Product Description

Rossetti is unique among Victorian poets for the sheer range of her subject matter and the variety of her verse form. This collection brings together fantasy poems, such as Goblin Market, and terrifyingly vivid verses for children, love lyrics and sonnets, and the vast body of her devotional poetry. Rossetti's poems weave connections between love and death, triumph and loss, heavenly joys and earthly pleasures. The directness and clarity of her lyrics still have the power to startle us with their truth and beauty.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39057 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1312 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Christina Rossetti's sonnets, ballads, nursery rhymes and devotional verse--all collected in The Complete Poems--confirm her reputation as one of the leading Pre-Raphaelite poets and a significant voice in Victorian poetry. She is possibly most loved for the elegant and simple "A Christmas Carol", popularly known as "In the Bleak Mid-Winter", first published in 1875 and set to music by Gustav Holst:

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Its incantatory repetition and direct, lean diction signal what is strongest in Rossetti's style. These qualities recur in much that's reprinted in this volume, in such poems as "Who Shall Deliver Me?", which echoes George Herbert's deeply religious metaphorical voice: "I lock my door upon myself / And bar them out; but who shall wall / Self from myself, most loathed of all?". In "Grown and Flown", "L.E.L." and "Life and Death", Rossetti's main themes of thwarted love and a yearning for death are entwined:

Sweet sweet love was
Now bitter bitter grown to me...
heart-breaking for a little love...
Life is not good.
One day it will be good
To die, then live again;...
Only dead refuse stubble clothe the plain:
Asleep from risk, asleep from pain.

While Rossetti famously rejected two suitors who did not share her religious fervour, in "Autumn", her striving for High Anglican moral purity strains: "I dwell alone--I dwell alone, alone / Whilst full my river flows down to the sea... O love-pangs, let me be". For her, death is a welcome relief from earthly suffering and "The Convent Threshold" conveys her choice unequivocally: "Your eyes look earthward, mine look up... I choose the stairs that mount above..." But Rossetti's charm lies in the intensity of her fight against denied pleasures and these overflow with sensual abundance and charged eroticism in one of her best known poems, "Goblin Market", in which two young maidens are tempted by the fruits of "goblin men" with "their hungry thirsty roots". The urgent descriptions of obsessive desire are rarely matched in later poems and "Goblin Market" remains an eerie and forceful work. --Cherry Smyth

About the Author
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), sister of the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was educated at home and shared her family's intellectual interests. Ill-health ended her work as a governess and later made her an invalid. Her poetry was first published in 1850 in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, The Germ, and several volumes of poetry followed, demonstrating an extraordinary emotional and technical range. Betty Sue Flowers is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Excerpted from The Complete Poems by Christina Rossetti, Betty Flowers. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
My Dream

Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night,

Each word whereof is weighed and sifted truth.

I stood beside Euphrates while it swelled

Like overflowing Jordan in its youth:

It waxed and coloured sensibly to sight,

Till out of myriad pregnant waves there welled

Young crocodiles, a gaunt blunt-featured crew,

Fresh-hatched perhaps and daubed with birthday dew.

The rest if I should tell, I fear my friend,

My closest friend would deem the facts untrue;

And therefore it were wisely left untold;

Yet if you will, why, hear it to the end.

Each crocodile was girt with massive gold

And polished stones that with their wearers grew:

But one there was who waxed beyond the rest,

Wore kinglier girdle and a kingly crown,

Whilst crowns and orbs and sceptres starred his breast.

All gleamed compact and green with scale on scale,

But special burnishment adorned his mail

And special terror weighed upon his frown;

His punier brethren quaked before his tail,

Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail.

So he grew lord and master of his kin:

But who shall tell the tale of all their woes?

An execrable appetite arose,

He battened on them, crunched, and sucked them in.

He knew no law, he feared no binding law,

But ground them with inexorable jaw:

The luscious fat distilled upon his chin,

Exuded from his nostrils and his eyes,

While still like hungry death he fed his maw;

Till every minor crocodile being dead

And buried too, himself gorged to the full,

He slept with breath oppressed and unstrung claw.

Oh marvel passing strange which next I saw:

In sleep he dwindled to the common size,

And all the empire faded from his coat.

Then from far off a winged vessel came,

Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame:

I know not what it bore of freight or host,

But white it was an avenging ghost.

It levelled strong Euphrates in its course;

Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote

It seemed to tame the waters without force

Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat:

Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands,

The prudent crocodile rose on his feet

And shed appropriate tears and wrung his hands.

What can it mean? you ask. I answer not

For meaning, but myself must echo, What?

And tell it as I saw it on the spot.

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Customer Reviews

One of the most considerable women poets before the 20thC
Rossetti's works are, above all, musical. Her acute ear enabled her to compose lyrical and melodic works that strike you for their sound before meaning.
Her poems are sometimes obsessive over death, which she sees to be a release -

Life is not sweet, one day it will be sweet
To shut our eyes and die

from the world that she clearly has no trust or faith in (poem: 'The World'). Her deep religiousness often shows through her choice of words, and her longer poems such as 'The hour and the ghost' are close to ballad form. Her poems contrast quite well which makes for really fascinating reading.

Her poems are often comforting in their use of satisfying rhyme ('Song' and 'Later life' sonnet 23) and some of her love poetry is bitter as hell.

A major English poet
Best known for the words of the carol 'In a bleak mid-winter' This work demonstrate she is probably the best English poet of the short poetic form and writes over a wide variety of topics especially nature.
Like all the best poets she writes from her experience of life and is unafraid to express her true inner feelings.