CHRISTINA ROSSETTI SONG-



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI SONG-

Essentials :

Elegy

Traditional form equal length stanzas and lines Title : implications

First word : When : assertive, assured. Imminent reality-mortality

Sing no –sibilance which lulls. Sing and other imperatives throughout that express a certain autonomy-moral instruction.

Roses cypress tree-symbolic elements Green grass

Inversion-dewdrops wet and ‘w’ alliteration : draws out idea.

And if thou wilt, remember- antithesis offering choice and beginning of aloofness ?

First stanza : apparently depicting woman pining for love ; pleading he not be distressed by her death

and the lines that follow suggest that the female speaker is not worthy of being remembered, especially if that remembrance causes pain to her beloved.

I shall not affiriming statement repeated three times with spondaic

See feel hear

Distancing self from what they might have had ; indifference

Female speaker narrating ; articulating thoughts on love ?

Assertive I

Imperative verbs-pleading and moral instruction

Aloofness, distance and ambiguous use of ‘haply’ implying she has found contentment without her lover

Critics continue to study Rossetti's response to and influence on a women writers' tradition. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, feminist critics were especially concerned with Rossetti’s critique of patriarchal amatory values and gender relations. Christina Rossetti has been called the greatest Victorian woman poet, but her poetry is increas-ingly being recognized as among the most beautiful and innovative of the period by either sex.

FROM VICTORIAN WEB :

The lines that close the first half of the poem — "And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget" — at first reading seem to state the dead woman's unwillingness to have her death trouble her beloved. These lines apparently to embody a stereotypical Victorian view of female selflessness. These lines at first seem, in other words, to echo the attitudes in her brother's earlier "The Blessed Damozel," in which the bereaved male lover imagines his dead beloved grieving for him in heaven. By the end of the poem, Christina has shattered Dante Gabriel's noton of an ideal woman. The next lines do not make that final conclusion completely clear, for the speaker mentions only that she exist in a world of sensory deprivation and apparent peace:

Dreaming

‘Haply’ happily or possibly ? The poem's concluding four brief lines, which present the dead female speaker withdrawing farther and farther from her supposed beloved, first make clear that she exists only in a twilight world beyond human desire — hardly the vision of a lover's afterlife proposed by Dante Rossetti (or at least by the speaker in his dramatic monologue). The final two lines of the poem make a reversal just as sharp and just as ultimately satiric as one of Pope's couplets.

1. Christina Rossetti describes heaven as a sort of void, where sunlight never rises or sets and there is no feeling. This is quite contrary to her brother's depiction of heaven in his painting, The Blessed Damozel where he shows lovers embracing, existing in a tangible space. Do these different images reflect their author's actual religious beliefs or their social visions?

2. Rossetti's woman asks her lover to "sing no sad songs" for her. Does Rossetti mean us to see the woman as unworthy of such attention?

3. Critics have analyzed the double meaning of the word "haply" in the last two lines of "Song" as hinting at both happily and also possibly. Which is it more likely that Rossetti intended or did she intend on such ambiguousness?

4. What does Rossetti tell us of what death will mean to her?

1. PRB members such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti often portrayed female lovers stricken with grief, pining for their male loved ones. However, with "Song," Christina Rossetti rejects the notion of the Fair Lady and thus, the idealized women that permeated the works of her brother. What responses do you think this poem generated ?

2. Why does Christina Rossetti invoke images of nature in "Song"? Why does she incorporate these aspects of nature — for example, the roses and the nightingale — as opposed to other images of nature? Do you think these images possess any possible symbolism?

3. What kind of afterlife does Rossetti imagine in "Song"?

4. If this poem were to have a visual representation to go along with it, what do you think it would look like? Do you think that the female vantage point used in "Song" would allow for a female subject?

A similar asymmetry of gazes can be seen between the artists’ self-portraits and their portraits of woman. The men are always looking at viewer whereas the women are always looking away. The asymmetry of the gazes certainly implies the fetishization of the female, the result of male fantasy. In all of these paintings we could argue that the male viewer is privileged and allowed, indeed encouraged, to take on the position of the voyeur. But especially with Rossetti the opposition between fear and desire seems to be equally important, if not the dominant factor, here. This becomes particularly clear when we look at the use of the mirror in his work. Leading up to Lady Lilith, the paradigmatic painting of the socially and sexually transgressive character sensuously combing her long locks in the mirror, there is the painting Fazio’s Mistress which mirrors male desire directly and then Woman Combing her Hair where the viewer, according to Bullen, ‘becomes the inanimate surface of the mirror’. In Lady Lilith not only is the subject a dangerous woman, a femme fatale, but the very nature of the painting — the mirror — creates the binary of fear and desire1. The self-consciousness and self-contemplation created by the mirror cuts out the man, making the narcissistic Lilith unobtainable but at the same time her absorption in the activity makes her incredibly desirable by giving us visual access to her exposed body.

Erotic love and its tragic loss acted as a theme that often engrossed the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Not only did this theme pervade the drawings and the paintings of the PRB, but it also saturated the literary works of PRB poets, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Though both these poetic and visual works oftentimes employed female subjects as in Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais and "The Blessed Damozel" by Rossetti, the works "clearly embod[ied] male vantage points" (Landow). However, in "Song," Christina Rossetti rejects the traditional male role as the speaker and uses a female voice to narrate her poem and articulate her thoughts on the theme of love. By employing the female voice, Christina Rossetti makes it clear that she wants to break away from her brother's as well as other Pre-Raphaelites' visions of love and offer a different perspective.

The first half of the poem appears to reflect the PRB's idealized notion of women who pine for their beloveds as the female narrator begs her lover not to be distressed by her death:

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree.

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

These lines, however, prove to be misleading. As the poem progresses, it becomes apparent that its meaning does not follow traditional male notions of the ideal woman. Rather, the woman distances herself from the possible love that she may have shared with her partner while on earth in sharp contrast with the grief-stricken woman in "The Blessed Damozel" by her brother, Dante Rossetti.

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on as if in pain.

Therefore, the lines — "And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget" — is not to ask her beloved to stop mourning her death in an attempt to embody "the Victorian view of female selflessness" (Landow). It instead invokes feelings of growing indifference towards her partner. Not only does the female voice in "Song" articulate indifference towards her supposed beloved, but also the woman seems to feel a sense of happiness in her inability to remember her beloved.

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

The wordplay on "haply" can be interpreted as either "possibly" or a shortened version of the word "happily." This wordplay also helps destroy the feminine ideal as portrayed by Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Rossetti by indicating that the woman perhaps realizes contentment and peace while without her beloved.

Questions

1. PRB members such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti often portrayed female lovers stricken with grief, pining for their male loved ones. However, with "Song," Christina Rossetti rejects the notion of the Fair Lady and thus, the idealized women that permeated the works of her brother. What responses do you think this poem generated from the male members of the PRB?

2. Why does Christina Rossetti invoke images of nature in "Song"? Why does she incorporate these aspects of nature — for example, the roses and the nightingale — as opposed to other images of nature? Do you think these images possess any possible symbolism?

3. What kind of afterlife does Rossetti imagine in "Song"? Why do you think that Rossetti chose to create an afterlife in such stark contrast with that of her brother's vision in "The Blessed Damozel"?

4. If this poem were to have a visual representation to go along with it, what do you think it would look like? Do you think that the female vantage point used in "Song" would allow for a female subject?

[pic]entimentalized depictions of the tragic death of women occupied many PRB poems and paintings. The familiar stories of Mariana and The Lady of Shalott make women into objects, manipulated and toyed with. They place women at the mercy of the men in their lives. These works come from a male vantage point. Christina Rossetti provides a unique rebuttal to these works in her poem, "Song". Here, Rossetti voices the inner thoughts of a dead Victorian woman. As though in response to her brother's poem, "The Blessed Damozel" (text) in which a woman, tortured by her feelings of loss for her lover, stirs in heaven, Christina Rossetti's woman in "Song" feels no pain or loss, but rather only peace. Christina Rossetti paints a picture of heaven devoid of human earthly desire, in fact characterized by ambivalence. Her woman does not pine for her lover; she states that she might actually forget him altogether in time. Rossetti's woman, not at the mercy of her lover, finds herself free of desire for him. She has moved onto another part of her life. Although her poems centered on the depiction of love, Rossetti's love translates from earthly passion to a peaceful, higher spirituality and comfort upon death. "Song", exposes the inadequacy of earthly love when compared with the peace and fulfillment experienced by the woman upon death.

Questions

1. Christina Rossetti describes heaven as a sort of void, where sunlight never rises or sets and there is no feeling. This is quite contrary to her brother's depiction of heaven in his painting, The Blessed Damozel where he shows lovers embracing, existing in a tangible space. Do these different images reflect their author's actual religious beliefs or their social visions?

2. Rossetti's woman asks her lover to "sing no sad songs" for her. Does Rossetti mean us to see the woman as unworthy of such attention?

3. Critics have analyzed the double meaning of the word "haply" in the last two lines of "Song" as hinting at both happily and also possibly. Which is it more likely that Rossetti intended or did she intend on such ambiguousness?

4. What does Rossetti tell us of what death will mean to her?

Christina Rossetti is one of the few poets, male or fermale, who creates such unusual poetic characters; the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson is another, but whereas Robinson uses this unusual vantage point somewhat like Dante to create a broad picture of human life and the human beings who live it, Rossetti's dead speakers concentrate more narrowly upon offering a woman's view of male conceptions of romantic love and loss. "After Death," which we may pair with "Song," another poem dating from around 1862, presents what seems to be a conventional view of pure, sacrificial womanly love. In this brief poem, the speaker, whom we gradually realize is dead, seems to embody the standard self-pitying adolescent fantasy expressed in the words, "they'll miss me when I'm gone (sob)": Here a man whom the female speaker loves but who did not see her worhty of love while she was alive at least notices her now she's dead — and that seems to be some sort of consolation, as the speaker concludes:

He did not love me living; but once dead

He pitied me; and very sweet it is

To know he still is warm though I am cold.

The lines, which seem to owe a lot to the close of Tennyson's much earlier "Lady of Shalott," contrast dramatically to those that end "Song," a poem that begins where "After Death" ends — in the female speaker's acceptance that she is so much less than her male beloved. In fact, "Song" begins with the plea, "When I am dead, my dearest/ Sing no sad songs for me," and the lines that follow suggest that the female speaker is not worthy of being remembered, especially if that remembrance causes pain to her beloved.

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

The lines that close the first half of the poem — "And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget" — at first reading seem to state the dead woman's unwillingness to have her death trouble her beloved. These lines apparently to embody a stereotypical Victorian view of female selflessness. These lines at first seem, in other words, to echo the attitudes in her brother's earlier "The Blessed Damozel," in which the bereaved male lover imagines his dead beloved grieving for him in heaven. By the end of the poem, Christina has shattered Dante Gabriel's noton of an ideal woman. The next lines do not make that final conclusion completely clear, for the speaker mentions only that she exist in a world of sensory deprivation and apparent peace:

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on as if in pain.

The poem's concluding four brief lines, which present the dead female speaker withdrawing farther and farther from her supposed beloved, first make clear that she exists only in a twilight world beyond human desire — hardly the vision of a lover's afterlife proposed by Dante Rossetti (or at least by the speaker in his dramatic monologue). The final two lines of the poem make a reversal just as sharp and just as ultimately satiric as one of Pope's couplets.

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

The note of complete indifference on which Christina Rossetti ends this poem is particularly shocking when seen in the context of male tradition. Rosetti's speaker here does not pine for her male partner to join her; indeed, she suggests that she has increasing difficulty in remembering him at all — and that's not a matter of serious concern or regret. The poet's wordplay increases the effect, for much depends on "haply," which might mean "possibly" or even serve as a poetic version of "happily." The first meaning of the word is harsh enough because it conveys the speaker's increasing indifference, the second her pleasure in such forgetfulness. Either way a new female voice reconfigures the poetic tradition.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

‘Sentimentalized depictions of the tragic death of women occupied many PRB poems and paintings. The familiar stories of Mariana and The Lady of Shalott make women into objects, manipulated and toyed with. They place women at the mercy of the men in their lives. These works come from a male vantage point. Christina Rossetti provides a unique rebuttal to these works in her poem, "Song". Here, Rossetti voices the inner thoughts of a dead Victorian woman. As though in response to her brother's poem, "The Blessed Damozel" (text) in which a woman, tortured by her feelings of loss for her lover, stirs in heaven, Christina Rossetti's woman in "Song" feels no pain or loss, but rather only peace. Christina Rossetti paints a picture of heaven devoid of human earthly desire, in fact characterized by ambivalence. Her woman does not pine for her lover; she states that she might actually forget him altogether in time. Rossetti's woman, not at the mercy of her lover, finds herself free of desire for him. She has moved onto another part of her life. Although her poems centered on the depiction of love, Rossetti's love translates from earthly passion to a peaceful, higher spirituality and comfort upon death. "Song", exposes the inadequacy of earthly love when compared with the peace and fulfillment experienced by the woman upon death.

"Song" begins with the plea, "When I am dead, my dearest/ Sing no sad songs for me," and the lines that follow suggest that the female speaker is not worthy of being remembered, especially if that remembrance causes pain to her beloved.

The lines that close the first half of the poem — "And if thou wilt, remember, / And if thou wilt, forget" — at first reading seem to state the dead woman's unwillingness to have her death trouble her beloved. These lines apparently embody a stereotypical Victorian view of female selflessness. These lines at first seem, in other words, to echo the attitudes in her brother's earlier "The Blessed Damozel," in which the bereaved male lover imagines his dead beloved grieving for him in heaven. By the end of the poem, Christina has shattered Dante Gabriel's noton of an ideal woman. The next lines do not make that final conclusion completely clear, for the speaker mentions only that she exist in a world of sensory deprivation and apparent peace: The poem's concluding four brief lines, which present the dead female speaker withdrawing farther and farther from her supposed beloved, first make clear that she exists only in a twilight world beyond human desire — hardly the vision of a lover's afterlife proposed by Dante Rossetti (or at least by the speaker in his dramatic monologue). The final two lines of the poem make a reversal just as sharp and just as ultimately satiric as one of Pope's couplets.

The note of complete indifference on which Christina Rossetti ends this poem is particularly shocking when seen in the context of male tradition. Rosetti's speaker here does not pine for her male partner to join her; indeed, she suggests that she has increasing difficulty in remembering him at all — and that's not a matter of serious concern or regret. The poet's wordplay increases the effect, for much depends on "haply," which might mean "possibly" or even serve as a poetic version of "happily." The first meaning of the word is harsh enough because it conveys the speaker's increasing indifference, the second her pleasure in such forgetfulness. Either way a new female voice reconfigures the poetic tradition’ Victorain Web

On pre-R art : A similar asymmetry of gazes can be seen between the artists’ self-portraits and their portraits of woman. The men are always looking at viewer whereas the women are always looking away. The asymmetry of the gazes certainly implies the fetishization of the female, the result of male fantasy. In all of these paintings we could argue that the male viewer is privileged and allowed, indeed encouraged, to take on the position of the voyeur. But especially with Rossetti the opposition between fear and desire seems to be equally important, if not the dominant factor, here. This becomes particularly clear when we look at the use of the mirror in his work. Leading up to Lady Lilith, the paradigmatic painting of the socially and sexually transgressive character sensuously combing her long locks in the mirror, there is the painting Fazio’s Mistress which mirrors male desire directly and then Woman Combing her Hair where the viewer, according to Bullen, ‘becomes the inanimate surface of the mirror’. In Lady Lilith not only is the subject a dangerous woman, a femme fatale, but the very nature of the painting — the mirror — creates the binary of fear and desire1. The self-consciousness and self-contemplation created by the mirror cuts out the man, making the narcissistic Lilith unobtainable but at the same time her absorption in the activity makes her incredibly desirable by giving us visual access to her exposed body.

Mourning customs : strict, respected by many. For rules, mourners could consult Queen or Cassell’s or other manuals.

For deepest mourning clothes were to be black, symbolic of spiritual darkness. Dresses for deepest mourning were usually made of non-reflective paramatta silk or the cheaper bombazine – many of the widows in Dickens’ novels wore bombazine. Dresses were trimmed with crape, a hard, scratchy silk with a peculiar crimped appearance produced by heat. Crape is particularly associated with mourning because it doesn’t combine well with any other clothing – you can’t wear velvet or satin or lace or embroidery with it. After a specified period the crape could be removed – this was called "slighting the mourning." The color of cloth lightened as mourning went on, to grey, mauve, and white – called half-mourning. Jewelry was limited to jet, a hard, black coal-like material sometimes combined with woven hair of the deceased.

Men had it easy – they simply wore their usual dark suits along with black gloves, hatbands and cravats. Children were not expected to wear mourning clothes, though girls sometimes wore white dresses.

The length of mourning depended on your relationship to the deceased. The different periods of mourning dictated by society were expected to reflect your natural period of grief. Widows were expected to wear full mourning for two years from

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