: 1–6)

The first two lines enact the comforting hope of reunion by bracketing the ‘sorrow’ of martyrdom within a chiasmic framework. They thereby linguistically contain the pain of ‘part[ing]’. Nonetheless, it is not until the end of the entire poem, when this focus has been re-directed away from a profane desire to restore earthly relationships and towards a self-possessed expression of desire for God, that the pain is fully overcome. This movement recalls the structural dynamics of The Prince’s Progress. Whereas a longing for reunion with a beloved

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partner is expressed in the earlier non-devotional poems of the volume (namely ‘One Day’ and ‘Memory’), the later devotional poems express the movement towards a transformed desire where the penitent’s heart cry is ‘give me the lowest place’ (‘The Lowest Place’, CP, p. 181: 1). By mapping out this extended journey from earthly longing to humble and holy desire, ‘Martyrs’ Song’ condenses an overarching theme of the volume and offers a key turning point. Using the step-like parallelism that characterises the structural dynamics of the Psalms of Ascent (Ps. 120–34), the poem in its entirety transforms the initial longing for reunion as the speaker receives and accepts the ‘grace’ that comes through Christ’s ‘one effort’ (53). By omitting the first six lines as well as the final thirty-eight, Littledale extracts this movement from the poem. In his preface to the second of the four volumes of the Commentary on the Psalms, he notes that John Mason Neale reached Psalm 59 before his death in 1866, and entrusted him to finish the rest.45 While the first two volumes of the Commentary consist solely of reflections by ancient and medieval commentators, the final two include poems dated from the sixteenth century onwards. While this move towards modernity coincides with Rossetti’s own concern to link contemporary believers to the saints of the historical church, substantial ideological differences between Rossetti and Littledale remain unresolved. Littledale’s decision to take only an extract (consisting of lines 7–14 and 17–24) from Rossetti’s poem, as he had taken extracts from other poems, including those by Herbert, exemplify these differences between his understanding of devotional poetry and hers (CPS, iv, p. 92). Associating devotional verse with ‘gold and gems’, he suggests that it supports a particular theological approach; for Rossetti, poetry creatively performs theology (CPS, ii, p. viii). Littledale contributed a poem and a translation of a Latin hymn to Lyra Mystica. As well as encountering ‘Martyrs’ Song’ here, he would have also come across it in The Prince’s Progress. From his transcription of punctuation and italics, it would appear that he extracted the verses for the Commentary from the Lyra. Rossetti’s awareness that Littledale reprinted extracts from ‘Martyrs’ Song’ in The People’s Hymnal (1867) and used them as the basis of a doxology for the East Grinstead Sisterhood signals a likely awareness of his intention to also use the poem in the Commentary on the Psalms (Letters 1616: 1889).46 Moreover, the correspondence of the Rossetti women that speaks of a familiarity with the earlier volumes of the Commentary indicate a commitment to the objectives of the four-volume project.47 With this in mind, it appears that Rossetti made an exception to her avowed intention to ‘make a point of refusing extracts’ (Letters 145: 24 November 1886).



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In the Commentary, Littledale uses the extract from ‘Martyrs’ Song’ to assert a link between Psalm 119.74 (‘They that fear thee shall be glad when they see me: because I have put my trust in thy word’) and Revelation 19.9 (‘Blessed are they that are called to the marriage-supper of the lamb’). Through the poem’s positioning, he also highlights the association between its devotional expression and ancient, medieval and modern accounts of encountering God’s presence. The citation of Herbert’s ‘Bitter-Sweet’ on the page opposite heightens the link that early readers were repeatedly making between the two devotional poets. The teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux were particularly important for the Tractarians as they sought to regenerate the holy aspirations of the church. Taking Bernard as an ‘example of piety and resignation’, Littledale draws on his descriptions of spiritual healing (CPS, iv, pp. 67–8). Bernard records that when his heart was ‘chill and numb’ and his ‘inward feelings’ bound by ‘the binding frost […] suddenly at the accost […] my spirit breathed again, and the waters flowed, and those tears were my bread day and night’ (ibid.). Considered in the context of these lines, the concern in ‘Martyrs’ Song’ that Christians receive the ‘accost’ of revelation is brought out. Reflecting on ‘the blessed ones gone before’ (11), the reader is urged to remain open and alert to the pressure of revelation and thereby respond to the divine call to personhood. After the account of Bernard and directly before incorporating Rossetti’s poem into his commentary, Littledale cites from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as he applies the words of the Psalm to the ‘joyous greeting given by the glorified Saints and Angels of God to the victorious Saint who presents himself at the gate of Paradise for admission’: ‘behold, a company of the shining host came out to meet them, to whom it was said by the shining ones: “These are the men that have loved our Lord when they were in the world”’ (CPS, iv, p. 68). By placing Rossetti’s poem directly below this citation, the Commentary amplifies the associations that it is making. It is significant that Littledale curtails his extract of the poem at the fourth and final re-structured quatrain: Welcoming Angels these that shine, Your own Angel, and yours, and mine; Who have hedged us, both day and night, On the left hand and on the right. (21–4)

The structure makes it clear that the angels ‘that shine’ in Rossetti’s poem can be understood in terms of the ‘shining ones’ that Bunyan’s Christian meets at the gate of Paradise.

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In spite of foregrounding the association between Rossetti’s poem and The Pilgrim’s Progress, Littledale’s decision to end the extract with the vision of the welcoming angels detracts from the emphasis on the progressive regeneration of the subject that ‘Martyrs’ Song’ offers. By adding a full stop to the final line of his restructured fourth verse, he dulls the fire of the interior spiritual battlefield that Rossetti envisions. Continuing with the reassurance ‘Who have watched us both night and day | Because the devil keeps watch to slay’ (25–6), the poem in its entirety develops a structure of parallelism to reflect the combative watchfulness of the angels and to stress the ongoing need for divine protection in the battlefield of the baptised soul as it enters a new form of personhood and becomes one with Christ. Introducing the pronoun ‘us’ at this point, Rossetti gestures out from the poem. Just as the protective might of the angelic army is revealed to Elisha’s servant (2 kgs 6.17), she signals that the invisible forces will be revealed to each believer. Moreover, her stress on the interiority of the eschatological vision draws on the reassurance offered by the promise of angelic protection for the individual in Psalms 34.7 and 91.11. As a committed church member, Rossetti would have heard Henry Burrows preach about angelic protection and the process of theosis. In a sermon on the Incarnation, Burrows considers man’s fall from his created state as ‘“[…] the image and glory of God” […] invested with some portion of the divine attributes’.48 After contemplating the ‘grief among the heavenly spirits that watched the issue of [humankind’s] trail’, he speaks of God’s revelation of himself as ‘man in an eminent sense’ and of the reversal of the effects of the fall.49 Resonating with the stress that Burrows lays on the response of the angelic communion to the Incarnation and to the recovery of man from sin, ‘Martyrs’ Song’ invites a renewed perspective of personhood through the process of theosis. That the ‘glow’ (7) of martyrs who have ‘gone before’ (11) can be glimpsed as they ‘lean over the golden bar’ (8) of heaven in a state of initial created splendour indicates the possibility of transformation. While the speaker of ‘Weary in Well-Doing’ (the poem that, in The Prince’s Progress, precedes ‘Martyrs’ Song’) asks in desperation when she might ‘rest with Thee?’ (CP, p. 176: 15), the existential glimpse in ‘Martyrs’ Song’ of transformed souls enjoying ‘the rest of that fulfils desire’ (16) drives the pilgrim forwards on his journey towards the martyrdom of self. In the poem’s entirety the questions ‘what are these […]?’ (7, 17) and ‘who is this?’ (28) highlight the experiential journey of the aspiring martyr. In addition to recalling Revelation 7.13 (‘What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?’), the question ‘what are these?’ echoes Isaiah’s



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anticipation of the return of the exiles: ‘Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?’ (60:8). After the typological invocations of Isaiah invite an understanding of Old Testament prophecy as both a signpost to Christ and as a reflective guide to lived experience, the later question ‘who is this?’ brings the transformative potential of a personal encounter with Jesus to the forefront. Throughout the New Testament, those who witness Jesus’s mighty acts repeatedly ask ‘who is this?’ Examples include: Herod (Lk. 9.9), the Pharisees (Lk. 5.21; 7.49) and the crowds to whom he speaks (Jn 12.34). Matthew records that when Jesus made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the citizens asked ‘Who is this?’ the crowds responded by declaring, ‘This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee’ (21.10). Occurring at the mid-point of ‘Martyrs’ Song’, the question represents the entry of Jesus into the interior space of the individual. Following it, the remainder of the poem articulates the progressive acceptance of the truth that Jesus is ‘God Almighty’ made Incarnate (61). Moving beyond an invocation of the watchful angels and towards selfknowledge, the final five stanzas consider the new orientation of the baptised Christian as she accepts the identity of Jesus as the Son of God and is transformed through the process of theosis. Continuing to enact the pivotal move from objective observation to subjective identification, the fourth stanza stresses God’s compassion for his people through an inclusion of plural personal pronouns: Light above light, and Bliss beyond bliss Whom words cannot utter, lo, Who is This? As a King with many crowns He stands, And our names are graven upon His hands; As a Priest, with God-uplifted eyes, He offers for us His Sacrifice; As the Lamb of God for sinners slain, That we too may live He lives again; As our Champion behold Him stand, Strong to save us, at God’s Right Hand. (27–36)

The emphasis here has moved away from a consideration of ‘the blessed ones gone before’ (11) and towards a focus on God’s compassion for the individual. The plural third-person pronouns and determiners that run through the second and third verses, ‘these’ (7, 8, 17, 21), ‘they’ (11, 12, 13) and ‘their’ (14, 19, 20), are replaced here by plural personal pronouns: ‘us’ (25, 32, 36), ‘our’ (30, 35)

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and ‘we’ (34). These pronouns invite the reader to understand herself among the ‘sinners’ for whom Christ was ‘slain’ (33). Her urgent need to be saved from sin is pronounced when she is considered against the purity and holiness of the angels and saints previously described. Discussing the lines ‘As a King with many crowns He stands, | And our names are graven upon His hands’ (29–30), Nilda Jimenez highlights how Rossetti combines the description of Revelation 19.12 (‘on his head were many crowns’) with the assurance of Isaiah 49.12 (‘Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands’). She explains: Bringing the line of Isaiah into conjunction with the line from Revelation gives the figure of Christ a tenderness and a love for his own which the first part lacks altogether. The names graven on the hands imply the special care, love, and attention that Christ has for his redeemed, one of the most attractive features of the risen Christ. Rossetti tells us that Christ is to her both awesome and tender, but He is especially so to those who have endured suffering and death for his sake.50

Exemplifying the sequential progress of Rossetti’s second volume, the poem’s emphasis on Christ’s ongoing compassionate act of naming authorises the desire for self-expression that is articulated by the speaker of ‘A Royal Princess’. It is only after the reader of ‘Martyrs’ Song’ has been accosted by a revelatory encounter with Christ and has asked in wonder ‘Who is this?’ that she is ready to accept the divine response to her prayers. By progressively recognising the different typological conflations that reveal how suffering can work as a lever to re-orientate the believer to existential encounter, she is able to appreciate more fully the transformative revelation of Christ’s love. Rossetti models a prayerful response to God’s love when she employs a psalm-inflected structure in the following three stanzas. Equally weighted, they map out the movement to the climactic realisation that salvation is to be granted through the ‘one effort by Christ’ (53). God the Father give us grace To walk in the light of Jesus’ Face. God the Son give us a part In the hiding-place of Jesus’ Heart: God the Spirit so hold us up That we may drink of Jesus’ cup. Death is short and life is long; Satan is strong, but Christ more strong.



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At His Word, Who hath led us hither, The Red Sea must part hither and thither. At His Word, Who goes before us too, Jordan must cleave to let us thro’. Yet one pang searching and sore, And then Heaven for evermore; Yet one moment awful and dark, Then safety within the Veil and the Ark; Yet one effort by Christ His grace, Then Christ for ever face to face. (37–54)

Together, these stanzas perform a liturgical function as they introduce the inclusive vocabulary of prayer through which ‘God the Spirit’ enables the believer to drink of the ‘cup’ of Jesus’s Passion and thereby share in his resurrection (41, 44). Confronting the imminent prospect of death, the speaker articulates a firmly Protestant emphasis on the sole work of God in ‘imputing’ faith ‘for righteousness’ (Rom. 4.22). The message that the ‘grace’ (37), the ‘part’ (39) and the sustenance to remain in Christ (41) are only attainable through His ‘one effort’ (53) is rooted in Paul’s description of the baptised person finding life with God’s Incarnate ‘Word’ (41, 53, 45). Drawing attention to the possibility, through baptism, of overcoming the chasm between earth and heaven, Rossetti anticipates the ultimate goal of being with ‘Christ for ever face to face’ (56). With this in mind, the ‘pang’ she describes (49) can be understood as indicative of the moment when the ‘old man’ of sin is identified and destroyed in order that the ‘new man’ may emerge in Christ (Rom 6.6). In sum, by enacting the experience of theosis, her poetic invocation provides an affective counterpart to the Tractarian theology of personhood. Rather than offering a description, her poem offers a dynamic theology of purpose in that it invites individuals to experience the journey of regeneration for themselves. Figuring the emergence of the new and regenerated person in Christ, the allusion to crossing the waters of the Jordan typologically enacts participation with the Israelites as they enter the Promised Land and promotes identification with Christ in his baptism (48). By linking the parting of the ‘Red Sea […] At His Word’ with both Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan and the salvation history of the individual soul (45–6), ‘Martyrs’ Song’ draws on the legacy that Barbara Kiefer Lewalski explains seventeenth-century Protestant poets took from Calvin. 51 It also recalls Herbert’s poems of baptised sensibility. Loosely following the pattern

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of ‘Jordan [1]’, which envisages spiritual movement towards a place of authentic praise where one can say, ‘My God, My King’ (WP, ii, p. 52: 15), the crossing of the Jordan that Rossetti describes commits to a thoroughly Christian poetic. At the end of Littledale’s edited extract of ‘Martyrs’ Song’ in the Commentary on the Psalms, the redeemed remain as the ‘shining ones’ beyond the gate that Bunyan envisions in The Pilgrim’s Progress. They are represented as ‘afar’ (7) from the world in both spatial and spiritual terms. In the poem’s entirety, the affective association that is envisaged between the worship of the redeemed through eternity and the chanting of the psalms on earth illuminates the place of the church at the threshold of the gate of heaven: the ultimate border of the Promised Land represented typologically by the River Jordan. By pushing beyond the boundary of lived experience, the second half of the poem indicates how an initial vision of the redeemed accentuates the pain of earthly existence and furthers the individual’s longing for God. The glimpse of the heavenly community leaning over the ‘golden bar’ (7) hints at the radical disruption their presence engenders. The image of finding ‘safety within the Veil and the Ark’ (52) provides ‘Martyrs’ Song’ with a re-conception of personhood (52). This re-conception enacts the movement from observation to participation; from the old understanding of the redeemed as ‘these that glow from afar’ to a new recognition of one’s own ‘part’ with, and in, Jesus (7, 39). The writer to the Hebrews invites believers to ‘draw near’ to God in recognition of the ‘new and living way’ that Jesus ‘hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh’ (Heb. 10.22, 20). Throughout the poem, Rossetti draws on this conflation of veil and divine flesh to stress that participation in the resurrection is found in the life of ‘the Lamb for sinners slain’ (33). Moreover, by exploring the New Testament association of Christ’s death with the rending apart of the veil of the temple (Matt. 27.51; Mk. 15.38; Lk. 23.45), she encourages a personal application of the gospel message and challenges the individualist conception of the self as a bounded unit. In his article, Watkins describes how, in ‘Affliction [5]’, Herbert figures a typological switch from enclosed garden to Ark as he ‘reconceives of himself as part of a whole, as a member of the body of Christ’.52 Rossetti creatively adds to this switch by drawing on the promise of ‘safety within […] the Ark’ (53) to forge an understanding of the self as both a part of the Ark of the Covenant and as a part of Noah’s Ark. By incorporating references to the ‘flood’ (4, 58), the ‘bar’ (8) and the ‘Red Sea’ (46), she recalls the protection offered by Noah. In line with her concern to define personhood, she extends the traditional



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typological association between Noah and Christ and insistently links the dove of Genesis 8 with the individual Christian. This identification is echoed in her later terza rima, ‘A Martyr: A Vigil of the Feast’, when the impassioned speaker asks Christ to: ‘Put forth Thy scarred right Hand, kind Lord, take hold | Of me Thine all-forsaken dove’ (CP, p. 367–71: 77–8). In the final verse of ‘Martyrs’ Song’, God’s hold of the faltering dove-like pilgrim is imagined and an appropriate response articulated: God the Father we will adore, In Jesus’ Name, now and evermore: God the Son we will love and thank In this flood and on the further bank: God the Holy Ghost we will praise, In Jesus’ Name thro’ endless days: God Almighty, God Three in One, God Almighty, God alone. (55–62)

Recalling the earlier questions, ‘What are these’ and ‘Who is This?’ (7, 17), this concluding declaration of praise and trust expresses the movement of the poem towards ultimate participation with those who have been regenerated. The thrice-repeated ‘we will’ (55, 57, 59) not only implies participation in the Trinity but also echoes the prayer-book response, ‘I will’, of the baptismal candidate. In The Prince’s Progress, Rossetti follows ‘Martyrs’ Song’ with her 1856 poem ‘After This the Judgement’. As indicated above, she was encouraged to include this terza rima in the volume after receiving praise from Charles Bagot Cayley when it had appeared in Lyra Mystica.53 It was not simply because Cayley was a beloved friend and soon-to-be suitor that Rossetti looked to his praise.54 Rather, it was because she was deeply engaged as a reader with his terza rima English translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Vision of Hell (1851), The Purgatory (1853), The Paradise (1854) and a volume of notes (1855); she describes these as ‘a permanent contribution to our English Classics’.55 In their article on Rossetti’s copy of the four-volume translation, Kamilla Denman and Sarah Smith consider how she annotates, corrects and questions Cayley’s work.56 That her engagement with the volumes continued through to the rest of her life is indicated by her decision to cite from them in Time Flies and in both her articles, ‘Dante, an English Classic’ for The Churchman’s Shilling Magazine (1867) and ‘Dante, the Poet Illustrated Out of the Poem’ for Century Magazine (1884). The preference, that Dinah Roe details, for the terza rima translations over the more literal blank ones, including William Michael Rossetti’s 1850

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translation of the Inferno, is perhaps indicative of her continued investment in the ‘intimate intertexture of a spiritual sense with a material form’ that guided the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its early stages.57 By choosing to use terza rima to reflect the movement from self-absorption to self-oblation in God, Rossetti indicates an adherence both to the ‘material form’ of Dante’s verse and to the English-language devotional uses of the form in Thomas Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms (1549) and The Sidney Psalter (1594). She also indicates her poetic affinities with, and her religious distance from, her more immediate forbear Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had used the form in ‘Casa Guido Windows’ (1851). Discussing the variety of new significations given to the terza rima in the nineteenth century, Naomi Levine considers how William Morris secularises the form in The Defence of Guenevere (1858) and uses it to meditate on issues of sexual love and adultery.58 With her immediate poetic forbears in mind, Rossetti’s use of the form to reflect on biblical subject matter can be seen to recover it as a devotional tool. From the start of ‘After This the Judgement’, the ternary structure expresses the sense of flux and the struggle for desire that the speaker experiences: As eager homebound traveller to the goal, Or steadfast seeker on an unsearched main, Or martyr panting for an aureole, My fellow-pilgrims pass me, and attain That hidden mansion of perpetual peace Where keen desire and hope dwell free from pain: That gate stands open of perennial ease; I view the glory till I partly long, Yet lack the fire of love which quickens these. O passing Angel, speed me with a song, A melody of heaven to reach my heart And rouse me to the race and make me strong; Till in such music I take up my part Swelling those Hallelujahs full of rest. (CP, pp. 178–9: 1–14)

Incorporating into their lilting rhymes references to ‘song’, ‘melody’ and ‘music’ (10, 11, 13), these lines stress the strengthening properties of liturgical devotion. By voicing a longing to receive the ‘fire of love which quickens’ (9), the speaker not only draws on Augustine’s articulation of fiery aspiration but also looks to the long devotional tradition of using this articulation to shape desire. While the form invites association with the rising flames of Dante’s



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Paradiso, the expression also invokes the fourteenth-century mystic Richard Rolle’s Fire of Love. With these gestures to past devotional classics in mind, the ‘fellow-pilgrims’ who pass through to heaven and beckon the lagging speaker onward can be identified as the witnesses to whom Rossetti looks for spiritual guidance. Significantly, it is the perception of God’s nurture that enables the speaker to claim her part in the ‘solace […] of Thy grace’ (38). After stressing her own posture of femininity through words of entreaty, ‘Be Husband, Brother, closet Friend to me’ (27), she mediates on what it means for Christ to be a nursing mother: Love me as very mother loves her son Her sucking firstborn fondled on her knee: Yea, more than mother loves her little one; For earthly, even a mother may forget And feel no pity for its piteous moan; But Thou, O Love of God, remember yet. (29–34)

In extending the metaphor of the maternal comfort that is invoked in Isaiah 49.15, Rossetti returns to medieval precedents. Caroline Walker Bynum suggests that despite the long-held critical assumption that, since identification of Jesus with motherhood must have been developed by women, it can actually be traced further back to twelfth-century men, including Bernard of Clairvaux.59 In her later book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, she notes how both male and female mystics, including Bernard, ‘drank from the breast of Christ, in vision and in image’ and took ‘from Pauline references to meal and milk and from the rich breast and food images of the Song of Songs – a complex sense of Christ’s blood as the nourishment and intoxication of the soul’.60 She moves on to explain that for medieval natural philosophers ‘breast milk was transmuted blood, and a human mother – like the pelican that also symbolized Christ – fed her children from the fluid of life that coursed through her veins’.61 Rossetti’s earlier poetical translation, ‘Imitated from the Arpa Evangelica: Page 121’ (CP, pp. 864–6), indicates a familiarity with this symbol of Christ as ‘Love’s Pelican’ (38) on whom St John reclined and was filled with the Spirit. In ‘After This the Judgement’, by moving from the identification of God with a lactating mother who feeds her ‘sucking firstborn’ (30) to a stress on the strengthening properties of ‘Thy Flesh and Blood’ (39), she foregrounds an affinity with the kind of Christian medievalism that conceives of Christ’s body as tangible and – perhaps recalling Lizzie in ‘Goblin Market’ – in some sense, as female.

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Responding to the Incarnation through the experiences of pain and war: ‘By the Waters of Babylon/ B.C. 570’ and ‘The German–French Campaign. 1870–1871’ Rossetti’s decision to include ‘After This The Judgement’ in The Prince’s Progress involved omitting her more recently composed terza rima, ‘Captive Jew’. A letter to Dante Gabriel anticipates his approval in excising this poem: ‘I will soothe your feelings by suppressing my Captive Jew without murmur’ (Letters. 256: 6 March 1865). Despite this suppression, Rossetti indicates her growing independence from his judgement when she submits it for inclusion in Macmillan’s Magazine. It was published here as ‘By the Waters of Babylon/ B.C. 570’ in October 1866 and, in 1875, Rossetti included it in Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. Its place in the later volume alongside ‘The German–French Campaign/ 1870–1871’ accentuates its insistent association of the contemporary believer and the Babylonian Exile. Both poems delineate the states of nature, grace and glory as they negotiate between the timeless and the temporal and the community and the individual. By re-titling her poem ‘By the Waters of Babylon/ B.C. 570’, Rossetti recalls the opening of Psalm 137: ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion.’ The addition of the date, ‘B.C. 570’, alerts readers to the year of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and of the Exile to Babylon. While Rossetti had appended dates to the titles of previous poems in order to situate lyric utterance in a specific temporal and spatial frame (‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857’; ‘The Lambs of Grasmere, 1860’), she had not previously appended a date to a poem based on biblical history. Adding one to her terza rima enables her to draw from the different biblical texts that speak of the same incident and locate her lyric voice in the schema of history: looking back to the Exodus (70–1), the devastation of Sodom and Gomorrah (10) and the occupation of Jericho (11), and looking forward to the promised Christ who will fill the seat of David and establish his supreme sovereignty (73–5). In 1861, three years before the composition of the terza rima, Rossetti indicates her ongoing concern with using the Psalms as a model for poetry and with the long devotional tradition of paraphrasing, quoting from and translating Psalm 137 in her trimeter lyric ‘By the Waters of Babylon’. By the time she came to write the terza rima in 1864, Rossetti was becoming more practiced in performing theology through the poetic conflation of passages and through



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allusions to past devotional classics. Building on Kooistra’s recognition that Francis Quarles’s Emblems (1635) had a formative effect on Rossetti’s aesthetic and visual imagination, I wish to highlight the influence of his gestures back to the interpretative models of ancient and medieval writers.62 Following his use of Psalm 137.4 as an epigraph (‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’), Quarles individualises his poetic voice: ‘Urge me no more […] not with my voice […] my untun’d fortunes.’63 This insistent use of personal pronouns both recalls Lamentations 1.11–22 and engages with the lyric voice of the Psalmist that gives personal utterance to the nation of Israel. Throughout her terza rima, Rossetti conflates Lamentations and the Psalms. In addition to adapting the voice of the widow of Jerusalem, the thirdperson descriptions of Lamentations are personalised, inviting the reader to engage with what is experienced viscerally. For instance, ‘their skin cleaveth to their bones’ (4.8) becomes ‘I waste to skin and bone’ (1), and ‘They ravished the women […]’ (5.11) becomes ‘their daughters took we for a pleasant prey’ (50). Theologian Harold Fisch explores the individualised expression of Israel’s resilient hope in his survey of the psalms, whereby ‘the trials and struggles of the community […] take on the character of a lonely, individual ordeal in which the suffering soul cries out to God and is answered’. He argues that ‘the ongoing covenant drama involving God and people is constantly interiorized to become the drama of a lonely soul, crying in anguish, trusting and despairing. The people in short take on the marks of lyrical subjectivity.’64 ‘By the Waters of Babylon/ B.C. 570’ extends this movement towards ‘lyrical subjectivity’ with its focus on revelatory encounter. Throughout, repetition and visceral imagery apply the subject of biblical history to the self in a manner akin to the characteristics that Lewalski finds in seventeenth-century Protestant poetics. Through descriptions of ‘skin and bone’ (1), the ‘body in this mire’ (8), the ‘famished faces’ (13) and the ‘painful heart’ (34), the physical body comes to the foreground and addresses the anguish of searching for God’s light in a broken world. Having her speaker take strength in God’s promise of providing a king to ‘fill’ David’s ‘seat’ (73), Rossetti emphasises how the Incarnation is the embodiment of prophecy and the supreme moment of the physical revelation of grace. It is her trust in grace that ultimately enables the speaker to join with the Psalmist as she remembers God’s past acts of salvation and continues in praise despite the uncertainty of her own existence (87–8). Rossetti published her two-part poem ‘The German-French Campaign/ 1870–1871’ alongside ‘By the Waters of Babylon/ B.C. 570’ in her 1875 volume. This returns to the application of biblical motifs and subjects to individual and

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national circumstance. It is bracketed by the more critically discussed poems, ‘Amor Mundi’, which warns the reader of the dangers of the ‘downhill path’ (CP, pp. 207–8: 20) and ‘A Christmas Carol’, which suggests that the only possible response to the radical love of the Incarnation is to ‘Give my heart’ (pp. 210–11: 40). Rooting the poem in the historical circumstances of the Franco-Prussian War and thereby bringing, by association of sequencing, the theology of the other poems into the lived experience of the 1870s subject, Rossetti highlights the relevance of her message. The poem’s second part returns to Psalm 137 as it identifies the oppressed citizens of France with the ancient Israelites who ‘sat down and wept’ by ‘waters of Babylon’ as they remembered Zion’s previous glory: She sitteth still who used to dance, She weepeth sore and more and more:Let us sit with thee weeping sore, O fair France. (CP, pp. 208–10: 37–40)

By expressing solidarity ‘with’ (39) the oppressed, Rossetti contributes to the formation of a national response of compassion. Tying her call to repentance with the question of who will be next to ‘drink the trembling cup […] after France’ (66, 68), she stresses that destruction can only be avoided by grasping the opportunities for ‘change and chance’ (61, 65). Rossetti’s preface to the poem indicates her concern to avoid political controversy: ‘These two pieces, written during the suspense of a great nation’s agony, aim at expressing human sympathy, not political bias.’ While William Michael suggests that his sister had ‘incomparably more general and native sympathy with the French nationality than with the German’, it is important not to lose sight of Rossetti’s own expressed aim to reveal the healing powers of ‘human sympathy’ (WMR, p. 487). This aim expresses not only an implicit ‘poetess’ move in the tradition of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, but also a significant ethic of compassion for the oppressed and the weak. As the driving force behind ‘The German–French Campaign’, Rossetti’s ethic of compassion draws on the use of biblical analogy and domestic appellations to lament the destruction of the landscape and to promote relational empathy for a ‘Brother’ (subtitle), ‘Mother’ (21) and ‘Sister’ (44) facing massacre, disease and starvation. In describing the ‘deathly trance’ (49) of the French nation anticipating defeat, Rossetti reflects on the destruction caused by foreign invasion as well as on the



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outbreak of domestic chaos. Sharing in the ‘suspense of a great nation’s agony’, she emphasises the hope that only grace can bring and offers the reassurance: Tears and blood have a cry that pierces Heaven Thro’ all its Hallelujah swells of mirth; God hears their cry, and tho’ He tarry, yet He doth not forget. (15–18)

This reassurance responds to the Psalmist’s cry, ‘You are my helper and my deliverer; do not tarry, O my God’ (Ps. 40.19). Added to this, the reminder that God ‘doth not forget’ the oppressed in their suffering invokes the Psalter’s insistent reminder of his ‘everlasting justice’ (Ps. 119.142). In the context of Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress, this reminder recalls the anguish of the fallen women to whom Rossetti gives voice. Her poem ‘Light Love’, which had appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine before its inclusion in The Prince’s Progress, ends with the speaker’s haunting question, ‘Does God forget?’ (CP, pp. 130–2: 70). This question gestures out to the community who, Rossetti believes, are given the grace to share in the divine life and to participate in God’s work of redemption. More radically, the question invokes the ‘supernatural grace’ necessary to transform prejudice into ‘human sympathy’.

Notes 1

2

3

4

William Michael Rossetti notes that while the second sonnet was ‘written for the death of Lady Isabella Howard’, the first ‘was meant for Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, and was so entitled; Christina had before then read with interest Kingsley’s drama The Saint’s Tragedy’ (WMR, p. 477). Maria Rossetti had composed a sonnet on the death of Lady Isabella several months earlier. Titled ‘The Daughter of Jairus’, it links her to the girl that Jesus raised from the dead (Lk. 8.41–56). University of British Columbia, Rare Books and Special Collections, Angeli-Dennis Collection. Box 13, file 9; Box 27 of this collection includes a memorandum by Charlotte Polidori that details the illness of Lady Isabella and documents relating to her time with the Wicklow family. Noelle Bowles, ‘A Chink in the Armour: Christina Rossetti’s “The Prince’s Progress”, “A Royal Princess”, and Victorian Medievalism’, Women’s Writing 12.1 (2005): 115–26 (116). A. M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998), p. 3.

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Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (2nd rev. edn; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990), p. 59. 6 Allchin, Participation in God, p. 49. 7 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols (London: Ellis & Elvey, 1895), ii, p. 162. 8 Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), p. 275. 9 Mary Arseneau notes Rossetti’s allusion to Archimago in ‘Pilgrimage and Postponement: Christina Rossetti’s The Prince’s Progress’, Victorian Poetry, 32.3–4 (1994): 279–98 (285); Linda H. Peterson suggests Pope as a model for the alchemist in ‘Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of Christina Rossetti and the PRB’, Victorian Poetry 32.3–4 (1994): 209–31 (221–2); Sharon Smulders suggests the link between the milkmaid and Wanton in Christina Rossetti Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 60. 10 Arseneau, ‘Pilgrimage and Postponement’, p. 279. 11 Simon Humphries, ‘Who is the Alchemist in Christina Rossetti’s “The Prince’s Progress”?’ Review of English Studies, 58 (2007): 684–97 (696). 12 Dawn Henwood, ‘Christian Allegory and Subversive Poetics: Christina Rossetti’s “Prince’s Progress” Re-examined, Victorian Poetry 35.1 (1997): 83–94 (88). 13 Bowles, ‘A Chink in the Armour’, p. 119. 14 For a discussion of these alterations see Constance W. Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 87. 15 Smulders, Christina Rossetti Revisited, p. 67 16 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 68. 17 Gisela Honnighausen, ‘Emblematic Tendencies in the Works of Christina Rossetti’, Victorian Poetry, 10 (1972): 1–15 (12). 18 Smulders, Christina Rossetti Revisited, p. 78. 19 Peterson, ‘Restoring the Book’, p. 223. 20 Poems: An Offering to Lancashire, ed. Isa Craig (London: Victoria Press, 1863), pp. 2–10. 21 ‘Books of the Month’, The English Woman’s Journal, 8.1 (1 February 1863): 422. 22 Amy Levy, ‘The Poetry of Christina Rossetti’, The Woman’s World, I (1888): 178–80 (178). 23 Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 144. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 145. 5



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26 Isaac Williams, Female Characters of Holy Scripture in a Series of Sermons (London: Rivingtons, 1859), p. 190. 27 Lyra Messianica: Hymns and Verses on the Life of Christ, Ancient and Modern, ed. Orby Shipley (Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1864), p. v. 28 Ibid., p. xix. 29 Emma Mason, ‘“A Sort of Aesthetico-Catholic Revival”: Christina Rossetti and the London Ritualist Scene’, in Outsiders Looking in: The Rossettis Then and Now, eds D. Clifford and L. Roussillon (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 115–30 (124–5). 30 G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 168. 31 Orby Shipley, The Daily Sacrifice: A Manual of Spiritual Communion for Daily Use (London: Joseph Masters, 1861), p. xv. 32 Orby Shipley, Daily Meditations: from Ancient Sources, 3 vols (London: Joseph Masters, 1861), ii, p. 96. 33 Poems by Christina Rossetti, ed. Edith Fry, illustrated Florence Harrison (London: Blackie, 1912), p. xvii. 34 Lyra Messianica, ed. Shipley, pp. 166–7. 35 Ibid, p. 176. Rossetti had encouraged Greenwell to submit her work to Shipley and to expect a positive response (Letters 199: October 1863). 36 George Landow, ‘Moses Striking the Rock: Typological Symbolism in Victorian Poetry’, in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1976), pp. 124–45 (335). 37 Ibid., p. 332. 38 Linda Schofield, ‘Being and Understanding: Devotional Poetry of Christina Rossetti and the Tractarians’, in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 301–21 (312, 313). 39 Ibid., p. 301. 40 Ibid., p. 311. 41 Lyra Mystica: Hymns and Verses on Sacred Subjects, Ancient and Modern, ed. Orby Shipley (Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865), p. 237. Oxenholm initally published the poem in his collection, The Sentence of Kaires and Other Poems (London: Whittaker, 1854), pp. 78–9. Here, he includes the note that it was ‘suggested by Hunt’s picture, The Light of the World.’ 42 Lyra Mystica, ed. Shipley, p. v. 43 The Works of George Herbert in Prose and Verse, 2 vols (2nd edn; London: William Pickering, 1841), ii, pp. 97–8. All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text as WP, followed by volume and page number. 44 A. E. Watkins, ‘Typology and the Self in George Herbert’s “Affliction” Poems’, George Herbert Journal, 31:1 (2007): 63–82 (74). 45 J. M. Neale and R. F. Littledale, A Commentary on the Psalms from Primitive and

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Medieval Writers, 4 vols [1869–83] (4th edn; London: Joseph Masters, 1884), ii, p. vii. All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text as CPS, followed by volume and page number. 46 Littledale includes lines 7–14, 17–24, 27–34, 37–42 and 61–2 of Rossetti’s original ‘Martyrs’ Song’ in The People’s Hymnal (London: Joseph Masters, 1867), no. 579. In the preface, he notes that ‘where deviations occur [from the original texts] in the case of living authors, their consent has, when practicable, been sought and obtained’ (p. iii). 47 In a letter to Rossetti, Maria cites ‘Dr Neale’s Commentary on the Psalms, Vol 2, p. 157’ (A–D Collection, Box 13: file 8). 48 Henry W. Burrows, ‘The Incarnation’, in The Warnings of Advent: A Course of Sermons, Preached in the Church of St. Bartholomew, ed. William Denton (London: J. Whitaker, 1853), pp. 270–80 (271). 49 Ibid., pp. 271, 278. 50 Nilda Jimenez, Christina Rossetti and the Bible: A Concordance (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. xii. 51 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 134. 52 Watkins, Typology and the Self ’, p. 74 53 Lyra Mystica, ed. Shipley, pp. 33–5. 54 For further discussion of their relationship, see Dinah Roe, The Rossettis in Wonderland: A Victorian Family History (London: Haus, 2011), pp. 239–42. 55 Christina Rossetti, ‘Dante, An English Classic’, The Churchman’s Shilling Magazine, 2.8 (October 1867): 200–5 (202). 56 Kamilla Denman and Sarah Smith, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Copy of C. B. Cayley’s Divine Comedy’, Victorian Poetry, 32.3–4 (1994): 315–38 (324). 57 Roe, The Rossettis in Wonderland, pp. 225–6; The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art. Being a Facsimile Reprint of the Literary Organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Published in 1850, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1901), preface, p. 8. 58 Naomi Levine, ‘Trebled Beauty: William Morris’s Terza Rima’, Victorian Studies, 53.3 (2011): 506–18 (507). 59 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 111–12. 60 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), p. 270. 61 Ibid. 62 Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration, p. 4.



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63 Francis Quarles, Quarles’ Emblems [1635], illustrated by Charles Bennett and Harry W. Rogers (London: James Nisbet, 1861), p. 255. 64 Harold Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature, Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 115.

4

Shaping a Poetics of Affect in A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee. (Lk. 15.17–18)

Between 1870 and 1880, Christina Rossetti published two books of short stories, one volume of poetry for children and two books of devotional prose. Concurrent with the maturation of her poetic and theological voice were the shifts in fin-de-siècle culture wrought by scientific and technological sea changes. According to Marion Thain, ‘what we see in poetry of [this] period is not so much the limbo of “transition” to modernist concerns […] but what Richard Le Gallienne identified as a self-conscious desire for a new aesthetic and a new beginning’.1 A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) responds to the selfconsciousness of its temporal moment by an engagement with the concerns of cosmopolitan modernity. As Isobel Armstrong explains, what appears in this volume is ‘a new order of lyric that is inconspicuously daring’.2 This chapter reveals the extent to which the stress that Rossetti places on self-identification is based on an assessment of contemporary culture coupled with a profound engagement with the form and properties of parable. In the second half of Luke’s gospel, parables represent halting moments of reflection in the longer narrative of Christ’s journey into Jerusalem. In each, Jesus invites his disciples to pause and reflect on what has happened and look forward to what is about to happen. Focusing on Rossetti’s bold appropriations of the parable in which Jesus describes the prodigal son’s painful awareness of lack and his encounter with the unexpected grace of his father, my argument details her efforts to make the story applicable to all readers, regardless of gender. It also considers how she overrides narrative historicism with typological gestures

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in order to revise the increasing secular understanding of the bounded and self-contained subject. In ‘Resurgam’, a sonnet that Rossetti first published in The Athenæum in 1882 before including it in her expanded version of A Pageant in 1888, she imagines the climber who ‘runs a race with Time’ (CP, p. 379: 6). In order that he win the race and proclaim ‘Resurgam’, or ‘I shall arise again’, with confidence, he must overcome the pains of the up-hill path and empty himself ‘of all save only Grace, | Will, [and] Love’ (7–8). Shrouded in ‘dark[ness]’ (9) and struggling with the ‘unbreathable thin air’ (10), he ascends with uncertain steps until he reaches the mountaintop where he is met by the ‘returning sun’ (14). As a metaphor for the spiritual journey, his climb is indicative of the necessity of submitting to spiritual purgation and looking beyond the limits of reason and vision. While it is impossible to win the ‘race with Time’ on human terms (6), the vision that Rossetti offers through the sonnet is one where grace supersedes. Throughout the poems of A Pageant, this vision is what shapes an understanding of personhood. In its entirety, the volume moves towards the closing perception of God’s ‘Everlasting Arms’ that reach out to save the returning prodigal, thus revealing the convergence of time with eternity that the Incarnation makes possible (“Love Is Strong as Death”, CP, p. 372: 10). Investigating Rossetti’s representation of this convergence means recognising her call that readers address their own prodigaliy, adopt an attitude of repentance, and remain receptive to divine activity. Discussing the receptive disposition of the ‘broken-hearted reader’, literary critic David Lyle Jeffrey explains that, with the Bible, the relationship between text and reader is no longer between simple story and interpreter. Instead, for the Christian, the reader becomes the object of interpretation: ‘when we read accountably, the text is not first and foremost an invitation to an act of criticism. Rather, the story breaks the reader’s heart to hear it.’3 An important article by Liam Corley similarly considers the implications of Christian reading practices and argues that the principal mode of devotional reading is self-critique.4 Extending my reading of Rossetti’s poetry in the context of the mid-century Lyras, I investigate how A Pageant calls for the receptive dispositions that Jeffrey and Corley describe and consider Rossetti’s engagement with the transformative properties of devotional reading. I suggest that, by building on a recognition that participation in the Sacraments enables the rightly disposed penitent to encounter God’s revelation of himself, Rossetti uses the volume to explore the affective processes of purgation and transformation that prepare the subject for a deeper re-revelation of God’s grace.



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A motif that runs through A Pageant is the figuration of winter as the cold and silent ground of the Church Militant who, having purged themselves of worldly preoccupation, wait to receive God’s grace. In Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879), Rossetti suggests that, ‘even while we shrink from it’, winter ‘abounds in hope’ (p. 56). Considering Rossetti’s ongoing use of the season as metaphor, Emma Mason comments that ‘in terminating the year in a state of glacial inertia to signal the close of mortality and the beginning of life in paradise, winter was Rossetti’s favourite season’.5 Mason then cites a passage from The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892) to indicate this preference: ‘Spring or summer might satisfy a light heart […] Autumn is a very parable of passing away and sorrowfulness. Only winter is cheered by our foresight of its coming to an end; winter the death of each year’ (FD, p. 300). In one of the opening lyrics of A Pageant, ‘Mirrors of Life and Death’, Rossetti anticipates this delineation of winter as she contemplates the time-bound world ‘All clothed in white, | All waiting for the long-awaited light’ (CP, pp. 283–7: 134–5). In sonnet 23 of Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets, she again associates winter with eschatological waiting when she has the weary subject face the ‘icebound seas’ of purgation that must be crossed before a glimpse of heaven can be caught (CP, pp. 346–58: 23.5). Rossetti’s theocratic vision of the wintry world that waits in hopeful expectation stands in contrast to many of the ideas of contemporary scientific and historic scholarship. In a discussion of his paired poems ‘Nothing will die’ and ‘All things will die’, Armstrong considers Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘versification of new geological theory’ and suggests that his concern with the ‘great “Geological winter” proposed by Charles Lyell in the first volume of Principles of Geology [1830–3]’ is particularly formative to his poetic practice. 6 Through both poems, Tennyson envisages the universe without origin or end; winter is simply a part of the long geological cycle. In ‘Nothing will die’, he echoes Lyell when he describes ‘the world’s winter’ in which ‘Earth is dry to the centre’.7 Although spring will eventually come, the poem anticipates that ongoing geological change means the recurrence of the cycle through eternity. While Rossetti’s equation of winter with the period of eschatological expectancy challenges this perception, her use of scientific vocabulary and her concern with accurately representing the natural and animalistic world indicates her deep engagement with geological perception and environmental ethics. If she did not read Principles of Geology first-hand, she was certainly familiar with Lyell’s geological investigations and with the scientific debates explored in The Athenæum, Macmillan’s Magazine and Good Words.8

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Christina Rossetti and the Bible

‘Birchington Churchyard’, the lyric that Rossetti wrote on the occasion of her brother Dante Gabriel’s death in 1882 and published in The Athenæum before including it in the 1888 expanded version of A Pageant, indicates that the relentless ‘tide rises’ that erode the chalky face of the cliff signify the final setting of ‘Time’ (CP, p. 375: 11, 10). Representative of Rossetti’s response to Lyell and Tennyson, the message throughout is that nothing of ultimate value will die and that time exists as a ‘defined period’ of duration (LS, p. 181). This message corresponds with her commitment to the patristic model of personhood. While Chapter 1 of this book explored this commitment in relation to her poem ‘The Thread of Life’, Chapter 3 considered Rossetti’s engagement with the doctrine of theosis: that is, the process of being made into the likeness of God through grace. In the discussion below, I take these ideas further as I suggest how Rossetti’s later poems investigate the significance of gender to an understanding of personhood and to the re-channelling – in time – of desire from eros to agape. While the first part of this chapter considers how typological thinking shapes the opening section of A Pageant and underlies the representation of personhood in Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets, the second part focuses on how Rossetti’s appropriations of the parable of the prodigal son work affectively to establish a hermeneutic that resonates with a long devotional heritage and remains hospitable to women’s spiritual experience. The final section then turns to Later Life in order to explore Rossetti’s response to the biblical precepts of repentance, forgiveness and sanctification.

Selfhood and typological thinking in Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets Rossetti opens A Pageant and Other Poems with a prefatory sonnet addressed to her mother. It begins, ‘Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome | Has many sonnets’ (CP, p. 267: 1–2). Most of these sonnets are included in the five sequences of the volume, while Monna Innominata is placed towards the start, “If Thou Sayest, Behold, We Knew It Not”, ‘The Thread of Life’, Later Life and “Behold a Shaking” are included among the more explicitly devotional poems at the end. As Diane D’Amico explains, A Pageant is the first volume where Rossetti does not ‘explicitly distinguish between her general poems and her devotional poems’.9 While the shift from ‘Passing and Glassing’ to “I Will Arise” marks a turn from an exploration of earth-based relationships to an investigation of spiritual experience, Rossetti’s refusal to label the latter set as ‘Devotional Pieces’



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signals an increasing concern with re-channelling all desire into alignment with God. Throughout the sonnet sequences of the volume, Rossetti foregrounds the process of this re-channelling as she undertakes poetic scriptural interpretation, responds to a long devotional and literary tradition, and invokes of the rhythms of lived experience. In his book, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence, John Holmes notes that the dozens of sonnet sequences published in the 1870s and 1880s ‘were characterised, individually and collectively, by attempts to develop a poetry of selfhood’.10 Tracing the widespread influence of Dante Gabriel’s The House of Life (1870–81), he considers how its rejection of ‘strict linearity’ sets a precedent for poets to invite readers ‘to seek interpretations and associations for themselves rather than being clearly led between them’ and to enter ‘into a process of self-exploration’.11 Extending Holmes’s reading, I suggest how the structure of both A Pageant and the sonnet sequences within it engage with the ethical probing of parable and the typological reading practices favoured by seventeenth-century Protestant poetics of applying the biblical subject to the self. I argue that Rossetti’s commitment to these practices enables her to Christianise the diachronic dynamics of her brother’s aesthetic and to call on the devotional imagination of her readers in a reassessment of the coherence of the gendered and time-bound self. By 1880 Rossetti had experienced the onset of Graves’ disease and had lost her sister Maria to cancer. Mary Arseneau comments on how both of these events ‘served to focus [her] attention on God and the continuation through eternity of the self in relationship with God in community with the devout’.12 Rossetti’s more mature theology of suffering not only attests to this focus but also looks back to a devotional heritage that recognises how God reveals himself to the faithful in what St John of the Cross terms ‘the dark night of the soul’. Following the dedicatory sonnet of A Pageant, ‘The Key-Note’ introduces the poetic voice of the volume as one of hard-learned experience. Here, the thought of a robin breaking through the dark night of the wintry landscape and making ‘one spot warm where snowflakes lie’ inspires the speaker to re-orientate herself as a receptacle of God’s grace (CP, pp. 267–8: 14); if a robin’s embodied song can alleviate ‘Winter’s Pause’, she asks, then ‘why not I?’ (16). Recurring through Rossetti’s poems of the 1880s as an ethical challenge, this question carries the quality of parable in that it interrogates assumption and activates a renewed perception. Alongside an agreement that the function of parable is to transform and provoke change in the hearer, theories of its dynamics are numerous and

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varied. In her book Victorian Parables, Susan Colòn reads Paul Ricoeur’s theory, whereby metaphor is transposed into story and engenders a response that ‘occurs in the gap between the expected and the unexpected – the familiar and the alien’, as the most instructive.13 By distilling the narratology of parable into lyric form, Rossetti calls on the reader to play a more active role as interpreter and engenders the response of self-critique and repentance indirectly. Throughout the poems of A Pageant, recognition of the ‘gap between the expected and unexpected’ is predicated on the practice of typological thinking; the reader is invited to measure her own experience and insert herself in the spaces between the different books of the Bible. According to Gerhard von Rad, ‘typological thinking is an elementary function of all human thought’. He argues that without it ‘there would be no poetry. The poet goes ceaselessly to and fro: he sees the often insignificant, obvious things and recognises in them ultimate value.’14 As Dinah Roe explains, ‘typological interpretation is dependent on the human imagination to bridge the gap between earthly event and sacred meaning’.15 It is this combination of the parabolic with the typological that, I argue, underlies the dialogic and diachronic structures of Rossetti’s sonnet sequences. In Monna Innominata, Rossetti performs a particularly innovative move when she situates her lyric distillation of typological motifs within the literary context of the sonnet tradition. Her interrogation of this tradition exemplifies what Thain describes as the ‘fashion for intricate, compact forms of verse’.16 In her discussion of fin-de-siècle poetry, Natalie M. Houston explores this fashion. She describes how ‘critics prescribed slow, reflective, reading and re-reading as the best approach to understanding the sonnet, and suggested that it could improve the reader’s intellect’.17 In Monna Innominata, by enacting the struggle to enter into biblical mediation and by calling for a reading and re-reading of each of the compact sonnets, Rossetti combines an attentiveness to the contours of the devotional imagination with a response to the surge of interest in the propensities of small and intricate verse forms. The prose preface of Monna Innominata has provided a subject for critical disagreement since its first publication. Subverting expected chronological patterning, Rossetti alerts the reader to the diachronic and typological nature of the traditions that her ‘semi-historical argument’ details (Letters 937: 5 September 1881). After responding to Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura and the ladies celebrated by the medieval Troubadours, Rossetti brings her argument into the present with an allusion to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She concludes with the suggestion that



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had the Great Poetess of our own day and nation only been unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to bequeath to us, in lieu of the ‘Portuguese Sonnets’, an inimitable ‘donna innominata’ drawn not from fancy but from feeling, and worthy to occupy a niche beside Beatrice and Laura. (CP, pp. 294–301)

Chapter 2 considered how ‘The Convent Threshold’ resonates with the twelfthcentury thwarted relationship that Alexander Pope treats in ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717). At the end of the poem, Pope has Eloisa anticipate that fate will provide ‘some future bard’ to tell her sad story (359). She imagines that faithful retellings will ‘soothe [her] pensive ghost’ and suggests that ‘He best can paint ’em, who shall feel ’em most’ (366).18 For Rossetti, Barrett Browning’s happiness in love precludes her from soothing the ‘pensive ghost[s]’ of the many ‘donna innominate’ who lived in the same era as Abelard and Heloise. Her own attentiveness to the inadequacies of romantic love inspires her to take on the task of giving voice to the crises of the representative donna who, in her own lifetime, was denied a voice. While Mary Arseneau and Alison Milbank helpfully explain the formative influence of Dante’s Divine Comedy on Monna Innominata, recent analysis by Michele Martinez and Mary Moore uncovers the influence on Rossetti of Petrarch’s sonnets.19 Recognising the comparatively ‘little attention [given] to the alternative context created by the Sonnets from the Portuguese’, Marjorie Stone illuminates the connections between Rossetti and Barrett Browning. In her discussion of Rossetti’s response to ‘the Great Poetess’, Stone reconciles William Whitla’s contention that Monna Innominata revises Dantean and Petrarchan sonnet conventions with Antony Harrison’s argument that it imitates these conventions in order to critique its own immediate historical context. She explains: Such apparently contradictory arguments are alike well grounded because Rossetti’s critique cuts both ways. She turned to the revisionary strategies of [Barrett Browning] to underline the limitations of the masculine sonneteers of the past; but she simultaneously turned to the past […] to reveal the inadequacies of spiritual vision in the increasingly secular world that surrounded her.20

I suggest that Rossetti’s perception of both the limitations of the ‘masculine sonneteers of the past’ and of the preoccupations of the ‘secular world’ emerge from her commitment to scriptural models of personhood. While feminist readings have brought Monna Innominata into focus as an important and influential Victorian sonnet sequence, the need remains for them to be synchronised

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with the insights that theological approaches can offer. Notwithstanding the readings that Dinah Roe and Cynthia Scheinberg offer, little attention has been given to the biblical types and motifs that recur through the sequence and none has been given to the sequence’s resonances with the long devotional traditions that reach back to Augustine in the West and Gregory of Nyssa in the East. Bridging the critical gap, I suggest that Rossetti’s concern with re-channelling of the romantic into the spiritual can be considered in terms of the apophatic tradition. In her discussion of this tradition, Sarah Coakley argues that, for medieval mystics, to ‘bring different desires in “alignment” in God’ necessitates the apophatic process of ‘purgation and transformation’.21 It is, I suggest, her commitment to exploring this process that enables Rossetti to root Monna Innominata in the history of devotional practice. Rossetti begins the preface by foregrounding her donna’s move away from a preoccupation with romantic love and by drawing a distinction between ‘charms’ and ‘attractiveness’. She suggests that Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura ‘have alike paid the exceptional penalty of exceptional honour, and have come down to us resplendent with charms, but (at least, to my apprehension) scant of attractiveness’. While charm characterizes romantic love, Rossetti implies that attractiveness is more of a spiritual disposition. Extending Natasha Distiller’s suggestion that Rossetti’s identification of the apparent lack of feminine attractiveness in Beatrice and Laura highlights the way in which the sonnet tradition denies the subject both voice and reciprocal desire, I indicate how she also suggests how the tradition complicates her donna’s journey towards integration in the Trinitarian community.22 Like the robin in ‘The Key-Note’ who, in making ‘one spot warm where snowflakes lie’ (14), represents grace in the bleak wintry landscape, Rossetti proposes that it is the embodied voice of the ‘donna innominata’ that renders her attractive and receptive to participation in the work of divine grace. That this voice operates in a different, and unknowable, sphere from the world of courtly love is reinforced throughout and connects the poem with the tradition of apophatic theology. In an 1863 entry for The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, Rossetti details her perception of the difference between ‘charm’ and ‘attractiveness’ when she recounts Petrarch’s descriptions, with their ‘untiring minuteness’, of Laura’s ‘bare hand, her dainty glove, her sweet speech and sweet laugh, her tears, her paleness, [and] her salutation’.23 Despite falling prey to the ‘fearful pestilence’ which ‘ravaged Europe’ in 1348, she explains that Laura was ‘ever regarded by [Petrarch] as invested with the pristine charm’ that first ‘captivated’ his heart.24 Countering the idealisation of the projected image, her preface to



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Monna Innominata anticipates how the sonnets offer what Susan Conley terms ‘an explicit rejection of the way in which woman is represented in the figure of the muse’.25 It is through the typological recapitulation of the speaking subject that Rossetti is able to maintain this rejection and recount the apophatic process of reaching out in faith for an understanding of God and the self. Revealing the incompatibility of ‘pristine charm’ with the subjective expression of desire, she highlights the dangers of neglecting the possibility of theosis. Rossetti’s concern with the insufficient representation of women in the poetry of the Troubadours was, in part, informed by Francis Hueffer’s book, The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages (1878). In a letter to William Michael, Rossetti asks whether he would ‘care to see this month’s Macmillan on account of a favorable article by Justin Mc. Carthy’ on the volume (Letters 777: 9 August 1878). In this article, Mc’Carthy stresses the timeliness of Hueffer’s contribution to scholarship. He writes that, as a ‘historical essay’, The Troubadours ‘fills up a blank long vacant in English literature’.26 As Rossetti recognises, it also reveals huge blanks that can only be dealt with through the means of imaginative identification. Jan Marsh connects the fact that Hueffer identifies ‘some fourteen gifted women’ – a ‘very modest figure seeing that the entire number of the troubadours is 400’ – with the fact that Rossetti’s sequence is comprised of fourteen sonnets.27 In a chapter on ‘Ladies and Lady Troubadours’, Hueffer comments on the scarcity of information regarding the ‘individual passions or caprices’ of these ‘Provencal ladies’.28 Considering Rossetti’s appreciation of Hueffer’s recognition of the lack that exists, Roe suggests how she replaces his ‘notion of individuality’ with ‘the euphemistic ‘attractiveness’.29 Rather than betraying feminine modesty, I argue that this move connects with her ongoing repudiation of individualism in favour of a commitment to the patristic model of personhood. In sonnet 8 of Monna Innominata, Esther’s charm is signalled by the ‘pomp of loveliness’ with which she adorns herself and her attractiveness is signalled through the ‘wisdom of her wit’ (10). The speaker recognises in her the value of a discipleship that is – after Christ’s instruction (Matt. 10.16) – ‘harmless as doves and subtle as a snake’ (8). Following the recognition of Esther as a pattern of Christian discipleship, she asks that, like her, she ‘might take my life so in my hand’ (8, 12). While Scheinberg’s suggestion that the phrase ‘If I might’ reveals ‘deep differences between Esther and the poem’s speaker’ and thereby offers the message that ‘this Christian woman can never really be like Esther at all’, my contention is that that the phrase calls on the typological imagination of the reader to reach out in faith and make the Old Testament narrative a lived reality.30

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The question ‘why not I?’ drives the second ‘sonnet of sonnets’ forward. Here the speaker repudiates her individualism by expressing the nature of sacrificial love and by adopting a posture of anticipation as she awaits the joys of heaven that, although they remain ‘out of view’ (sonnet 11.8), promise fulfilment. Distiller explores the revisionist strategies of female poet’s sonnet sequences by considering how they pose a challenge to the individualism of the Petrarchan subject: ‘one specific incarnation of the embattled, battling, humanist subject who is by definition also automatically gendered male within a discourse of domination’.31 She suggests that while Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti use their sequences to express a desire that was revolutionary, they simultaneously contain it ‘within a socially sanctioned form’.32 She then contends that, by ‘entering Petrarchism from within its constituting rules’, Rossetti ‘ensures that her poet’s desire will be safely honourable, that is, it is from the beginning a never-to-be-met need’.33 Rossetti’s use of epigraphs is particularly indicative of the challenge to the Petrarchan subject that Distiller suggests Monna Innominata makes. In addition to situating the donna within a ‘sanctioned form’, the epigraphs also gesture out from the sequence to a wider vision and to voices – such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s – that threaten to de-stabilise the individualist enterprise. The epigraphs that head sonnets 13 and 14 connect with the content and tone of the speaker’s lyrical expression, and scope out a wider trans-historical perspective. William Michael translates the first epigraph of sonnet 13: ‘And we will direct our eyes to the Primal Love’, and the first of sonnet 14: ‘And His will is our peace’ (CP, p. 957). While the first of these expressions is taken from the hymn that Dante has Bernard of Clairvaux utter at the end of the Divine Comedy when he replaces Beatrice as his guide, the second is from the speech of the sister of Dante’s wife, Piccarda. William Whitla explains that Piccarda’s expression of finding peace in God’s will conflates Ephesians 2.15 with ‘a phrase from Augustine’s Confessions (XII.9) […] “In thy good pleasure is our peace.”’34 The spiritual longing that both epigraphs enact intervenes in the process of the re-challenging of desire that Rossetti’s donna describes. That speakers other than the protagonist Dante utter them is indicative of Rossetti’s concern with multiform experience. By picking up on Dante’s appropriations of the words of St Paul, Bernard and Augustine, Rossetti draws attention to her critique of individualism. William Michael translates the second (Petrarchan) epigraph of sonnet 14 ‘Only with these thoughts, with different locks.’ Considering the sonnet itself, Moore suggests that, while Rossetti has her speaker express her Petrarchan-like



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renunciation as conclusive, ‘the echoes of sonnet 1 suggest a circulation, implying that sonnet 14 is the last of the lost poem that sonnet 1 sought; sonnet 1 therefore is the temporal successor of sonnet 14, creating a circular, almost corona-like structure’.35 With this in mind, the ongoing ‘thoughts’ that Petrarch speaks of can be understood as a threat to chronological linearity. In her article that reads the manifestation of the ecstatic mystical body through the theoretical lens of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray, Krista Lysack anticipates Moore’s discussion of the circular structure of the sequence when she suggests that sonnets 2 and 13 resonate with one another in their delineation of touch as ‘the space between parted lovers’.36 Sonnet 2 ends with the speaker struggling to recall the sensation of feeling the lover’s hand for the first time: ‘If only now I could recall that touch, | First touch of hand in hand’ (13–14). Sonnet 13 enacts her struggle to bring this romantic longing in alignment with her trust in the supremacy of ‘God’s hand’ (12). Calling on Psalm 139.18 and Job 28.25, the speaker responds to the call of the Dantean epigraph to ‘direct [her] eyes to the Primal Love’: Who numbereth the innumerable sand, Who weighs the wind and water with a weight, To whom the world is neither small nor great, Whose knowledge foreknew every plan we planned. (sonnet 13.5–8)

Rather than renouncing a desire for erotic touch, the devotional meditation that these lines enact calls for a re-channelling of eros into agape. Like sonnet 2, which uses the imagery of seasonal change (the thaw of snow and the budding of a tree), the organic imagery here testifies to Rossetti’s concern with situating the immutable self in the created world where she receives glimpses of the eternity through analogical means. In his review of A Pageant for The Athenæum, Theodore Watts-Dunton praises the sense of organic expression that Monna Innominata achieves. He describes the sequence as a group of sonnets which, although written in the regular form of octave and sestet, run as fluently and are as free from artificial constriction as though they consisted like Shakespeare’s sonnets, of a simple succession of three quatrains clenched by a couplet.37

In a sonnet that he contributed to the journal only a week later, he envisages the organic dynamics of the ideal Petrarchan sonnet in terms of ‘tidal music’. It concludes,

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A sonnet is a wave of melody: From heaving waters of the impassion’d soul A billow of the tidal music one and whole Flows in the ‘octave;’ then returning free, Its ebbing surges in the ‘sestet’ roll Back to the deeps of Life’s tumultuous sea. 38

Commenting on these lines, Houston considers Dunton’s perception that the rhyme scheme abba abba cddc cd is ‘modelled on the ebb and flow of a wave, because the sestet’s cddc rhyme in lines 9–12 echo the structure of the octave’.39 In sonnet 2 of Monna Innominata, the use of this wave-like rhyme scheme amplifies the speaker’s struggle to pin down a memory and recall that ‘first day, | First hour, first moment of your meeting me’ (1–2). She echoes this expression of regret in the opening lines of the sestet when she wonders at letting such ‘A day of days […] come and go’ (10). Rossetti uses sea and wave imagery through the larger ‘octave’ of the ‘sonnets of sonnets’ to express the overwhelming hold of romantic love. In sonnet 5, she has her donna describes her passion ‘as the Jordan at his flood sweeps either shore’ (13). Effectively baptising her lover, the donna positions herself as a ‘helpmeet’ who is not so much a partner as a partaker in her lover’s personhood (14). She returns to the image of the sweeping Jordan in sonnet 7 when she anticipates transcending the ‘dividing sea’ of the world (3). After a series of similar passion-driven expressions, the turn to silence in sonnet 14 is initially something of a surprise. William Whitla argues that it indicates ‘an expression of a much darker heart where art fades into silence’ and Sharon Smulders proposes that it signals Rossetti’s failure to recuperate the masculine form of the sonnet sequence. 40 Taking a different approach, I propose interpreting the ‘silence’ in terms of the ‘death’ of the self that immersion in the Jordan, the initial site of baptism and of the revelation of God’s overpowering love calls for (Rom. 6.4). As Simone Weil explains in her discussion of forms of love, a revelatory encounter with God causes the senses to recognise that silence is not the absence of sounds, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce […] There is silence in the beauty of the universe which is like a noise when compared to the silence of God.41

In overcoming the Dantean and Petrarchan legacy that prioritises ‘charm’ over ‘attractiveness’, Rossetti anticipates Weil’s delineation of silence as she moves her donna beyond the realm of sense perception and individualism. In doing



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so, she expresses the launch into the unknown that accompanies the search for a transcendental reality. Following the epigraphs that indicate a re-challenging of desire from the romantic to the transcendental, sonnet 14 gives voice to the pain of finding oneself in the wintry space of numbness and eschatological anticipation. As Rossetti’s poems repeatedly suggest, it is only by passing through this space that the individual is able to grasp something of God’s revelation of himself. Youth gone, and beauty gone if ever there Dwelt beauty in so poor a face as this; Youth gone and beauty, what remains of bliss? I will not bind fresh roses in my hair, To shame a cheek at best but little fair,– “Leave youth his roses, who can bear a thorn,– I will not seek for blossoms anywhere, Except such common flowers as blow with corn. Youth gone and beauty gone, what doth remain? The longing of a heart pent up forlorn,   A silent heart whose silence loves and longs:   The silence of a heart which sang its songs While youth and beauty made a summer morn, Silence of love that cannot sing again.

Having been stripped of her ‘charm’, the speaker considers all that ‘doth remain’ (9). The only thing she is able to identify as her own is her aching heart. The association of her pent-up longing with the loss of the romantic songs that are described in sonnet 1 indicates that, rather than representing an annihilation of selfhood, sonnet 14 scopes out a new wintry space for self-articulation. Extending the circularity of the sequence, the interactive gestures of the volume as a whole can be understood to resist linearity. It is in the context of the network of connections and dialogisms that the silence of Monna Innominata can best be appreciated. Anticipating the donna’s question ‘where are the songs I sang | When life was sweet […]?’ (sonnet 1.13–14), the speaker of the earlier poem, ‘A Key-Note’, wonders ‘Where are the songs I used to know’? (1). As I indicated above, it is not until the unexpected presence of a robin that the speaker of ‘A Key-Note’ can envisage the possibility of life in the bleak wintry landscape. Throughout the poems that close A Pageant, Rossetti extends this encounter with life as she considers how God manifests his grace when the beauty of the environment and the self are obliterated. The final poem, “Love Is Strong as Death”, envisages

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how ‘the Everlasting Arms’ come down to embrace the prodigal wanderer who, surrounded by the ‘cold billows of death’, is unable to look up to heaven (10, 3). Reading Monna Innominata alongside ‘A Key-Note’ and in the context of the Incarnation-inflected vision of this later poem means refusing to perceive its turn to silence as entirely destructive. Although youth and beauty might be gone, Rossetti’s theocratic insistence that nothing that is of ultimate value will be lost remains.

The journey of the prodigal son: Repentance and return In the middle portion of A Pageant, Rossetti signals a turn to the explicitly devotional poems that close the volume with two lyrics that enact the experience of the prodigal son. The first, “I Will Arise”, reflects on what it means to echo the words of the prodigal: ‘I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee’ (Lk. 15.18). The second, ‘A Prodigal Son’, details the spiritual and psychological progression that the prodigal undergoes as he strives to overcome his fallen state. The two prodigal lyrics are bracketed in the volume by poems explicitly concerned with female experience. In ‘Passing and Glassing’, the speaker adapts the weariness of the speaker of Ecclesiastes to her own situation and echoes the renunciation voiced in sonnet 14 of Monna Innominata through her lament that ‘all things that pass | Are as woman’s looking-glass’ (CP, p. 325: 1–2). Following ‘A Prodigal Son’, ‘Soeur Louise de La Misericorde (1674)’ adopts the voice of a royal mistress turned Carmelite nun in order to express the disappointment that accompanies her misplaced ‘spent desire’ (CP, p. 327: 8–13). Reverberating out from this web of intratextuality, the other poems that constitute A Pageant establish the permeation of forgiveness across all experience in their insistence on applying biblical subjects and motifs to the self. In the Confessions, the parable of the prodigal son provides the underlying structure for Augustine’s account of his journey out of spiritual exile. From the start, Augustine comments that it is his own ‘darkened affections’, rather than any spatial distance, that keeps him apart from God.42 He frames the parable in psychological terms when he reads the landscape that is described in the gospel in terms of his own spiritual state: ‘I sank away from Thee, and I wandered, O my God, too much astray from Thee my stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a barren land’ (Confessions, II.x.18, p. 28). A vision of how desperate his circumstances have become is later revealed to him through the bestowal of divine light. The beams of this light incite



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his declaration, ‘I perceived myself to be far off from Thee, in the region of unlikeness’ (Confessions, VII.x.16, p. 121). What Rossetti’s poems reveal is that the deeper structure of the Confessions – based on the prodigal’s return – can be particularly helpful in constructing models of female relational identity. Just as Augustine imagines the ‘region of unlikeness’ in terms of his spiritual distance from God, so too do Rossetti’s female speakers find in themselves the barren landscape of the parable. For instance, her ‘Soeur Louise de La Misericorde’ laments that misplaced desire has turned her ‘garden plot to barren mire’ (18). For many feminist scholars, the conversion trajectory that Augustine describes is completely alien to female self-conception. Mary Mason suggests that the ‘dramatic structure’ of the Confessions, ‘where the self is presented as the stage for a battle of opposing forces […] does not accord to the deepest realities of women’s experience’.43 As I indicate in Chapter 1, Rossetti’s ongoing engagement with the spiritual drama of that Augustine describes indicates a patristic-inflected perception of a God-ordained personhood that is distinct from the gender-bound individualist self. While Mason’s suggestion that Augustine’s narrative of conversion ‘does not accord’ with women’s experience is helpful in drawing attention to the persistent silencing of the female voice that has continued through history, it is important not to lose sight of Rossetti’s engagement with the long female tradition that reads the Confessions as equally applicable to female experience as to male. This tradition can be traced through St Teresa of Avila’s engagement with Augustine’s spiritual experience. In charting the long pilgrimage from prodigality to holiness, The Life of Teresa by Herself (1565) follows the pattern of the Confessions. Teresa records that it was upon reading Augustine’s account of his conversion that that she came to an understanding of her own self.44 Writing at a time that saw a revival of interest in medievalism, it is likely that Rossetti found in Teresa a precedent for her appropriation of the prodigal trajectory of the Confessions. John Mason Neale’s attestation of a widespread familiarity with St Teresa’s Life in his Annals of Virgin Saints (1846), Orby Shipley’s inclusion of Edward Caswall’s translation of ‘The Canticle of S. Teresa’ in Lyra Eucharistica (1863), and Richard Frederick Littledale’s reference to the ‘strenuous efforts’ that Teresa made in her reforms of the religious life in his Commentary on the Song of Songs (1869), point to a Tractarian willingness to engage with the writings of the medieval saint.45 With this in mind, I suggest that, for Rossetti, Teresa’s appropriation of Augustine’s intensely personal interpretation of the prodigal’s homebound journey has particular resonance. Like Teresa, Rossetti adds to Augustine’s midrashic contemplations in her call for all Christians, regardless of gender, to adopt the

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traditionally female trait of compliance and to perceive the ontological chasm between creation and creator that only grace can bridge. Addressing God, the first verse of “I Will Arise” indicates the depth of this ontological chasm: Weary and weak, – accept my weariness; Weary and weak and downcast in my soul, With hope growing less and less, And with the goal Distant and dim, – accept my sore distress. I thought to reach the goal so long ago, At outset of the race I dreamed of rest, Not knowing what now I know Of breathless haste, Of long-drawn straining effort across the waste. (CP, p. 326: 1–10)

Although the poem is entitled with the words of the prodigal son, no genderspecific pronouns are included. While I will refer to the speaker as male for reasons of consistency with the parable, the indeterminacy in the poem indicates Rossetti’s emphasis on the soul’s adopting what she perceives to be the traditionally male characteristics of action and reason alongside the traditionally female characteristics of emotionality and affective love. The dactyls that open the first two lines establish the slow halting pace that the dashes and the repetition amplify. Added to this, the mixing of dimeter, tetrameter and pentameter lines accentuates a sense of the twisting and steep upward path that is described. The speaker’s recollection that the struggle he is encountering was unexpected when he first set out on the ‘race’ indicates that his voice is one of experience and maturity (7). The comparisons he draws between his previous expectations and his present position anticipate the sestet to sonnet 12 of Later Life, where the speaker describes how her priorities have altered over time. While the speaker of this sonnet sequence ‘deemed that sweets are sweet’ (9) when she was younger, experience means that she now ‘deem[s] some searching bitters are | Sweeter than sweets’ (10–11). Stressing that these ‘searching bitters’ are to be ‘pursued on eager feet’ (13), she highlights the value of attaining an acute awareness of our emptiness that is akin to the prodigal’s realisation of his emptiness that made him come ‘to himself ’. Reflecting this recognition on to the opening verse of “I Will Arise” means appreciating how the speaker’s painful awareness of his poverty of spirit and his ontological



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difference from all that is holy spurs him on to make the ‘long-drawn straining effort across the waste’ (10). In the second verse of “I Will Arise”, divine grace mitigates the speaker’s ‘sore distress’ and replaces his ‘breathless haste’ with the ‘breath’ that enables perseverance (5, 10, 20). One thing I knew, Thy love of me; One only thing I know, Thy sacred same Love of me full and free, A craving flame Of selfless love of me which burns in Thee. How can I think of Thee, and yet grow chill; Of Thee, and yet grow cold and nigh to death? Re-energize my will, Rebuild my faith; I will arise and run, Thou giving me breath. (11–20)

The central question here, ‘How can I think of Thee, and yet grow chill […]?’ (16), recalls the spiritual alienation of the speaker of ‘Good Friday’, who laments an inability to ‘weep’ beneath the cross (CP, pp. 180–1: 4). Added to this, the image of the ‘craving flame’ (14), which has the power to reignite the pilgrim’s ‘will’ and ‘faith’ (18, 19), gestures back to the prefatory sonnet of A Pageant, where Rossetti acknowledges the transcendence of her mother’s ‘flame | Of love’ (‘Sonnets are full of love’, 12–13). The imagery also recalls both Proverbs 20.27, which speaks of the ‘candle of the Lord’, and the fire and light imagery that characterises the representation of holy aspiration in Augustine’s Confessions. Just as beams of divine light jolt Augustine into an awareness of his ontological ‘unlikeness’ (Confessions, VII.x.16, p. 121), a glimpse of the ‘craving flame | Of selfless love’ (14–15) causes Rossetti’s prodigal to acknowledge his desperate need for forgiveness. I will arise, repenting and in pain; I will arise, and smite upon my breast And turn to Thee again; Thou chooset best, Lead me along the road Thou makest plain. Lead me a little way, and carry me A little way, and hearken to my sighs And store my tears with Thee,

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The repetition of the phrase ‘I will arise’ (20, 21, 22, 30) rehearses the scene in the parable where the prodigal reaches a startling self-realisation. Added to this, the prayer, that God might ‘store my tears’ (28), echoes the Psalmist’s prayer that he would ‘put my tears into thy bottle’ (56.8). By weaving together an allusion to the gospel with an allusion to the Psalter, Rossetti stresses the personal character of God’s love and reinforces how the unity and structure of the Christian Bible speaks of his unfailing faithfulness.46 Coming at the end of the end of the poem, the reference to the Psalm is embedded among a series of verbs that denote God’s activity; as well as storing tears, it is God who chooses, leads, carries and replies. In response to this activity, Rossetti implies that it is the role of the penitent to wait for and receive the grace that is bestowed. Jeffrey’s description of the broken-hearted reader of Scripture is helpful here in illuminating the kind of approach to the parable that Rossetti’s poems foster as they invite the penitent reader to enter imaginatively into the scene described and to feel the intense pain of the prodigal’s alienation as he awaits God’s redemptive activity. Beginning with the image of a lamp burning, ‘A Prodigal Son’ develops the symbolism of the ‘craving flame’ of God’s saving and personal activity. By mapping out the psychological progress of the prodigal as he comes to the decision to return to his father’s house, the poem invites further meditation on the biblical passage. Unlike ‘Resurgam’ and “I Will Arise”, the pain of the journey out of exile is not described. Instead, what is imagined is the gap between present and past experience. For the prodigal Rossetti describes here, it is a dream that enables a re-assessment of circumstances. Hungry here with the crunching swine, Hungry harvest here I to reap; In a dream I count my Father’s kine, I hear the tinkling bells of his sheep, I watch his lambs that browse and leap. There is plenty of bread at home, His servants have bread enough and to spare; The purple wine-fat froths with foam, Oil and spices make sweet the air, While I perish hungry and bare. (CP, pp. 326–7: 6–15)



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While the prodigal’s present situation is described tersely in terms of lack, his dream is one of tactile and sensory encounter: he hears bells (9), watches lambs (10), tastes the wine-fat (13), and smells oil and spices (14). While the repetition of ‘hungry’ in the opening lines of the second stanza indicates his desperation, the repetition of ‘bread’ in the opening lines of the third invites the comparative vision of future fulfilment. The prodigal’s dream vision of his father’s sheep resonates with Rossetti’s ongoing suggestion that journeying home well means finding one’s identity among the Good Shepherd’s trusting flock. This sheep motif continues through to ‘An Old-World Thicket’ where the speaker is able to appreciate nature’s response to the incarnation when she hears ‘a pattering fall | Of feet, a bell and bleatings’ (CP, pp. 331–6: 144–5), sonnet 1 of Later Life which imagines all ‘flock[ing] home to [God] by divers way’ (1.10), and “Behold a Shaking” where Heaven is envisioned as the place where God brings ‘His sheep home to the pen’ (CP, pp. 364–5: 1.14). Combined, these references all reinforce the message that, outside the solidarity and movement of the flock, individuals live without direction and at the mercy of the dissolving and barren world. In the third verse of ‘A Prodigal Son’, the pastoral landscape is associated with the ecclesiastical, and the imagery of bread, wine, oil and spices recall the space of the Tractarian church. Alluding to the central placing of the communion altar and the use of oils and incense, Rossetti celebrates the church’s inclusivity. The insistence that there is ‘bread enough to spare’ reinforces the message that Christ’s invitation of salvation is open to all (12). Recalling George Herbert’s vision of prayer as the entry into ‘the land of spices’, her ongoing contention is that, through participating in the liturgy and communion, the penitent approaches the threshold of Heaven.47 A poem that she had contributed to Lyra Eucharistica (1863) reflects this in its description of the communicant as ‘Thy home-sick prodigal’ responding to Christ’s Passion.48 In an important sermon of 1845, Isaac Williams considers how integrating the prodigal’s words ‘I will arise’ into daily liturgical prayer, as recommended in the Prayer Book, ‘implies growth and progress in grace’.49 After stressing the need to ‘deal very severely with ourselves’, he contends that ‘there is nothing so rare as a living repentance, extending to all the heart and conduct’ and emphasises the pain involved in repudiating ‘all unrealities and shadows’.50 In a sermon written for the same occasion – the consecration of St Saviour Church in Leeds – William Dodsworth offers a similar interrogation of the preference for the shadows of the world over the path of true penitence. He argues that the death of Christ should be ‘a present reality to each of us and

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in each of us’ and should kindle repentant spirits.51 By integrating the words and symbols of the liturgy and the call to spiritual ‘reality’ into ‘A Prodigal Son’, Rossetti maintains this Tractarian call for an emotional response to the biblical paradigm. The huge chasm between the servants in the Father’s house and the isolated self is apparent throughout ‘A Prodigal Son’. It is their plenty contrasted to the prodigal’s poverty that provides the poem with its drama: ‘Rich and blessed those servants, rather | Than I who see not my Father’s face!’ (16–17). In her earlier devotional poems, Rossetti repeatedly speaks of the startling contrast between situation and possibility. ‘Why should we shrink from our full harvest? why | Prefer to glean with Ruth?’ she asks in ‘Sweet Death’ (CP, pp. 68–9: 23–4), a poem that was first published in The Germ (1850) before being incorporated into Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). It is this same question that is asked of the prodigal in ‘A Prodigal Son’: why choose to reap the ‘hungry harvest’ when the possibility of entering a house of plenty remains open? (7). At the heart of this question is a call to the reader to repent of her preference for the ‘unrealities and shadows’ of the easy, shrinking path. While the comparison between his father’s servants and himself leads Rossetti’s prodigal to the jolting realisation that he is ‘beggared of grace’ (19), the message that resonates is that the painful process of repentance leads to renewal. In a chapter on Jewish and early Christian interpretations of Psalm 130.4 (‘For there is mercy with thee; therefore shalt thou be feared’), Coakley locates the embodied practice of repentance in what she terms ‘costly chronology of forgiveness’.52 Insisting that a ‘vibrant sense of the fearfulness of (divine) forgiveness’ needs to be recaptured, she calls for a renewed focus on the central themes that the early theologians identify. These include: the maintenance of awe at the uniqueness of the divine prerogative to forgive; the patient waiting on the chronology of that process; the embodied practices of repentance, purgation and self knowledge; and finally the participation in the flow of compassion which can strictly only come from God.53

All four of these themes run through A Pageant and stand at the core of Rossetti’s poem ‘An Old-World Thicket’. In this, she extends the insights of the prodigal poems through a delineation of the chronology of forgiveness and a reflection on the work of grace in the life of the individual. In an important essay that investigates Rossetti’s response to the Romantic glorification of the natural world, Catherine Musello Cantalupo comments



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on how ‘An Old-World Thicket’ subscribes to the Christian idea of nature as sacrament. Distinguishing this idea from pantheism, she explains: ‘Sacramental nature is, in Christian theology, subject to the action of “grace,” which is the selfcommunication of a transcendent God which allows the mind to recognise and share in the divine presence.’54 Introducing her analysis, Cantalupo suggests that throughout ‘An Old-World Thicket’ the speaker’s tortured sense of self comes from the Dantean-inflected conflict between Romantic and religious values.55 She argues that ‘the “evil” implied […] is not the inability to rejoice with nature, as Wordsworth has it, but to rejoice mistakenly by construing nature as heaven rather than as one sign of heaven’.56 Through the course of the poem, Rossetti’s speaker comes to recognise that grace can only be mediated through God’s redemptive power; fleeting beauty serves as a reminder of the ultimate alienation of humanity in this world. From the start of ‘An Old-World Thicket’ the speaker finds herself overwhelmed by and alienated from the beauty of the natural world. Her words chime with those of Rossetti’s prodigals in their expression of weariness and desperate hunger: But I who saw such things as I have said, Was overdone with utter weariness; And walked in care, as one whom fears oppress   Because above his head Death hangs, or damage, or the dearth of bread. (CP, pp. 331–6: 36–40)

The threat of death becomes increasingly accentuated as the speaker continues on her journey and is ‘stripped […] empty and bare’ by a sense of sin (50). When she finally sinks into despair, she witnesses the natural world ‘Moaning and groaning wrung by pain or fear’ (75). Like the speaker of Ecclesiastes, she responds to the pain and fear that grips the world by registering her own insubstantial individuality. Lamenting ‘outer and inner darkness’ (97), she comments on her apparently unceasing affliction: I, trembling, cling to dying life; for how Face the perpetual Now? Birthless and deathless void of start or stop, Void of repentance, void of hope and fear, Of possibility, alternative, Of all that ever made us bear to live   From night to morning here,

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Of even which has no gift to give. (123–30)

Arguing that the passive reception of Rossetti’s speaker provides a ‘definition of the action of the divine grace’, Cantalupo comments: ‘Stanzas 21 to 28 are reminiscent of the spiritus veriginis of St. John of the Cross’.57 Rossetti’s depiction of the darkened soul, ‘void of repentance, void of hope and fear’ (126), also recalls St Teresa’s representation of the reception of God’s mercy and anticipates what Weil, after these medieval Spanish mystics, envisages as the type of ‘real affliction’, that involves a complete ‘uprooting of life’ (SW, p. 68). In his description of the ‘ten steps of the mystic ladder of Divine Love, according to Saint Bernard and Saint Thomas’, St John of the Cross considers the initial stage of ‘contemplative purgation’ in which the individual ‘can find no pleasure, support, consolation or abiding place in anything soever [sic]’.58 His description corresponds with the state of the soul in the sixth mansion of St Teresa’s Interior Castle (1580). Here, Teresa writes of the intolerable oppression that it is felt by the individual who is on the threshold of receiving God’s grace in the final mansion: ‘I know not to what it can be compared, except to the torments of hell, because in this tempest no comfort finds admittance.’59 She stresses that the only hope for such oppression lies in God’s mercy, ‘which by one word of His, or by some circumstance which seems casual, dispels everything so suddenly, that such a soul appears as if she had never been overcast, for she is now filled with light, and with much greater consolation’.60 Rossetti has her speaker experience the sudden infusion of divine consolation that Weil describes through hearing ‘something not music, yet most musical’ (142). The intense darkness of her oppression is dispelled as the ‘pattering’ of journeying sheep breaks ‘through all’ (144, 145). Then I looked up. The wood lay in a glow From golden sunset and from ruddy sky; The sun had stooped to earth though once so high;   Had stooped to earth, in slow Warm dying loveliness brought near and low. (146–50)

The image of the sun stooping down to the earth is clearly analogous to the Incarnation, and its ‘dying loveliness’ to the crucifixion. That the earth is the passive recipient of the sun’s warmth and light indicates its complete dependence. It is because the speaker, like the earth, had been completely deprived of life that



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she is able to encounter grace in the space of passivity and dependence that Weil describes as the ‘intersection of creation and its Creator’ (SW, p. 81). Exploring the mystical encounter with grace in the space of intersection, Weil considers how the experience of spiritual affliction offers a taste of the ultimate kenosis of the Passion: ‘Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion’ (SW, p. 72). Weil suggests that unless the soul experiences this ‘infinite distance’ for itself it cannot encounter divine grace in a profound way. Through her writings, she envisages the complete ‘restraint and renunciation’ of God as he takes the place of the prodigal son in the far country (SW, p. 89). She explains, he ‘denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him’ (ibid.). Terming this act of complete renunciation ‘creative attention’, she envisages it as the point upon which the divine and human converge (SW, p. 91). As the paragraphs that follow reveal, Weil’s theology of creative attention provides a helpful lens through which to interpret the celebration of solidarity with which ‘An Old-World Thicket’ concludes. At the end of the poem, Rossetti critiques what she perceives to be the prodigal wandering of Romantic individualism. A patriarchal ram with tinkling bell Led all his kin; sometimes one browsing sheep Hung back a moment, or one lamb would leap   And frolic in a dell; Yet still they kept together, journeying well, And bleating, one or other, many or few, Journeying together toward the sunlit west; Mild face by face, and woolly breast by breast,   Patient, sun-brightened too, Still journeying toward the sunset and their rest. (171–80)

Significantly, it is the sound of his Father’s sheep and the sight of ‘his lambs that browse and leap’ that jolt the speaker of ‘A Prodigal Son’ into a realisation of his own isolation (10). When this poem is read alongside ‘An Old-World Thicket’, the vision of the prodigal’s homecoming is embedded in the perception of the community where the immutable individual participates in a harmony that reaches far beyond her self-interests. What Coakley delineates as the fourth stage in the chronology of forgiveness, ‘participation in the

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flow of compassion’, is manifest in Rossetti’s vision of the sheep ‘journeying well’ together (175). As the final part of this chapter argues, the integration of the individual in the Trinitarian community is, for her, what characterises God-given personhood.

Exploring penitence and forgiveness in Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets Operating as a kind of extended volta in the devotional series, Later Life can be read in terms of the prodigal reaching the final stretch of her journey and struggling to catch a glimpse of the plenitude of mercy that lies ahead. The title is indicative of this in its allusion to the process of ageing. Throughout, the speaker indicates how her priorities have altered over time; just as the prodigal’s realisation of his emptiness makes him come ‘to himself ’, the sequence offers the message that an awareness of the urgent need for transformative forgiveness enables an anticipation of becoming ‘His praise thro’ endless days’ (sonnet 1.14). The need for an awareness of what lies beyond the visible is delineated through the sequence in terms of ‘seeing eyes’ (sonnet 10.2) and is reflected in the subtitle, A Double Sonnet of Sonnets. The subtitle also invites a reading of the sequence as an opening out of the traditional double sonnet whereby the first fourteen sonnets represent each line of the first part and the next fourteen represent each line in the second. Considering the nature of this structure, Mary E. Finn suggests that, like the fourteen sonnets of Monna Innominata, the twenty-eight sonnets of Later Life are not actually regular sonnets but rather ‘poetic explorations of the sonnet’.61 Continuing to draw attention to the sequence’s form and its narrative threads, Constance W. Hassett recognises that it is ‘organised as an anthology of sonnets’ and takes its loose structure from Petrarch’s Cazoniere.62 Considering how the narrative threads that Hassett distinguishes create space for dialogism between the speaker, the Biblical narrative, the community of worshippers and the individual reader, I suggest that the dynamics of the sequence can best be appreciated through the lens of both Weil’s comments on affliction and Karl Barth’s theological methodology. Describing his Epistle to the Romans as ‘fragments of a conversation between theologians’ Barth indicates the basis on which it is best understood.63 Writing Later Life when Barth was only two years old, Rossetti’s insistent invocation of dialogue as she alternates between



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singular and plural speakers and different registers anticipates his methodology. Moreover, her speaker’s intense anxiety that she ‘May miss the goal at last, may miss a crown’ (sonnet 27.14) enters the long devotional conversion with Calvin’s theology and looks forward to Barth’s insistence on cultivating a fearfulness that recognises the inspired nature of Scripture and avoids ‘the language of victory’.64 The opening sonnet of Later Life uses the familiar words of the Psalmist to usher the reader towards an existential space of apprehension. Gradually attuning the senses to this space, it offers a declaration of God’s eternal presence: Before the mountains were brought forth, before Earth and the world were made, then God was God: And God will still be God, when flames shall roar Round earth and heaven dissolving at His nod: And this God is our God, even while His rod Of righteous wrath falls on us smiting sore: And this God is our God for evermore Thro’ life, thro’ death, while clod returns to clod. For tho’ He slay us we will trust in Him; We will flock home to Him by divers ways: Yea, tho’ He slay us we will vaunt His praise Serving and loving with the Cherubim, Watching and loving with the Seraphim, Our very selves His praise thro’ endless days.

Rooted in the opening of Psalm 90, the collective voice here opens up a renewed understanding of personhood in the light of God’s sovereignty and omniscience. Throughout, the eschatological expectation and firm ‘trust’ of the faith community take precedence over individual doubt (9). The insistent focus on solidarity is rooted in the psalmist’s articulation of the cry of the exiled community as they respond to God’s continuing faithful love and protection: ‘Lord, Thou hast been our refuge, from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, thou art God from everlasting, and world without end’ (Ps. 90.1–2). In order to stress the instability of language in the face of an existential encounter with God, Rossetti translates the parallelism of the Psalms into insistent repetition. The repeated line ‘And this God is our God’ (5, 7) invokes the radical breaking in of the gospel through the incarnation and highlights the personal relationship that is made possible between God and the faith community.

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In the final line of the sonnet, Rossetti enacts the process whereby the terms of possession are reversed; rather than claim God as ‘our God’, the community has God claim them as his people. Their dedication of ‘Our very selves [as] His praise thro’ endless days’ express entry into a new existence among the redeemed flock (14). By tracing the movement from anticipation to realisation, the sestet revises the gospel’s radical promise of grace. As the ‘fact of forgiveness’, Barth describes grace as an instrument that cuts through present circumstances to bring new life: ‘Grace digs up sin by its roots, for it questions the validity of our present existence and status. It takes away our breath, ignores us as we are, and treats us as what we are not – as new men.’65 Reading sonnet 1 in the context of this description means recognising the movement it expresses towards a new existence. The acceptance of the painful ‘rod | Of righteous wrath’ (5–6) indicates a willingness to submit to God’s work of digging up sin and reveals the pain involved in taking the path of penitence and purgation. Directly after establishing a renewed understanding of the forgiven community among the Cherubim and Seraphim, Rossetti changes the poetic register from doxological meditation on God’s original design for humanity to prophetic warning. The disorientating shock with which she opens sonnet 2 highlights the pain of digging up and breaking down sin. The plea ‘Rend hearts and rend not garments for our sins | Gird sackcloth not on body but on soul’ underlines the urgency of Joel’s words with which he presses his hearers to turn from their sin and selfishness (1). However, by altering his command ‘rend your heart, and not your garments’ (Joel 2.13, italics added), Rossetti has her lyrical community express their participation in the guilt of the accused. Self-realisation causes them to invoke God’s relational activity and to recognise that the only appropriate response available is to renounce the worldly preoccupation with individuality and to pray contrition for ‘our sins’ (1). Through the first five sonnets, Rossetti continues to foreground the urgent need for the invention of grace and to draw on the psalmist’s description of holy thirst to encourage readers to re-orientate their desires and overcome selfish and worldly concerns. While the octave of sonnet 6 highlights the futility of looking back at the lost hopes ‘for which we steered on life’s salt stormy sea’ (7), the sestet advises ‘straining dim eyes’ (14) toward eternity: If thus to look behind is all in vain, And all in vain to look to left or right, Why face we not our future once again, Launching with hardier hearts across the main,



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Straining dim eyes to catch the invisible sight And strong to bear ourselves in patient pain?

Envisioning the process of waiting on God in terms of the launch of the heart to the ‘invisible’ plane of eternity (13), these lines stress the importance of stripping away the trappings of illusive worldliness. Recalling how Christian in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress loses his ‘heavy burden’ at the sight of the cross, the speaker encourages readers to strain their eyes toward the sight that will loosen ‘the sunstroke and the frozen pack’ (8).66 The insistent focus on active waiting extends the expression of thirst in the psalm to convey the sense of a Calvinist-like wrestling with the theology of predestination: seekers must strain wholeheartedly after salvation but cannot achieve it by their own strength. In her analysis of the technologies of vision invoked in sonnet 6, Armstrong identifies Rossetti’s concern with the ‘intellectual and mental aspect of fixing’.67 She suggests that the ‘“off ” patternings’ throughout are ‘symptomatic of the failure to “fix upon” the lack, to settle upon what lack itself is and to define its content’.68 Considering the theological implications of this observation, I suggest that the sonnet’s linguistic instability is indicative of an active waiting on God’s mercy at the threshold of known experience and expression. The speaker reveals that when we look beyond language structures and strain ‘dim eyes to catch the invisible sight’ God meets us (13). As the sequence progresses, Rossetti reveals that true penitence is founded on existential apprehension of an encounter with God. She contends that it is only when we recognise our sins, feel appropriate shame and repent that we are able to adopt the appropriate posture of encountering divine forgiveness. She describes the chronology of this process in sonnet 13: Shame is a shadow cast by sin: yet shame Itself may be a glory and a grace, Refashioning the sin-disfashioned face; A nobler bruit than hollow-sounded fame, A new-lit lustre on a tarnished name, One virtue pent within an evil place, Strength for the fight, and swiftness for the race, A stinging salve, a life-requickening flame. A salve so searching we may scarcely live, A flame so fierce it seems that we must die,   An actual cautery thrust into the heart:   Nevertheless, men die not of such smart;

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And shame gives back what nothing else can give, Man to himself, – then sets him up on high.

Enacting the process of purgation and re-orientation whereby the faith community come to a consciousness of their collective and individual sin, this sonnet draws on a verse from the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus that identifies the dual nature of shame: ‘For there is a shame that bringeth sin; and there is a shame which is glory and grace’ (4.21). Rossetti insists that while shame may remain a ‘shadow’ blocking spiritual vision, it can also work positively to restore ‘the sin-disfashioned face’ and revive the individual’s relationship with God (1, 3). Recalling Psalm 51 and revealing the shock that occurs when God brings the wickedness of humanity to light, her descriptions of shame as a ‘stinging salve’, ‘a life requickening flame’ and as ‘an actual cautery thrust into the heart’ stress its restorative properties (8, 11). Moving beyond the shock of encountering God’s transformative forgiveness, the remainder of Later Life considers how God’s forgiveness can be embraced and extended and how the ‘seeing eyes’ of faith (sonnet 10.2) can be restored. Looking back to Adam and Eve to investigate the origin of shame, the octave of sonnet 14 reveals how the mutual recognition of sin results in an attitude of penitence that glimpses the possibility of extending the forgiveness that comes from God: When Adam and when Eve left Paradise Did they love on and cling together still, Forgiving one another all that ill The twain had wrought on such a different wise? She propped upon his strength, and he in guise Of lover tho’ of lord, girt to fulfil Their term of life and die when God should will; Lie down and sleep, and having slept arise.

Affirming the interdependence of Adam and Eve, while concurrently recognising their ‘different’ fallibilities (4), these lines point to the possibility of reciprocal love that only forgiveness can bring. The ‘searching bitters’ (sonnet 12.10) that the speaker has come to value are translated here into the shame that sets the first human couple back ‘on high’ and enables them to look forward to the time when they can ‘arise’ (sonnet 14.8). The vision of their reciprocal love gestures back to Monna Innominata with a critique of the donna’s initial Jordan-like passion. It is by accepting their comparative weakness and by



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baptism in God’s strength that the Adam and Eve of Later Life are able to support one another. Sonnet 15 garners the lessons of shame and forgiveness that can be learnt from the love shared between Adam and Eve. In response to the lament voiced in the octave that the first man ‘fired a train by which the world must burn’ (8), the sestet emphasises how mutual forgiveness is predicated on God’s love: Did Adam love his Eve from first to last? I think so; as we love who works us ill, And wounds us to the quick, yet loves us still. Love pardons the unpardonable past: Love in a dominant embrace holds fast His frailer self, and saves without her will.

While the sonnet opens with a reminder of Paul’s teaching that since women live in the shadow of original sin they should ‘fear to teach and bear to learn’ (1 Tim 2.11–12), these closing lines invite a renewed conception of the self as a beloved partner whose redemption depends on grace, not the ‘will’ of the individual (14). Associating the reader first with Adam and then with Eve, Rossetti stresses the reciprocity of the forgiveness process whereby the faith community are lifted into a relationship with God ‘who is Love’ (1 Jn 4.8), and who therefore pardons ‘the unpardonable past’ (12). She implies that all should, regardless of gender, imitate Adam and Eve by accepting God’s forgiveness and extending it to one another. In conveying the insistency of what the psalmist describes as God’s ‘plenteous redemption’ (Ps. 130.7), the unsettling rhythm of the opening dactyl in line 12 alerts the reader to the radical breaking-in of the ‘last Adam’ (1 Cor. 15.45). In anapaestic metre, the subsequent plosive stresses continue to convey the shock-recognition of the supernatural forgiveness that comes from Christ’s sacrificial love and involves the whole of humanity. The shift between ‘I’ and ‘we’ in line 10 of the sonnet is representative of the dynamics of the sequence as a whole. In an article that considers the lyrical ‘we’ of Later Life, Julie Melynk suggests how, by writing her lyrics in the form of prayers, Rossetti is able to ‘present not self-in-isolation but self-in-relation, albeit a vertical rather than horizontal relation’.69 Considering how the voices of the sequence alternate between ‘the plaintive soloist “I” and the choral “we”’, she argues that both the ‘fear of absorption and fear of individualism make themselves felt’.70 In sonnet 15, the emergence of the ‘I’ is fleeting and its question is answered swiftly by its consolidation within the faith community; resolving the fear of individualism that is felt through the collective song of

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praise, Rossetti models her commitment to Trinitarian personhood. Just as the Trinity’s status of three-in-one confuses attempts at logical deduction, so, too, Rossetti suggests in sonnet 16, does humanity’s. Modelled after the Trinity, she implies that when men reflect the Godhead, they bring themselves into an alternative mathematical spectrum where ‘one and one make one’ (sonnet 16.2). As I indicated in the introduction to this book, the unexpected question that Rossetti’s speaker poses in sonnet 17, ‘Thus with myself: how fares it, Friends, with you?’ (14), alters the dynamic of the other sonnets in the sequence. Bracketed by sonnets 16 and 18, that probe the possibility of overcoming ‘these long still-lengthening days’ and ‘the slumbering sense’ (sonnet 16.14; sonnet 18.14), the startling switch from the ‘I’ of the speaker to the ‘you’ of the reader is indicative of understanding faith as a shared experience. Gesturing out in order to establish a sense of solidarity, the seams of the sequence are stretched. The pause that is enacted between sonnets 17 and 18 draws the reader into the poem’s existential space of encounter and discovery. Sonnet 19 returns to the vision of ‘The Key-Note’ in its contemplation of winter as a time of hopeful anticipation. The robin’s embodied music reappears here to signal the unexpected intervention of grace into the bleak landscape. Here now is Winter. Winter, after all, Is not so drear as was my boding dream While Autumn gleamed its latest watery gleam On sapless leafage too inert to fall. Still leaves and berries clothe my garden wall Where ivy thrives on scantiest sunny beam; Still here a bud and there a blossom seem Hopeful, and a robin still is musical. Leaves, flowers and fruit and one delightful song Remain; these days are short, but now the nights Intense and long, hang out their utmost lights; Such starry nights are long, yet not too long; Frost nips the weak, while strengthening still the strong Against that day when Spring sets all to rights.

The fear of individualism that the speaker had felt in the anticipation of winter is dissipated here by awareness that grace enables life to continue in the face of apparent sterility. As Rossetti had written in Seek and Find, winter can be celebrated since it ‘abounds in hope’ (p. 56). While the senses are silenced and numbed in what St John of the Cross terms the ‘dark night of the soul’, God



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performs the work of re-shaping desire and of ‘strengthening […] the strong’ in trust (13). Foreshadowing Rossetti’s poetic delineation of metaphysical space and choosing to use the sonnet form for his devotional rather than secular poetry, John Donne’s Holy Sonnets reveal an appreciation of the genre’s aptitude for conveying the shock that God’s grace brings to the alienated individual, and the expression of holy ‘fear’ that ‘shakes my every joint’.71 The message of Later Life extends this discovery by revealing how fearfulness gives birth to an experience of the divine. Throughout, Rossetti reveals the emptiness of a life that, through its ‘inconstancy’, distances itself from the existential space between earth and heaven and thereby forfeits the trembling fear of devotion. Devoid of an awareness of God’s presence, she stresses that language is simply a bleak and ‘wordy maze’ (sonnet 16.9). After commenting that it would be wrong to fetch the dead back to this world of empty words for ‘a solace of our need’ (sonnet 23.8), she uses this recognition to emphasise the precarious position that humanity occupies. Rossetti’s speaker finds solace in the possibility that ‘The dead may be around us, dear and dead’ (sonnet 28.9). With a renewed transcendental awareness, an assessment of the comparative emptiness of worldly things is offered. Can life be all ‘numbness’ and ‘balk’ when the dead who wait at the other side of the cross, ‘Brimful of love for you and love for me’ (sonnet 28.14), witness to the possibility of ultimate redemption? In Sonnet 8, the speaker had suggested that ‘We feel and see with different hearts and eyes’ (1). Understanding this difference to be between the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant, the implications of forgiveness are glimpsed. ‘If ’, as the speaker suggests, ‘all our hearts could meet in Thee’ and could ‘be all alike Thine own dear sacrifice’ (sonnet 8.2, 8), then life would be invested with new meaning. As this chapter has revealed, a recognition of Christ’s Incarnate self, who ‘by death hast ransomed us from death’ (sonnet 8.9), necessitates a re-visioning of the forgiven self who is not separated existentially from those gone before.

Notes 1 2

Marion Thain, ‘Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 223–40 (223). Isobel Armstrong, ‘Christina Rossetti in the Era of the New Woman and Fin-deSiècle Culture’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 13 (2004): 21–48 (21).

168 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18

19

Christina Rossetti and the Bible David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Michigan; Cambridge: William B. Eerdman’s, 1996), p. 361. Liam Corley, ‘The Jouissance of Belief: Devotional Reading and the (Re)turn to Religion’, Christianity and Literature, 58.2 (2009): 252–60 (257). Emma Mason, ‘Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 7.2 (2002): 196–219 (209). Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 57. The Collected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), p. 30. The Rossetti and the Lyell family shared close ties. Lyell’s father was a naturalist and a translator of Dante. J. R. Woodhouse details his support for Gabriele Rossetti’s work on Dante in ‘Gabriele Rossetti and Charles Lyell: New Light on an Old Friendship’, Italian Studies, 38.1 (1983): 70–86. Rossetti’s letters show evidence of her engagement with the scientific debates at play in contemporary periodicals. For instance, writing to her friend Amelia Heimann, she comments on the Sir John Frederick William Herschel’s article ‘On Comets’ that was published in Good Words in 1863 (Letters 196: 15 July 1863). Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith Gender and Time (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 151. John Holmes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. vii. Ibid., p. 24. Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 181. Susan E. Colòn, Victorian Parables (London; New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 13. Quoted in Robert Hollander, ‘Typology and Secular Literature: Some Medieval Problems and Examples’, in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1976), pp. 3–19 (4). Dinah Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 156. Thain, ‘Poetry’, p. 224. Natalie M. Houston, ‘Towards a New History: Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets and the Sonnet’, Victorian Women Poets, ed. Alison Chapman (Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 145–64 (151). Eloisa to Abelard. By Alexander Pope (Manchester, 1794). Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (www.jisc-content.ac.uk/collections/eighteenth-centurycollections-online-ecco) (28 October 2013). Mary Arseneau, ‘“May My Great Love Avail Me”: Christina Rossetti and Dante’,



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in The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, eds Mary Arsenau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999), pp. 22–45; Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 117–49; Mary Moore, ‘Laura’s Laurels: Christina Rossetti’s “Monna Innominata” 1 and 8 and Petrarch’s Rime sparse 85 and 1’, Victorian Poetry, 49.4 (2011): 485–508; Michele Martinez, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Petrarcha’, in Victorian Women Poets, ed. Chapman, pp. 99–121 (99). 20 Marjorie Stone, ‘“Monna Innominata” and Sonnets from the Portuguese: Sonnet Traditions and Spiritual Trajectories’, in The Culture of Christina Rossetti, eds Arseneau, Harrison and Kooistra, pp. 46–75 (49). 21 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘on the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 300. 22 Natasha Distiller, Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 24. 23 Christina Rossetti, ‘Petracha, Francesco’ [1863], in Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, eds David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) pp. 163–8 (164–6). 24 Ibid. 25 Susan Conley, ‘“Poet’s Right”: Christina Rossetti as Anti-Muse and the Legacy of the “Poetess”’, in Victorian Poetry, 32.3–4 (1994): 365–84 (373). 26 Justin M’Carthy, ‘Hueffer’s Troubadours’, Macmillan’s Magazine 38 (August 1878): 275–81 (81). 27 Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), p. 472. 28 Francis Hueffer, The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages (London: Chatto & Windus, 1878), p. 272. 29 Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination, p. 67. 30 Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 141. 31 Distiller, Desire and Gender, p. 45. 32 Ibid., p. 99. 33 Ibid., p. 125. 34 William Whitla, ‘Questioning the Convention: Christina Rossetti’s Sonnet Sequence “Monna Innominata”’, in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 82–131 (103). 35 Moore, ‘Laura’s Laurels’, p. 504. 36 Krista Lysack, ‘The Economics of Ecstasy in Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata’, Victorian Poetry, 36 (1998): 399–416 (408–9).

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37 Theodore Watts-Dunton, ‘Literature’, The Athenæum, 2811 (10 September 1881): 327–8 (328). 38 Theodore Watts-Dunton, ‘The Sonnet’s Voice: A Metrical Lesson by the Sea Shore’, The Athenæum, 2812 (17 September 1881): 377. 39 Houston, ‘Towards a New History’, p. 154. 40 Whitla, ‘Questioning the Convention’, p. 113; Sharon Smulders, Christina Rossetti Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 138. 41 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 141. All subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text as SW, followed by page number. 42 The Confessions of St Augustine Revised from a Former Translation, trans. Edward Pusey (Oxford: John Henry Parker; London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1843), Book I, xviii.28, p. 16. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text as Confessions, followed by book, part, section and page number. 43 Mary G. Mason, ‘The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers’, Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, eds Bella Brodski and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 19–44 (21–2). 44 The Life of St. Teresa, Written by Herself, trans. David Lewis (London: St Anselm’s Society, 1888), p. 60. 45 John Mason Neale, Annals of Virgin Saints (London: Joseph Masters, 1846), p. ix; Lyra Eucharistica: Hymns and Verse on the Holy Communion, Ancient and Modern, ed. Orby Shipley (London: Longman & Green, 1863), pp. 244–8; Frederick Richard Littledale, A Commentary on the Song of Songs: From Ancient and Medieval Sources (London: Joseph Masters, 1869), p. 231. 46 For more on how the structure of the Christian Old Testament differs for Hebrew Scriptures, see Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, ‘Introduction’, The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. xi–xlvi (xiii–xviii). 47 The Works of George Herbert in Prose and Verse, 2 vols (2nd edn; London: William Pickering, 1841), ii, p. 46. 48 ‘The Offering of the New Law, the One Oblation once Offered’, CP, pp. 560–61: 28; Lyra Eucharistica, pp. 448–9. 49 Isaac Williams, ‘Sermon VIII: St. Luke xv. 18, 19’, in A Course of Sermons on Solemn Subjects: Chiefly Bearing on Repentance and Amendment of Life (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1845), pp. 123–42 (124). 50 Ibid. 51 William Dodsworth, ‘Sermon IX: Romans 6.3–4’, A Course of Sermons (1845), p. 143–56 (155). 52 Sarah Coakley, ‘On the Fearfulness of Forgiveness: Psalm 130:4 and its Theological Implications’, Meditations of the Heart: The Psalms in Early Christian Thought



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and Practice, eds Andreas Andreopoulos, Augustine Casiday and Carol Harrison (Brepols: Turnhout, 2011), pp. 33−51 (48). 53 Ibid, p. 49; italics in the original. 54 Catherine Musello Cantalupo, ‘Christina Rossetti: The Devotional Poet and the Rejection of Romantic Nature’, in Kent, The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, pp. 301–21 (283). 55 Ibid., p. 293. 56 Ibid., p. 294. 57 Ibid., pp. 296–7. 58 St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (Mineloa; New York: Dover Publications, 2003), p. 93. 59 St Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle; or, The Mansions, trans. John Dalton (London: T. Jones, 1852), p. 98. This was the second translation of the book into English and the one that was most widely available in the Victorian period. 60 Ibid. 61 Mary E. Finn, Writing the Incommensurable: Kierkegaard, Rossetti, and Hopkins University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 132. 62 Constance W. Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 187. 63 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns [1932] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 4. 64 Ibid., p. 411. 65 Ibid., p. 191. 66 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress [1678], ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 31. 67 Isobel Armstrong, ‘D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti as Sonnet Writers’, Victorian Poetry, 48.4 (2010): 261–473 (p. 469). 68 Ibid., p. 470. 69 Julie Melnyk, ‘The Lyrical “We”: Self-Representation in Christina Rossetti’s “Later Life”’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 11 (2002): 43–61 (43). 70 Ibid., p. 49. 71 The Works of John Donne, ed. Henry Alford, 6 vols (London: John W. Parker, 1839), vi, pp. 443–50, sonnet X.8.

5

Maternity and Vocation: The Devotional Prose

For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream: then shall ye suck, ye shall be borne upon her sides, and be dandled upon her knees. As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. (Isa. 66.1–13)

In Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879), Christina Rossetti suggests that, because the divine promise of comfort that Isaiah records takes the ‘feminine form’, the female self is able to ascend from shame to ‘glory’ (p. 31). This suggestion connects to one of the key concerns of this book: her engagement with the Tractarian adherence to the patristic conception of personhood. As theologian Nicholas Lossky explains, rather than conceiving of personhood as ‘the natural experience of the human being’, the Church Fathers perceived it as revealed by God to humankind.1 Concurrent with this perception, Rossetti derives an understanding of what it means to be a ‘nursing mother’ from the revelation of divine maternity rather than from any single character in Scripture. In this chapter, I consider how she develops this understanding over the six books of devotional prose that she published between 1874 and 1892. Ultimately, I argue that it is by looking with and beyond the Virgin Mary to Christ that she is able to assess the nature of vocation and find the necessary authority to take on the role of spiritual mother. Rossetti was engaged with the composition of prose texts most of her life. David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood explain that her serious illness in 1871–2, coupled with the reception of ‘mixed reviews’ of Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870), contributed to her decisive turn from short fiction to an almost exclusive focus on devotional writing.2 As comments that run through her letters and devotional prose indicate, she saw writing as a ‘duty’ to which God had called her (TF, 27 January: p. 22). Her ongoing concern was with responding to God’s call and with shaping the self in accordance with an eternal perspective.

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In The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892), she encapsulates this concern when she encourages readers to learn from Eve’s mistake and ‘exchange desire for aspiration, the corruptible for the incorruptible’ (p. 312). Following this, she glosses the description in Revelation 7.1–2 of the ‘woman clothed with the sun’ – who cries out in pain ‘to be delivered’ of her son – with a critique of misdirected vocation. Citing the words of Isaiah that Paul appropriates in his letter to the Galatians, ‘the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband’ (Isa. 54.1; Gal. 4.27), she upends the lament of Abraham’s wife Sarah and Jacob’s wife Rachel: ‘“Give me children, or else I die,” was a foolish speech: the childless who make themselves nursing mothers of Christ’s little ones are true mothers in Israel’ (ibid.). Robert M. Kachur suggests how Rossetti’s careful choice of words here echoes Peter’s description of Scripture as ‘milk’ (1 Pet. 2.2) and the Bible’s ‘many references to the fathers of Israel […] who heard God speak directly and communicated his words to others’. In addition, he argues that Rossetti’s use of the term ‘mother’ ‘allows her to posit an Apocalyptic reversal, re-envisioning women’s cultural roles as household mediators and nurturers; here they are powerful mediators in the household of God itself, using God’s word to nurture God’s people’.3 Unsurprisingly, the statements Rossetti makes through her devotional prose regarding her lack of ‘learning and critical practice’ (CS, p. xvii), and her ‘anxious ignorance’ (FD, p. 342), have not aided the recovery of her theological insights or instruction. While, as Joel Westerholm notes, ‘the constant reminders of the humility of the author may have influenced The Face of the Deep’s going through seven editions’, it has been difficult for readers since the early twentieth century to appreciate, or look beyond, such self-deprecation.4 For the most part, the critical recovery of Rossetti’s prose has focused on the way that expressions of humility act as a strategic guise through which she is able to deliver modern and protofeminist sentiment. Notwithstanding the helpfulness of recent feminist criticism in bringing Rossetti to critical attention, a preoccupation with what Lynda Palazzo describes as her ‘startlingly modern’ theological orientation is liable to obscure her commitment to her devotional heritage.5 With this in mind, my argument returns to the work of Colleen Hobbs who looks further back in history as she suggests that Rossetti’s ‘denial of authorial responsibility and influence would seem to have more in common’ with the female medieval mystics than with the ‘male-centred paradigms that dominate English Romanticism’.6 Keeping in mind Caroline Walker Bynum’s recognition of how the figuration of the Christ as divine mother can be traced to twelfth-century men including Bernard of Clairvaux, I add to Hobbs’s argument by suggesting that Rossetti’s affinity with



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female medieval mystics should be considered alongside an awareness of representations of divine maternity by the Anglican Divines with whom she was familiar.7 Foremost among these are Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor. Both draw on Bernard’s writings and use the imagery of maternal reproduction and breast-feeding to legitimise feminine subjectivity and to foreground the possibility of participating in the divine life.8 While my recognition of their influence blurs the distinctions that are often made between male and female paradigms of theology, it also highlights the backdrop behind Rossetti’s concern that each individual approach God with a childlike humility and look to develop the virtues of divine motherhood, regardless of their gender. Along with the eleven-volume translation of Lancelot Andrewes’s works in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (1841–54), C. P. Eden’s revision of Reginald Heber’s edition of The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor (1847–52) helped bring the Caroline Divines to the forefront of Tractarian thought and practice. Commenting on a newly published book on Andrewes, a writer for The Saturday Review in 1894 considers how the Devotions remain ‘a living book to us’ and serve as the ‘intimate companion of not a few of those more serious Churchmen’.9 Taylor’s books were also more than texts of historical interest for many in the mid to late nineteenth century. Testaments to this can be found in the many references to them that run through the eight volumes of Isaac Williams’s Devotional Commentary on the Gospel Narrative (1842–50).10 By gesturing to Andrewes and Taylor in Time Flies, Rossetti indicates her familiarity with their theology and with the Tractarian project of recovering their voices (TF, Ember Saturday: p. 259; 19 August: p. 160). Continuing to follow Wai Chee Dimock’s recognition of how literary texts can disrupt the synchronic plane by bringing into play ‘a different set of temporal and spatial co-ordinates’, this chapter considers how Rossetti’s prose gives a sense of the immediacy of the seventeenth-century devotional classics with which she was familiar and reveals a broader trans-historical perspective than she is often given credit for.11 I contend that Rossetti’s affinity with the Caroline Divines not only offers her a basis from which to assess her own era but also provides her with a means through which to establish the continuity of devotional experience. As previous chapters have ascertained, Rossetti’s concern with ancient and medieval worship coincides with both the increasing demand for material for personal devotion and the Tractarian emphasis on the principle of Apostolic Succession. By defining her meditations after ancient devotions such as the ‘O Sapientia’, one of the seven ‘O’ antiphons traditionally used at Advent (TF, p. 241), Rossetti brings her work into increased dialogue with the ongoing project that

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John Henry Newman had defined in the Lyra Apostolica (1836), of ‘offering battle, in the case of the Ancient Church’.12 Rossetti’s repeated expressions of selfdeprecation have obscured the extent to which she contributes to this ongoing ‘battle’ and engages with the seventeenth-century texts that informed Newman’s theology. Following the publication by Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent in 2004 of Rossetti’s notes on Genesis and Exodus and of the Princeton fragment, scholars have begun to re-engage more seriously with Rossetti’s commitment to questions of biblical interpretation and gender difference. Recent focus has, however, largely been on Rossetti’s last two volumes, Time Flies (1885) and The Face of the Deep (1892). Recognising that the earlier volumes are still understudied, the first section of this chapter considers their intervention into the space of late nineteenth-century religious publishing and suggests what they reveal about how Rossetti developed her theology of personhood. By tracing the chronological trajectory of her devotional prose, my discussion indicates how her comments on femininity and vocation are particularly timely in their counter-cultural response to the Victorian deification of motherhood. The second half of the chapter then locates Rossetti’s treatment of the Virgin Mary within this trajectory. Investigating her representations of what it means to imitate the humility and obedience of the Virgin, I focus on her concern that believers participate in the worship of the angels and shape themselves into ‘mirror[s] of […] grace and love’ (CS, p. 193).

The responsibility of living out the Christian vocation For the apostles, virgin martyrs, and beloved friends that Rossetti considers throughout her devotional prose, vocation is enabled by obedience and associated with affliction. In Time Flies, she argues that different ‘vocations exhibit as wide a scale of extremes’ as the sizes and shapes of humankind (2 September: p. 181). Rather than reaching for the highest, she asks readers to meditate on the virtue of obedience. This is, she argues, the ‘one point’ in which we can all emulate the ‘luminous example’ that St Matthew sets by his response to Christ’s call to apostleship (ibid., p. 182). Later in the volume, she uses the image of a line of swallows perched on a telegraph wire and ready to fly as a metaphor for how we should live in the world: ‘contented to wait, contented to start, at peace and fearless’ (20 October: p. 202). In The Face of the Deep, she identifies vocation as a gift that God bestows on both Christians who occupy the world and angels who are sent from heaven to judge and to comfort. As I will



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demonstrate, the insistent association between humankind, saints, and angels that runs through Rossetti’s final volume guides readers towards a renewed conception of personhood. Repudiating fin-de-siècle notions of the self and the individual, this renewed conception involves a focus on the origin of the word ‘vocation’ in the Latin word vocare, ‘to call’, and a commitment to responding to Christ’s Passion with self-renunciation and obedience.

Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year (1874) and Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881) The first two devotional volumes that Rossetti composed, Annus Domini and Called to be Saints, remain the most critically neglected. One reason for this is the long-held assumption that, since much of their content comes in the form of long citations of Scripture and prayers, they are less imaginative than her poetry and later prose books. Although recent scholarship has challenged the assumption that ‘the Biblical strain too often dominates what [Rossetti] wants to say’, I contend that more needs to be done to investigate how the prose texts use scriptural citation and prayer to interpret personhood in the light of the biblical schema.13 While Rossetti’s devotional poems might offer an embodiment of theology, the prayers in her devotional prose offer important insights into her vision of personhood. Based on the Anglican liturgy, both Annus Domini and Called to be Saints use prayer to re-orientate vision and to attend to the convergence between the temporal and the eternal. As A. M. Allchin explains: Prayer has a curious way of altering our perspectives on time, being in itself an encounter between eternity and time, a moment in which the past is recalled and the future anticipated in an activity which sets in motion the deepest levels of the human psyche, levels which seem to be less closely tied to the sequence of time than is the conscious mind.14

Beginning with Annus Domini, the discussion below highlights how Rossetti enacts the alteration of perspective that Allchin describes and uses prayer to establish an affinity with the saints of all ages. Concurrent with the title, which can be paraphrased as ‘a year of the Lord’, the emphasis throughout Annus Domini is on situating daily struggle and continual repentance in the perspective of eternity. In each entry, by offering a ‘Text and a Collect for each day of the year’ (p. vii), Rossetti models an ongoing imaginative engagement with the Bible and an intense awareness of the coming together of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant in the Communion

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of Saints. Ordering the text after the chronology of the Christian Bible, she uses prayers to guide the reader through the schema whereby the Old Testament has the Prophets point forward to the Gospels. Through the inclusion of a ‘Calendar’, she specifies certain prayers for the church seasons and suggests the possibility of an alternative approach whereby the reader takes the entries out of order, thereby treating the volume in the same manner as she would the Book of Common Prayer. Citing 2 Chronicles 34.32, which describes how the ‘inhabitants of Jerusalem’ acted in accordance with the commands of ‘the God of their fathers’, Rossetti includes a prayer towards the beginning of the volume that offers praise for ‘pious fathers, devout mothers, zealous priests, chaste virgins, harmless infants, all in all vocations who have pleased Thee’ (prayer 28). She then adopts the collective voice of the Church Militant: ‘give us also grace to walk before Thee as they walked in righteousness and self-denial’ (ibid.). By associating ‘self-denial’ with the fulfilment of vocation, she affirms Christ’s message that ‘he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it’ (Matt. 10.39). In a later prayer in which she invites an awareness of living between Christ’s first coming that ‘brought grace and hope’ and His second, that will bring ‘wrath and mercy’, she accentuates her commitment to revealing the unity of the Bible (prayer 201). Recognising that we ‘live in an continual Advent, watching and longing for Thine appearing’, her ongoing plea is that the state of Christian expectancy become a discipline on the path toward renunciation (ibid.). Investigating the influence of George Herbert’s poetry on Simone Weil’s resistance to modernist notions of subjectivity, Michael Vander Weele registers the ‘unusual collocation of affliction and vocation’ that persists through the work of both authors.15 Using Weele’s argument as a springboard, I locate Rossetti’s perception of vocation in the long tradition of interpreting it in terms of the ‘apprenticeship required by self-renunciation’.16 As Rossetti suggests in the prayer cited above, those who have obediently entered this apprenticeship and have renewed their vision of the world accordingly are the saints that have ‘pleased’ God. Authorising the content of Annus Domini, cleric Henry Burrows advises caution. Perhaps indicative of his own anxieties surrounding the Filioque clause in the Nicene Creed, he writes in the preface that, although Rossetti’s prayers are ‘valuable’ for ‘their fervour, reverence, and overflowing charity’, since they are all ‘addressed to the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity’, they should be ‘used as supplementary to other devotions’ (AD, p. iii).17 The ‘other devotions’ concurrently issued by religious publisher James Parker of Oxford and advertised at the back of the volume include Augustine’s Confessions, Lancelot Andrewes’s Devotions, Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ and Jeremy Taylor’s Holy



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Living and Holy Dying. As D’Amico and Kent recognise, the advertisements associate ‘Rossetti’s seemingly rather modest work […] with major works by prominent men of the Church’.18 Although Rossetti saw her prayers as ‘supplementary’ to these traditionally canonical texts in the general sense that they rehearse their insistent message of dying to self and living in Christ, she would not herself have described them as somehow incomplete in their insistence on addressing Christ. Palazzo registers this in her comment that Burrows’s preface ‘misses Rossetti’s quiet but firm re-instatement of Christ’s centrality in our understanding of the words of God, and her own claim through Christ to interpret the word as woman and as wordsmith’.19 I suggest that it also misses the perception that chimes with Julian of Norwich’s revelation: Christ is ‘the ground’ of all our praying and the ‘first receiver of our prayer’.20 In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti clarifies any misapprehension regarding her position: ‘the devout formula “Jesus Christ our only Mediator and Advocate,” may beguile us […] unless we consciously limit “only” to “Mediator”; jealously bearing in mind that God the Holy Ghost vouchsafes to be our other Advocate’ (p. 239). In delineating Rossetti’s response to the long devotional tradition, I want to recover the word ‘meditation’ as a descriptor of contemplative attentiveness and wrest it from association with the forms of sentimentality and gush that it has come to be associated with. As Taylor writes in The Great Exemplar (1649), ‘meditation is an attention and application of spirit to Divine things’.21 Throughout her devotional work, Rossetti repeatedly draws on this understanding and responds to the meditative practices promoted in both Protestant and Roman Catholic texts of the seventeenth century that were being edited and translated by the Victorian religious press to meet the huge demand for material for private devotion. Her engagement with the Caroline Divines and with their emphasis on the place of meditation in the upending of the natural self and its desires finds a contemporary touchstone in John Henry Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). Here, Newman echoes Taylor’s words as he advocates the ‘practice of meditation on the Sacred Text’: Reading, as we do, the Gospels from our youth up, we are in danger of becoming so familiar with them as to be dead to their force, and to view them as a mere history. The purpose, then, of meditation is to realize them; to make the facts which they relate stand out before our minds as objects, such as may be appropriated by a faith as living as the imagination which apprehends them.22

In his Sermons on Passages of the Psalms, John Mason Neale lays similar emphasis on shaping the self when he suggests to his readers how the practice

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of meditation ‘will help you to realise that history in a higher way: to throw yourselves into prayer as regards to it: to make yourselves, so to speak, a very part of it’.23 By drawing on the models of meditative prayer that Newman and Neale promote, Rossetti not only enacts doctrinal precept but also expresses the kind of temporal elasticity that, she believes, an eschatological awareness of life engenders. In Chapter 3, I suggested how her poem ‘Good Friday’ nuances the kind of daily meditative exercises Orby Shipley takes from seventeenthcentury devotions. After the pattern of these exercises, the meditations of Annus Domini bring to the fore an intense engagement with the pain of the crucifixion and refuse to sentimentalise its horror. In one, Rossetti writes ‘I adore Thee for Thy Head crowned with thorns, Thy Back torn by the cruel scourge, Thy Hands and Feet nailed to the cross, Thy Side pierced and giving forth Blood and Water’ (prayer 242). Reaching beyond the confines of individual subjectivity, such expressions of meditative adoration enact the late-medieval focus on the crucifix that runs through Continental Roman Catholic Piety and that, in turn, informs Anglo-Catholic ritual. Rossetti’s expressions of faith also enact the principles that Newman describes of coming to ‘realize’ the words of the Gospels and of appropriating them by faith. ‘Alas my Lord’ is the only poem in Annus Domini and serves as the vehicle through which Rossetti introduces the juxtaposition between expressions of pain and judgement with promises of Christ’s maternal comfort. Throughout, the poem explores what is involved in aligning the individual ‘me […] that faints’ with examples of biblical characters and communities who exemplify what expectant waiting involves (pp. ix–xii: 33). These examples include: Abraham (10), Jacob (13), Elias (16), Jonah (20), the nation of Nineveh (21), and the New Testament Church (25). The opening words, ‘Alas my Lord’, recall the anguish of Aaron’s plea that Miriam be healed from leprosy (Num. 12.11). They also remember the closing line of Herbert’s ‘The Thanksgiving’ where, contemplating what he can do in response to the Passion, he cries out ‘Alas! my God, I know not what’ (50).24 Continuing on from the place of struggle with which Herbert ends his poem, Rossetti has her speaker enact the experiences of spiritual crises that are described through the Bible as both individuals and communities struggle to align their pain with what they know of God’s love and mercy. The poem begins: Alas my Lord, How should I wrestle all the livelong night With Thee my God, my Strength and my Delight?



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How can it need So agonized an effort and a strain To make Thy Face of Mercy shine again? How can it need Such wringing out of breathless prayer to move Thee in Thy wonted Love, when Thou art Love? (p. ix)

As this book contends, perseverance through the ‘livelong night’ of suffering is a key theme of Rossetti’s work. While Chapter 1 suggested how, in ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ (1847), Rossetti appropriates the struggle of Psalms 6 and 55 and situates the intercessory voice of the individual within a long devotional and poetic tradition, subsequent analysis reveals that the devotional poems she composed over the last forty years of her life articulate the experiential process of the dynamic movement from despair to the confidence that ‘tho’ He slay us we will vaunt His praise’ (Later Life, sonnet 1.11). As ‘Alas my Lord’ indicates, this confidence – which enables the individual to listen for God’s ‘Voice’ and look for his ‘Face’ (35, 38) – is the result of responding aright to Christ’s own act of self-renunciation. Throughout Annus Domini, Rossetti extends the pattern of ‘Alas my Lord’ when she invites readers to adopt the child-like humility of their biblical counterparts in the process of overcoming their sinful nature and becoming ‘partakers’ in Divine glory. In a meditation on what it means to be ‘living stones’ (1 Pet. 2.4), she prays for ‘tears with the blessed Mary Magdalene’ (prayer 299). In other prayers, she asks that that worshippers ‘rend [their] hearts with the humble cry of the Publican’ (prayer 77), and sorrow over their sins with Peter (prayer 97). She suggests it is by adopting the appropriate attitude of penitence and sorrow that the individual renounces her own self-centredness and assents to the pain of being remade after Christ’s ‘Image’ and ‘Likeness’ (prayer 90). Following the pattern of Herbert’s The Temple (1633), she perceives that the complete re-shaping of the self into a temple of the Holy Spirit is the most important part of the Christian vocation. Repeatedly, Rossetti’s prayers adopt a devotional posture of receptiveness that is predicated on an awareness of the dual awareness of Christ as divine Mother and supreme Judge. In this way, they return to the theological emphasis of Julian of Norwich who, as Allchin observes, contrasts ‘the reality of judgement as taught in the Gospels and the Church’s tradition, with the more hidden promise that in the end all shall be well [in a way that] is much more typical

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of eastern Christianity than it is of western’.25 As Alexandra Barrett explains, Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love ‘have had a more robustly continuous life than those of any other Middle English mystic’.26 In the Victorian period, Barrett indicates how ‘the interest in Julian came not from academics, but from devout Catholics (Anglican and Roman) who were intrigued or inspired by what Julian had to say- or rather, by what they were led to think she had said’.27 This interest was particularly encouraged by the two clerics who republished the book: George Hargreave Parker in a re-issue of Serenus Cressey’s 1670 edition of the Long Text in 1843, and Henry Collins in the first printed edition based on the Sloane Manuscript in 1877. The Anglo-Catholic concern with the principles of Eastern Christianity and Monastic models of meditation provided a particularly receptive foundation for the engagement with Julian’s vision of God. I suggest that it is within this context that the development of Rossetti’s theology can best be understood. Linking the emphasis on Christ as the ‘Propitiation’ for the ‘sins of the whole world’ (1 Jn 2.2) with the imagery of maternal comfort in Isaiah 66.12–13 (see the epigraph that opens this chapter), she concludes a prayer towards the end of the Annus Domini with the words Thou who comfortest as no mother comforteth, comfort us: Thou who rememberest as no mother remembereth, remember us. Break, I implore Thee, proud wills, bend stiff necks, wring hard hearts: convert sinners into saints, and let all Thy saints praise Thee. (prayer 318)

The threefold movement in this prayer, from an awareness of God’s comfort to a Jacob-like struggle with his strength and then to a participation in the praise of the saints, replicates the movement of ‘Alas my Lord’ and underlines Rossetti’s perception of what it means to live in the ‘continual Advent’ between Christ’s Incarnation and his return (prayer 201). While we might feel the affliction of God’s discipline, Rossetti stresses with Julian that we can also know his comfort that surpasses that of any mother. The struggle that she describes rehearses the precept that Newman sets out of refusing to let the Gospel become too familiar. The emphasis on God’s prerogative to destruct startles the penitent out of a sense of self-reliance. The writings of Lancelot Andrewes mediate the tradition that runs from the Eastern Christianity of Gregory of Nyssa to Julian of Norwich. In an essay on Andrewes’s sermons, Allchin considers how he draws attention to the meaning of ‘Eve’ (life) and to the significance that this name is given to her after the fall. 28 Rossetti comes closest to echoing Andrewes’s interpretation of Eve in her notes on Exodus 1.22 when she affirms that, since ‘Eve was “the mother



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of all living,” or it may be (?) of the Living One [sic]’, the need for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception can be rendered superfluous.29 Her prayers in Annus Domini correspond to this positive recognition of Eve as life-giving mother as they repeatedly present her as a restored penitent. Throughout the volume, Rossetti expresses the comfort that believers can take from the implied promise of regeneration that Eve’s name carries and focuses on what it means to participate in Christ’s life-affirming work. Rossetti insists that those who know Christ’s restorative maternal comfort must extend that comfort to others (prayer 196). These include ‘sojourners in strange lands’ (prayer 19), bereaved parents (prayer 107), ‘all fallen women’ and ‘those who have sinned with them’ (prayer 141) and ‘all persons of deficient or darkened intellect’ (prayer 237). Anticipating Weil’s recognition that true attentiveness to God means to ‘give up our imaginary place as the center [sic]’, Rossetti highlights the self-denial and humility involved in extending Christ’s comfort and mercy to the suffering.30 Her prayer that Christ would ‘graft in us such love of Thee as may transform us more and more into Thy Likeness’ signals that penitence and receptiveness enable participation in the Trinitarian life (prayer 126). Shortly after she completed Annus Domini, Rossetti began to extend her investigation into the devotional disciplines that enable the penitent to enter the process of transformation from sinner to saint. In a letter that she wrote to Alexander Macmillan in 1876, she asks him to consider her volume Young Plants & Polished Corners for publication and recommends that he pass it on to Burrows for ‘revision and sanction’ because he ‘did me so great a favour by endorsing “Annus Domini”’ (Letters 679: 4 November 1876). Although Macmillan rejected Young Plants, it was eventually published in 1881 by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) with a title more transparently descriptive of its content: Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied. The second of the two epigraphs to the volume indicates the origin of Rossetti’s initial title: ‘That our sons may grow up as the young plants: and our daughters may be as the polished corners of the Temple’ (Ps. 144.12). A preface citing Richard Hooker’s perception that Saints’ Days witness to those who ‘cannot be drawn to hearken unto that we teach’ but who can be taught to read Christ by ‘looking upon that we do’ signals that the volume will focus on the shaping of spiritual vocation and will promote a greater appreciation of the church festivals (CS, p. iv).31 In the introduction, Rossetti further specifies her subject – the nineteen saints days commemorated in the Book of Common Prayer alongside the festivals of the Holy Innocents, St Michael and All Angels, and All Saints – and defends her idiosyncratic approach. This

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approach involves associating certain feast days with the twelve apostolic foundation stones of New Jerusalem that are described in Revelation 21, and with a plant that is in bloom. It also involves the composition of ‘Memorials’; in these, she arranges aspects of the ‘special history’ of the day in a column alongside the assigned Psalm (p. xvi). Accounting for her choice of illustrative material, she notes that the ‘Gospel records more lessons drawn by our Master from a seed or plant than from a pearl’ and suggests that a flower ‘familiar to the eye and dear to the heart may often succeed in conveying a more pointed lesson than could be understood from another more remote if more eloquent’ (pp. xvi, xviii). This emphasis on the commonplace not only signals a concern to locate her theology within acceptable ‘feminine’ bounds but also looks back to writings of the medieval mystics and to Herbert’s call for the use of ‘familiar illustration’ in preaching in The Country Parson (WP, i, p. 51). One of the most striking images in Julian of Norwich’s revelations is that of ‘a little thing, the quantite of a hasel-nutt, lying the palme of my hand’. In response to her question ‘What may this be?’ Christ reveals that ‘it is all that is made’. After anticipating that it will ‘shrivel up and disappear’, Julian learns that it is far from insignificant to God: ‘It lasteth, and ever shall: for God loveth it’ (JN, pp. 11–12). The lesson Julian takes from this revelation is that, although the created world is ‘a mere nothing’ when set beside God’s transcendence, it is nonetheless filled with his presence and grace (ibid.). This is the lesson that Rossetti rehearses through Called to be Saints. Like the Wood Sorrel, which she associates with the feast day of St Mark (25 April), most of the plants she takes for emblems of the saints appear weak but ‘yet enshrine a perennial vitality’ (p. 213). Discrediting superstitious tendencies to value a plant or a precious stone with innate power, such as the topaz with the bestowal of calmness (p. 374), Rossetti is careful to distance herself from the idolisation of the natural world and encourages readers to recognise that all gifts and virtues are derived from God alone and are filled with his presence. Considering the alleged virtues of the amethyst, she writes that ‘we ourselves enjoy a surer dependence’ on divine teachings than any occidental tradition (p. 491). With this emphasis, she moves away from the impulse of renunciation expressed in her earliest poetry and towards an analogical understanding of the natural world. G. B. Tennyson describes how the Tractarians perceived how ‘the external world of Nature [can be understood as] God speaking by Analogy’.32 The principle of analogy finds detailed expression in Tract 89 of The Tracts of the Times, ‘On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church (1840). Through this, John Keble investigates the system of correspondences through



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which he perceives the whole of creation is to be understood. By insistently returning to the analogical principles that, Keble argues, are rooted in the Apostolic Church, Rossetti brings to her work an appreciation of a created universe that avoids idolisation. Throughout Called to be Saints, her recognition that whatever God touches will emanate his glory looks beyond contemporary Tractarian poetry and recalls the words of Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’: ‘Nothing can be so mean, | Which with his tincture (for thy sake) | Will not grow bright and clean’ (WP, ii, p. 197). In moving from a focus on the wonder that a sacramental vision can bestow on the commonplace things of the environment to a contemplation of what it means to be saint, she joins with Herbert and responds to Keble as she calls readers to a renewed self-understanding. The prayer that Rossetti composes for the feast day of St Barnabas (11 June) celebrates the saint who ‘being Paul’s elder in the truth occupied the second place in serving with him, and being himself a luminary withdrew not from the other’s exceeding effulgence’ (CS, p. 255). After the recognition of how Barnabas’s humility and joy offer an ‘example for our imitation’, the prayer closes by calling on all, ‘with one voice’, that we may ‘praise Thee for all our higher and all our lower vocations, and having thus the mind of Christ may begin Heaven on earth, and exercise ourselves therein till that day when Heaven where love abideth shall seem no strange habitation to us’ (ibid.). Through this, Rossetti signals how prayer enters the threshold between Heaven and earth and defines it as the place where Christians – as new creatures gifted by the Holy Spirit with the ‘mind of Christ’ (2 Cor. 2.16) – are transformed. She stresses that with the new perspective that Christ bestows comes the revelation that the nature of one’s appointed vocation is not so important as the adoption through faith of an obedient response. Her ongoing message throughout Called to be Saints is that all are able to follow the path of the saints by responding aright to Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. Considering Rossetti’s commitment to the ethos of the SPCK, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra suggests that the declaration she made to Dante Gabriel, that she was ‘glad to throw my grains of dust into the religious scale’ (Letters 257: 1 January 1881), signals ‘her willingness to sacrifice both public reputation and personal income for the purpose of providing Christian knowledge to the less educated classes targeted by the society as its principal audience’.33 The ‘sacrifice’ that Kooistra describes correlates to Rossetti’s own perception of devotional writing as a vocation forged in response to the Passion. Reviewing Rossetti’s writings for readers of the Monthly Packet in 1895, Christabel Coleridge repeatedly uses the descriptors ‘little’ and ‘charming’ and emphasises the suitability of

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her devotional prose ‘for the use of ordinary people’.34 Throughout Called to be Saints, the possibility that ‘ordinary’ readers – and Rossetti as first reader – can follow the example of the saints highlights a recognition of vocation as rooted in the receptiveness and humility of the subject. Rossetti’s decision to focus solely on the composition of the devotional material for the last thirteen years of her life indicates her recognition of the needs of the print-mediated religious community and foregrounds her perception that God had called her to the role of spiritual nurturer.

Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (1879) and Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883) Both Seek and Find and Letter and Spirit signal Rossetti’s ongoing commitment to the edification of the ‘ordinary’ Christian. In Letter and Spirit she emphasises how all believers should extend God’s gentle nurture when she affirms ‘the dignity of creation’ and finds ‘in every creature […] a memorial of its Creator’ (p. 130). Resonating with Herbert’s suggestion in ‘The Windows’ that ‘holy preachers’ become windows into which Christ ‘anneal[s] in glass […] thy story’ (WP, ii, p. 64: 8, 6), she insists that Christians should meditate on the biblical text in the painful process of becoming transparent reflectors of God’s grace. In contemplating ‘personal influence’ she considers how ‘our possibilities, our responsibilities, seem to enlarge and multiply’ (LS, p. 150). In the discussion below, I consider Rossetti’s reflections on what it means to submit to becoming a ‘memorial’ of God and trace her increasingly accentuated emphasis on the dangers of prioritising ‘intellectual luminosity’ over obedience to divine precept (ibid.). I also detail her recognition of ‘how momentous’ the choices are that each individual must make regarding his use of reason and free will (SF, p. 123). Unlike Called to be Saints (which was yet to be published), Seek and Find contains no poems and expresses an increased concern with the dangers that beset the interpreter of scripture. Palazzo suggests that its comparative ‘bleakness and formal austerity’ can be explained by Macmillan’s rejection of the earlier volume and Rossetti’s recognition that ‘if she wanted her devotional work published she would have to fit into an acceptable category for women religious writers’.35 Rossetti’s increasing fearfulness in dealing with the words of Scripture at a time when the debates of Higher Criticism were taking hold also accounts for her more restrained imaginative reflections. As she was to profess in Letter and Spirit, ‘I feel it a solemn thing to write conjectural sketches of



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Scripture characters; filling up outlines as I fancy […] attributing motives and colouring contact’ (p. 158). Countering Palazzo’s suggestion that Rossetti’s ‘use of inspiration owes much to the work of Benjamin Jowett’, whose controversial piece in Essays and Reviews (1860) asks the interpreter to read the Bible like any other book, I trace through the chronology of Rossetti’s devotional prose an increasing fearfulness in responding to the doctrine of divine inspiration.36 In two letters that she wrote to Frederick Shields, Rossetti reveals a familiarity with Thomas Scott’s four-volume Comprehensive Commentary on the Bible (1778–92) (Letters 741: December 1877; no. 1280: 1885). In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), Newman records that this was a text that had a formative influence on his own thought.37 Scott’s affirmation that the ‘Divine Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures’ should remain at the heart of biblical interpretation and should ‘lay a foundation for our hope, and inculcate humility, reverence, love, and gratitude’ provides a touchstone for the type of exegesis with which Rossetti was becoming increasingly engaged.38 While, as D’Amico and Kent note, Rossetti’s earliest devotional prose engages in the ‘kind of imaginative speculation she would subsequently condemn’, the contents of her prose from the late 1870s onward indicates a fearfulness indicative of the huge responsibility of the exegete.39 In Seek and Find, Rossetti highlights the dangers ‘to which students of the Bible are eminently exposed’ (p. 125). She writes that it is ‘worse than vain to coin a lesson yet not learn it, to relish an example yet not follow it’ (ibid.). To avoid this, she recommends watchful prayer and an overarching concern with love (p. 126). In Letter and Spirit, she proffers the same message when she suggests how Christians should maintain a double perspective. In exercising ‘the mind of Christ’, she writes that they are blessed with the revelation of ‘the two worlds, visible and invisible […] as double against each other’ and are therefore able to perceive in ordinary things such as a plough or a fold of sheep an aspect of God’s Providence (p. 131). By tying the words of the Bible to lived experience, she recognises that ‘to fill a bason [sic] and take a towel will preach a sermon on self-abasement’ (ibid.), and that practical ‘works preach at least as powerfully as words’ (ibid., p. 150). It is for the ‘ordinary’ Christian who encounters the difficulties that beset living out one’s vocation as a ‘memorial’ of God that Rossetti writes. Describing Seek and Find in a letter to Dante Gabriel as a ‘simple work adapted to people who know less (!) than I do’, she admits, albeit with modesty, that her vocation is to educate and edify the ‘ordinary’ reader (Letters 813: 25 July 1879). Throughout her devotional prose, Rossetti recurrently cites from and alludes to the verse in the apocryphal book Ecclesiasticus that reads ‘all things are

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double one against another: and he has made nothing imperfect’ (42.24). Williams’s Devotional Commentary reveals that she was not alone in using this verse as the basis for elaborating on a hermeneutic principle.40 In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti suggests that a commitment to perceiving all things ‘double one against another’ indicates ‘that everything cognizable by the senses may be utilized as symbol or parable’ (p. 215). Prior to both this statement and her allusion to Ecclesiasticus 42.24 in Letter and Spirit to describe what it means to adopt the ‘mind of Christ’, she cites the verse in Seek and Find as she considers the double aspect of the seasons (p. 56). Significantly, it is on an appreciation of duality that the structure of her ‘double series’ is based. While the first half reflects on the ‘creation’ of the objects of praise listed in the Benedicite (a canticle provided for Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer), the second half focuses on ‘redemption’ in regard to the same objects. Introducing a selection of extracts from Seek and Find, Kent and Stanwood note that G. C. Chaplin’s Benedicite; or The Song of Three Children (1866) provides a basis for Rossetti’s own expression of the connectedness of earth and heaven.41 While Rossetti’s creation of a ‘double series’ – through which the reader is invited to read the creation through the lens of redemption – critiques Chaplin’s emphasis on ‘the devout handmaiden Natural Theology’, her comments nonetheless replicate his intense focus on the details of the natural environment.42 Considering the basis for Seek and Find, Rossetti considers how the book of Daniel receives edifying and devotional additions, including the ‘Benedicite,’ from the Apocryphal ‘Song of the Three Holy Children.’ Studying this narrative, we shall, I think, find that the three heroic saints we are now at last contemplating did in their own persons in some sort represent every class of those fellow men whom in the Canticle they invoke to render a tribute of praise to God. (SF, p. 163)

Rossetti’s approach to apocryphal material as ‘devotional additions’ follows the tradition of the Church Fathers who, according to Hooker, ‘willed [the books] to be read in churches, but not to be alleged as if their authority did bind us to build upon them our faith’.43 By choosing to base Seek and Find on the additions to the book of Daniel (inserted between chapters 3.23 and 3.24), Rossetti guards herself against the kind of speculative approach to the divinely inspired words of Scripture that Scott’s Commentary warns against, and promotes the apostolicbased concern with drawing on the wealth of devotional material available in the Apocrypha. As well as detailing the lessons that can be taken from the additions to Daniel, she considers what can be learnt from the ‘notable fish’



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in Tobit (SF, p. 112) and the book of Judith (p. 97). The fact that she takes the liberty of incorporating the words of Ecclesiasticus into her own prose sentences in a way that her later work rarely attempts with the authorised portions of the Bible indicates the basis upon which she reads these extra-canonical writings: as helpful tools for devotion, but not as divinely inspired words which carry the dreadful warning for those who dare ‘add’ or ‘take away’ from them (Rev. 22.18). Throughout Seek and Find, Rossetti keeps in mind the example of commitment that the ‘three heroic saints’ of the Benedicite offer (see above). Having been thrown in the ‘fiery furnace’ by Nebuchadnezzar because they would not bow down to the ‘golden image’ that he had set up (Dan. 3. 18), the Hebrew exiles ‘praised, glorified, and blessed God’ (‘The Song of The Three Holy Children’, 28). Rather than in a ‘golden image’, Rossetti locates the contemporary danger of idolatry in the lure of ‘superficial knowledge’ (SF, p. 198). Reflecting on the vision that Daniel receives of end times (Dan. 12.4), she perceives how ‘this nineteenth century of ours seems […] to be a period of running to and fro, and of increased knowledge’ (p. 197). She repeatedly turns to sketches of biblical characters to reveal how knowledge can work as both a blessing and a curse. Accordingly, she writes that it is because ‘she postponed obedience to knowledge’ that Eve fell from grace (p. 142). Continuing to contemplate the fall, she returns to a likely source of her volume’s initial title, ‘Treasure Trove’: ‘As inevitable as the truth, that where our treasure is there our hearts will be also (St. Matt. vi. 21), so inevitable is it that wherever our hearts are there must in truth be abiding our treasure’ (p. 176).44 She proceeds by offering the lesson that ‘if we would reinstate God, our jealous God (Ex. xx. 5), as our All in all in heaven, we must begin by making Him our All in all on earth’ (pp. 176–7). With its recognition of how God both transcends and fills creation, the volume in its entirety traces the path towards this reinstatement of his lordship. In Letter and Spirit, Rossetti continues to extend her investigation of the lessons that the contemporary reader can take from the biblical account of Eve’s misuse of knowledge. She proposes that female readers in particular should remain aware of Eve’s ‘specially vulnerable point’ (p. 17). Although attributing the blame for the fall to both Adam and Eve in equal measure, she contends that their different weaknesses are a result of their gender differences. Corresponding to her sister Maria’s recognition in The Shadow of Dante (1871) that ‘the fundamental principle of action’ is Love, and to Orby Shipley’s subsequent citation of this recognition as the basis for his sermons that elucidate the process by which this love, when misdirected, leads to selfishness, Rossetti indicates how Eve’s ‘very virtues may have opened the door to temptation’ (ibid.).45 Considering

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how she balances sympathy for Eve with a warning for all women, D’Amico specifies what Rossetti’s comments on the Fall reveal about woman’s path to salvation: ‘Rossetti’s helpmeet need not be a wife and mother, but she must be humble and self-sacrificing […] If woman was too assertive […] her weak female nature could lead to destruction, literally to the loss of her soul.’46 In Seek and Find, Rossetti suggests that as ‘helpmeet’ to man, ‘the female lot copies very closely the voluntarily assumed position of our Lord and Pattern’ (p. 30). Her letters to Augusta Webster on this issue, and her decision to sign Mary Ward’s 1889 petition against female suffrage, have been well documented.47 Affirming Rossetti’s recognition of the divine validation of female subjectivity, I want to suggest how her representations of the virtuous woman of Proverbs 31 also underline her perception of maternity. Emphasising the importance of applying scriptural precept to lived experience, Rossetti calls on the readers of Seek and Find to ‘imitate the practical example of that virtuous woman “who is not afraid of the snow for her household […]”’ (p. 223). By ‘copying her’, she suggests that ‘we shall become trustworthy, loving, prudent, diligent’ and able to take on the characteristics of ‘the Good Shepherd Himself ’ (ibid.). In Letter and Spirit, she weaves the biblical description of the virtuous woman into her discussion of the ‘heavenly-minded Economist’ who ‘imitates Christ’: ‘“She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness;” and this by no means grudgingly or of necessity, but by free-will of love, enabling herself more abundantly to stretch out her hand to the poor, yea, both hands to the needy’ (p. 121–2). In both texts, Rossetti’s concern is with situating the virtuous woman in a Christian framework and with foregrounding the relevance of her example of maternal activity for contemporary readers. Enacting a swerve away from the tendency to locate the woman of Proverbs on an impossible pedestal as the exemplar of perfect domesticity, she indicates how her vocation is a divine gift and how the reception of this gift means participation in Christ’s work of redemption. As the citation for Seek and Find with which I began this chapter reveals, Rossetti perceived that an understanding of God’s adoption of the maternal form enables the female self to ascend from shame to ‘glory’ (p. 31). By representing the virtuous woman of Proverbs as a model of this ascension and by insisting that her qualities all derive from Christ, she holds out the possibility that through theosis (the doctrine that ‘God has lifted us up to be where he is in his divine splendour’) all can become like her. 48



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Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892) In a letter to her friend Caroline Gemmer, Rossetti speaks of the ‘paramount burden’ of vocation and, echoing her earlier words to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, comments on how each volume she writes ‘heaps up’ her own sense of responsibility (Letters 1098: 27 February 1883). Particularly in Time Flies and The Face of the Deep, she contemplates the huge responsibility of making the most of the time that is available and of imitating the virtuous woman in her refusal to partake in ‘the bread of idleness’ (Prov. 31.27). In a poem in Time Flies, she recognises that ‘Heaven and earth alike are chronometers’ and emphasises the importance of redeeming the time that is available (TF, 18–19 September: pp. 180–81). In The Face of the Deep, she repeats this lesson with an increased urgency: ‘we are bidden to redeem the time because the days are evil’ (p. 420). Throughout both volumes, the combination of prayers, poems and prose reflections illuminate the intersection of time with eternity that she perceives as having been brought about in Christ. Repeatedly, Rossetti situates the dynamic movement from one temporality to another in the process of reading, meditating on, and living out Scripture, and offers a vision of how an obedient response to God’s call enables the individual to wait in divine peace ‘some time below till timeless time above’ (FD, p. 549). In Time Flies, Rossetti renews her commitment to interpreting the natural world works as an emblem of the spiritual. Encouraging the practice of daily meditation, the entries urge the reader to remain alert for signs of the creator in the created and, from this, to adopt an eternal perspective. In considering those people who occupy the lower vocations as the ‘Ajax Telamons of everyday life’, Rossetti calls for the longview that recognises how, with time, the ‘comparative aspect’ fades (16 April: p. 72). She asks, ‘If even time lasts long enough to reverse a verdict of time, how much more eternity?’ (ibid.). With this new perspective on time, she emphasises that those who remain obedient to God’s call but are repeatedly overlooked in the world find their recompense in heaven. She considers the examples of St Hilary’s wife, who was ‘involved in the career of her husband’ yet remained unknown by the world (13 January: pp. 11–12), St Perpetua’s female slave Felicitas who was martyred alongside her mistress (7 March: pp. 47–8), and the man appointed to execute St Alban but who responded to the ‘sudden call of Divine Grace’ and was decapitated along with the saint (17 June: pp. 115–16). Echoing the Psalmist, her entry for the Feast of St Alban concludes with the affirmation that ‘The righteous shall be had

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in everlasting remembrance’ (ibid.: Ps. 112.6). In the next entry a sonnet calls readers to value ‘everlasting remembrance’ over worldly fame and to consider how lived experience should be shaped by a response to the Passion (18 June: p. 116). Rather than enlarging desire in a world that ‘is half spent and rotting at the core’, it contends that believers should reshape themselves in accordance with the ‘exceeding prize of heaven’ (ibid.). This call chimes with Rossetti’s subsequent vision of souls as swallows ‘perched’ on the telegraph wire and ready for migration; they are ‘at peace and fearless’ because they are not captives of the fallen world (20 October: p. 202). By far the most autobiographical of Rossetti’s writings, Time Flies is filled with anecdotes and recollections. In one, she describes her trip to Madame Tussauds and finds, in her bashful response to the exhibits, a ‘parable’ to elucidate the significance of adopting an eternal perspective: Things seen are as that waxwork, things unseen as those real people. Yet over and over again we are influenced and constrained by the hollow momentary world we behold in presence, while utterly obtuse as regards the substantial eternal world no less present around us though disregarded. (19 February: p. 36) 49

In the entries that follow, Rossetti confronts the afflictions that beset the pilgrims who occupy the ‘hollow momentary world’ and draws attention upward to the ‘substantial eternal world’ towards which they are heading. ‘In one sense’, she writes, ‘we are all alike square people in round holes, inasmuch as we are made less for our actual environment of earth and time than for heaven and eternity’ (20 February: p. 37). While the pilgrim ‘ought to be incessantly thankful, contented, joyful [and] hopeful’, he can scarcely expect to be ‘comfortable’ in a space that is ill fitting; ‘we do not expect a caged eagle to look comfortable’, she reasons (21 February: p. 38). Although Rossetti recognises the world to be comparatively ‘hollow’, this does not in any way diminish her sacramental commitment to valuing it for the sake of its creator. As Stanwood recognises, Time Flies reveals a vision of the ‘natural world as emblematic of God’s Incarnational presence’.50 Taking this perception further, Todd O. Williams considers how the volume offers Rossetti’s ‘most explicit statement of environmental ethics’ and draws attention to her perception that caring for the natural environment is an ‘essential part of humankind’s spiritual purpose while on the earth’.51 Resonating with the mystical theology of Julian of Norwich, this ongoing affirmation of the environment is concurrent with Rossetti’s Incarnation-inflected reassessment of the value of the body and of sense experience.



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Throughout The Face of the Deep, Rossetti continues to explore the exchanges that occur between Christ and the embodied earth-bound subject. The divergences that recur through the volume as Rossetti moves from commentary to prayer to poem signal an Augustine-inflected concern with humankind’s perception of God as seen ‘through a glass, darkly’ (1 Cor. 13.12). Considering its ‘somewhat fractured structure’, Roe suggests that the volume illustrates the ‘problems of fallen language’.52 Rather than attempt to reconcile the fractures, Rossetti holds them in tension as she expresses a kind of apophatic peace in the recognition that ‘we know not a millionth part of what Christ is to us’ and perhaps ‘we even less know what we are to Him [sic]’ (p. 84). Throughout the volume, her prayers reflect her understanding of the comparative littleness of humanity alongside God who is beyond our imagination as both judge and advocate: ‘while Thou art our loving Father to correct us, Thou art still as our mother to comfort us’ (p. 136). Recognising that the earth is not a place in which to make oneself comfortable, Rossetti affirms its value as a temporary abode and ‘race course’ in which the believer should exercise careful stewardship as she lives out the vocation to which she is called (FD, p. 343). She extends these reflections later in the volume when she considers how the gift of vocation exhibits a ‘twofold aspect’ and cannot be understood apart from the faith community and the created environment (FD, pp. 514–15). She weaves through her commentary on Revelation reflections on the urgency of responding to God’s call, saving one’s soul and serving others. In her gloss on Revelation 10.6, which looks forward to when ‘there should be time no longer’, she describes the pilgrim’s occupation of the world as a period of ‘probation’ and stresses that ‘it is in Him Who inhabiteth eternity (not time) that we ourselves day by day live and move and have our being’ (p. 278). Based on Paul’s declaration to the Greeks (Acts 17.28), these lines express the belief that, once grounded in God, believers can partake in the Incarnation and experience in themselves the convergence of time with eternity. In the mid 1880s, Rossetti began experimenting with the poetic form of the roundel and used it as a means through which to explore an awareness of living as a subject caught between the different temporalities of time and eternity. Consisting of three stanzas of 3, 5 and 3 lines, and with lines 4 and 11 repeating the first phrase or word, the structural properties of the form offered her a means of articulating a glimpse of life in flux and the embodied movement of the self toward God.53 Rikki Rooksby details Algernon Charles Swinburne’s adaptation of the roundel from the medieval French rondeaux in an analysis of his volume A Century of Roundels (1883).54 It is from this volume (which was dedicated to her) that Rossetti’s use of the roundel is based. Her thirty-two roundels in The

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Face of the Deep draw on the characteristic circularity of the form to express the re-evaluation of time that a meditation on the apocalypse calls for and to indicate how the shock of sudden understanding can lead to a transformed vision. Preceding the inclusion of one that Rossetti includes towards the end of the volume, she appends comfort and encouragement to the descriptions of divine judgement (FD, p. 505). Then, after glossing the words of Revelation 21.16, she considers the need for all to accommodate themselves to the shape of the cross: ‘Length … breadth … height … are equal,’ – there. Here human ways and works are deplorably out of scale, out of relative proportion. […] If here thou must be squeezed or stretched to bring thee into shape, look outward and upward to the ensuring amplitude.   Time is short: long is eternity.

The roundel that follows assesses time from the perspective of eternity and enacts the process of bringing the self ‘into shape’. Short is time, and only time is bleak; Gauge the exceeding height thou hast to climb: Long eternity is nigh to seek: Short is time. Time is shortening with the wintry rime: Pray and watch and pray, girt up and meek: Praying, watching, praying, chime by chime. Pray by silence if thou canst not speak: Time is shortening; pray on till the prime: Time is shortening; soul, fulfil thy week:   Short is time.

A reading of this roundel in conjunction with the preceding encouragement exemplifies the fracturing and the slippages that occur between the prose and poetry through The Face of the Deep. Just as the refrain of the roundel structurally re-enacts the process of shortening, the previous juxtaposition of ‘here’ with ‘there’ and the compact phrase ‘Time is short: long is eternity’, with which Rossetti constitutes an entire paragraph, draw attention to the re-visioning that is required by pilgrim. By enacting through language the Augustinian idea that the self is uncomfortably stretched in and through time, Rossetti returns to the concept of living as ‘square people in round holes’ (see p. 192 above) and signals the importance of listening for the chimes of eternity rather than for the clocks of the world. Throughout the roundel, the constant repetition of the



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words ‘praying’ and ‘watching’ reinforce the idea of passing time as the clock ticks round and round in a never-ending circle. The encouragement to listen to the vibrations of Heaven, which can be heard by the obedient pilgrim beyond the realm of earthly existence, recall Jesus’s command to keep ‘watch […] for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come’ (Matt. 24:42), and emphasise the need to make the most of time – ‘fulfil[ing] thy week’ (10) – in preparation for the coming of the final and ultimate Sabbath day. Meditating on the eschaton, Rossetti prays for wisdom ‘to fear Thee without terror, and to trust thee without misgiving’ (FD, p. 10). Constance W. Hassett finds in this prayer a ‘protest’ against the ‘fearsome narrative of John of Patmos’.55 She argues that ‘Rossetti’s motive for writing […] is revulsion from the “taint of cruelty” [FD, p. 458] that suffuses the sacred text and the terror that, as Northrop Frye tells us, “is inseparable” from apocalypse’ (ibid.). Rather than ‘revulsion,’ perhaps a more appropriate term through which to describe Rossetti’s response to the biblical text is ‘fearfulness’. As she had in her earlier volumes, Rossetti holds an awareness of God as a judge with the prerogative to destroy in constant tension with recognition of him as Divine Mother. Her fearfulness of attributing the ‘taint of cruelty’ to the avenging Angel of Revelation 20.1 is derived from recognition that he embodies God’s ‘displeasure’ over the cruelties of the world (FD, p. 458). The drastic measures he takes are represented as an element of the ‘casting away of all evil’ that is ‘the restitution of all things’ (ibid.). A brief look at Rossetti’s handling of the angels of Revelation will indicate how an apprehension of apocalyptic doom broadens her understanding of vocation and of the responsiveness of the human subject. In a gloss that considers the awful charge that the angels are given when they are told ‘to hurt the earth and the sea’ (Rev. 7.2), Rossetti offers their response as an example worthy of imitation. Each duty, office, vocation, is God’s gift whether to man or to angel. Man indulges ardours and reluctances, choices, recoils and preferences; some gifts he styles trials, some burdens. Angels seem to see and feel no difference between calling and calling, opportunity and opportunity. Angels doubtless estimate the gift by the Giver: men too often the Giver by the gift; not, that is, by the intrinsic value of the gift, but rather by their own taste or distaste for it. (FD, pp. 224–5)

Through this derivative reflection, Rossetti extends her project of embedding the terrestrial in the world of the eternal. Recognising that believers are not so far removed from the angels in that both are the servants of God, she offers a renewed conception of vocation. She contends that, if a firm and unfaltering

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gaze on God is adopted, even the most dreadful calling can be accepted. As the angels accept the call to destroy so, she argues, believers should read and accept the word of Scripture as holy and, through it, steady their gaze on God who holds the prerogative to extend forgiveness or to ‘shut up His loving-kindness in displeasure’ (ibid.). Explaining that the word angel means ‘messenger’ and can indicate ‘either a celestial or a human delegate’, Rossetti wonders whether the Twelve Angels at the gates of New Jerusalem (Rev. 21.12) are angels ‘by nature, or only by office; whether they belong to the flying nation of heaven, or whether they have mounted to equality with those elder angels’ (ibid., p. 499). By blurring the distinction between the Angels of heaven and the souls who are brought there, she indicates how present obedience to God’s call has huge future significance that far outruns what is visible. As the final part of this chapter will argue, Rossetti reads the Annunciation narrative as a model and pattern for how Christians should respond to God’s call and ‘fulfil’ the vocation that they have been called to perform while they wait for the opportunity to migrate to their true home and join their voices with the Church Triumphant in its praise of God’s glory.

The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary: Responding to God’s call The figure of the Virgin Mary has been a subject of contention for the Church of England from its conception. This can be demonstrated by a consideration of her place in the Book of Common Prayer. In 1561, by affirming the celebration of five feast days associated with her person (the Annunciation, her visit to Elizabeth, her purification, her birth and her conception), but choosing not to include the feast of the Assumption in its calendar, the church departed from Roman Catholic doctrine and highlighted a concern to avoid honouring mother over son. The 2004 document, ‘Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ’, was published as the result of conversations on the Marian dogmas commissioned by the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC).56 The authors of this document investigate ‘entrenched positions’ in an attempt to locate common ground between the polarised sectors of the church (#65). They note: ‘Anglican liturgy, as expressed in the successive Books of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559, 1662) when it mentions Mary, gives prominence to her role as the “pure Virgin” from whose “substance” the Son took human nature’. They then trace a chronology of liturgical responses to the Virgin:



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In spite of the diminution of devotion to Mary in the sixteenth century, reverence for her endured in the continued use of the Magnificat in Evening Prayer, and the unchanged dedication of ancient churches and Lady Chapels. In the seventeenth century writers such as Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Ken re-appropriated from patristic tradition a fuller appreciation of the place of Mary in the prayers of the believer and of the Church. (#46)

Continuing to investigate the influence of the Caroline Divines on Rossetti, I suggest how her response to the figure of the Virgin Mary looks back, with the Tractarians, to the writings of Andrewes and Taylor. It is after the example of their theology that, I argue, Rossetti affirms the principle of theosis as the basis of Marian devotion. In her detailed assessment of the contestation of the Virgin Mary’s identity between 1830 and 1885, Carol Engelhardt Herringer considers the common features that the Roman Catholics shared with ‘advanced Anglicans’ (those who had ‘advanced their religious beliefs beyond that which the Church of England officially sanctioned’).57 She focuses particularly on the contentions that arose from the broadly Catholic recognition of the Virgin’s extraordinary power. Indicative of this recognition, she considers how both Orby Shipley’s comments in the introduction to his translation of Anthony Stafford’s 1635 volume, Life of the Blessed Virgin (1869), and Isaac Williams’s emphasis, in Female Characters of Scripture (1869), register Mary’s ‘power to deny, or at least, delay, salvation to all humans’.58 As less of an ‘advanced’ than a High Church Anglican – although not solidly positioned in either of the camps that Herringer describes – Rossetti repeatedly grounds this power in obedience. Nuancing Williams’s recognition of the Virgin as ‘example’ and as ‘the very pattern of all obedience’, she expresses devotion to the state of blessedness she exemplifies rather than to her actual person.59 Rossetti’s devotion recalls the prescribed practice of using the Magnificat for daily Evensong; adhering to this would have meant ongoing repetition of Mary’s exclamation ‘behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed’ (Lk. 1.48). As her poetic and prose reflections on the Virgin reveal, Rossetti finds in these words a legitimisation of personhood and a basis from which to situate her reflections in the wider framework of what Allchin describes as the ‘doctrine of our deification by God’s grace’ (theosis). It is only in the context of this doctrine, Allchin argues, that ‘the whole development of [Anglican] devotion to Mary can make sense’.60 Considering the connections that were made in Christian medievalism between the lactating mother who gives of herself to another and Jesus who, dying on the cross, gives life to the world, Caroline Bynum Walker draws attention to the pervasive understanding of Christ’s body as, in some sense,

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female.61 In Chapter 3, I spoke of Rossetti’s affinity with the emphasis of the mystics on the physicality of Christ’s body. Here, I want to suggest how this affinity informs her understanding of Mary’s relationship with Christ. Commenting on the tradition ‘of depicting a lactating Mary’, Herringer considers the Catholic tradition that drew attention to ‘Mary’s nourishing breasts and the intimacy of the relationship they mediated’. She describes how Rossetti reveals a commitment to this tradition through the ‘reduction of Mary to “a breastful of milk” in her poem “A Christmas Carol”’.62 I suggest that Rossetti’s emphasis on Mary’s physicality here and elsewhere in her devotional corpus is particularly indicative of her engagement with the moment of the Incarnation when God took on the flesh and wordlessness of a new-born child. Engaging with a long devotional history, her writings repeatedly balance recognition of the danger of worshipping the mother in lieu of the divine son with an appreciation of Mary’s co-operation in the work of redemption. In Seek and Find, she reveals her commitment to a typological interpretation of the Incarnation as a fulfilment of the Moses’s vision of the burning bush (Exod. 3.2; SF, pp. 206–7). This reading resonates with Gregory of Nyssa’s approach; as Rowan Williams explains, Gregory understood that ‘as the vision of the burning bush is the beginning of the liberation of the Hebrews from bondage, so the vision of the true light incarnate in the flesh of Jesus is the beginning of our liberation from sin’s tyranny’.63 Throughout her work, Rossetti draws on this association of the Incarnation with the liberation and transformation of humanity to critique both the over-emphasis of Mary’s power and the Gnostic-like denial of her maternal body. By engaging with the writings of Andrewes and Taylor, she forges a basis from which to respond to and counter the contemporary representations that she perceived to be misdirected and to ground recognition of Mary as powerful within a full appreciation of her humanity. In Called to be Saints, Rossetti’s comments on the Feast of the Presentation and Purification of Mary (2 February) exhibit her commitment to the principle of reserve. Considering the little we are told about Mary’s presence at Gethsemane, she writes, ‘surely the good providence of God has veiled her from our curiosity, even while holding her to our admiration’ (CS, p. 136). Alongside Taylor’s comments on the quiet and hidden nature of the Virgin’s life, and Williams’s suggestion that Mary is ‘hid, as if designedly, by a cloud from our view, and of her character we can divine but little’, Rossetti’s recognition of the operation of reserve in the gospels exhibits a wariness of the danger of worshipping the mother in lieu of her divine son.64 Drawing on the long tradition of reading the Virgin in terms of the ‘hallowed Eastern Gate of the mystical Temple, which



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Ezekiel in a rapture beheld first open and then shut for ever’, she considers how Mary is ‘a shut gate, not a gate of access: Christ is our open door’ (CS, p. 181).65 While devotion to Mary is permissible, she is wary of the danger of its turning into misdirected worship. According to William Sharp, Rossetti envisioned Mariolatry as the ‘most cardinal error’ of the Church of Rome.66 As she had indicated in Annus Domini, it is Christ who is the ultimate Mother and the source of all comfort. Testifying to this, her writings on the Annunciation focus on how the reader can emulate Mary’s obedience and humility and receive comfort from Christ. In the entry that she includes in Called to be Saints for the festival of ‘The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ (25 March), Rossetti cites Luke 1.27–35 in full and indicates how it fulfils the promise in Isaiah that ‘a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His Name Immanuel’ (Is. 7.14; CS, pp. 172–3). In her subsequent meditation on the ‘Glories of the Annunciation,’ she weaves various biblical verses together and centres them on the words of Psalmist: ‘Mercy and Truth met together, Righteousness and Peace kissed each other’ (Ps. 85.10; CS, p. 174). She then takes the unusual step of altering the subsequent words of the Psalm to stress their messianic importance. Whereas the subsequent verse of Psalm 85 begins, ‘Truth shall flourish out of the earth’ (85.11), Rossetti runs on with the words ‘Truth bowed its strength to spring out of the earth.’ These words gesture to the opening of Psalm 86 (‘Bow down thine ear, O Lord’) and connect to Isaiah 11.1, a verse that Rossetti alludes to in her comment ‘the dormant Sap stirred in the Root of Jesse’ (ibid.). While Rossetti’s use of the Psalm is unusual and certainly would not occur in her later devotional prose, her choice of Old Testament texts here is grounded in a long history of elucidating the Annunciation narratives. For his Nativity sermon of 1616, Andrewes takes as his text Psalm 85.10–11. He comments that these are the verses ‘selected of old by the primitive church’ and used by St Bernard in his sermons on the Feast of the Annunciation.67 His words provide a helpful context in which to understand Rossetti’s ongoing emphasis on how Mary, ‘by faith and submission’, brought ‘Righteousness’ to birth (FD, p. 310). By describing Mary in typological terms – as the ‘root of Jesse,’ the ‘earth’ from which Christ springs, and the ‘land of promise’ – Andrewes foregrounds Christ’s humanity. Rossetti’s use of organic metaphor to speak of Mary in Called to be Saints resonates with his emphasis. The flower that she associates with the Feast of the Annunciation is the violet. Dissecting it, she finds that the mature ‘seed-vessel […] exhibits the figure of a somewhat irregularly modelled globe’ that ‘seems a miniature world held in the hollow of hand’ (p. 191). In addition

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to rehearsing Julian of Norwich’s vision of ‘all that is made’ in a ‘little thing, the quantite of a hasel-nutt’ (see p. 184 above), the association of the seed-vessel with Mary situates her as representative of the created universe and the place from which Christ took on human nature. In The Face of the Deep Rossetti uses the poem ‘Lord, grant us eyes to see’ to emphasise how God reveals his grace through analogical glimpses of a tree within a seed and a bird within an egg (p. 285). Her revision of this poem for Verses involves adding the title ‘Judge not according to the appearance’ (from Jn. 7.24), and changing the phrase ‘grant us eyes’ to ‘purge our eyes’ (CP, p. 418). These revisions accentuate the necessity of adopting an eternal perspective. Rossetti repeatedly suggests that it is from this perspective that we should, with God’s grace, see in Mary the divine promise of theosis. The poem that concludes the entry for the Annunciation in Called to be Saints reinforces the perception of Mary as the earth from which Christ, in his humanity, springs. Herself a rose, who bore the Rose, She bore the rose and felt its thorn. All Loveliness new-born Took on her bosom its repose, And slept and woke there night and morn. Lily herself, she bore the one Fair Lily; sweeter, whiter, far Than she or others are: The Sun of Righteousness her Son, She was His morning star. She gracious, He essential Grace, He was the Fountain, she the rill: Her goodness to fulfil And gladness, with proportioned pace He led her steps thro’ good and ill. Christ’s mirror she of grace and love, Of beauty and of life and death: By hope and love and faith Transfigured to His Likeness, ‘Dove, Spouse, Sister, Mother,’ Jesus saith. (CS, p. 93)



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Throughout this poem, Rossetti remains insistent that it is only by becoming ‘Christ’s mirror’ (16) that Mary can legitimately be called a ‘rose’ and a ‘lily’ (1, 6), symbols that have traditionally been used to express her mystic and sacred significance.68 Indicating Mary’s receptiveness to Christ’s presence, the first verse reveals how she provided a space of ‘repose’ for the ‘new-born’ infant (4, 3). The emphasis here is imitative of the words of another of Andrewes’s Nativity sermons in which he speaks of how the Virgin ‘rested in the Angel’s resolution’ and encourages his hearers to follow her example.69 Explaining how the process of conception involves co-operation, he writes of how Mary did ‘both give and take’: ‘Give of her own substance whereof His body was framed; and take or receive power from the Holy Spirit’.70 As Allchin explains, Andrewes then ‘turns at once to what [this co-operation] says about the love of God, the primal, underlying reality which alone makes possible any movement of man’s love in response’.71 It is this vision of participation in God’s love that Rossetti’s poem celebrates. Describing Mary as a ‘rill’ (12) – much as she would describe the believer as a ‘rill’ in a later poem (FD, p. 444) – Rossetti moves away from the traditional association of the Virgin with the ‘fountain sealed’ (Song of Sol. 4.12) and contends that, while she is of the same substance as the true ‘Fountain’, she participates in rather than possesses its power (12).72 Exhibiting the virtues that Paul extols, ‘hope and love and faith’ (1 Cor. 13.13), Rossetti affirms that Mary is valuable, not for any innate supernatural attribute, but for what she reflects of Christ’s ‘essential Grace’ (11). The line ‘He led her steps thro’ good and ill’ (15), indicates that she is not above receiving Christ’s discipline and guidance. As Rossetti later observes in Seek and Find, Mary’s humility is revealed when her son ‘taught [her] once and again by a check (St. John ii. 4; St. Mark iii. 31-35)’ (p. 321). Many of the descriptors of Mary that recur through Rossetti’s poem connect with those given in the hymns of the Parisian Breviary, a text that Isaac Williams translated in 1839. In addition to invoking the ‘water’s | Glassy face’ as a symbol of how the mother reflects the glories of her Son, a verse dedicated to Mary exalts Christ as the ‘sole Fountain of all good’.73 In the final line of her poem, Rossetti’s rehearses another ancient typological figuration that is celebrated in the breviary when she associates the Virgin with the beloved of the Song of Solomon. According to Marina Warner, this connection was introduced by Ambrose in the fourth century and has remained a mainstay of mystical hermeneutics since.74 Rossetti’s citation of the lover’s voice in the Song of Solomon, ‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled’ (5.2), exemplifies her perception of Mary’s faithful response to God’s call and connects with the

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tradition of reading the beloved as both the Virgin and the communal self in the Church. In her eleventh revelation, Julian of Norwich finds identification with Mary particularly empowering. Rather than simply seeing her, Julian recounts how Christ enables her to ‘see in [Mary] how [she is] loved’ (JN, p. 58). It is this same invitation that Rossetti enacts in her poem. In doing so, she expresses what it means to have a vocation and to participate in the outworking of God’s love. In her entry for the ‘Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ in Time Flies, Rossetti draws attention the imitable aspects of the Virgin Mary and reflects on what we can take from her example. If, she asks, the ‘approach of Christ wrought up [Mary and Gabriel] to such a height of piety, whereunto cannot His indwelling exult us?’ (TF, 2 March: p. 59). She concludes with Paul’s declaration that ‘I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’ (Gal. 2.20). Her commitment to the principle of theosis is clear: as Christ fills Mary with his glory, the believer should look to him to find life and meaning. In a later entry in Time Flies, Rossetti repeats this lesson when she celebrates ‘The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ (8 September: pp. 173–4). She opens with the reminder that ‘controversy’ cannot detract from the ‘mystery of godliness’ and invites readers to regard Mary ‘with loving reverence’. She then includes a poem: Whereto shall we liken this Blessed Mary Virgin, Fruitful shoot from Jesse’s root graciously emerging? Lily we might call her, but Christ alone is white; Rose delicious, but that Jesus is the one delight; Flower of women, but her Firstborn is mankind’s one flower: He the Sun lights up all moons through their radiant hour. ‘Blessed among women, highly favoured,’ thus Glorious Gabriel hailed her, teaching words to us: Whom devoutly copying we too cry ‘All hail!’ Echoing on the music of glorious Gabriel.

By imitating the liturgical pattern of declaration and response, and by using the words ‘we’ (1, 3, 9) and ‘us’ (8) in conjunction with references to ‘call[ing]’ (3), ‘hail[ing]’ (9) and ‘music’ (10), the lines enact the liturgies of the Prayer Book and of the ancient and medieval breviaries that were being concurrently translated. In an Anglo-Catholic translation of the Sarum Breviary, the entry for the festival of the Annunciation includes the words of Gabriel as part of communal worship for the hour of Terce. Following the reading of Isaiah 7.14, the liturgy reads



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R. Full of grace are thy lips. V. Because God hath blessed thee for ever. R. Are Thy lips. V. Glory be. R. Full of grace. V. With thy glory and thy majesty. R. Go, ride prosperously, and reign.75

While Rossetti’s poem resonates with the first of the echoing chants specified here, it is nonetheless particularly critical of attributing ‘glory’ and ‘majesty’ to Mary rather than to Christ. The retractions she expresses indicate the difficulty of honouring Mary’s humility and obedience without treating her as Mediatrix. In discussing Rossetti’s representation of the Virgin’s humility in The Face of the Deep, D’Amico considers how she was, in a sense, keeping Mary from the pedestal many others had placed her upon, but significantly, she was keeping her in reach. Mary as a virgin mother, no woman could emulate; Mary as obedient daughter of God, all could.76

Rossetti’s emphasis on the emulation of Mary is particularly resonant of Taylor’s comments in The Great Exemplar. In the prayer that he appends to his own meditation on the Annunciation, he asks that God would grant him the same ‘promptness to obey thee’ and the same ‘holy purity and piety, prudence and modesty’ as had been given to Mary.77 It is likely that Taylor’s comments on the imitable aspects of Mary inform Keble’s poem ‘The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ (1827). The last verse of the poem reads: Bless’d is the womb that bare Him – bless’d The bosom where His lips were press’d, But rather bless’d are they Who hear His word and keep it well, The living homes where Christ shall dwell, And never pass away. (55–60)78

In these lines, Keble aligns the Virgin Mary with the individual believer by focusing on the importance of retaining the word of God and never letting it ‘pass away’ (60). By alluding to Luke 11.27–8 through the repetition of the phrase ‘Bless’d are they’ (57), he envisages the believer who imitates Mary’s obedience as a respondent to Christ’s promise of future comfort.79 Like Taylor, he uses the example of Mary to promote humility and, as Andrewes had done,

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he represents her womb as a forerunner of the soul of the individual Christian and of the Church. For him, as for Rossetti, it was important that the believer adopt the attitude of ‘nursing mother’ in keeping and living out God’s word. While Felicia Hemans’s sonnet ‘The Annunciation’ extends Keble’s words to depict the believer who imitates Mary as an ‘o’er fraught’ and ‘meek’ virgin, Rossetti looks back to the Caroline Divines to emphasise the bestowal of divine strength that undergirds the applicability of Mary’s example to both male and female believers.80 Her attention to the writings of Andrewes and Taylor enables her to nuance, rather than repeat, the representations of Mary that the Tractarian leaders offer and to extend recognition of her significance in modelling the principle of theosis. Considering Victorian representations of the Virgin Mother, Michael Wheeler argues that since she has come to represent a patriarchal feminine ideal, imitation is ‘seen as a social goal as well as a spiritual exercise’ and ‘easily becomes a means of social control within patriarchy’.81 Warner anticipates this reading when she traces the emergence of the unhelpful perception that Mary is ‘Alone of All her Sex’: In Christian theology Mary’s consent to the Incarnation, her Fiat, exemplifies the most sublime fusion of man’s free will with the divine plan. The free cooperation of man and God for salvation bears the metaphysical name of synergy, but this magnificent and lofty view of Mary’s act of acceptance came to epitomize a restricted moral notion quite unworthy of the term: that of feminine submissiveness.82

Warner’s understanding of ‘synergy’ relies on the concept of an interlocked space whereby two beings immerse themselves in engagement with the other. It is Rossetti’s focus on Mary’s courage to enter this interlocked space, making herself vulnerable to the metamorphic transformation of the Holy Spirit, which enables her devotion. Recalling Julian of Norwich’s identification of herself with Mary, this restrained devotion repudiates alternative representations of Mary as a merely passive vessel and as an impossible role model. While recognition of how Mary’s obedience works in synergy with God’s redemptive plan is, for Warner, impossible to untangle from the ‘restricted moral notion[s]’ with which readings of the Annunciation have come to be loaded, for others it has meant identifying the extraordinary power she is given. Challenging Cynthia Scheinberg’s suggestion that constructions of Mary as a Christian woman ‘render her silenced’, F. Elizabeth Gray comments on how ‘recognition of Mary’s power finds varied and vivid shape’.83 Defending this



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recognition, she demonstrates how Victorian women ‘regularly present [Mary] as the foremost Christian singer,’ finding in her voice, a primary model of holyanointed, and authoritative speech’.84 Affirming that it is in the context of the doctrine of theosis that Rossetti’s representations of Mary are to be best understood, I want to build on Gray’s recognition and suggest that the authorisation she finds in the Virgin renews her understanding of vocation and informs her articulation of what it means to participate in the divine life.

Notes 1

Nicolas Lossky, ‘The Oxford Movement and the Revival of Patristic Theology’, in From Oxford to the People, ed. Paul Vaiss (Hertfordshire: Gracewing, 1996), pp. 76–83 (77). 2 Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, eds David A. Kent, and P. G. Stanwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) p. 4. 3 Robert M. Kachur, ‘Repositioning the Female Christian Reader: Christina Rossetti as Tractarian Hermeneut in The Face of the Deep’, Victorian Poetry, 35.2 (1997): 193–213 (202). 4 Joel Westerholm, ‘ I Magnify Mine Office”: Christina Rossetti’s Authoritative Choice in Her Devotional Prose’, The Victorian Newsletter, 84 (1993): 11–17 (p. 14). 5 Lynda Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. ix. 6 Colleen Hobbs, ‘A View from “The Lowest Place”: Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Prose’, Victorian Poetry, 37.3–4 (1994): 409–28 (415). 7 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 111–12. 8 For example, see Jeremy Taylor’s discussion of breast feeding: ‘I cannot think the question despicable, and the duty of meanest consideration, although it be specified in an office of small esteem, and suggested to us by the principles of reason, and not by express sanctions of divinity. For although other actions are more perfect and spiritual, yet this hath in it some degrees of necessity, and possibly is with more danger and irregularity omitted, than actions which spread their leaves fairer and look more gloriously.’ The Great Exemplar, 3 vols (London: William Pickering, 1849), i, p. 82. 9 ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 78.2042 (1894): 664–5 (664). 10 Isaac Williams, Devotional Commentary on the Gospel Narrative, 8 vols (2nd edn; London: Rivingtons, 1870), iii, pp. 174, 398; viii, p. 16.

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11 Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Literature for the Planet’, PMLA, 116.1 (2001): 173–88 (p. 175). 12 Lyra Apostolica, ed. John Henry Newman (2nd edn; London: Rivingtons, 1879), p. vii. 13 Raymond Chapman, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), p. 192; Chapman’s perception is challenged in F. Elizabeth Gray, Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry (Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 38. 14 A. M. Allchin, The Dynamic of Tradition (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1981), p. 19. 15 Michael Vander Weele, ‘Simone Weil and George Herbert on the Vocations of Writing and Reading’, Religion & Literature, 32.3 (2000): 69–102 (73). 16 Ibid., p. 84. 17 Michael Chandler explains that ‘in the translation of the Nicene Creed in the Communion Service of the Book of Common Prayer the Filioque Clause is translated by the words “and the Son” in the sentence “And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son … [sic]”.’ The Eastern Church found this problematic for a number of reasons. Chandler records that an increased engagement with these reasons brought the debate over the inclusion of the clause in the creed to a head in the 1870s, when the suggestion was made that it ‘should be dropped from the Prayer Book in order to promote the cause of unity with the East’. The Life and Work of John Mason Neale (Leominster: Gracewing, 1995), p. 162. Burrows’s comment in the preface of Annus Domini resonates with the contentious debates of the 1870s through its emphasis on maintaining the unity of the Godhead. 18 Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Notes on Genesis and Exodus’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 13 (2004): 49–98 (56). 19 Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology, p. 56. 20 XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Servant of our Lord, called Mother Juliana, An Anchorete of Norwich, ed. R. F. S. Cressy; repr. G. H. Parker (Leicester: John S. Cossley, 1843), pp. 89, 90. All subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text as JN, followed by page number. 21 Taylor, The Great Exemplar, i, p. 148. 22 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent [1870] (Notre Dame; London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 79. 23 John Mason Neale, Sermons on Passages of the Psalms (J. T. Hays, 1873), p. 302. 24 The Works of George Herbert in Prose and Verse, 2 vols (2nd edn; London: William Pickering, 1841), ii, pp. 28–9. Further references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text as WP, followed by volume and page number. 25 A. M. Allchin, ‘Julian of Norwich and the Continuity of Tradition’, in Julian:



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Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985), pp. 27–40 (31). 26 Alexandra Barratt, ‘Julian of Norwich and her Children Today’, in Julian of Norwich’s Legacy, eds Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 13. 27 Ibid., p. 17. 28 A. M. Allchin, ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. Geoffrey Rowell (Wantage: Ikon, 1992), pp. 145–64, p. 160. 29 D’Amico and Kent, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Notes on Genesis and Exodus’, p. 81. 30 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 100. 31 Selections from the Fifth Book of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. John Keble (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1839), 71.11. 32 G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 67. 33 Quoted in Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 147. 34 Christabel Coleridge, ‘The Poetry of Christina Rossetti’, The Monthly Packet, 89 (March 1895): 276–82 (277). 35 Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology, p. 70. 36 Ibid., pp. 113–14. 37 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Ian Ker (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 26. 38 Thomas Scott, ‘On the Divine Inspiration of Scripture’, The Theological Works of the Rev. Thomas Scott (Edinburgh: Stirling & Kenny, and Waugh & Innes, 1829), pp. 163–79 (169). 39 D’Amico and Kent, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Notes on Genesis and Exodus’, p. 62. 40 Williams, Devotional Commentary on the Gospel Narrative, i, pp. 266–7. 41 Kent and Stanwood, Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, p. 220. 42 G. C. Chaplin, Benedicite; or the Song of Three Children (2nd edn; London: John Murray, 1868), p. viii. 43 Hooker, Selections from the Fifth Book of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, p. 41. 44 The autograph manuscript of Seek and Find, entitled ‘Treasure Trove’, is in the Fitzwillian museum, Cambridge. Other sources for this initial title are Psalm 33.7 (‘He gathereth the waters of the sea together, as it were upon a heap: and layeth up the deep, as in a treasure-house’) and Psalm 135.7 (‘He bringeth forth the clouds from the ends of the world: and sendeth forth lightenings with the rain, bringing the winds out of his treasures). 45 Maria Francesca Rossetti, The Shadow of Dante (London: Rivingtons, 1871),

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p. 113; Orby Shipley, A Theory about Sin in Relation to Some Facts of Daily Life: Lent Lectures on the Seven Deadly Sins (London: Macmillan & Co., 1875), p. 135. 46 Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith Gender and Time (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 27. 47 For instance, see Alison Chapman, ‘Father’s Place, Mother’s Space: Identity, Italy, and the Maternal in Christina Rossetti’s Poetry’, in The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, eds Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999), pp. 235–59 (238); Dinah Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 112–17. 48 A. M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998), p. 3. See Chapter 3 of this book for a discussion of the doctrine of theosis. 49 Rossetti identifies the location as Madame Tussauds identified in her MS notes. Kent and Stanwood, Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, p. 393. 50 Kent and Stanwood, Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, p. 243. 51 Todd O. Williams, ‘Environmental Ethics in Christina Rossetti’s Time Flies’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 33.3 (2011): 217–29 (226). 52 Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination, p. 179. 53 For more on Rossetti’s use of the roundel form see my article ‘Christina Rossetti, Amy Levy, and the composition of roundels in late Victorian Bloomsbury: Poetic snapshots of city pageants’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 56.1 (2013): 83–103. 54 Rikki Rooksby, ‘Swinburne in Miniature: A Century of Roundels’, Victorian Poetry, 23:3 (1985): 249–65 (253). 55 Constance W. Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 219. 56 Mary: Grace and Hope and Christ, The Seattle Statement: Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II: 2004), www.anglicancommunion. org, (accessed 10 November 2013). 57 Carol Engelhardt Herringer, Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England, 1830–85 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 14. 58 Ibid., p. 45. 59 Isaac Williams, Female Characters of Scripture (new edn; London, Oxford and Cambridge: Rivingtons, 1869), pp. 231, 327–8. 60 A. M. Allchin, The Joy of All Creation: An Anglican Mediation on the Place of Mary (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), p. 105. 61 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), p. 270.



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62 Herringer, Victorians and the Virgin Mary, p. 39. 63 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (2nd rev. edn; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990), p. 58. 64 Taylor, The Great Exemplar, i, p. 97; Williams, Devotional Commentary on the Gospel Narrative, vii, 329. 65 John Mason Neale traces this interpretation back to St Proclus’s Lady-day sermon. J. M. Neale and R. F. Littledale, A Commentary on the Psalms from Primitive and Medieval Writers, 4 vols [1869–83] (4th edn; London: Joseph Masters 1884), I, p. 429; Anna Jameson details artistic representations of Mary as the ‘Porta Clausa’ or ‘the Closed Gate’ in Legends of the Madonna as Represented in the Fine Arts (New York; Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 35. 66 Quoted in D’Amico, Christina Rossetti, p. 183. 67 Lancelot Andrewes, ‘Sermon XI’, Ninety Six Sermons (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1856), pp. 175–95 (175). 68 The images are included in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849). Rossetti posed as his model for the virgin. 69 Lancelot Andrewes, ‘Sermon IX’, Ninety Six Sermons (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1856), pp. 135–52 (138). 70 Ibid., p. 140. 71 Allchin, The Joy of All Creation, p. 27. 72 Jameson, Legends of the Madonna, p. 34. 73 Isaac Williams, Hymns Translated from the Parisian Breviary (London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1839), p. 174. 74 Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1976), p. 126. 75 The Lesser Hours of the Sarum Breviary, translated and arranged according to the Kalendar of the Church of England (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889), p. 135. 76 Diane D’Amico, ‘Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene: Christina Rossetti’s Female Triptych’, in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 175–91 (pp. 182–3). 77 Taylor, The Great Exemplar, p. 98. 78 John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year (new edn; New York: White, Stokes & Allen, 1887), pp. 240–2. 79 Luke 11.27 records a conversation between Jesus and a woman in the crowd: ‘And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’

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80 The works of Mrs. Hemans; With a memoir of her life, by her sister (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1839), pp. 222–3. 81 Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 230. 82 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 117 83 Gray, Christian and Lyric Tradition, p. 91. 84 Ibid., p. 96.

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‘O hope deferred, hope still’: Shaping the Self through Verses (1893)

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily best us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb. 12.1–2)

In her final volume, Verses (1893), Christina Rossetti collects together 331 lyrics. Only one of these (‘Good Friday Morning’) is new; the rest are taken from Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). Comprised of eight sections, Verses enacts the dynamic ‘race’ towards God that the author of Hebrews describes. Throughout, Rossetti uses section headings as epigraphs to guide the reader through the different stages of Christian pilgrimage. She closes the volume with a roundel that reflects on life from the last stage of this pilgrimage; with the distance of space and time, its pilgrim-speakers look back in wonder and ask, ‘is that the cloud we called so black? (‘Looking back along life’s trodden way’, CP, p. 543: 6). With a renewed awareness of the joys of the ‘New Jerusalem’ that they are to still to experience, they treat the process of reassessing the trials of life with an eternal perspective that sees earth as a ‘race-course, not a goal’ (FD, p. 343). In Religious Imaginaries (2012), Karen Dieleman sets out to counter the neglect that Verses has faced in twentieth and twenty-first-century scholarship.1 Repudiating the long-held assumption that Rossetti ‘lost something as time closed on her’ and ‘becomes doctrinaire [and] catechistic’ in her later poetry, I extend Dieleman’s project and emphasise how Verses presents the insights of a mature and spiritually astute poet and theologian.2 At 63, Rossetti revises and arranges

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her devotional poetry so as to cultivate an intense focus on the interface between life and death and time and eternity. After having experienced the physical and emotional pain of Graves’ disease, the recurrence of breast cancer after surgery and bereavement following the deaths of her eldest brother, sister and mother, this choice of focus is unsurprising. As Diane D’Amico notes, it was in Rossetti’s later life when her thoughts were on eternity that she became ‘the spiritual poet and religious teacher the Victorians so admired’ and who, ‘in an age of religious doubt, kept singing that God is Love’.3 Describing Verses as ‘a kind of writer’s testimonial declaring that though she has published a considerable amount of prose, her commitment, first and last, is to poetry’, Constance W. Hassett indicates what it reveals about Rossetti’s increasing association of writing with devotion.4 Pivotal to Hassett’s argument is her suggestion that, when they are detached from their ‘prose encumbrances’, Rossetti’s poems can be appreciated ‘as poems’ rather than as expository vehicles.5 While I extend Hassett’s project of restoring Verses to critical focus, I also nuance it by developing my argument that Rossetti’s work expresses continuity between prose and poetry. David A. Kent accounts for the lack of critical attention that the sequencing of Verses has received with the consideration that, in his 1904 edition of Rossetti’s poetry, William Michael unsettles his sister’s meaningful arrangement when he places poems from across her corpus in chronological order.6 As Mary Arseneau explains, it is likely that this editorial choice helped fuel ‘the biographical/amatory approach that dominated Rossetti criticism through much of the twentieth century’.7 However, simply registering that William Michael’s remained the authoritative edition of Rossetti’s poetry through the twentieth-century until the first volume of Rebecca Crump’s variorum edition was published in 1970 does not fully account for the neglect that Verses has suffered. The fact that 21,000 copies had been printed by 1914 means that it has never been as difficult to access as Rossetti’s devotional prose.8 With the initial popularity of Verses in mind, I suggest it is more likely that the later neglect is a result of both the complex theological content of the poems and the fact that, since almost all were re-printed from Rossetti’s earlier prose volumes, many critics have seen a consideration of their sequencing as secondary to an analysis of their original context. While I draw on the work of Diane D’Amico, Karen Dieleman, Constance W. Hassett and David A. Kent, I propose that more needs to be done to recognise the value of Verses as a cohesive volume. In his article, Kent identifies over 800 revisions that Rossetti makes to the poems she includes in the volume. Apart from D’Amico’s discussion of the significant change of meaning that occurs when Rossetti revises two stanzas that she takes from her



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1857 lyric, ‘The Heart Knoweth its own Bitterness’, and creates ‘Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive’, little has been done to analyse the theological implications that Rossetti’s revisions signal.9 Considering the detailed textual history of the poems that Crump’s three-volume edition offers, this is surprising. My analysis responds to the need for a deeper engagement with Rossetti’s practices of editing her work over time by considering the revisions that she makes to ‘Earth has clear call’ over a thirty-five-year period and by exploring how she alters the dynamics of the poems by giving them new titles and by placing them in dialogical sequence. Rather than adhering to Kent’s suggestion that the first four sections of Verses ‘center on the speaker’s growth, while the second quatrain of sections shifts to a more cosmic, impersonal vantage point’, Dieleman demonstrates how the volume charts different stages of pilgrimage as it loosely echoes the liturgical pattern of entering to encounter God (section 1), moving through the modes of confession, comfort and renewal after Christ (sections 2–4), and going out again for further living in the present (sections 5–8).10

Expanding Dieleman’s reading, I consider how the structure of the volume draws on the Bible, the liturgy and the patterns of the Lyra Apostolica (1836) to delineate the nature of personhood and to detail the relationship between God and human beings. After signalling its affinity with the Lyra through its bibliographical appearance, Verses invites the reader to work through the same themes. Considering how the repetitions and refrains that Rossetti places through each sequence remain attentive to the inter-dependence of the personal and the cosmic, I analyse the volume’s simultaneous interpretation of the apocalypse in the world, the Communion of Saints and the soul of the individual. Prefacing a discussion of how Verses explores the interface of the personal and the cosmic, the pages that follow use an analysis of the roundel ‘Tune me, O Lord’ to illuminate some of the key features of Rossetti’s late poetic practice and to highlight the interface she forges between lyric form and participation in the Sacraments. In the second section, I explore the ecclesiastical aspects of the volume in more detail as I discuss how Rossetti treats the poems themselves as liturgical spaces. I then take my reading of the volume’s verbal–visual dynamic forward as I consider how the poems interrogate theological concepts through their motifs of gazing, looking and keeping vigil. Concluding, I suggest how Rossetti recognises God as a waiting partner and, in the poems that end the volume, enacts the responsive shaping of self for which this recognition calls.

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‘Tune me, O Lord’: Responding to God’s touch As the twenty-first of the forty-two poems in the fourth section of Verses, ‘Gifts and Graces’, ‘Tune me, O Lord’ stands at the heart of Rossetti’s message regarding the right reception of love and grace. It exemplifies what Dieleman describes as the poetic potential to draw ‘viewer-readers into lingering encounter with the Christ within them’.11 Tune me, O Lord, into one harmony With Thee, one full responsive vibrant chord: Unto Thy praise all love and melody, Tune me, O Lord. Thus need I flee nor death, nor fire, nor sword: A little while these be, then cease to be, And sent by Thee not these should be abhorred. Devil and world, gird me with strength to flee, To flee the flesh, and arm me with Thy word: As Thy Heart is to my heart, unto Thee Tune me, O Lord. (CP, p. 463)

By using the form of the roundel as a vehicle for poetic prayer, Rossetti embodies the musicality of the lyre strings and extends her project of Christianising fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In his discussion of the adaptation of the roundel from the medieval French rondeaux, Rikki Roosksby describes how, for Algernon Charles Swinburne, poetic composition became ‘an attempt at self discipline’.12 In ‘Tune me, O Lord’, Rossetti baptises the form afresh by re-working it as a space of divine encounter and by transforming the kind of discipline with which Swinburne was concerned into the discipline of Christian spirituality. The concentrated intensity of each line of the roundel invites the reader to pause and make the prayer her own (see pp. 193–4 above). As Kent notes, the speaker’s prayer that God would ‘tune’ her and transform her into ‘one full responsive vibrant chord’ echoes the words of George Herbert’s ‘Denial’: ‘O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast.’13 Recalling the sense of the final lines of Herbert’s poem – which uses a rhyming couplet to signal that the prayer, ‘mend my rhyme’ (30), has already been answered – Rossetti puns on the pronunciation of ‘word’ as ‘ward’ to conflate God’s act of keeping ward (or watch) with the protection that a grounding in the Bible provides



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(10).14 This pun carries a particular resonance when the roundel is read in the context of The Face of the Deep where it glosses the divine promise: ‘I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely’ (Rev. 21.6). Incorporating this into a recognition that the penitent is ‘also free to accept or to decline’ God’s free gift of life and protection, Rossetti draws attention to the messages it intimates regarding the necessity of human responsiveness (FD, p. 489). The association that ‘Tune me, O Lord’ makes between right-tuning and the choice to accept one’s cross resonates with Herbert’s ‘Easter’, a poem that, with ‘Denial’, he includes in The Temple (1633). In this, the self is imagined as a lute whose strings are most responsive when they are stretched out after the pattern of Christ on the cross. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy art. The cross taught all wood to resound his name, Who bore the same. His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key Is best to celebrate this most high day. (WP, ii, pp. 34–5)

Rowan Williams suggests that Augustine’s comments on Psalm 150 must have been in Herbert’s mind when he penned these lines.15 Considering Augustine’s response to the words ‘Let them sing praises unto him with tabret and harp’ (Ps. 150.3), he cites from his reflections that meditate on the significance that, in both instruments, ‘ordinary flesh is being “crucified”’ to produce sound: And what does Paul the apostle say about making his harp sound more sharp and clear? ‘Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward (extentus) to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call’ (Phil. 3.13, 14). So he stretched himself out; Christ touched him, and the sweetness of truth gave tongue.16

Through its appropriation of Paul’s instruction to the Ephesians, ‘put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’ (Eph. 6.11), the concluding lines of ‘Tune me, O Lord’ gesture to Augustine’s emphasis on what it means to ‘strain forward’ with Paul. As Williams recognises, it is the recollection of this emphasis that fuels Herbert’s reflection that, though the believer is ‘crucified with Christ’, he lives a new life in accordance with the spirit rather than the flesh (Gal. 2.20). Rossetti’s image of the self as God’s instrument emphasises the synchronism that Augustine and Herbert indicate

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as the basis of the relationship between Christ and humanity. As her roundel indicates, the Passion is the life-force of each string that sounds in the ‘one harmony’ of grace (1). Reading the closing verse of the roundel in the context of Paul’s words to the Galatians means that its recognition, of the need to ‘flee the flesh’ (9), can be understood as indicative of the movement from life in the ‘flesh’ to new life in the ‘spirit’. ‘Tune me, O Lord’ pivots on the biblical phrase ‘a little while’ (6). While Jeremiah includes this phrase in his warning of the oncoming overthrow of Babylon (51.33), the writer of Hebrews uses it to encourage patience and hope in anticipation of Christ’s coming (10.37). In addition to incorporating it into ‘Tune me, O Lord’, Rossetti includes it in two other poems in Verses and appends it as part of the title of another.17 In all four instances, she detaches it from any particular biblical reference. Dinah Roe suggests that it is through this method of uprooting biblical phrases that Rossetti bridges the gap between ‘different parts of the Old Testament and between the Old Testament and the New’.18 In ‘Tune me, O Lord’, Rossetti heightens the typological potential of the words ‘a little while’ by paying particular attention to how they resonate with an ongoing reassessment of temporality. This involves an attempt to adopt the perspective of eternity. In her move towards this perspective, the speaker is able to recognise the speed in which time passes and takes comfort that the trials of lived experience will shortly ‘cease to be’ (6). The position of ‘Tune me, O Lord’ in the centre of both the sequence and the volume is significant. After suggesting how ‘the groupings in Verses represent deliberate sequences’, Dolores Rosenblum describes the ‘Chinese-box’ effect that Rossetti forges as she ‘follows out a train of associations which [are] almost “free,” in that rhymes call up meanings that call up other rhymes and meanings and which circle round […] to underlying obsessions and fixations […] and simultaneously break through to new grounds of feeling’.19 The echoes and associations that Rossetti establishes in her descriptions of the stretching and re-shaping of the self and in her re-assessments of worldly-based visions of temporality are accentuated by the prayer-book-like appearance of Verses. Set in the intratextual framework of the text, the figuration of the self as a lyre or lute filters out and informs the other poems. In the first edition of Verses, ‘Tune me, O Lord’ is framed together – in the double red lines that decorate the volume – with the eight-line lyric ‘Lord, I am feeble and of mean account.’ In this preceding poem, the speaker petitions Christ for ‘grace to hear and grace to see’ and recognises that a tangible experience of his presence would enable her to ‘make but slight account | Of



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aught beside wherein to sink or mount’ (CP, p. 463: 4, 7–8). Read alongside the recognition that Christ is able and willing to descend to the level of the ‘feeble’ and weak penitent, the dynamic of tuning and harmonising in ‘Tune me, O Lord’ can be understood in terms of the Incarnational intervention of creator with created world. Both the figures – of Christ’s descent to earth and of the fine-tuning of the subject – recur and merge through the remainder of the volume and give shape to a re-visioning of personhood through theosis, or the ‘divinization’ of the individual life. For instance, in ‘Sursum Corda’ (a poem that Rossetti includes towards the end of the final section and titles after the preface of the Eucharistic Prayer), Christ responds to the individual weakness by ‘stoop[ing]’ down in order that he might ‘take’ the penitent up to be where he is and tune her heart aright (CP, pp. 519–20: 1, 6).

The space of the church Considering the many allusions in Verses to liturgical symbols such as incense, candles and crucifixes, Emma Mason suggests that ‘it is as if Rossetti forges the poem as a church space in the manner of George Herbert in The Temple (1633) or Isaac Williams in The Cathedral (1838), decorating its interior to invite contemplation on deeper religious secrets’.20 Foregrounding his later volume of poetry, The Altar (1847), which Rossetti appreciates for the spiritual guidance it offers (Letters 952: 2 December 1881), Williams’s The Cathedral promotes the extraction of ‘moral and religious instruction from visible objects’ and, taking ‘hints’ from Herbert’s Temple, focuses particularly on the architectural features of the cathedral building and of the objects inside.21 Building on Mason’s perception of the poems in Verses as indicative of church spaces, the discussion that follows details their engagement with the words of the liturgy, the consecrated building and, by extension, with the nature of personhood. Situating Rossetti in a long devotional tradition that looks beyond the theology of her immediate contemporaries, I suggest how her representation of ecclesiastical space not only draws on the models offered in The Temple and The Cathedral but also looks back to the apophatic tradition of theology and anticipates Karl Barth’s argument that the church, ‘situated on this side of the abyss which separates men from God, is the place where the eternity of revelation is transformed into a temporal, concrete, directly visible thing in the world’.22 While Barth represents the church as ‘a company’ whose ‘visibility […] forces invisibility upon our notice’ and ‘directs our attention towards God’, his insights nonetheless offer a helpful tool in thinking

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about Rossetti’s poetic representations of the ecclesiastical space.23 In particular, his comments on the ‘veritable God-sickness’ that the church cultivates can be helpfully adopted as a lens through which to explore Rossetti’s contextualisation of the doctrine of analogy within the apophatic tradition of theology.24 Rossetti’s sympathy for ceremonial ritual is particularly evident in her continued poetic exploration of how the spatial dynamics of the church building and its decoration showcase the pilgrim’s progress towards heaven. As I noted in Chapter 1, the Anglo-Catholic recognition of the Eucharist as the reception of Christ’s resurrected body (or ‘Real Presence’) involved the placing of the communion table, rather than the pulpit, as the visual and liturgical focus of the church. In her discussion of the Oxford Movement, Evelyn Underhill draws attention to the re-ordering of the church space to meet prescribed ritualist requirements. She writes: The character of the Anglican revival, as fundamentally a re-awakening of worship, a renewed response to the Holy, is fully realized when we come to the second phase of the movement, with its intense concentration on the details of corporate devotion. This impassioned ritualism is easily discredited […] But it was in fact the outward expression of a deeply founded life of worship and self-oblation; which could not be content with less than perfection in all that belonged to the service of God.25

By the ‘second phase of the movement’, Underhill denotes the years that followed John Henry Newman’s secession in 1845. In his survey of the ‘countercultural’ presence of Tractarianism, John Shelton Reed records that it is this second phase that is ‘largely forgotten’ by scholarship.26 I propose that bringing Rossetti’s poetry into dialogue with this phrase of ecclesiastical renewal enables a move beyond questions to influence to an informed appreciation of her contribution to the Tractarian project. In a sermon that he published during his time as the perpetual curate at Christ Church, Albany Street, Henry Burrows articulates a characteristically ritualist concern with how the space of the church enables the believer to contemplate the wonders of heaven. The painted windows are to remind us of the Saviour or of just men made perfect; the music is to be faint echo of the everlasting chant, of the sound of many waters, of harpers harping, of cherubim and seraphim continually crying, of the song of Moses and the Lamb. The altar, the chancel, are typical of things invisible.27



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Signalling Rossetti’s attentiveness to ‘aesthetic-religious relations’, Dieleman describes how Christ Church ‘underwent at least four major renovation projects over some 35 years to conform to new sacramental vision for church architecture’.28 Rossetti’s letters and devotional writings reveal her support for these projects. Writing to her friend Caroline Gemmer in 1870, she enthuses about the ‘most delightful decoration’ that was used in Christ Church at Christmas: ‘a large red cross reared on high in the Chancel arch’ (Letters 404: 4 February 1870). Three years later, and in another letter to Gemmer, she comments: ‘Christ Church is so improved since the old days of its plainness, – to use no stronger word –: even the far-from-beautiful faith-hope-&-charity window has been replaced by (I hope) something better (Letters 511: February 1873). Through the carefully shaped lyrics of Verses, her focus turns to the longings that the ritual decorations of crosses and windows invoke and to the insights that are enabled by participation in the liturgy. The first section heading of Verses, “Out of the Deep have I Called unto Thee, O Lord”, is taken from Psalm 130.1. Commenting on this verse, Augustine exclaims: ‘and what else is that profundum, that abyss, but the whole of our present life’.29 Seeing the world, with Augustine, as a place not only ‘of exhilarating mysteriousness, but [also] of agonizingly frustrating ignorance’, Rossetti follows the lead he sets in the Confessions and shapes the voice of her poetic persona after the aspiration of the Psalmist who seeks to rise above what is finite.30 Attending to the significance of the fact that one-fifth of the poems in Verses are sonnets, Sharon Smulders indicates Rossetti’s prioritisation of the ‘form best suited to contain the soul’s inherent feeling of personality and to express its commitment to God’.31 From the outset, the sonnets return to Rossetti’s early perception of the form of translating the Psalms into poetry and express how prayer and worship interrogate the boundaries of the terrestrial and touch the threshold of the eternal. The volume opens with ‘Alone Lord God’: Alone Lord God, in Whom our trust and peace, Our love and our desire, glow bright with hope; Lift us above this transitory scope Of earth, these pleasures that begin and cease, This moon which wanes, these seasons which decrease: We turn to Thee; as on an eastern slope Wheat feels the dawn beneath night’s lingering cope, Bending and stretching sunward ere it sees. Alone Lord God, we see not yet we know; By love we dwell with patience and desire,

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  And loving so and so desiring pray;   Thy will be done in earth as heaven today; As yesterday it was, tomorrow so; Love offering love on love’s self-feeding fire. (CP, p. 389)

In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti includes this sonnet as part of a gloss on Revelation 11.1, ‘And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.’ In her discussion of the ‘reed’, which she associates with the ‘bruised reed’ of Isaiah 42.3, she contemplates the fact of a weak instrument being ‘consecrated as a measure of what is holy’ (p. 286). She then suggests: ‘when we shrink appalled from the holiness of our calling, privileges, vocation, there is comfort for us in [this] reed’ (ibid.). Recognising that the ‘practice of the celestial Temple’ should be the ‘theory of each terrestrial temple, whether of hewn stone and carved work, or of flesh blood’, she highlights the awful task of measurement that John was asked to undertake and emphasises his and – by implication – our need for transmuted strength and grace (p. 287). From John’s obedience to the task, she takes the lesson that right living is when ‘Christ is felt to be that true and only living Centre to which all living life gravitates’ (p. 288). Situated after these lines, ‘Alone Lord God’ invites the reader to make a connection between the individual reed and the ‘wheat’ that, representative of the church body, gravitates upward in its worship: ‘bending and stretching’ towards Christ, the ultimate Son (8). When the sonnet is read as an invitation into the space of Verses, the dynamic progression that it describes takes on a new resonance. By opening it with an address to God and by repeating collective pronouns, Rossetti draws attention to the expression of communal worship. Through the poem’s movement towards the echo of the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 610), ‘Thy will be done in earth as heaven today; | As yesterday it was, tomorrow so’ (12–13), the reader’s gaze is orientated away from ‘this transitory scope’ (3) and towards the eternal. For the Anglo-Catholic, the allusion to turning to God ‘as on an eastern slope’ (6) would have brought to mind the renewed apostolic practice of facing east in prayer.32 Rooted in Christ’s promise, ‘For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of Son of man be’ (Matt. 24.27), adherence to this practice highlights the need to remain alert for signs of Christ’s Second Coming. Critic Horton Davis records that the issue over whether the clergy should ‘employ the eastward position (facing the altar, with their backs towards the worshippers) in the celebration of Holy Communion



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– became an important one because of its implications’.33 The eastern position was, for the Anglo-Catholics, a sign that the Eucharist was a sacrifice and the communion table an altar. Rossetti’s emphasis, in the sestet of ‘Alone Lord God’, on the worshipper as a desiring being who finds solidarity in the community of saints and who offers her love on the altar of ‘love’s self-feeding fire’ (14), signals a clear commitment to the belief that the church provides a space where symbols and liturgies invite the penitent to renounce self-centredness and experience in herself the convergence of time with eternity. Returning to Mason’s suggestion that ‘Rossetti forges the [devotional] poem as a church space’, the movement towards the fiery altar that ‘Alone Lord God’ maps out can be read in terms of the communicant’s progression towards participation in the Eucharist. Although the use of Psalm 130.1 for the title of the opening section of Verses invokes the prayer of the individual (“Out of the Deep have I Called unto Thee, O Lord”), it is not until its sixth sonnet, ‘O Lord, I am ashamed to seek Thy Face’, that the reference to the individual ‘I’ reappears. Through this sonnet, the speaker expresses her sense of alienation from ‘Thy saints’ who know and experience divine grace (CP, p. 391: 2). Pleading with God, she asks that he might ‘purge [her] heart’ and enable her to taste ‘Thy hidden Sweetness’ and ‘see | Thy hidden Beauty in the holy place’ (6, 7–8). Reading these lines in the context of Rossetti’s devotional corpus means appreciating their allusions to the tactility of tasting the communion bread and of catching glimpses of divine ‘Beauty’ through an engagement with ritualist decoration. Her ongoing prayer that Christ would enable believers to ‘discern Thee hidden in Thy Blessed Sacrament’ is particularly indicative of a recognition that the mysteries of the Sacrament can only be glimpsed by the individual through analogical means (AD, prayer 17). Her allusion to the ‘Sweetness’ of the Sacrament indicates its regenerative properties and recalls the longing of Herbert’s lyric ‘I’ in ‘The Banquet’, who celebrates God’s unique power and prerogative to impart ‘sweetness’ to the supplicant (WP, i, pp. 193–4). In the volta of ‘O Lord, I am ashamed’ Rossetti stresses that it is penitence that launches the individual on to the path towards unity with the saints and to the reception of this ‘sweetness’. Moreover, the plea, ‘O Thou Who callest sinners to repent, | Call me Thy sinner unto penitence’ (9–10), signals a recognition of penitence as a divinely bestowed gift that transforms the recipient afresh. It is through the speaker’s shame over her ‘many sins’ that she aspires to know ‘the greater love’ (11) that comes from much forgiveness, and to overcome ‘Devil and shifting world and fleshly sense’ (13). The implication of these lines is that once the process of penitence has broken down the worldly desires of

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the individual sinner she is able to receive the grace that enables participation in the divine life. The sonnet that follows ‘O Lord, I am ashamed’ opens with the words, ‘It is not death, O Christ, to die for Thee’. In this, Rossetti continues to contemplate what it means to join the saints who have been transformed through divine grace. After praising Christ for how he bestows beauty on the saints who are ‘Loving and loved thro’ all eternity’ (8), she voices the hope of the individual who strives to assimilate her own ‘humble hopeful quiet psalm’ into the wider communion (CP, p. 392: 11). In The Face of the Deep, she uses the sonnet to accompany her comments on Revelation 6.1: ‘And when He had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony they held.’ Establishing how a ‘martyr of this generation is the spiritual descendent of [these] martyrs of yore’, she contemplates the convergence of the Church Militant with the Church Triumphant and affirms ‘All who are united to Christ are thereby united to one another.’ She then meditates on how ‘The Communion of Saints flows in one continuous stream from the One Fountain Head; descends as one unbroken chain link by link from that irremovable anchor our only hope, the Cross of Christ’ (FD, pp. 209–10). Pointing out that St John’s own brother, St James, would have been among the communion of martyrs he describes, Rossetti wonders that ‘we find no trace of human recognition, of human tenderness’ (p. 210). She suggests that John’s reserve on this count is ‘perhaps [given] for our sakes, lest we should presume to people heaven with our own cherished dead as to turn them into idols in the very shrine and Presence of Christ’ (ibid.). In the sonnet, it is by focusing on the ‘anchor’ that is the ‘Cross of Christ’ that the speaker finds the authority to speak of and with the saints. Embodying the praying subject, the words of the sestet enact the response of self-oblation that Christ’s passion calls for. Finding in her ‘heart-field’ the small offerings of ‘sun-courting heliotrope’, ‘myrrh’ and ‘balm’, the speaker’s ‘psalm’ rises up and is united with the worship of the saints (13–14, 11). It is the revelation that the saints carry no power themselves but are enlivened by Christ’s all-embracing grace that gives the speakers of ‘O Lord, I am ashamed’ and ‘It is not death’ the confidence to bring their individuality into alignment with the wider communion. Enveloped in Verses by sonnets that use collective pronouns, the laments in both poems signal the mystery through which the immutable self comes to a realisation of her place as a member of a larger body, thereby losing a sense of individuality as burden. Filtering out from the poems is an awareness of the tension that comes from an understanding that, although



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bound to the terrestrial present, one’s true ‘citizenship’ is with the saints in heaven (‘Lord, grant us eyes to see and ears to hear,’ p. 392). Repeatedly through the first section, Rossetti draws on the yearning of the individual who longs to be ‘made one with [Christ’s] own faithful ones’ (‘Lord, make me one with Thine own faithful ones,’ pp. 395–6: 1) to expose the ache at the heart of the church. This is the ache that Barth defines as the recognition of being ‘situated on this side of the abyss which separates men from God’ (see p. 217 above). The heading that Rossetti gives the second section of Verses, ‘Christ our All in All’, comprises a paraphrase of St Paul’s affirmation that the church can be described as the ‘fullness’ of Christ since it is filled by him who ‘filleth all in all’ (Eph. 1.23). By appropriating these words, Rossetti forges a frame, akin to the church space, in which the reader can bring her meditation into unity with the forms of the Prayer Book. By taking phrases from the Prayer Book Psalter as titles for a number of poems that she includes in ‘Christ our All in All’, she reinforces the unity that is forged when the church community follow the practice of the Apostolic Church and pray the ‘I’ Psalms together. For instance, by appending the title “Thou art Fairer than the children of men” (Ps. 45.2) to a poem that she had previously included in Time Flies, she brings the search for appropriate appellations for Christ that it expresses into dialogue with the Psalmist’s expression of praise and worship. Whereas the poem describes Christ as it considers how ‘He is Rose of Sharon […] He is Lily of the Valley’ (CP, p. 409: 3, 5), its new title addresses him. Later in the section, the addition of another Psalm-derived title performs the re-alignment of the individual’s cry with liturgical expression. Taking for a title the verse “Like as the hart desireth the water brooks” (Ps. 42.1), Rossetti transforms a poem that she had previously included in The Face of the Deep (CP, pp. 416–17: 1). She calls on the reader to associate the Psalmist with the penitent who yearns for the ‘look’ (9) with which Christ convicts and restores Peter (Lk. 22.61) when she brings the words of the Psalm into dialogue with the speaker’s request that Christ ‘Turn, as once turning | Thou didst behold Thy Saint | In deadly extremity’ (6–8). As the second part of this chapter reveals, Rossetti returns to explore this ‘look’ in several of the poems that she includes in the third section of Verses, ‘Some Feasts and Fasts’. While Kent suggests that whereas ‘Christ our All in All’ ‘dramatizes the gracious intervention of Christ into the individual’s heart’ and ‘Some Feasts and Fasts’ ‘traces the consequences of Christ’s historical intervention into time as it is recreated and commemorated annually by the church’, I want to foreground the intratextual framework of the volume and suggest

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how the unifying figure of Christ’s ‘look’ signals the profound harmonisation between the heart of the individual and the Church community.34 By accentuating the interface between church liturgy and personal devotion, ‘Some Feasts and Fasts’ continues the project of echoing the worshipper’s movement towards the Eucharistic sacrifice. Although most of the titles correspond to the festivals of the church and thereby recall the precedent of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827), some key differences remain. Whereas Keble offers a poem for each day set out in the Book of Common Prayer, Rossetti is more selective. While she omits some days, she provides more than one poem for others (e.g. for the morning, day and evening of Good Friday). Her addition of vigils for some of the Saints Days and the allocation of some poems to parts of the day indicates that she is looking beyond the framework of the Christian Year and recalling the patterning of the ancient and medieval breviaries upon which the Prayer Book is based. In The Face of the Deep, she expresses dissatisfaction with the state of the Church and exclaims: ‘our solemn feasts languish, and our fasts where are they?’ (p. 243). By using the titles of the poems in Verses to affirm the significance of these ‘feasts’ and ‘fasts’, she not only extends the Tractarian project of upholding apostolic precept but makes this a living and active principle for the individual soul as she perseveres through the ‘vigil of our mortality’ (FD, p. 541). Before returning to ‘Some Feasts and Fasts’ and considering how Rossetti represents vision in her St Peter poems and her sonnet, ‘Vigil of St. Bartholomew’, the paragraphs below suggest how she carries the theme of vigil-keeping through Verses and repeatedly returns to it as an underlying principle of personhood. In the sixth section of Verses, ‘Divers Worlds. Time and Eternity’, Rossetti draws on the imagery and symbol of ritual to articulate what it means to understand life as a Vigil and to reveal the unsettling disjunction between the material and divine worlds. An analysis of the composition history of the opening lyric of the section, ‘Earth has clear call of daily bells’, neatly illustrates her ongoing engagement with the interface between typology and liturgy. Composed on 6 August 1858 as part of a longer (unpublished) poem, “Yet a Little While”, and altered for inclusion in Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) and then again for Verses, the changes that Rossetti makes to the poem over the course of thirtyfive years demonstrate her attention to detailed editing. “Yet a Little While” opens with the lament that ‘These days are long before I die’ (CP, pp. 804–6: 1). In the third and fourth stanzas (that are later revised to create the poem ‘Vanity of Vanities’, which Rossetti also includes in Time Flies and Verses), the speaker proceeds to contemplate how ‘the downfall of an Autumn leaf ’ (14), ‘A young fruit cankered on its stalk’ (21) and ‘A strong bird snared for all his wings’ (22)



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can give rise to pangs of grief. The closing verses (which provide the basis for the poem with which I am concerned) contextualise this grief by their allusion to a wider transcendental perspective. We have clear call of daily bells, A dimness where the anthems are, A chancel vault of sky and star, A thunder if the organ swells: Alas our daily life – what else? – Is not in tune with daily bells You have deep pause betwixt the chimes Of earth and heaven, a patient pause Yet glad with rest by certain laws: You look and long: while oftentimes Precursive flush of morning climes And air vibrates with coming chimes. (37–48)

Drawing on the symbolism of the church space, these lines offer a revised perspective on the emptiness of ‘our daily life’ (41) and express the movement away from the Romantic worship of nature to the Christian belief that the natural world should be understood through analogy. While Rossetti begins “Yet a Little While” with the image of the ‘nightingale forlorn’ who ‘swells her heart to extasy [sic] | Until it bursts and she can die’ (3, 5–6), she uses the final verses of the poem to enact a shift towards a Tractarian-inflected understanding of analogical perception. As Roe explains, Rossetti’s treatment of the imagery of Romanticism is informed by Tractarian poetry, which reworks ‘the sense of nature’s relationship to the human imagination to imbue it with transcendent, explicitly Christian meaning’.35 In “Yet a Little While”, by taking the image of the ‘nightingale forlorn’ from the close of John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and by coupling it with the apocalyptic image of the swelling of earthly music as it shadows forth the spiritual, Rossetti indicates her commitment to regarding the natural world after the pattern of the Church Fathers. In Tract 89 of the Tracts of the Times, Keble suggests that the Fathers avoided idolising external things by perceiving them ‘either as fraught with imaginative associations, or as parabolical lessons of conduct, or as a symbolical language in which God speaks to us of a world out of sight’.36 In the revised versions of her early lyric, Rossetti accentuates the aspects of each type of perception that Keble describes and considers the lessons that the space of the church can teach about analogical interpretation.

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By linking liturgical anthems, the chancel vault and the organ to the urgent call of the ‘daily bells’ (42), Rossetti imbues them with the characteristics of prophecy. As material receptacles of spiritual substance, they function to bring the community of worshippers into harmony with the eternal. The description of the ‘chancel vault of sky and star’ linguistically maps the arching space of the chancel and particularly envisions the Victorian high gothic style of All Saints, Margaret Street, an Anglo-Catholic church that had been commissioned and designed in 1849. It was finally consecrated in 1859; Rossetti would come to have a more personal attachment to it the following year when her sister Maria entered as a novice. Taking up one third of the church, the immense chancel vault creates a dramatic effect as it fosters an appreciative awe of the glories of heaven. Above the organ pipes and the ornamental frescos designed by Pre-Raphaelite artist William Dyce, the arched chancel vault is painted royal blue and covered with gold stars.37 Read in terms of this ecclesiastical space, Rossetti’s lyric can be taken as an invitation to the pilgrim who ‘look[s] and long[s]’ (46) for a glimpse of eternity in the vibrations of the chimes and in the ‘Precursive flush of morning climes’ that break into the receptive space of liturgical worship. By using regular iambic tetrameter to capture the ‘thunder’ (40) of the organ, and by using arched rhyme to replicate the harmony of the church music, the two verses work as a counterpart to Dyce’s frescos. Just as the frescos depict the saints looking up to an enthroned Christ, Rossetti’s lyric envisions the upward longing of those ‘called to be saints’ (1 Cor. 1.2). The ‘dimness where the anthems are’ (38) recalls the haze of incense accompanying the service and suggests that, as the natural world reveals signs of the Creator, the sights and sounds of the church represent analogical shadows of the eternal. In her first revision of ‘Earth has clear call’ for Time Flies, Rossetti indicates an increased appreciation of the church’s place on the threshold of eternity. Among other alterations, she changes the word ‘dimness’ for the eschatological term ‘rapture’ and the word ‘sky’ for the apophatic-inflected ‘gloom’. She also omits the personal pronouns. Replacing ‘you’ with ‘saints’, she foregrounds her concern with repudiating the late Victorian culture of individualism. Earth has a clear call of daily bells, A rapture where the anthems are, A chancel-vault of gloom and star, A thunder when the organ swells: Alas, man’s daily life – what else? – Is out of tune with daily bells.



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While Paradise accords the chimes Of Earth and Heaven: its patient pause Is rest fulfilling music’s laws. Saints sit and gaze, where oftentimes Precursive flush of morning climbs And air vibrates with coming chimes. (TF, 11 March: p. 50)

In the previous entry Rossetti comments on the Prayer Book’s ‘Table of days upon which Easter can possibly fall’ and draws attention to the twelve days that happen, every year, to be included in the days of Lent (10 March: p. 49). She suggests that ‘for nearly nineteen centuries these twelve solemn days, like twelve Sybils arrayed in mourning robes, have year by year sounded an alarm throughout the Church’s holy mountain; calling on the faithful to bewail the past, amend the present, face the future’ (ibid.). By incorporating ‘Earth has clear call’ into the volume to represent the first of these prophetic ‘Sybils’, Rossetti draws attention to the urgency of its message. By changing ‘if the organ swells’ to ‘when the organ swells’ (4), she expresses a surer recognition that the earthly music conveys something of the mystery of the transcendent. Added to this, the introduction of the word ‘gloom’ signals the necessity of an apophatic approach whereby the symbolism of the church gives rise to the believer’s sense of lack (3); the sounds of the ‘bells’ and ‘anthems’ can only gesture to what is unknowable to those in the world and the huge ‘chancel-vault’ becomes representative of the boundary that divides earth from heaven (1, 2, 3). When Rossetti includes the lyrics in Verses, she makes further alterations. By switching around the second and third lines, she illuminates the association between the earth and the ‘chancel-vault’. Using the poem to open the ‘Divers Worlds’ section, she draws attention to its assessment of the disjunction between time and eternity and to its concluding warning: ‘air vibrates with coming chimes’ (12). In the context of Verses in its entirety, the sensory experience that the poem describes as it imagines how the ecclesiastical sights and sounds break in to ordinary experience and call the pilgrim to adjust her vision can be understood in terms of the delineation of personhood. Recognising that ‘man’s daily life […] Is out of tune with daily bells’ (5–6), the need for keeping vigil is accentuated. Whereas in “Yet a Little While” Rossetti had used an inclusive pronoun in her pronouncement ‘our daily life […] is not in tune’ (41–2), the use of the more impersonal descriptor – ‘man’s’ – in the revised version indicates that the assessment offered is occurring at a distance. In the context of the ‘Divers Worlds’ section, the expression anticipates the refrain of the roundel

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that concludes the sequence ‘Man’s harvest is past’ (‘For All,’ p. 487: 1, 4, 11), and participates with it in enveloping the vision of the juxtaposition between time and eternity that the series of lyrics in-between offers. The message that the concluding roundel consolidates is that, although life might seem long, those who reach its end recognise that the time that has passed ‘fleeted so fast’ (4). Returning to ‘Earth has clear call’ with this message in mind means recognising that the ‘Saints’ who ‘sit and gaze’ (10) – whether they be artistic representations of the worshippers themselves in the church or the representations of saints departed – remain in the best position to receive divine revelation.

Saved by looking One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us. The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it It is at those moments when […] we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that befits holy things […] that is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire. (Simone Weil, Waiting for God)38

Simone Weil’s reflections on the act of turning towards the ‘perfect purity’ of God in order that the evil inside of us be burned by the fire of divine encounter offers a helpful basis from which to explore the theological implications of the visual motifs in Verses. Considering Rossetti’s association of looking with rightorientation, the discussion below opens by analysing her treatment of keeping vigil. By focusing particularly on three poems in ‘Some Feasts and Fasts’ – ‘Vigil of St. Peter’, ‘St. Peter Once’ and ‘Vigil of St. Bartholomew’ – it highlights how she encourages emulating the patience and determination of biblical saints and martyrs. Turning to the fifth section of Verses, ‘The World: Self Destruction’, the final part of this discussion suggests how Rossetti warns against the epidemic effects of looking on what is harmful. The section above considered how, in her poem ‘Like as the hart desireth the water brooks’, Rossetti calls for the ‘look’ with which Christ convicts and restores Peter. In the four St Peter poems that she includes in ‘Some Feasts and Fasts’ she continues to explore the virtuosity of the moment when Jesus ‘turned and looked straight at Peter’ (Lk. 22.61). As Esther Hu’s important



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article reveals, it is through these poems that ‘Rossetti transfigures the Divine Look, which appears in the three stanzas in [John Keble’s] “St. Peter’s Day,” into a moment of sustained encounter: a gaze.’39 Particularly characteristic of the representation of visuality and virtuosity in Verses, ‘Vigil of St. Peter’ associates Christ’s sustained gaze with the Psalmist’s plea ‘Look well if there be any way of wickedness in me: and lead me in the way everlasting’ (139.24): O Jesu, gone so far apart Only my heart can follow Thee, That look which pierced St. Peter’s heart Turn now on me. Thou Who dost search me thro’ and thro’ And mark the crooked ways I went, Look on me, Lord, and make me too Thy penitent. (CP, p. 448)

In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti situates this poem after a gloss on both St John’s description of the ‘Son of man’ and his comment that ‘His eyes were as a flame of fire’ (Rev. 1.14). Continuing on from a prayer of adoration that begins with the words of Psalm 139.11, ‘Yea, darkness is no darkness with Thee,’ she reflects on biblical accounts of the sustained gaze between God and humanity: O Lord, Who beholding Adam and Eve in their misery didst find comfort for them, Who beholding David in his pollution spakest [sic] the word that he should not die; Thou, Lord, Who hast beheld all sinners from the first sinner, and wilt behold us all even unto the last; turn Thy face from our sins, but turn it not from us. These are the very Eyes which I myself at the last day may look upon, and which will look upon me. ‘In the Day of Judgment, good Lord, deliver us.’ (FD, p. 33)

When read directly after these lines, the poem’s initial allusion to Peter places him in a long tradition of human penitence reaching back to Adam and Eve. In the wider framework of The Face of the Deep, the allusion also works to consolidate the association between the biblical personages and the whole of humanity. This finds its ultimate expression in the concluding prayer of the volume that calls on Christ to ‘look upon us with Thy most gracious eyes, with the eyes of Thy most overcoming pity, with the eyes that recalled St. Peter to himself, to the Communion of Saints, to Thee’ (p. 551).

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In ‘Some Feasts and Fasts’, the appended title, ‘Vigil of St. Peter’, and the new context mean that the poem carries a different resonance. Along with Verses’s recurring allusions to the space of the church, the suggestion that the lyrics are to be read in terms of vigil-keeping invites us to read the speaker as a representative of the Christian community. In a sermon on the practices of the Apostolic Church, Newman describes how the Festivals of the Martyrs were ‘commonly ushered in by a Vigil or religious watching’ that lasted right through the night.40 Calling for endurance and patience, these vigils indicate the significant place of penitence and sorrow in the Christian journey. Extending her perception of penitence as a divine gift, and as the ‘shame which is glory and grace’ (Ecclesiasticus 4.21), Rossetti’s description of the ‘look which pierced St. Peter’s heart’ (3) can be understood in terms of the devastating encounter that the liturgical practice of vigil-keeping accentuates: in which the self is completely broken down in sin before being remade in grace. Although Christ’s look is credited with the power that enables the transformation of the self into ‘Thy penitent’ (8), the poem stresses the relational basis of personhood. The shift in meter that comes with the imperative dactyl ‘Look on me’ (7) signals the supreme effort involved in breaking out of present circumstances and turning to God. This is the effort that Weil describes, whereby mediocrity ‘comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire’. In Verses, the shock re-orientation that the poem enacts is brought to the fore by appearing among a series of lyrics that focus on the obedience and holiness of the saints. After the St Mary poems, in which Rossetti invites the reader to join in Gabriel’s cry ‘All hail!’ (‘Feast of the Annunciation’, CP, p. 446: 10), the internalization of Peter’s recognition of his sin is startling in its relevance for the spiritual experience of every Christian. In Chapter 3, I argued that whereas Roman Catholic meditations based on the Stabat Mater Dolorosa have the subject apply oneself to a biblical personage, the move that the speaker of Rossetti’s ‘Good Friday’ makes recalls the Reformed Protestant appropriation of the Passion narratives to individual spiritual development. Keeping this in mind means recognising the significance of the way in which, instead of giving a voice to the saint, the St Peter poems interiorise and express the experience that is available to every Christian. In the third St Peter poem, ‘St. Peter Once’, Rossetti continues to explore the lively dynamic of the relationship between creator and created subject. However, the waiting here is performed not solely by the penitent subject, but



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also by God. After internalising Peter’s question ‘Lord, dost Thou wash my feet?’ and expressing her recognition that Christ is knocking at her ‘closed heart more rugged than a rock’ (1, 3), the speaker translates the process of spiritual regeneration into dialogue. In apostrophising Christ, the sestet enacts Rossetti’s perception that there is ‘a sense in which heaven waits on earth: in which (if I dare say so) God waits on man’ (FD, p. 241). Yet still I hear Thee knocking, still I hear: ‘Open to Me, look on Me eye to eye,   That I may wring thy heart and make it whole; And teach thee love because I hold thee dear, And sup with thee in gladness soul with soul, And sup with thee in glory by and by.’ (CP, pp. 448–9: 10–14)

The waiting that vigil-keeping calls for is represented here in terms of the synchronism of relationship. As Hu comments, we see ‘penitent and Priest collaborate in the creation of the poem’s final making, penitential prayer ending more in Divine serenading […] than human poetic pleading’.41 In The Face of the Deep, the sonnet concludes Rossetti’s gloss on Revelation 3.20: ‘Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.’ Associating Christ’s promise to ‘sup’ with both the ‘Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’ and the ‘beatitude of final perseverance’, Rossetti provides a framework in which to read the closing lines of the sonnet and consolidates an understanding of how the Eucharist provides a taste of what is eternal (FD, p. 143). When ‘St. Peter Once’ is incorporated into Verses, the exchange between Christ and the penitent that is described is brought into the framework of the liturgical community who celebrate St Peter’s Feast Day. Consequently, the looking and eating that takes place becomes a matter of participating not only with Christ but also with the Community of Saints. Reading the poem through the lens of Weil’s reflections on beauty accentuates the close connections between watching and consuming that are forged. In a discussion on the sacramental glimpses of incarnate glory in the universe and in each human soul, Weil considers the impossibility of humanity’s inbuilt desire to ‘get behind beauty’ and to ‘feed upon it’. She writes, ‘the great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation.’42 It is on the promise of ‘gladness’ and glory’ that Rossetti’s sonnet remains focused (13, 14).

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The anticipation that Christ will, out of love, ‘sup’ with each penitent ‘soul with soul’ (13) is indicative of the consummation of the sustained gaze, ‘eye to eye’ (10), between creator and created subject. Following on from the St Peter poems, ‘Vigil of St. Bartholomew’ describes how an encounter with Christ enables the transfiguration of the penitent: Lord, to Thine own grant watchful hearts and eyes; Hearts strung to prayer, awake whilst eyelids sleep; Eyes patient till the end to watch and weep. So will sleep nourish power to wake and rise With Virgins who keep vigil and are wise, To sow among all sowers who shall reap, From out man’s deep to call Thy vaster deep, And tread the uphill track to Paradise. Sweet souls! so patient that they make no moan, So calm on journey that seem at rest,   So rapt in prayer that half they dwell in heaven   Thankful for all withheld and all things given; So lit by love that Christ shines manifest Transfiguring their aspects to His own. (CP, p. 451)

Throughout this sonnet, the necessity of retaining ‘watchful hearts and eyes’ (1) is stressed. It is through careful watchfulness that the saints who are described can catch Christ’s light of love and transfigure ‘their aspects to His own (14), thereby participating in the process of theosis. In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti uses the sonnet to preface her reflections on Revelation 19.9: ‘And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the Marriage Supper of the Lamb’ (FD, p. 439). As a result of its positioning, the poem’s allusions to ‘man’s deep’ that calls out to ‘Thy vaster deep’ of God (7) resonate with the calling and recalling that Revelation describes. The title and the positioning of the sonnet in Verses extends this dynamic still further by associating the ‘sweet souls’ with St Bartholomew (9). In Called to be Saints, Rossetti considers the biographical additions that speak of St Bartholomew’s martyrdom by a ‘death of torture’ (p. 362). Associating the saint with the harebell, she praises his ‘serenity’ in the face of persecution and promotes the ‘holiness of silence’ that recalls ‘an aspect of heaven’ (p. 376). Interpreting the ‘uphill track’ (8) as the path to martyrdom, and the ‘patient’ and ‘calm’ souls as those who follow in the path of Bartholomew (9, 10), she encourages the reader of Verses to persevere in her vigil keeping.



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The enfolding movement that the sonnet enacts, whereby the individual is incorporated into the eternal community of saints, is reinforced by the chiastic rhyme schemes (abbaabba and cdeedc). The self-contained and echoing structures that these schemes reproduce give the sonnet the quality of liturgy. Through her echoes and intimations of liturgy, Rossetti engages with the ‘transforming and re-shaping’ of created temporality that critic Jeremy Begbie associates with the Eucharist. Considering how the Eucharistic celebration offers ‘repeated opportunity for time-laden creatures to be incorporated into a temporal environment, established in Christ, in which past, present and future co-inhere, in such a way that our identities can be healed, recast and reformed’, Begbie highlights how it works to both stabilise and destabilise an understanding of personhood.43 Repeated Eucharistic celebration will of course provide consolation, a rooting again in the forgiveness forged at the cross. But because it settles us in Christ crucified and risen, in whom the new humanity of the future has been given in our midst, the Eucharist will provoke unsettledness, in ourselves and in relation to our surrounding reality, an acute sense that we have not yet reached our ‘rest’ (Heb. 4).44

These lines helpfully express the dynamic at work in Rossetti’s sonnet. While the fellowship she envisages is rooted in prayer and celebrates the stability that Christ provides, the fact that the pilgrims are only able to ‘half […] dwell in heaven’ is indicative of difficulty (11). Through heightening an awareness of the de-stability that arises from hanging between two worlds, she accentuates the need for keeping vigil. In addition, by using the intricate patterning of the sonnet form she calls readers to return again and again to the interpretative act where they can re-experience the chiasmic crossing over from earth to heaven. She thereby reinforces awareness that complete incorporation in Christ is not yet possible; thus the unsettledness that Begbie describes continues. The patience and hope that characterises the pilgrims in ‘Vigil of St. Bartholomew’ is thrown into sharp relief by the impatient rebellion described in the ten poems that comprise the fifth section of Verses, ‘The World: Self-Destruction’. Originally published in The Face of the Deep, these poems reveal the disastrous consequences of failing to watch and of losing all sense of the self-renunciation that Vigil and Sacrament call for. In the second, “Lord, save us, we perish”, Rossetti contrasts the hollow seductions of worldly things with the reality of God’s mercy. Recognising the frailty of man, she prays for Christ’s protection.

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Lest the god of this world blind us, Lest he speak us fair, Lest he forge a chain to bind us, Lest he bait a snare. (CP, p. 470: 4–7)

By associating the notion of ‘blind[ing]’ (4) with ‘bind[ing]’ (6), these lines indicate how illusive vision can work as a ‘snare’ (7) to trap the gazer into a state where he or she is incapable of accepting divine grace. Throughout The Face of the Deep, Rossetti registers the danger of gazing on ‘excessive wickedness, lest its immeasurable scale should fascinate us as if it were colossal without being monstrous’ (FD, p. 321). Acknowledging that while ‘we cannot prevent the World’s besetting, haunting, overshadowing us’, she recognises that we can choose not to give ‘her’ room in our hearts (ibid.). In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti follows a discussion of Revelation 17.6, in which St John describes how he ‘wondered with great admiration’ when he saw the Whore of the Babylon, with an encouragement that readers pray against ‘shallow judgements’ (FD, p. 402). Illustrating the danger of ill-informed wonder, she recalls the episode in the Divine Comedy where Dante writes of how he ‘dreamed of a woman stammering, squinting, lame of foot, maimed of hands, and ashy pale. He gazed on her […] and under his gaze her form straightened, her faced flushed, and her song loosened to the Siren’s song’ (p. 406). In her interpretation of this dream as an example of the sin of ‘Sloth’, Maria Rossetti describes how the singing of the foul woman captivates Dante and holds him entranced until a saintly lady, ‘probably Lucia or Illuminating Grace’, appears and rouses Virgil to go to his aid. Virgil then rips open the woman’s garment to reveal her belly, the stench from which breaks the ‘spell’.45 In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti rehearses the lessons that her sister takes from Dante’s dream in a sonnet on the dangers of gazing on the ‘foul’ woman who has the power to captivate the senses: Foul she is and ill-favoured, set askew: Gaze not upon her till thou dream her fair, Lest she should mesh thee in her wanton hair Adept in arts grown old yet ever new. Her heart lusts not for love, but thro’ and thro’ For blood, as spotted panther lusts in lair: No wine is in her cup, but filth is there Unutterable, with plagues hid out of view. Gaze not upon her, for her dancing whirl



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Turns giddy the fixed gazer presently: Gaze not upon her, lest thou be as she   When, at the far end of her long desire, Her scarlet vest and gold and gem and pearl   And she amid her pomp are set on fire. (CP, p. 470)

The words ‘foul’ (1), ‘mesh’ (3), ‘blood’ (6), ‘filth’ (7) and ‘plagues’ (8) all point to the possibility that spiritual infection can be caught through the misdirected gaze. Added to this, the stark warning, ‘lest thou be as she’ (11), offers a recognition of the porosity of the self as it negotiates its place in the world. The allusion to Dante with which Rossetti introduces the sonnet in The Face of the Deep, and the implicit gesture to the warning that is passed from father to son in Proverbs regarding the ‘strange woman’ who lures the gazer in with smooth words but who ultimately leads him to destruction (Prov. 5.3–5), indicates that the sonnet is speaking of a male being seduced. Critics including Colleen Hobbs and Lynda Palazzo indicate how the sonnet offers a proto-feminist message about female suffering and solidarity and, contextualising it in The Face of the Deep, emphasise the importance of reading it alongside the preceding sonnet: ‘Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful’.46 When ‘Babylon the Great’ is interpreted in the context of Verses, the gendered associations that it acquires through its gesture to the Dantean context and through its pairing with ‘Our Mothers’ are omitted. Here, by placing ‘Babylon the Great’ after a poem that focuses on man’s free choice over whether to become ‘Sinner, – or Saint’ (‘What is this above thy head’, CP, pp. 469–70: 35), Rossetti portrays Babylon as a figure of a more universal type of temptation and invites the reader to meditate on the nature of free will. She thereby accentuates the message that the decision to wait on God requires patience and the willingness to endure pain. Although Rossetti attributes to the Whore of Babylon the power to infect the unwary gazer with ‘plagues’, the assertion that her scheming is rendered completely ineffectual if the subject refuses to look on her is made particularly poignant by the sonnet’s new context. Together, the poems of ‘The World: Self Destruction’ present the reader with a startling vision of the alternative to the long journey of Christian perseverance. As the title of the first poem of the section reveals, the world is ‘A vain shadow’ that deceives the unwary subject. In ‘Babylon the Great’, Rossetti insists that by ‘dream[ing] [the Whore of Babylon] fair’ (2) the subject succumbs to the ultimate deception and is turned ‘giddy’ (10) by the spectacle; an encounter with the sustained gaze of Christ is, as a result, foregone. Rossetti’s emphasis on

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the necessity of keeping vigil and refusing to stray from the Communion of Saints is thus amplified and made accessible to a wider audience.

Conclusion: Continuing to wait In Verses, Rossetti situates ‘Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful’ among the concluding poems of the seventh section, ‘New Jerusalem and its Citizens’. In the poem that precedes this sonnet, she has a speaker look for the ‘saints [she has] known’ among the ‘cloud of Witnesses’ (‘So great a cloud of Witnesses’, CP, p. 499: 1). ‘Lift[ing] up [her] eyes’ to catch a glimpse of them (1), she uses this poem to launch into a meditation on the joys the saints experience in the ‘far-away home of beautiful Paradise’ (2). Recollecting the huge chasm that remains between earth and heaven, her speaker asks for a revelation of grace that will enable her to persevere: O sights of our lovely earth, O sound of our earthly sea, Speak to me of Paradise, of all blessed saints to me: Or keep silence touching them, and speak to my heart alone Of the Saint of saints, the King of kings, the Lamb on the Throne. (9–12)

These lines express the movement that the author of Hebrews describes when he contemplates the movement from a vision of the saints to an intense focus on Christ (Heb. 12.1–2). In his sermon ‘Helps after Heaven’, Burrows rehearses this movement when he suggests that ‘if we begin’ by conceiving of heaven of ‘a place for reunions […] we may be drawn on to something more advanced’.47 In ‘Our Mothers’ Rossetti recalls this suggestion and illuminates the movement from a focus on foremothers to a contemplation of the place where ‘God shall wipe away all tears’ (Rev. 7.17). Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful; Our Sisters, gracious in their life and death; To us each unforgetten memory saith: “Learn as we learned in life’s sufficient school, Work as we worked in patience of our rule, Walk as we walked, much less by sight than faith, Hope as we hoped, despite our slips and scathe, Fearful in joy and confident in dule.” I know not if they see us or can see;



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But if they see us in our painful day,   How looking back to earth from Paradise   Do tears not gather in those loving eyes? – Ah, happy eyes! whose tears are wiped away Whether or not you bear to look on me. (CP, p. 500)

By repeating the same chiastic rhyme scheme that she had used for ‘Vigil of St. Bartholomew’ (see p. 232 above), Rossetti uses these lines to enact the incorporation or ‘gather[ing]’ (12) of the saints into one body. Just as the speaker’s foremothers learned to walk ‘much less by sight than faith’ (7) so, she suggests, must she. While a contemplation of the destination of her cherished dead enables her to begin her journey, Rossetti makes it clear that the memories of the lessons they exemplified in life are more valuable than a concern over what they can see from heaven. By having the rhyme scheme of the sestet echo the patterning of the octave, the sonnet gestures back on itself to indicate how the memory of these lessons tempers the difficulties of the present ‘painful day’ (10). Commitment to the promise that the tears of loved ones will be ‘wiped away’ offers solace in the face of separation by death (13). Coming after ‘New Jerusalem and its Citizens’, the closing section of Verses, ‘Songs for Strangers and Pilgrims’, reflects on the waiting and discipline involved in Christian pilgrimage. Commenting on what may at first appear a surprising editorial choice, Smulders suggests understanding the final section in terms of Rossetti’s response to the need of her audience for ‘strength and encouragement to persist through time’s remainder’.48 Extending this perception, Dieleman considers how the dynamic that the final two sections enact is based on the structures of the liturgy. After the eschatological promise of communion, the participants still depart into a world in which they consider themselves but pilgrims. Similarly, the placement of ‘New Jerusalem and Its Citizens’ before the record of the pilgrims’ songs along the way suggests that the goal of New Jerusalem gives purpose to the pilgrimage and motivates the pilgrims’ songs. The ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth’ press forward to the heavenly city, but the idea of that city lies behind their everyday walk of life with its triumphs and sorrows. The future is alive in the present.49

A consideration of the influence of the Lyra Apostolica on Rossetti’s poetry adds to this recognition of the liturgical inflections in the final two sections of Verses. Newman closes the Lyra with three poems grouped together under the heading ‘Waiting for God’. The last of these, ‘The New Jerusalem’, is a translation

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of a liturgy from the Paris Breviary by Isaac Williams. While it describes the splendours of heaven, it is clear that these are still ‘to be unfolded’.50 Continuing on from the previous poem, Richard Hurrell Froude’s ‘Separation’, the speaker’s words proceed from the place where penitents suffer ‘a little doubt’ as they await the time when ‘all will […] be plain’.51 For Rossetti, this time of waiting is characterised by an extraordinary hope. Concluding with an overview of her representation of this hope, I want to consider how two of the poems that she includes towards the end of Verses express the lived reality of what it means for the ‘stranger and pilgrim’ to exist in the place of doubt and uncertainty. By giving the title “Whither the Tribes go up, even the Tribes of the Lord” (Ps. 122.4) to the poem with which she had concluded Called to be Saints, Rossetti brings her expression of pilgrimage into dialogue with the words of the Psalmist (CS, p. 518; CP, p. 506). Recalling Isaiah’s declaration ‘I have set my face like a flint’ (50.7) and Jesus’s perseverance as ‘he set his face to go to Jerusalem’ (Lk. 9.51), Rossetti expresses the solidarity in the Christian journey: ‘Our face is set like flint against our trouble’ (9). Throughout the poem, a visceral sense of anticipation is intensified and indicates the sure hope that, although they ‘toil’ in present separation (15), the pilgrims will eventually participate in eternity. The increasing certainty of this hope repudiates the illusive promise of satisfaction offered by ‘This bubble-life tumultuous’ (16); although God might bestow ‘comfort’ when he reveals his promises through the ‘rainbow-coloured’ environment (12, 11), the poem suggests that any comfort here should inspire the believer to persevere onwards toward the heavenly Jerusalem. The message, ‘So brief a sorrow can be scarcely sorrow’ (3), is brought to the conclusive realisation that holy aspiration engenders the presence of eternity in the individual. As she continues to articulate the association between an awareness of God’s presence and the perseverance to continue on the Christian pilgrimage, Rossetti uses ‘All heaven is blazing yet’ to express the felt experience of hope. She first published this poem in Time Flies; while the first two cross-rhymed quatrains provide a meditation for 10 October, the second two are given as the entry for 11 October. Incorporating the poem into Verses, she changes the quatrains into octets and revises the imperative third line from ‘Make haste, O Sun’ to ‘Make haste, ‘unshadowing sun’. All heaven is blazing yet With the meridian sun: Make haste, unshadowing sun, make haste to set; O lifeless life, have done.



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I choose what once I chose: What I once I willed, I will: Only the heart its own bereavement knows; O clamorous heart, lie still. That which I chose, I choose; That which I willed, I will; That which I once refused, I still refuse: O hope deferred, be still. That which I chose and choose And will is Jesus’ Will: He hath not lost his life who seems to lose: O hope deferred, hope still. (CP, p. 525)

These lines capture the sacramental tension between incorporation in Christ and unsettledness in the self and the world. While heaven remains unchangeable and ‘blazing yet’ (1), the speaker awaits the time when she can experience its joy in full. Her task as a ‘stranger and pilgrim’ in the world is to shape herself and her desires in accordance with a hope that must remain ‘deferred’ (12, 16). I argue that it is also to accept suffering. While ‘Alone Lord God’ opens Verses by representing God as the sun drawing the wheat and the sparks to himself, ‘All heaven is blazing yet’ is included near the end to encourage the perseverance of the self who, as a strand of wheat and a faltering spark, must re-conceive of herself in relation to the cross. The struggle to keep her eyes fixed to the East and to wait for the ultimate peace that will ‘still’ her ‘clamorous heart’ (8) is invoked through the poem by the discipline of rhyme, a sparseness of language, and insistent repetition. Aligning the prepositions ‘to be’ and ‘to hope’, Rossetti affirms that personhood is defined by the posture of waiting. The word ‘still’ recurs through Verses over one hundred times. Used as both verb and adjective, it indicates persistence (‘I still refuse’) and perseverance (‘hope still’). For Rossetti, the posture of stillness and the acceptance of pain is representative not of passivity and sloth but hope. Theologian Dorothee Solle suggests that, rather than tolerate suffering, the ‘mystical way’ of the cross remains open to it: ‘the soul […] abandons itself to suffering, holds back nothing’.52 The stance of acceptance that Solle explores provides a helpful lens through which to appreciate the choice that Rossetti has her speaker make in ‘All heaven is blazing yet.’ As Solle explains, while the calmness that is characteristic of the stoic concept of suffering is rooted in indifference and an absence of emotion, the stillness of a Christian encounter with suffering finds its source in

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hope.53 From the vision of the swallows perched on a telegraph wire and ready to fly in Time Flies (20 October: p. 202) to the image of the saints who ‘sit and gaze’ in ‘Earth has clear call’, Rossetti’s devotional writings repeatedly focus on what it means to wait on God. Throughout, the waiting that she envisages is associated with the instruction that Christ gives to his disciples – ‘if any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosover will save his life shall lose it: and whosover will lose his life for my sake will find it’ (Matt. 16.24–5). Rehearsing responses to this call, she stresses that obedience is enabled by the sure hope of heaven. As the discussion in this chapter reveals, Rossetti’s later writings come to appreciate that God waits on humanity and invites men and women to partner him in the work of redemption. A key to the speaker’s willingness to partner with God in ‘All heaven is blazing yet’ comes in her utterance ‘That which I chose and choose | And will is Jesus’ Will’ (13–14). The tension that these lines express, between individual struggle and grace, is resolved by the ultimate submission to ‘Jesus’ Will’. It is his will that enables the speaker to look forward and recognise that, as a ‘stranger and pilgrim’ in the world, she is able to forego her ‘life’ and ‘hope still’ (15, 16). ‘All heaven is blazing yet’ provides a neat example of Rossetti’s mature engagement with the tradition, consolidated by seventeenth-century Protestant poetry, of assim­ilating biblical narratives into the self rather than the self into the biblical narrative. Following my suggestion that, in her St Peter poems, Rossetti offers a clear expression of this engagement when she chooses not to adopt the voice of Peter but to represent the anguish of one who yearns for Christ, I want to stress how it is her ongoing commitment to the interiorisation of biblical narratives that enables her to interpret the self through Christ’s Passion. I anticipate that as we continue to explore the interface between literature and theology, more nuanced understandings of Rossetti’s representations of personhood will emerge. As my discussions of Rossetti’s contributions to Victorian periodicals and anthologies have revealed, more work also needs to be done to explore her attentiveness to her audience and her intervention in fostering the huge demand for devotional reading in the literary marketplace.



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Notes Karen Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Adelaide Proctor (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012), p. 137. 2 Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (London: Orion, 1999), p. 458. 3 Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith Gender and Time (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 149. 4 Constance W. Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 233. 5 Ibid., pp. 233, 226. 6 David A. Kent, ‘Sequence and Meaning in Christina Rossetti’s Verses (1893)’, Victorian Poetry, 17 (1979): 259–64 (p. 261). 7 Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 96–7. 8 W. K. L. C., ‘Introduction’, in Verses by Christina Rossetti (London: SPCK, 1925), p. 10. 9 D’Amico, Christina Rossetti, p. 160. 10 Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries, p. 152. 11 Ibid., p. 143. 12 Rikky Rooksby, A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), p. 253. 13 David A. Kent, ‘“By thought, word, and deed”: George Herbert and Christina Rossetti’, in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 250–273 (269). 14 The Works of George Herbert in Prose and Verse, 2 vols (2nd edn; London: William Pickering, 1841), ii, pp. 78–9. Further references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text as WP, followed by volume and page number. 15 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (2nd rev. edn; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990), p. 99. 16 Ibid., p. 98. 17 ‘Vigil of All Saints’, CP, p. 452; ‘Time Lengthening’, CP, pp. 483–4; ‘Yet a Little While’, CP, p. 474. 18 Dinah Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 9. 19 Dolores Rosenblum, ‘Christina Rossetti and Poetic Sequence’, in Kent, ed., The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, pp. 132–56 (154–5). 20 Emma Mason, ‘“A Sort of Aesthetico-Catholic Revival”: Christina Rossetti and the London Ritualist Scene’, in Outsiders Looking in: The Rossettis Then and Now, eds D. Clifford and L. Roussillon (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 115–30 (123). 1

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21 Isaac Williams, The Cathedral; or The Catholic and Apostolic Church in England (London: Griffith, Okeden & Welsh, 1889), pp. 14, 13. 22 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns [1932] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 332. 23 Ibid., pp. 332, 337. 24 Ibid., p. 332. 25 Evelyn Underhill, Worship (James Nisbet and Co., 1936; repr. Guildford: Eagle, 1991), pp. 253–4. 26 John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian AngloCatholicism (Nashville; London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), p. 7. 27 Henry W. Burrows, ‘Helps to Desires after Heaven’, Parochial Sermons (1872): pp. 1–12 (10). 28 Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries, p. 121. 29 Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, p. 81. 30 Ibid. 31 Sharon Smulders, Christina Rossetti Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 148. 32 In a note on the architectural space of Christ Church, Albany Street, Dieleman considers its conceptual ‘east–west internal arrangement’ that was created in an attempt to overcame exterior positioning and to meet ritualist requirements (pp. 277–8). 33 Horton Davis, From Newman to Martineau, 1850–1900: Worship and Theology in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 117. 34 Kent, The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, p. 263. 35 Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination, p. 30. 36 John Keble, ‘On the Mysticism Attributed to the Fathers of the Church’, Tract 89 of Tracts for the Times. Project Canterbury, http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract89 (accessed 28 October 2013). 37 To view images, see the church’s official website, www.allsaintsmargaretstreet.org.uk (accessed 28 October 2013). 38 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 125. 39 Esther Hu, ‘Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze’, Victorian Poetry, 46.2 (2008): 175–89 (175). 40 John Henry Newman, ‘A Particular Providence as Revealed in the Gospel’, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), iii, pp. 301–17 (309). 41 Hu, Christina Rossetti, pp. 181–2. 42 Weil, Waiting for God, p. 105. 43 Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 166.



‘O hope deferred, hope still’: Shaping the Self through Verses (1893)

243

44 Ibid., p. 167. 45 Maria Francesca Rossetti, A Shadow of Dante (London: Rivingtons, 1871), p. 162. 46 Colleen Hobbs, ‘A View from “The Lowest Place”: Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Prose’, Victorian Poetry, 37.3–4 (1994): 409–28 (423); Lynda Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 129. 47 Burrows, Parochial Sermons, p. 3. 48 Smulders, Christina Rossetti Revisited, p. 150. 49 Dieleman, Religious Imaginaries, pp. 153–4. 50 Lyra Apostolica, ed. John Henry Newman (2nd edn; London: Rivingtons, 1879), pp. 247–8. 51 Ibid., pp. 245–6. 52 Dorothee Solle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Karlin (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975), p. 101. 53 Ibid., p. 100.

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254 Bibliography Taylor, Jeremy, The Great Exemplar, 3 vols (London: William Pickering, 1849). Tennyson, G. B., Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1981). Thain, Marion, ‘Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 223–40. The Collected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995). Underhill, Evelyn, Worship (James Nisbet & Co., 1936; repr. Guildford: Eagle, 1991). Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1976). Watkins, A. E., ‘Typology and the Self in George Herbert’s “Affliction” Poems’, George Herbert Journal, 31:1 (2007): 63–82. Watts-Dunton, Theodore, ‘Literature’, The Athenæum, 2811 (10 September 1881): 327–8. Weele, Michael Vander, ‘Simone Weil and George Herbert on the Vocations of Writing and Reading’, Religion & Literature, 32.3 (2000): 69–102. Weil, Simone, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Westerholm, Joel, ‘“I Magnify Mine Office”: Christina Rossetti’s Authoritative Choice in Her Devotional Prose’, The Victorian Newsletter, 84 (1993): 11–17. —‘Christina Rossetti’s “Wounded Speech”’, Literature and Theology, 24.4 (2010): 345–59. Wheeler, Michael, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Whitla, William, ‘Questioning the Convention; Christina Rossetti’s Sonnet Sequence “Monna Innominata”’, in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 82–131. Williams, Isaac, Hymns Translated from the Parisian Breviary (London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1839). —Female Characters of Holy Scripture in a Series of Sermons (London: Rivingtons, 1859). —Devotional Commentary on the Gospel Narrative, 8 vols, (2nd edn; London; Oxford; Cambridge: Rivingtons, 1870). Williams, Rowan, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross, (2nd rev. edn; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990). Williams, Thomas Jay and Allan Walter Campbell, The Park Village Sisterhood (London: SPCK 1965). Williams, Todd O., ‘Environmental Ethics in Christina Rossetti’s Time Flies’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 33.3 (2012): 217–29.

Index 1 Corinthians 5, 8, 165, 193 2 Corinthians 1, 31, 185 à Kempis, Thomas: The Imitation of Christ 24, 45, 59–60, 66–7, 71 178 Adam 164–5, 189, 229 Agnes, St 81, 83, 88 All Saints, Anglican Sisterhood 67, 77–9 All Saints Church, Margaret Street 226 Allchin, A. M. 25, 98, 99, 177, 178–9, 181, 182, 197, 201 altar 27, 32, 155, 218, 220–1, 228 Ambrose, St 50, 51, 201 analogy, doctrine of 5, 26, 147, 184–5, 200, 218, 225 Andrewes, Lancelot 6, 175, 182, 197–9, 201, 203 angels 34, 99, 119–22, 176–7, 195–6 Cherubim and Seraphim 161–2, 218 Anglican: High Church 107, 116, 175, 196–7, 218 Annunciation, the 82, 196, 199–204 see also Mary, Mother of Christ apophatic theology 144–5, 193, 217–18, 227 Apostolic Succession 27–8, 175 Armstrong, Isobel 10, 12, 42–3, 137, 139, 163 Arseneau, Mary 8, 12, 24, 31, 64, 101, 141 ascent, symbolism of 86–7, 118, 158 Athenæum, The 29, 69, 138, 140, 147 Augustine, St 26, 193 Confessions 24, 46–52, 63, 66, 150–3 interpretation of Scripture 3–4, 215, 219 on personhood 48–9, 151 Pusey on 46 Rossetti citations of 49–50, 146 baptism 6, 34, 50, 120–1, 123, 125, 214 Jordan river as site of baptism 123, 124, 148 Baring-Gould, Sabine: The Life of the Saints 50–1, 83

Barth, Karl 3, 8, 89, 160–1, 162, 217–18, 223 Bartholomew, St 228, 232–3, 237 Baynes, Robert H. 40–1, 43, 46 Begbie, Jeremy 233 Bernard of Clairvaux 88–9, 99, 119, 127, 146, 174–5 Blair, Kirstie 9, 32 Blake, William 70, 71, 76 Book of Common Prayer 1, 32–3, 41, 155, 178, 183, 188, 196, 223–4 Coverdale Psalter 15, 30, 38, 223 breviaries 33, 78–9, 202, 224 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 24, 126, 142–3, 146 Bunyan, John: The Pilgrims Progress 64–5, 91, 101, 105, 119, 124 Burrows, Henry 29, 31, 120, 218, 236 and Annus Domini 178–9, 183 Bynum, Caroline Walker 91, 127, 197–8 calendar: church year 6–7, 32, 45, 117–18, 223–4 Advent 101, 103, 105–6, 175, 178, 182 Lent 34, 227 Calvin, John 6, 123, 163 Caswall, Edward 111, 151 Cayley, Charles Bagot 116, 125 chancel 218, 219, 226, 227 Christ as Bridegroom 60, 98, 103 crucifixion of 3, 5, 85, 110, 113, 124, 158, 215, 233 as divine mother 127, 174, 179, 181–2, 199 and grace 1, 122–3, 127, 183, 186, 202, 216, 223, 232 incarnation of 35, 60, 112, 129, 130, 161, 198, 217 resurrection of 86, 123–4 as true Shepherd 109, 111–12, 114, 155, 190

256 Index and typology 5, 31, 41–4, 60, 74, 82, 90, 111–13, 124–5, 223 Christ Church, Albany Street 29, 218–19 church architecture and furnishings 217–19, 221 see also altar; chancel; crucifix; stained glass windows; ritualism church fathers 24, 33–4, 44, 46–7, 51, 64, 98, 173, 188, 225 see also Ambrose, St; Augustine, St; Gregory of Nyssa, St Churchman’s Shilling Magazine, The 40, 125 Cloud of Unknowing, The 59, 86 Coakley, Sarah 144, 156, 159–60 Coleridge, Christabel 12, 185–6 Collinson, James: ‘The Child Jesus’ 69, 72 Communion of Saints 2, 28, 48, 60, 79, 222, 236 Church Militant 97, 139, 167, 177, 178, 222 Church Triumphant 97, 167, 177, 196, 222 contemplation 17, 59–60, 63, 67, 179, 217 Corley, Liam 26, 138 Craig, Isa 104–5 crucifix 110, 180, 217 D’Amico, Diane 26, 33–4, 77–8, 140, 179, 212 on Rossetti and gender 37, 190, 203 on Rossetti and Herbert 14, 39–40 Daniel 188–9 Dante 24, 157 Divine Comedy 89, 101, 125–7, 142, 143–4, 146, 234 Dieleman, Karen 25–6, 41–2, 219 on Verses 211, 213, 214, 237 Distiller, Natasha 144, 146 Dodsworth, William 29, 31–2, 155–6 Donne, John 35, 37–8, 167 dramatic monologue 86–7, 105 dreams 88–9, 154–5, 234–5 Dyce, William 226 Ecclesiastes 3, 14, 59, 61, 63–5, 67, 72–6, 83, 150 Ecclesiasticus 164, 187–9, 230 Eclectic Review, The 11, 15

Elizabeth of Hungary, St 83, 91, 97 English Woman’s Journal, The 11, 15, 104, 114 Esther 104, 106–7, 145–6 Eucharist 42, 44, 45, 221, 231, 233 and doctrine of the Real Presence 26–7, 41, 43–4, 218 Eve 164–5, 174, 182–3, 189–90, 229 exile, symbolism of 34, 90, 99, 109, 121, 161 Babylonian 128–9, 188–9 prodigal son 150–1, 154 fairy tale 81, 99, 101, 102 female suffrage 190 feminist criticism 143, 151, 174 festivals see calendar: church year Finn, Mary E. 7–8, 89, 160 Fisch, Harold 15–16, 129 forgiveness 35, 150, 153, 156, 160, 162–5, 167, 196, 233 and penitence 49, 86, 155–8, 160, 162, 163, 181, 221, 230 Franco–Prussian War 130–1 Froude, Richard Hurrell 92n. 9, 113, 238 Galatians 97, 174, 202, 215–16 Genesis 83–4, 87, 125 Germ, The 67–73, 75, 156 Gray, F. Elizabeth 33, 204–5 Greenwell, Dora 101, 105, 112 Gregory of Nyssa, St 60, 98, 182, 198 Harrison, Antony H. 24, 46–7, 143 Hassett, Constance W. 8–9, 160, 195, 212 Hebrews 124, 211, 216, 236 Hemans, Felicia 36–7, 130, 204 Herbert, George 37, 39, 21n. 56 influence on Rossetti 14–15, 39–40, 124, 181, 184–6 works of ‘Affliction [5]’ 116–17, 124 ‘Antiphon [1]’ 42–3 ‘Banquet’ 221 Country Parson, The 184 ‘Denial’ 214 ‘Easter’ 215 ‘Elixir, The’ 185 ‘Holy Communion, The’ 42

Index ‘Jordan [1]’ 124 ‘Love [3]’ 39–40, 80 ‘Misery’ 39 ‘Prayer [1]’ 25, 155 ‘Windows, The’ 186 Herringer, Carol Engelhardt 197, 198 Higher Criticism 4, 52, 99, 186 Hobbs, Colleen 174, 235 Holmes, John 141 Hooker, Richard 28, 45–6, 183, 188 Houston, Natalie M. 142, 148 Howard, Lady Isabella 97, 99 Hu, Esther 228–9, 231 Hughes, Linda 10, 11, 14 Humphries, Simon 91, 101, hymns 31, 40, 108, 111, 116, 201 idolatry 61, 184–5, 189, 222 illustration 14, 102–3, 110 Isaiah 62, 65, 82, 90, 120–2, 174, 199, 202, 220 and metaphors of maternal comfort 127, 173, 182 Jeffrey, David Lyle 138, 154 Jeremiah 43, 216 Jesus see Christ Job 43, 147 John (biblical book) 43, 72, 182, 200 John of the Cross, St 25, 87, 141, 158, 166–7 John of Patmos, St 195, 220, 222, 234 Jimenez, Nilda 61, 122 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love 37, 59, 179, 181–2 on God as Mother 82, 182 on the Virgin Mary 82, 202, 204 and vision of the hazelnut 184, 200 Kachur, Robert 174 Keats, John 81, 225 Keble, John 5, 28, 33, Christian Year, The 31–4, 224 ‘The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ 203–4 ‘Fourth Sunday in Lent. The Rosebud’ 34–5 ‘Sixth Sunday After Trinity’ 113 ‘St. Peter’s Day’ 229

257

Ecclesiastical Polity 45 Psalter, The 29–31 Tract 89, 184–5, 225 Kent, David 14, 26, 173, 176, 179, 187, 188 on Verses 212, 213–14, 223 King, Joshua 33 Kingsley, Charles 13, 91, 97 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen 10–11, 103, 105, 129 Lamentations 129 Landon, Letitia (L. E. L) 24, 61, 130 Landow, George 5, 112–13 Levy, Amy 23, 104 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 6, 38, 123–4, 129 Littledale, Richard Frederick 41, 60, 108, 118–20, 151 Lossky, Nicholas 2, 47, 173 Luke 121, 124, 223, 228, 238 and Christ’s nativity 82, 197, 199, 203 and parables 75, 137, 150 Lyell, Charles 139–40 Lyra Apostolica 9, 28, 113, 176, 213, 237–8 Lyra Eucharistica 44–5, 108, 151, 155 Lyra Messianica 32, 108–9, 113 Lyra Mystica 116, 118, 125 Macmillan, Alexander 13, 100, 183, 186 Macmillan’s Magazine 11–13, 16, 101, 128, 131 Mark 124, 201 Marsh, Jan 8, 78, 88, 145 martyrdom 65, 88, 116–17, 120, 191, 230 Christian participation in 92, 100, 125 and the Early Church 77, 191, 222, 228, 232 Mary Magdalene 86, 181 Mary, Mother of Christ 7, 26, 35, 111, 173, 196–205 see also Annunciation, the Mason, Emma 30, 110, 139, 217, 221 Matthew 14, 75, 109, 220, 240 on discipleship 103, 114, 145, 178, 189, 240 McAlpine, Heather 26–7, 73 McGann, Jerome 13–14 memory 111–12, 148, 236–7 Millais, John Everett: Pre–Raphaelite artist 87–8

258 Index Milner, Joseph 51–2 mirror, symbolism of 80–1, 100, 105–6, 201 Monthly Packet, The 12 Morris, William 98, 126 Moses 109–11, 113, 198 music 158, 166, 202, 214, 218, 226–7 singing 31, 104, 126, 215 Neale, John Mason 2, 6–7, 79, 118, 179–80 Newman, John Henry 51, 78 influence on Rossetti 28–30 sermons 5, 30, 230 and Tracts for the Times 28, 29 and turn to Roman Catholicism 111, 218 works of Apologia Pro Vita Sua 13, 187 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, An 179–80, 182 Lyra Apostolica 9, 176, 237–8 Packer, Lona Mosk 7, 46, 87 Palazzo, Lynda 62, 76, 174, 179, 186–7, 235 parables 75, 112, 114, 141–2 the prodigal son 137–8, 150–7, 159–60 the wise virgins 59, 102, 103 Park Village Sisterhood 77–8 Parkes, Bessie Rayner 105 Paul, St 127, 165, 174, 185 on personhood 48, 123, 193, 215–16 Peter, St 181, 223, 228–31 Petrarch 37, 62, 80, 142–4, 146–7, 160 pilgrimage 13, 99, 151, 211, 213, 237–8 Platonism 63 Pope, Alexander: ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ 87–9, 143 prayer 25, 39, 50, 111, 155, 177, 179–80, 182, 185, 187, 229 poems as 35, 38, 123, 125, 202, 214, 216, 220–1, 231–3 Pre-Raphaelitism 67–9, 72, 126 Proverbs 69–70, 75, 153, 190, 235 Psalms 49, 161, 199, 102, 111–12, 118, 120, 129 Christological readings of 5, 30, 78, 112, 154 in liturgy 15, 37, 66, 79, 117, 124, 223 metrical translations of 16, 29–31, 36–9, 126

as a model for poetry 15–16, 31, 35, 37, 128, 161, 219 Pusey, Edward 32–3, 44, 46, 51, 77–9 Quarles, Francis 129, 171 reserve, doctrine of 12, 26, 30, 34–5, 45, 85, 198 Revelation (biblical book) 122, 174, 184, 220, 222, 234 invitation and promise 14, 113, 119, 231–2 ritualism 29, 32, 34, 44, 79, 110, 218–19 see also church architecture and furnishings Roe, Dinah 70, 125–6, 142, 145, 193, 216, 225 Roman Catholicism 27, 78–9, 111, 179, 180, 196, 197 Romans 23, 48, 49, 123, 148 Romanticism 81, 104, 156–7, 159, 225 Rossetti, Christina and ageing 73, 212 and contributions to devotional anthologies 9, 24–5, 44–5, 113, 116, 118–19, 109, 155 and copyright of poems 11, 118 as Ellen Alleyn 69, 73 and the natural world 76, 83, 138–9, 147, 156–7, 191–3 beauty 71, 76, 85, 148, 157, 231 birds 83–4, 200, 225 doves 2, 36–8, 41–3, 50, 125 robins 141, 144, 149, 166 swallows 176, 192, 204 floriography 72–3, 184, 199 sheep 109–10, 112, 114, 154–5, 158–60 winter 139, 141, 166 and the periodical press 9, 11, 13, 15, 24, 25, 33, 68–9, 139 on personhood 47–9, 117, 120–4, 151, 166, 173, 227, 230, 239 and renunciation 59, 60, 63, 71, 76, 85, 146, 178, 184, 233 and silence 39, 89, 148–9 and theological acumen 23–4, 29–30, 46, 52 and vocation as writer 173, 176, 178, 185–7, 191

Index and worship 25–8, 41–2, 218, 220, 224–8 Rossetti, Christina, letters 45, 68, 118, 168n. 8 to Gemmer, Caroline 219 to Greenwell, Dora 101, 105, 133n. 35 to Macmillan, Alexander 100, 183 to Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 11, 63, 104, 115–16, 128, 185, 187, 191, 217 to Rossetti, William Michael 68, 145 to Shields, Frederick 187 to Webster, Augusta 190 Rossetti, Christina, poems, ‘Advent’ [This Advent moon shines cold and clear] 103 ‘After Communion’ 35, 40–5, 80 ‘After This the Judgment’ 99, 115, 116, 125–8 ‘Alas, alas for the self-destroyed’ 34–5 ‘Alas my Lord’ 180–2 ‘All heaven is blazing yet’ 238–40 ‘Alone Lord God’ 219–21 ‘Babylon the Great’ 234–6 ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock’ 114 ‘Birchington Churchyard’ 140 ‘Birthday, A’ 11, 23 ‘Bruised Reed Shall He Not Break, A’ 15 ‘By the waters of Babylon’ 129 ‘By the Waters of Babylon. B.C. 570’ 116, 128–30 ‘Cardinal Newman’ 29 ‘A Christmas Carol’ [In the bleak mid-winter] 130, 198 ‘Come unto Me,’ 44–5 ‘Convent Threshold, The’ 86–90, 143 ‘Despised and Rejected’ 114–15, 117 ‘Earth has clear call’ 213, 224–8 ‘Feast of the Annunciation’ [Whereto shall we liken] 202 ‘For All’ 228 ‘From House to Home’ 90–1 ‘German-French Campaign. 1870–1871, The’ 130–1 ‘Goblin Market’ 14, 44, 59, 90–2, 128 ‘Good Friday’ [Am I a stone and not a sheep] 108–13, 117, 153, 180, 230 ‘Herself a rose, who bore the Rose’ 200–1

259 ‘I Will Arise’ 150, 152–4 ‘Imitated from the Arpa Evangelica: Page 121’ 127–8 ‘It is not death, O Christ, to die for Thee’ 222 ‘Judge not according to the appearance’ 200 ‘On Keats’ 81 ‘The Key-Note’ 141, 144, 149–50, 166 Later Life 10, 25, 63, 139–40, 152, 155, 160–7, 181 ‘Light Love’ 131 ‘Like as the hart desireth the water brooks’ 223 ‘Long Barren’ 115, 117 ‘Looking back along life’s trodden way’ 211 ‘O Lord, I am ashamed to seek Thy Face’ 221–2 ‘Lord, I am feeble and of mean account’ 216–7 ‘Lord, save us, we perish’ 233–4 “Love Is Strong as Death” 138, 149–50 ‘Lowest Place, The’ 117, 118 ‘Martyr: A Vigil of the Feast, A’ 125 ‘Martyrs’ Song’ 108, 115–25 ‘Mirrors of Life and Death’ 139 Monna Innominata 89, 106–7, 140–9 ‘Old-World Thicket, An’ 155–7, 159 ‘One Certainty’ [Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith] 60–1, 65–6, 85 ‘Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful’ 235–7 ‘Passing and Glassing’ 150 ‘Pause of Thought, A’ 69–72 ‘Portrait, A’ 97–8 ‘Prince’s Progress, The’ 100–4 ‘Prodigal Son, A’ 150, 154–6, 159 ‘Resurgam’ 138 ‘Royal Princess, A’ 100, 104–7 ‘Seven vials hold Thy Wrath’ 2–3 ‘So great a cloud of Witnesses’ 236 ‘Soeur Louise de la Misericorde’ 150, 151 ‘Song’ [Oh roses for the flush of youth!] 72–3 ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ 35–9 ‘Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome’ 140, 153

260 Index ‘St Andrew’s Church’ [To watch and pray, false heart?] 66 ‘St. Elizabeth of Hungary’ 91, 97 ‘St Peter Once’ 230–2 ‘Sursum Corda’ 217 ‘Sweet Death’ 156 ‘Testimony, A’ 62, 73–6 ‘Thou art Fairer than the children of men’ 223 ‘Thread of Life, The’ 47–9, 140 ‘Three Nuns’ 79–86 ‘Tune me, O Lord’ 213–17 ‘Up-Hill,’ 11–16, 87 ‘Vanity of Vanities’ [Ah woe is me for pleasure that is vain] 62–5 ‘Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith’ 65–6 ‘Vigil of St Bartholomew’ 224, 228, 232–3, 237 ‘Vigil of St Peter’ 229–30 ‘Whither the Tribes go up, even the Tribes of the Lord’ 238 “Yet a Little While” [These days are long before I die] 224, 227 Rossetti, Christina, poetry collections Goblin Market and Other Poems 11, 13–17, 66, 71, 86 Goblin Market, the Prince’s Progress and Other Poems 40, 98, 128 Pageant and Other Poems, A 17, 137, 140, Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, The 17, 61, 97–9, 108 Verses (SPCK) 211–14, 216–17, 219–28, 232, 236–9 Rossetti, Christina, prose works Annus Domini 1, 4, 82, 177–83 Called to Be Saints 28, 177, 183–6, 198–200, 232, 238 Face of the Deep, The 3–4, 174, 191, 193–4, 200, 220–4, 229, 231–5 Letter and Spirit 8, 27, 28–9, 186–90 Maude 65, 77, 79, 86 Seek and Find 4, 63–4, 139, 173, 186–90, 198, 201 Time Flies 50–2, 101, 106, 175–6, 191–2, 202, 211, 223–4, 226 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 42–4, 71, 98, 102–3, 140, 141

and the Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood 67–9, 77 Rossetti, Frances 29, 44, 140 Rossetti, Maria 29–30, 33, 78, 189, 234 Rossetti, William Michael 126 Poetical Works 23–4, 79–80, 97, 100, 130, 146, 212 and the Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood 67–9, 71 roundel (poetic form) 34–5, 193–4, 214–16, 228 Saturday Review, The 11, 175 Scheinberg, Cynthia 106–7, 144, 204 Schofield, Linda 9, 113 Shipley, Orby 32, 108, 110, 116, 180 Sidney Psalter, The 37–9, 126 Smulders, Sharon 80, 102–4, 148, 219, 237 Solle, Dorothee 239–40 Solomon 63–4, 60 Song of Solomon 40–3, 60, 82, 85–6, 89, 102, 113–14, 201–2 sonnet (poetic form) 142, 147–8, 160, 163 devotional use 35, 42–3, 165, 167, 222, 233 sequences 10, 140–9, 152, 160, 165–6 SPCK: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 11, 183, 185 Spenser, Edward: The Faerie Queene 100–1, 103 Stabat Mater Dolorosa 7, 110–11, 230 stained glass windows 186, 218–19 Stanwood, P. G. 42, 173, 188, 192 Stephens, Frederick George 69, 72, 77 Stone, Marjorie 143 suffering 23, 37, 78, 88, 122, 129, 131, 181, 235, 239 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 193, 214 Taylor, Jeremy 175, 178–9, 197, 203–4 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 8, 85 Idylls of the King 98, 101 In Memoriam 72 ‘Mariana’ 70, 105 ‘Nothing will die’ and ‘All things will die’ 139 ‘St Agnes’ Eve’ 81, 83, 88 Tennyson, G. B. 5, 9, 26, 32, 110, 184 Teresa of Avila, St 86, 151, 158

Index terza-rima (poetic form), 115–16, 125–6, 128–9 Thain, Marion 137, 142 theosis, doctrine of 98, 120, 121, 190, 197, 217 Tractarianism 2, 26, 31–3, 68, 218 Library of the Fathers 46, 60 Tracts for the Times 32, 28, 184, 225 Trinity 27, 42, 125, 166, 178 typology 5–6, 109, 115, 142, 198 see also Christ, and typology

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Underhill, Evelyn 218 Virgin Mary see Mary, Mother of Christ Warner, Marina 201, 204 Weil, Simone 147, 158, 159, 178, 228, 231 Whitla, William 146, 148 Williams, Isaac 110, 155, 175, 188, 217, 238 Williams, Rowan 63, 98, 198, 215