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  1. #31
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    A Crow's Command


    I be a common salty, once,
    No captain's bars, did bear,
    Yet blessed was I to venture,
    Where few a skipper dared.

    From steadfast crow's high perch
    I watched the bright coast beacons wink,
    Through a biting spray's December gale,
    What goring shoals would sink.

    For untold days I rocked atop
    An oaken spar at length,
    While wake and skies conveyed my eyes,
    Lord Neptune's sullen strength.

    Busy dogs, the mates and jacks
    Bent hard to tasks below,
    While toward the sky, with glass to eye,
    My post waved to-and-fro.

    First was I to e'er spot land,
    My voice the first to yell,
    Aye, first to sight the skull and bone,
    And raise the warning bell.

    "Thar she blows!" was oft my call
    If viewed a breach, had I,
    And "Friend or foe?!?" the question barked,
    If strange sails split the sky.

    But the moments that becalmed my soul,
    As the swells ticked off my time,
    Were star-filled nights, a bullion moon,
    And the phosphorescent brine.

    The darkest times were battlements,
    When the ship groaned in its might,
    But never dark, the eventide,
    Sea and sky awash with light!

    So rare, it was, to find this tar
    On deck or down below,
    And rarer still, did I abdicate,
    My nest there in the crow.

    Well, I'm adrift on shore now,
    With brittle bones and gray,
    Yet still my mind climbs up the mast,
    To man my post and sway.

    And when the angels task me,
    To a new and heavenly crow,
    I'll bend my gaze to the looking glass,
    And give a hearty "Tally-ho!"

    Copyright © Greg Barden | Year Posted 2017
    Truly outstanding poetry!!! Chosen as POTD at my home poetry site, on Feb 28, 2017...Quite deserving..-Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  2. #32
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    The Supreme Sacrifice
    ---------by Emma Lazarus

    Well-nigh two thousand years hath Israel
    Suffered the scorn of man for love of God;
    Endured the outlaw's ban, the yoke, the rod,
    With perfect patience.
    Empires rose and fell,
    Around him Nebo was adored and Bel;
    Edom was drunk with victory, and trod
    On his high places, while the sacred sod
    Was desecrated by the infidel.

    His faith proved steadfast, without breach or flaw,
    But now the last renouncement is required.

    His truth prevails, his God is God, his Law
    Is found the wisdom most to be desired.

    Not his the glory! He, maligned, misknown,
    Bows his meek head, and says, "Thy will be done!"
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  3. #33
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    Love, the Destroyer
    ------------------------------ by Anne Reeve Aldrich

    Love is a Fire;
    Nor Shame, nor Pride can well withstand Desire.
    "For what are they," we cry, "that they should dare
    To keep, O Love, the haughty look they wear?
    Nay, burn the victims, O thou sacred Fire,
    That with their death thou mayst but flame the higher.
    Let them feel once the fierceness of thy breath,
    And make thee still more beauteous with their death."

    Love is a Fire;
    But ah, how short-lived is the flame Desire!
    Love, having burnt whatever once we cherished,
    And blackened all things else, itself hath perished.
    And now alone in gathering night we stand,
    Ashes and ruin stretch on either hand.
    Yet while we mourn, our sad hearts whisper low:
    "We served the mightiest God that man can know."
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  4. #34
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    A Grave Stone
    by William Allingham

    Far from the churchyard dig his grave,
    On some green mound beside the wave;
    To westward, sea and sky alone,
    And sunsets. Put a mossy stone,
    With mortal name and date, a harp
    And bunch of wild flowers, carven sharp;
    Then leave it free to winds that blow,
    And patient mosses creeping; slow,
    And wandering wings, and footsteps rare
    Of human creature pausing there.

    William Allingham
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  5. #35
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    The Ruby Spires

    -------- by Greg Barden

    There, among the Ruby Spires,
    I stood a-gazing toward the mist,
    The Red Wind cut skin, heaven-kissed,
    Far too cold for Hades' fires.

    Ages and eons behind me, then,
    The joys of youth were swallowed, thus,
    By wormholes, ranged and turned to dust,
    All for the sake of gloried men.

    Such an odyssey, we crossed
    Three galaxies and matter, dark,
    To find this rare and conscious spark
    Of Life, (tho' life is what it cost).

    Though I, their peerless proxy, was,
    I felt no debt to human kind,
    And through that struggle there, did bind,
    A union true, of alien cause.

    My own, a naught-but-violent race,
    Had found these creatures far from home,
    And sought to then rewrite their tome,
    With our corrupt and vain disgrace.

    Yet before we could our ruin, spread,
    This planet's unseen chaperones,
    Wreaked mortal plague on us alone,
    'Til naught but I was cold and dead.

    Then, those sentient souls and I,
    Did journey up from mountain's base,
    Until we met that jagged face,
    With ruby columns to the sky.

    To every side but one, we saw,
    For endless breadth, the crimson sphere,
    The vermilion glow, both far and near,
    That wondrous planet's crystal maw.

    The sparkling slopes of gemstone red,
    That slanted down and out of sight,
    Were being swallowed by the night,
    And yet, no trail had shown ahead.

    Far too late to turn around,
    We gave our final fate its due,
    That breathtaking red, exquisite view,
    That few blessed eyes had ever found.

    Such astounding visions we beheld,
    That far exceeded all we knew,
    That held us, transfixed, to that view,
    With yearning that could not be quelled.

    Colors that challenged conscious thought,
    With light at angles inconceived,
    Iridescence otherwise not believed,
    Were we not breathless, on that spot.

    The misty opalescent glow,
    Refracting hues beyond compare,
    Prismatic sparkles here-and-there,
    That danced with flakes of scarlet snow.

    Rainbow shafts of glistening light,
    Swirling phosphorescent sprays,
    Shimmering hues in broad displays,
    That flashed and faded out of sight.

    Palettes and shades we'd never seen,
    Reflected beams from crystal shards,
    The wondrous muse of godly bards,
    Presented there for us alone.

    Such vistas, no words can e'er construe,
    A beauty that language does not appease,
    That brought us, weeping, to our knees,
    And left us shaken, through-and-through.

    The consuming joy that view inspired,
    Was known to only us who'd trade
    Our lives for the sight, that covenant made,
    There among the Ruby Spires.

    ** For the "Fable" Poetry Contest - Nayda Ivette Negron, Sponsor **

    Copyright © Greg Barden | Year Posted 2017
    This poet, my friend is truly awesome!!!!! -Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  6. #36
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    Night is Darkening Around Me
    ---------------by Emily Bronte

    The night is darkening round me,
    The wild winds coldly blow ;
    But a tyrant spell has bound me,
    And I cannot, cannot go.


    The giant trees are bending
    Their bare boughs weighed with snow ;
    The storm is fast descending,
    And yet I cannot go.


    Clouds beyond clouds above me,
    Wastes beyond wastes below ;
    But nothing drear can move me :
    I will not, cannot go.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  7. #37
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    A Rolling Stone
    --------------------------by Robert William Service

    There's sunshine in the heart of me,
    My blood sings in the breeze;
    The mountains are a part of me,
    I'm fellow to the trees.

    My golden youth I'm squandering,
    Sun-libertine am I;
    A-wandering, a-wandering,
    Until the day I die.


    I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
    And I roomed in the cool of a cave;
    I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
    The fret and the sweat of a slave:
    For far over all that folks hold worth,
    There lives and there leaps in me
    A love of the lowly things of earth,
    And a passion to be free.


    To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,
    To range and to change at will;
    To mock at the mastership of man,
    To seek Adventure's thrill.

    Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;
    To go my own sweet way;
    To reck not at all what may befall,
    But to live and to love each day.


    To make my body a temple pure
    Wherein I dwell serene;
    To care for the things that shall endure,
    The simple, sweet and clean.

    To oust out envy and hate and rage,
    To breathe with no alarm;
    For Nature shall be my anchorage,
    And none shall do me harm.


    To shun all lures that debauch the soul,
    The orgied rites of the rich;
    To eat my crust as a rover must
    With the rough-neck down in the ditch.

    To trudge by his side whate'er betide;
    To share his fire at night;
    To call him friend to the long trail-end,
    And to read his heart aright.


    To scorn all strife, and to view all life
    With the curious eyes of a child;
    From the plangent sea to the prairie,
    From the slum to the heart of the Wild.

    From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,
    From the vast to the greatly small;
    For I know that the whole for good is planned,
    And I want to see it all.


    To see it all, the wide world-way,
    From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;
    With never a one to say me nay,
    And none to cramp my soul.

    In belly-pinch I will pay the price,
    But God! let me be free;
    For once I know in the long ago,
    They made a slave of me.


    In a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt,
    Here, pal, is my calloused hand!
    Oh, I love each day as a rover may,
    Nor seek to understand.

    To enjoy is good enough for me;
    The gipsy of God am I;
    Then here's a hail to each flaring dawn!
    And here's a cheer to the night that's gone!
    And may I go a-roaming on
    Until the day I die!

    Then every star shall sing to me
    Its song of liberty;
    And every morn shall bring to me
    Its mandate to be free.

    In every throbbing vein of me
    I'll feel the vast Earth-call;
    O body, heart and brain of me
    Praise Him who made it all!
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  8. #38
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    After Death
    ----------By Christina Rossetti

    The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
    And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
    Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
    Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
    He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
    And could not hear him; but I heard him say,
    ‘Poor child, poor child’: and as he turned away
    Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
    He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
    That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
    Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
    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.


    Poems by Christina Rossetti
    After Death
    Amor Mundi
    A Better Resurrection
    A Birthday



    Biography

    Christina Rossetti

    Poet Details
    1830–1894

    Of all Victorian women poets, posterity has been kindest to Christina Rossetti. Her poetry has never disappeared from view, and her reputation, though it suffered a decline in the first half of the twentieth century, has always been preserved to some degree. Critical interest in Rossetti’s poetry swelled in the final decades of the twentieth century, a resurgence largely impelled by the emergence of feminist criticism; much of this commentary focuses on gender issues in her poetry and on Rossetti as a woman poet. In Rossetti’s lifetime opinion was divided over whether she or Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the greatest female poet of the era; in any case, after Browning’s death in 1861 readers and critics saw Rossetti as the older poet’s rightful successor. The two poets achieved different kinds of excellence, as is evident in Dante Gabriel Rossetti‘s comment on his sister, quoted by William Sharp in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1895): “She is the finest woman-poet since Mrs. Browning, by a long way; and in artless art, if not in intellectual impulse, is greatly Mrs. Browning’s superior.” Readers have generally considered Rossetti’s poetry less intellectual, less political, and less varied than Browning’s; conversely, they have acknowledged Rossetti as having the greater lyric gift, with her poetry displaying a perfection of diction, tone, and form under the guise of utter simplicity.

    Rossetti was the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Francesca in 1827, Gabriel Charles Dante (famous under the name Dante Gabriel but always called Gabriel by family members) in 1828, William Michael in 1829, and Christina Georgina on 5 December 1830. In 1831 Gabriele Rossetti was appointed to the chair of Italian at the newly opened King’s College. The children received their earliest education, and Maria and Christina all of theirs, from their mother, who had been trained as a governess and was committed to cultivating intellectual excellence in her family. Certainly this ambition was satisfied: in addition to Christina’s becoming one of the Victorian age’s finest poets, Maria was the author of a respected study of Dante, as well as books on religious instruction and Italian grammar and translation; Dante Gabriel distinguished himself as one of the foremost poets and painters of his era; and William was a prolific art and literary critic, editor, and memoirist of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

    Rossetti’s childhood was exceptionally happy, characterized by affectionate parental care and the creative companionship of older siblings. In temperament she was most like her brother Dante Gabriel: their father called the pair the “two storms” of the family in comparison to the “two calms,” Maria and William. Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behavior, and she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper. Years later, counseling a niece subject to similar outbursts, the mature Christina looked back on the fire now stifled: “You must not imagine, my dear girl, that your Aunt was always the calm and sedate person you now behold. I, too, had a very passionate temper; but I learnt to control it. On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath. I have learnt since to control my feelings—and no doubt you will!” Self-control was, indeed, achieved—perhaps too much so. In his posthumous memoir of his sister that prefaces The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904) William laments the thwarting of her high spirits: “In innate character she was vivacious, and open to pleasurable impressions; and, during her girlhood, one might readily have supposed that she would develop into a woman of expansive heart, fond of society and diversions, and taking a part in them of more than average brilliancy. What came to pass was of course quite the contrary.” As an adult Christina Rossetti was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.

    Frances Rossetti read to her children, favoring religious texts such as the Bible, John Bunyan‘s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and the writings of St. Augustine, or moralistic tales such as those by Maria Edgeworth. When the children began reading for themselves, however, they generally shunned their mother’s edifying selections in favor of the imaginative delights of The Arabian Nights or Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828); later favorites included Sir Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis. Until 1836, when the boys began attending day school, the four children were offered similar instruction by their mother; thereafter, only Dante Gabriel and William were formally instructed in classics, mathematics, and sciences. Asked to describe her poetic influences, Rossetti speculated in a 26 March 1884 letter to Edmund Gosse: “If any one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather’s cottage-grounds some thirty miles from London.” At Gaetano Polidori’s cottage at Holmer Green she fostered the attention to the minute in nature that marks her poetry; there she also observed the corruptibility and mortality that became keynotes in her work. Her reminiscences in Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) include reflections on childhood adventures at the cottage: her patient attendance on a strawberry, only to find it blighted before it has fully ripened, and her burial of a dead mouse and later observation of its decay. The visits to Holmer Green ended in 1839 when her grandfather sold the house and moved to London. A great lover of nature, Rossetti nevertheless spent most of her life in the city.

    In his memoir William notes that Christina composed her first verse, “Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator,” before she was old enough to write. Her next attempt was an aborted tale, modeled on The Arabian Nights, about a dervish named Hassan; and she wrote her first poem, “To my Mother on her Birthday,” when she was eleven. The children produced a family newspaper, “The Hodge-Podge or Weekly Efforts,” the first issue of which was dated 20 May 1843, and later a periodical titled “The Illustrated Scrapbook.” Christina’s early poetic efforts included experiments in lyric, devotional, pastoral, ballad, and fantasy forms.

    Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti’s poetry. She was also influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement, as is documented in the annotations and illustrations she added to her copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) and in her reading of poetry by Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman. For more than twenty years, beginning in 1843, she worshiped at Christ Church, Albany Street, where services were influenced by the innovations emanating from Oxford. The Reverend William Dodsworth, the priest there until his conversion to Catholicism in 1850, assumed a leading role as the Oxford Movement spread to London. In addition to coming under the religious influence of prominent Tractarians such as Dodsworth, W. J. E. Bennett, Henry W. Burrows, and E. B. Pusey, Rossetti had close personal ties with Burrows and Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church theologian who became her spiritual adviser. The importance of Rossetti’s faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated. More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry.

    Gabriele Rossetti’s health collapsed in 1843, leaving him virtually blind and unable to teach. Frances Rossetti returned to her former employment as a daily governess. Maria and William also took employment, Maria as a nursery governess and William in the civil service. Dante Gabriel continued his art studies, while Christina remained at home as a companion to their ailing father. In 1845 she, too, suffered a collapse in health. The breakdown has mystified biographers, some of whom have surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic and rescued Rossetti from having to make a financial contribution to the family by working as a governess like her mother and sister. She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, but another doctor speculated that she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania. Her biographer Jan Marsh conjectures that there may have been an attempt at paternal incest: the father’s breakdown and the resultant changes in family fortunes leaving a needy patriarch in the daily care of his pubescent daughter, Christina’s recurring bouts of depression, her lifelong sense of sinfulness, nightmarish poems about a crocodile devouring his kin, a poetic image of a “clammy fin” repulsively reaching out to her, and the recurring motif of an unnameable secret, Marsh suggests, could be indications of suppressed sexual trauma. Rossetti had bouts of serious illness throughout her life; William insists in his memoir that one cannot understand his sister unless one recognizes that she “was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid.” The morbidity that readers have so often noted in her poetry, William suggests, was attributable to Christina’s ill health and the ever-present prospect of early death rather than any innate disposition.”

    By her sixteenth birthday Christina, who was regarded as the poet in the family, had written more than fifty poems that were transcribed into a notebook by her sister. In 1847 a collection of her poems, titled Verses, was privately printed by her grandfather Polidori. As Marsh points out, this private publication, dedicated to her mother, decorously avoided anything resembling public display, but at the same time it constituted a juvenile literary debut in the tradition of other women poets such as Browning and Felicia Hemans. It was circulated among family and friends and was well received. The thirty-nine poems are notably literary in their inspiration, which is traceable to the Gothic writers Radcliffe, Lewis, and Charles Maturin; the English poets George Herbert, George Crabbe, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Alfred Tennyson; and the Italian poets Dante, Torquato Tasso, and Pietro Metastasio. The first and most striking poem in the collection is “The Dead City,” an ambitious 275-line dream vision of a magnificent city, succulent banquet, and voluptuous revelers all turned to stone, the evocative descriptions of which anticipate the Pre-Raphaelite style. Here, as in Rossetti’s most famous poem, “Goblin Market“ (1862), lusciously described fruits represent the temptations of self-indulgence and pleasure. This genre—a narrative that combines fantasy with moral allegory—was an important one for Rossetti, and she employed it in more-accomplished poems such as “Goblin Market,” “From House to Home,” “The Prince’s Progress,” and “A Ballad of Boding,” as well as in her tales “Nick,” “Hero,” and Speaking Likenesses, with Pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes (1874). A morbid strain can be seen in many of the poems in the collection: themes of mortality, inconstancy, and corruptibility figure prominently. Although Rossetti’s mature style is not fully realized at this point, Verses is important as a tangible sign of her commitment to poetry and of her family’s recognition of her vocation.”

    Later in 1847 Dante Gabriel, William, and Christina began a tradition of playing bouts rimés, a game in which two of them would race to compose a sonnet conforming to a set of line endings provided by the third. Christina excelled at the exercise, composing sonnets in a matter of minutes. In 1848 she had her first taste of fame when, at Dante Gabriel’s instigation, she submitted two of her poems, “Death’s Chill Between” and “Heart’s Chill Between,” to the prestigious literary periodical The Athenaeum; their acceptance made her a nationally published poet at seventeen. During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group; she even refused to have her work read aloud in her absence at its meetings, on the grounds that such display was unseemly. Nevertheless, her poetry has been described as “Pre-Raphaelite” in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism. Later in her career a reviewer in the Catholic World (October 1876) called her the “queen of the Preraphaelite school”; but more-recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti’s work have been overemphasized at the expense of proper notice of the Tractarian influences. Certainly, Rossetti was involved in the early days of Pre-Raphaelitism. She sat as Mary for Dante Gabriel’s paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), and her pensive Italianate countenance was a familiar image in the first phase of the movement. The art and poetry of the brotherhood has a strong sacramental element, and Rossetti had more in common with this early manifestation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic than she did with its later developments.”

    Late in 1849 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood initiated a periodical, The Germ, as a vehicle for the members’ innovative views on art. Its four issues—dated January to April 1850—provided a venue for seven of Rossetti’s poems: “Dreamland,” “An End,” “Song“ (“Oh roses for the flush of youth” ), “A Pause of Thought,” “A Testimony,” “Repining,” and “Sweet Death.” These publications, which were anonymous in the first issue and pseudonymous thereafter, found an appreciative, though small, audience. The poems, and others composed at this time but not published until later, show that Rossetti had by then attained her mature poetic style, in which pain, loss, and resignation are expressed in diction and images that strike the reader as simple, perfect, and effortless.”

    One of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, James Collinson, proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848. She refused the offer, giving Collinson’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism as the reason. Collinson promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted. Collinson has struck biographers as an unlikely suitor (anecdotes generally portray him as a lackluster sleepyhead), and opinion is mixed as to whether Rossetti was ever in love with him. The engagement ended in the spring of 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism.”

    In 1850 Rossetti wrote Maude: A Story for Girls (1897), a novella that was not published until after her death. The title character’s appearance and personality bear many similarities to accounts of the author, and this work, with its exploration of the tensions among the sometimes incompatible categories of female, poet, and Anglo-Catholic, is usually considered a semi-autobiographical portrait of the adolescent Rossetti. Fifteen-year-old Maude Foster is a poet whose “broken-hearted” verse dwells on themes of suffering, world-weariness, resignation, and religious devotion. Some of Rossetti’s important early poems, later published under the titles “Song“ (“She sat and sang alway”), “Three Nuns,” and “Symbols,” are included as Maude’s productions, and a bouts rimés contest also appears in the narrative. Rossetti returned to this mixing of genres—prose punctuated with poetry—in her devotional works Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Time Flies, and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). Religious issues play a central role in the story when Maude suffers a spiritual crisis, and Anglo-Catholic practices are described as she discusses with her cousins the heavily symbolic lectern cover they are embroidering, the question of a vocation as a nun, and the Eucharist. The main conflict in the narrative revolves around Maude’s experience of the incompatibility of ladylike behavior and poetic achievement. Like the author, Maude is torn between pride in her work and moral qualms about that pride. The heroine’s overactive conscience and endless self-recriminations provide considerable insight into Rossetti’s own overscrupulous nature.”

    The family’s financial crisis continued, and in 1851 the Rossettis moved from Charlotte Street to Camden Town, where Christina and her mother briefly ran a small day school. A second attempt at establishing a school, this time in Frome, lasted from March 1853 to February 1854, the only period in Rossetti’s life when she made her home outside London. When she returned to the city, the family moved to Albany Street. At this point Christina and her mother permanently gave up teaching, and the family lived on William’s and Mary’s earnings and Frances’s modest inherited income. Gabriele Rossetti died on 26 April 1854. For most of her adulthood Christina was financially supported primarily by William, a debt that she made provisions in her will to repay.”

    Throughout her twenties Rossetti continued to write poetry and prose. Her Italian heritage is apparent in the Italian poems “Versi” and “L’Incognita” and an unfinished epistolary novel, “Corrispondenza [sic] Famigliare,” which were published in a privately printed periodical, The Bouquet from Marylebone Gardens during 1851 and 1852. Attempts at publication in prestigious periodicals such as Blackwood’s and Fraser’s in 1854 failed. In a letter of 1 August 1854 to William Edmonstoune Aytoun of Blackwood’s Rossetti declared: “poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality; and . . . I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right.”

    Rossetti has often been depicted as shrinking from worldly concerns, but, in fact, she did engage in humanitarian work. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she volunteered to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses but was turned down. Her aunt Eliza Polidori did join Nightingale in Scutari, and Rossetti temporarily took over some of Polidori’s district visiting, providing assistance to the sick and poor of the parish. In early 1859 Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of “fallen“ women. As an “associate” at Highgate, Rossetti was known as “Sister Christina” and wore a habitlike black uniform with a veil. When she was on duty she resided at the penitentiary, probably for a fortnight at a time. By the summer of 1859 Rossetti was devoting a good deal of time to her work at Highgate, and its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal, and illegitimacy, such as “Cousin Kate,” “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,’“ and “From Sunset to Star Rise,” though poems composed before the period of her work at Highgate— “An Apple-Gathering,” “The Convent Threshold,” and “Maude Clare” for instance—demonstrate her prior interest in the fallen woman. “Goblin Market,” with its theme of a fallen woman being saved by a “sister,” can also be seen as informed by Rossetti’s experiences at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. Her interest in this topic reflects the Victorian concern about prostitution as a social evil; other Pre-Raphaelite treatments of the subject include Dante Gabriel’s poem “Jenny,” begun in 1847 and revised in 1858-1859 and again in 1870; his unfinished painting Found (1854-1881); and William Holman Hunt’s The Awakened Conscience (1853).”

    In the 1850s a few of Rossetti’s poems were published in anthologies; “Maude Clare” appeared in Once a Week (5 November 1859) and the short stories “The Lost Titian” (The Crayon, 1856) and “Nick” (National Magazine, October 1857). In 1861 she submitted poems to Macmillan’s Magazine, and Dante Gabriel sent “Goblin Market“ to the art critic John Ruskin in the hope that he would recommend it to William Makepeace Thackeray, editor of The Cornhill. Ruskin’s criticism of Rossetti’s masterpiece is infamous. In his letter of 24 January 1861 to Dante Gabriel, Ruskin singled out for criticism the original meter that is now so often praised: he acknowledged the poem’s “beauty and power” but asserted that it was unpublishable because it was “so full of quaintnesses and offences,” adding, “Irregular measure . . . is the chief calamity of modern poetry . . . your sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like.” Almost simultaneously, Rossetti’s poem “Up-hill” was accepted enthusiastically for Macmillan’s (February 1861), and Alexander Macmillan expressed an interest in seeing more of her work. During 1861 Macmillan’s published two more of Rossetti’s poems: “A Birthday“ (April 1861) and “An Apple-Gathering” (August 1861). In June of that year Rossetti took a short vacation in France.”

    In 1862 the Macmillan firm brought out Rossetti’s first commercially published volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems. Although some of the poems had been published in Macmillan’s, Once a Week, and The Germ, and others were included in the manuscript for Maude, most were taken from the notebooks in which Rossetti had been writing since the private printing of Verses in 1847. Comparisons of the manuscript and printed versions of the poems show that most were not substantially revised. Usually the earliest extant version of a given poem is the fair copy transcribed into the notebook; if Rossetti reworked it in the act of composition, such drafts no longer exist. She often changed a word or two in preparation for publication; where major revisions occurred, they took the form of the deletion of whole stanzas, sometimes reducing a poem by more than half its original length: such is the case with “Maude Clare,” “Echo,” and “Bitter for Sweet.” This tendency to reduce is part of the economy of expression that is a Rossetti trademark, and the result is poetry in which meaning is suggestive rather than explicit. Looking back on her career, Rossetti wrote in an 1888 letter to an unknown clergyman that “Perhaps the nearest approach to a method I can lay claim to was a distinct aim at conciseness; after a while I received a hint from my sister that my love of conciseness tended to make my writing obscure, and I then endeavoured to avoid obscurity as well as diffuseness. In poetics, my elder brother was my acute and most helpful critic.” Throughout her career Dante Gabriel not only critiqued her work but also negotiated with publishers, assisted with book design, corrected proofs, and provided illustrations for her publications. As Goblin Market and Other Poems was being prepared for the press, he advised on the selection of poems, suggested dividing them into secular and devotional sections, and proposed new titles for some—including the title poem, which was originally called “A Peep at the Goblins.” He also provided frontispiece and title-page designs drawn from that poem.”

    Goblin Market and Other Poems was a critical success, with favorable notices in many periodicals, including The London Review (12 April 1862), The Spectator (12 April 1862), The Athenaeum (26 April 1862), The Saturday Review (24 May 1862), The Eclectic Review (June 1862), and The British Quarterly Review (July 1862). Critics welcomed a fresh and original poetic voice: The Eclectic Review hailed “a true and most genuine poet,” while The Athenaeum remarked that “To read these poems after the laboured and skilful but not original verse which has been issued of late, is like passing from a picture gallery, with its well-feigned semblances of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors which greets us with the waving grass and the pleasant shock of the breeze.” “Goblin Market,” “Up-hill,” “An Apple-Gathering,” and “Advent” were frequently singled out for praise.”

    Today “Goblin Market“ remains Rossetti’s most discussed poem. Critics have dismissed her protest that she intended no allegorical meaning and have interpreted in various ways her fairy tale of two sisters’ responses to the temptation of goblin fruit. Lizzie rejects the luscious fruit as “evil,” but Laura purchases it with a lock of her hair and indulges. Afterward she wastes away, pining for more fruit. The goblins refuse to allow Lizzie to purchase fruit to save her sister, try to persuade her to eat with them, then attempt to force the fruit into her mouth. Lizzie escapes and runs home to Laura, who is cured by tasting the juices smeared on her sister’s face. The poem ends years later with Laura telling the story to the sisters’ offspring; she concludes by saying:

    For there is no friend like a sister
    In calm or stormy weather;
    To cheer one on the tedious way,
    To fetch one if one goes astray,
    To lift one if one totters down,
    To strengthen whilst one stands.

    The suggestiveness of the narrative runs in many directions, and this multivalency is perhaps the most striking quality of the poem. It can be read as a straightforward moral allegory of temptation, indulgence, sacrifice, and redemption. It has also been interpreted as a specifically Christian allegory, with a reenactment of the temptation in the Garden of Eden and a Christ-like offer of redemption through sacrifice—a reading that is encouraged by the Eucharistic diction of Lizzie’s greeting, “‘Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me.’“ Significantly, this Christ is a female one, and feminist readings of “Goblin Market“ have often focused on its positive image of sisterhood. Psychoanalytic interpretations have regarded the sisters as two aspects of one psyche and have emphasized the sexuality of the poem, noting both its orality and its lesbian dynamics. Marxist critics have pointed to the poem’s separation of the domestic and commercial spheres and to Lizzie and Laura’s attempts to do business in a marketplace designed to make women into goods to be exchanged rather than agents in their own right. Critics of many orientations have noted that the sensuality of the fruit, its prohibition to maidens, and its association with nuptial pleasures suggest that Laura’s transgression is a sexual one. In this interpretation, Lizzie’s climactic redemption of Laura can be seen as a critique of the Victorian cultural understanding of the fallen woman, for here she is not forever lost but is saved by a sister’s intervention.”

    In “Goblin Market“ the sisters are endangered by male goblins, and Laura is redeemed through the strength of sisterhood; elsewhere in Goblin Market and Other Poems, however, the danger that men pose as sexual predators is not offset by female solidarity. Throughout the volume Rossetti presents a bleak appraisal of gender relations. The flimsiness and inconstancy of romantic love is a recurring theme, as is the treachery of sister against sister in a ruthlessly competitive marriage market. In “Cousin Kate” the unnamed speaker has been seduced by a nobleman and has borne him a son; now she finds herself a discarded “plaything,” supplanted by her fair and pure cousin Kate, whom the lord has taken not as a mistress but as his wife. The women in this ballad do not live up to the code of sisterly conduct with which “Goblin Market“ concludes. Kate usurps her cousin’s position and ensures the latter’s status as “an outcast thing”; the speaker accuses Kate of betrayal of female loyalty, but her own moral integrity comes under question in the final stanza when she gloats that while she has borne her former lover a son, her cousin remains barren.”

    Adversarial women are also depicted in “Noble Sisters,” a deftly ambiguous dialogue in which the reader must evaluate the reliability of two speakers with opposed moral viewpoints. Similarly, in “Sister Maude” the reader is asked to consider whose sin is greater: the woman who has taken a lover or her sister, who exposes the illicit union. Other pieces in Goblin Market and Other Poems that depict the failure or betrayal of human (as opposed to divine) love and explore women’s sexual and economic vulnerability include “At Home,” “A Triad,” “After Death,” “The Hour and the Ghost,” “An Apple-Gathering,” “Maude Clare,” and “The Convent Threshold.” These works serve to reinforce the devotional poems’ theme of looking to the next life for reward, happiness, and fulfillment. Indeed, with the exception of “A Birthday“ and its ecstatic declaration that “the birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me,” little evidence exists anywhere in the volume that human love is satisfied or satisfying.”

    The theme of the inconstancy and insufficiency of any love except God’s pervades the devotional section. Deferral of satisfaction is constantly advocated, as in “The Convent Threshold,” in which the speaker urges her lover to join her in repentance for their “pleasant sin.” The speaker’s motives are complex, however, for her purpose seems to be the prospect of resuming their “old familiar love” in heaven. Consistently in Rossetti’s poetry the concerns of this world are regarded as inconsequential in comparison to the promise of salvation. Throughout her canon, but especially in the devotional poems, biblical image and idiom merge with Rossetti’s own voice. Revelation and Ecclesiastes are favorite sources, and the “vanity of vanity” refrain is a recurring motif.”

    Other pieces reveal some of Rossetti’s poetical range: the political subject matter of “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857”; the social critique of “A Triad”; the banter of “No, Thank You, John” ; the whimsical, teasing mystery of “Winter: My Secret” ; and the darker, suggestive mystery of poems with enigmatic and unnamed significances, such as “My Dream,” “May,” and “A Pause of Thought.” In a style that has affinities with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but that she made distinctively her own, Rossetti’s precisely drawn natural details assume the weight of suggestive symbolism. For example, in “An Apple-Gathering,” in which the speaker finds herself abandoned by Willie and replaced by “Plump Gertrude,” the speaker’s ill-considered plucking of apple blossoms and the concomitant forfeit of a rich harvest resonates on many levels. Similarly, “Up-hill” and “Symbols” effortlessly evoke profound meaning from the simplest details: an uphill journey toward a place of rest, a flower that blooms and fades, and eggs that fail to hatch. Many poems in Goblin Market and Other Poems continue the morbid strain that was so prominent in Verses. “Dream-land,” “At Home,” “Remember,” “After Death,” “An End,” “Song“ (“Oh roses for the flush of youth”), “Echo,” “A Peal of Bells,” “May,” “A Pause of Thought,” “Shut Out,” “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest“), “Dead Before Death,” “Bitter for Sweet,” and “Rest” strike the signature Rossetti notes of longing, loss, resignation, and death. In the final two poems in the volume, “Old and New Year Ditties” and “Amen,” this loss is met with the promise of fulfillment, expressed in the biblical figures of marriage and the fruitful garden. Critics have noted that Rossetti’s volumes are carefully arranged into meaningful sequences, and Goblin Market and Other Poems includes many examples of significant continuities among the poems and correlations between the nondevotional and devotional sections.”

    During the early 1860s Rossetti was often in contact with female artists—including the members of the Portfolio Society, an informal group organized by Barbara Bodichon—and female poets, such as Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell. She published poems in the feminist periodicals The English Woman’s Journal and Victoria Magazine and in various anthologies, in addition to making regular appearances in Macmillan’s. A respiratory complaint led her to spend the winter of 1864-1865 in Hastings, where she began work on her next poetry volume, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866).”

    That Dante Gabriel played a large role in the preparation of the book is evident from the almost daily correspondence between brother and sister, which provides valuable insight into Rossetti’s methods and includes some spirited rebuttals to Dante Gabriel’s criticisms. Rossetti’s letters make it clear that she tried to write to order for the book, which was not her preferred method of composition. In later years she acknowledged in a 20 May 1885 letter to W. Garrett Horder that “Just because poetry is a gift . . . I am not surprised to find myself unable to summon it at will and use it according to my choice.” According to William Michael Rossetti in Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903), the title poem originated in a suggestion from Dante Gabriel that she “turn a brief dirge-song . . . into that longish narrative, as pièce de résistance for a new volume.” The Prince’s sojourn with the Alchemist gave Rossetti some difficulties, as she explained in a 16 January 1865 letter to Dante Gabriel: “the Alchemist makes himself scarce, and I must bide his time.” Rossetti was not given to rewriting, and once written, the Alchemist remained unchanged: “He’s not precisely the Alchemist I prefigured, but thus he came,” she wrote to Dante Gabriel on 30 January, “& thus he must stay: you know my system of work.”

    In a letter of 10 February she rejected Dante Gabriel’s suggestion that she try to write an episode in which the Prince would fight in a tournament, pleading inability, lack of inspiration, and the formidable precedent of Tennyson’s two tournaments in Idylls of the King (1859). Publication of the volume was delayed for a year, while Rossetti waited for Dante Gabriel’s promised illustrations. In May 1865 she, William, and their mother traveled in France, Switzerland, and Italy. That same year she met Robert Browning, who visited her in London and told her about his work in progress, The Ring and the Book (1868-1869).”

    The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems was met with mildly favorable reviews. The critic for The Saturday Review (23 June 1866) thought that the title poem lacked “subtle suggestion,” while the reviewer for The Reader (30 June 1866) pronounced it “too long to suit Christina Rossetti’s genius for short lyrical thoughts.” In a letter of 6 March 1865 to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti agreed that “The Prince’s Progress” lacked “the special felicity (!) of my Goblins.” “The Prince’s Progress” has never attracted the same intensity of critical scrutiny as “Goblin Market“ and typically suffers in comparisons with that masterpiece. As the reviewer for the 23 June 1866 issue of The Athenaeum observed, the two title poems are similar in that both are allegories of temptation; in “Goblin Market,” however, temptation is overcome, while in “The Prince’s Progress” it wins out. The Prince procrastinates at great length before setting out to claim his waiting bride. He does not, however, remain true to his purpose, and on his journey he is sidetracked and delayed first by a milkmaid, then by an alchemist, and finally by a circle of ministering females who save him from drowning. When he arrives at his bride’s palace, she is dead. The element of spiritual allegory is evident in “The Prince’s Progress”; even the title echoes Bunyan’s allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress, a literary influence from Rossetti’s earliest childhood. The pilgrimage of Bunyan’s Christian through an emblematic landscape is a topos that Rossetti must have absorbed into her own consciousness, for her poems often depict journeys in which topographical details, such as paths that go uphill or downhill, are morally and spiritually significant. For instance, the easy downhill path of “Amor Mundi“ is clearly the way to damnation, while the upward climbs of “Up-hill” and “The Convent Threshold” are made by those who aspire to salvation.”

    While biblical language and image are pervasive in “The Prince’s Progress,” the poem also has a fairy-tale quality; the unhappy ending, however, serves to critique the gender roles typical of that genre. Relegated to a passive role, the waiting bride dies because of the Prince’s failure to complete his quest in a timely fashion; her fate underlines the dangerous predicament of women waiting to be rescued. Elsewhere in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, however, women engage in lives of active service, deferring satisfaction in this life in favor of the reward promised in the next. In “A Portrait” the sacrifice of “youth,” “hope and joy and pleasant ways” for the sake of serving the “poor and stricken” earns the heroine union with the Bridegroom Christ in Paradise. In “A Royal Princess,” which originally appeared in Poems: An Offering to Lancashire (1863), an anthology published in support of Lancashire textile workers, the title figure realizes that her wealth and privilege are based on the enslavement of others: “Once it came into my heart and whelmed me like a flood, / That these too are men and women, human flesh and blood.” The poem ends with the princess’s rebellion against the insulation from social concerns to which she has been subject because of her class and gender; echoing the biblical Esther, she risks all in offering herself and her wealth to an angry, hungry mob.”

    Dante Gabriel was highly critical of a long poem that his sister included in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.’“ Responding in a letter of 13 March 1865, Rossetti vigorously defended the woman poet’s right to explore indelicate issues such as illegitimacy: “whilst I endorse your opinion of the unavoidable and indeed much-to-be-desired unreality of women’s work on many social matters, I yet incline to include within female range such an attempt as this: where the certainly possible circumstances are merely indicated as it were in skeleton, where the subordinate characters perform (and no more) their accessory parts, where the field is occupied by a single female figure whose internal portrait is set forth in her own words. . . . and whilst it may truly be urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don’t see why ‘the Poet mind’ should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities.” The speaker of “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children’“ lives as a servant in the household of her mother, who so fears social condemnation that she does not acknowledge her illegitimate daughter. Mother and daughter suffer the lifelong consequences of illegitimacy, while the seducer father is absent from the poem and, presumably, free of social stigma. The poem shows the injustice of conventional morality in a patriarchal society and offers the equality of the grave as the only solution.”

    Typically, Rossetti’s poems evince a concern with individual salvation rather than social reform. Writing to Dante Gabriel in April 1870, she declared, “It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I, and having said my say may well sit silent.” The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems lays great emphasis on the transitoriness of this life, a recurring theme in the Rossetti canon. The lesson to be learned from poems such as “On the Wing,” “Beauty is Vain,” “The Bourne,” “Vanity of Vanities,” “Grown and Flown,” “A Farm Walk,” and “Gone for Ever” is that all earthly things are unreliable, illusory, and passing. Implicitly contrasted with the fleeting quality of this life is the permanence of God and the heavenly reward. With its comparison of human and divine love, “Twice” is a characteristic statement of this theme. The speaker first offers her heart to her lover, who, with a “friendly smile” and “critical eye,” sets it aside as “unripe.” The speaker then offers the broken heart to God, with the entreaty “Refine with fire its gold, / Purge Thou its dross away.” The failure of human love is a keynote in the volume, beginning with the title poem and appearing again in “Jessie Cameron,” “The Poor Ghost,” “Songs in a Cornfield,” “One Day,” “A Bird’s-Eye View,” “Light Love,” “On the Wing,” “Maggie a Lady,” “The Ghost’s Petition,” “Grown and Flown,” and “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.’“

    In the autumn of 1866 Rossetti declined an offer of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley. Cayley had begun studying Italian with her father in 1847, sharing the Rossettis’ enthusiasm for Dante and endearing himself to them with his attentive visits during their father’s final illness. A hesitant romance probably began to develop between Rossetti and the awkward, absentminded scholar around 1862. Rossetti’s reasons for rejecting his proposal can only be surmised. In a note in his edition of The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908) William says that she turned Cayley down “on grounds of religious faith.” At the time, William thought that there might be financial obstacles to the union and offered the couple a place in his household; his sister responded on 11 September 1866: “As to money I might be selfish enough to wish that were the only bar, but you see from my point of view it is not.— Now I am at least unselfish enough altogether to deprecate seeing C.B.C. continually (with nothing but mere feeling to offer) to his hamper & discomfort: but, if he likes to see me, God knows I like to see him, & any kindness you will show him will only be additional kindness loaded on me.” Much is unknown about the relationship between Cayley and Rossetti. In his memoir William notes that “Christina was extremely reticent in all matters in which her affections were deeply engaged” and that “it would have been both indelicate and futile to press her with inquiries, and of several details in the second case [Rossetti’s relationship with Cayley]— though important to a close understanding of it—I never was cognizant.” Cayley and Rossetti remained close until his death in 1883, and Rossetti served as his literary executor. She declined to have a large packet of her letters to him returned to her, asking that they be destroyed. After Rossetti’s death, William found in her desk a series of twenty-one highly personal poems written in Italian. Composed between 1862 and 1868 and titled “Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente” (The Reddening Dawn), the sequence is generally understood to be addressed to Cayley; it was first published in Rossetti’s New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected (1896).”

    In 1867 Rossetti published in The Churchman’s Shilling Magazine three religious and moralistic stories: “The Waves of this Troublesome World: A Tale of Hastings Ten Years Ago” (April and May 1867), “Some Pros and Cons about Pews” (July 1867), and “A Safe Investment” (November 1867); all were republished in Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870). For this volume Rossetti was persuaded by Dante Gabriel to defect from Macmillan to his publisher, F. S. Ellis. Commonplace and Other Short Stories was a commercial failure, though reviewers singled out “The Lost Titian” and the title story, with its Jane Austen-like social comment, for praise.”

    From 1870 to 1872 Rossetti was dangerously ill, at times apparently near death, with a condition characterized by fever, exhaustion, heart palpitations, stifling sensations, occasional loss of consciousness, violent headaches, palsied hands, and swelling in the neck that made swallowing difficult. Her hair fell out, her skin became discolored, her eyes began to protrude, and her voice changed. After some months her doctors diagnosed a rare thyroid condition, exophthalmic bronchocele, more commonly known as Graves’ disease. Although Rossetti recovered, the threat of a relapse always remained. Moreover, the crisis left her appearance permanently altered and her heart weakened.”

    The reception of Rossetti’s collection of stories left Ellis disinclined to publish her next work, a collection of poems for children. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book was published by Routledge in 1872 and was favorably received; the public was particularly pleased by the illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Some of the poems are primarily edifying, promoting, for instance, patience or good manners; others are memory aids for learning about numbers, time, money, months, and colors. The sound and meter of these little rhymes delight the ear, and Rossetti’s wit is evident in the playfulness of lines such as “A hill has no leg, but has a foot; / A wine-glass a stem, but not a root.” Again nature presents an emblematic aspect, and the phenomena of wind, rain, growth, and death and the alternation of night and day suggest a larger order. Most of the poems are evocative of the security of an ideal childhood, but others modulate into more-serious subject matter in simple and moving explorations of death and loss. Some critics have questioned the appropriateness of these darker themes for the intended audience.”

    Dante Gabriel had been prone to insomnia for some time and had become dependent on alcohol and chloral in his attempts to sleep. By June 1872 his paranoid belief that there was a conspiracy led by Robert Buchanan, author of “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871), to ruin his reputation had become clearly delusional, and he was raving and hearing voices. William concluded that his brother was insane and put him under the care of Dante Gabriel’s friend Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, in whose home he took a large dose of laudanum in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Cared for by friends, Dante Gabriel made a partial recovery, though he continued his use of alcohol and chloral.”

    In 1873 Maria Rossetti joined the All Saints’ Sisterhood. In March 1874 William married Lucy Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. The combined household of the newly married couple and William’s mother, sister, and aunts Charlotte and Eliza Polidori was not a harmonious one.”

    Following her recovery from Graves’ disease Rossetti published the first of her six volumes of devotional prose, Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874). In these devotional writings readers can find explicit statements of themes treated in the poetry of previous decades, and in many instances Rossetti discusses natural and biblical images, virtually glossing favorite poetic symbols. More generally, the devotional prose provides insight into Rossetti’s symbolic method, for she repeatedly indicates that this world is to be read as “typical,” “suggestive,” “emblematical,” and “symbolical.” Annus Domini consists of 366 meditations, each of which includes a passage from scripture followed by a collect beginning with an invocation to Christ. The texts are arranged in the order of their appearance in the Bible, and prayers throughout are intensely Christ-centered; even Old Testament passages prompt an address to Christ.”

    Rossetti returned to Macmillan for the publication of Speaking Likenesses in 1874. The book consists of three tales framed by the dialogue among a storytelling aunt and her nieces. Many readers have noted the sexual implications of the monstrous children in the first tale—boys bristling with hooks, quills, and angles; girls exuding sticky and slimy fluids—and that the predatory games they play amount to a figurative rape. While terror predominates in the first tale, in the second a young child’s desire to have a gypsy tea ends in frustration and despair as she fails to master the tasks of lighting a fire and boiling a kettle. The final tale, in which danger and temptation are overcome, rounds out the volume with a happy ending. The influence of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) is evident, and Rossetti herself described the work to Dante Gabriel in a letter of 4 May 1874 as “a Christmas trifle, would-be in the Alice style, with an eye to the market.” The title, Rossetti explained to Macmillan on 27 July 1874, refers to the way the heroines “perpetually encounter ‘speaking (literally speaking) likenesses’ or embodiments or caricatures of themselves or their faults.” Ruskin lamented in a 21 January 1875 letter to the publisher Ellis that Speaking Likenesses was the worst of the children’s books from the previous Christmas season: “How could she or Arthur Hughes sink so low after their pretty nursery rhymes?”

    In 1874 Macmillan offered to bring out a new edition of Rossetti’s complete poems and inquired after new compositions. On 4 February Rossetti responded, “the possibility of your thinking proper some day to reprint my two volumes, is really gratifying to me as you may suppose; but as to the additional matter, I fear there will be little indeed to offer you. The fire has died out, it seems; and I know of no bellows potent to revive dead coals. I wish I did.” In 1875 the idea of a new edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems and Prince’s Progress and Other Poems was taken up again. In a 30 January letter to Macmillan, Rossetti said that she would try to gather new pieces as well as “waifs and strays,” poems that had appeared in magazines but had not been published in her collections. In Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1875) pieces from the previous volumes and thirty-seven new ones are intermingled into a single poetic sequence. Rossetti omitted some poems from the new collection, most notably “A Triad,” “Cousin Kate,” and “Sister Maude,” all of which explore sexual issues. Evidently she did not work under her brother’s guidance in preparing the volume, for Dante Gabriel’s 3 December 1875 letter addressed the book as a fait accompli. While he conceded that “A Royal Princess” is “too good to omit,” he thought it bore the taint of “modern vicious style,” a kind of “falsetto muscularity” in part traceable to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s influence. He also perceived this taint in “No, Thank You, John” and, more prominently, in “The Lowest Room,” and he lectured his sister that “everything in which this tone appears is utterly foreign to your primary impulses” and warned that she should “rigidly keep guard” against it. Although “The Lowest Room” had been published in Macmillan’s Magazine in March 1864, Dante Gabriel had prevailed in keeping it out of The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. In this extended dialogue between two sisters the younger asks, “Why should not you, why should not I / Attain heroic strength?”—a question at the heart of the poem’s engagement with Homeric epic and with women’s search for fulfilment in the modern Christian age. The tensions between the sisters, between aspiration and opportunity, and between ambition and resignation are highly charged and never fully resolved. One speaker’s hard-won submission—”Not to be first: how hard to learn / That lifelong lesson of the past; / Line graven on line and stroke on stroke; / But, thank God, learned at last”—and acceptance of the “lowest place” are undermined in the final stanza by her anticipation of an inversion of this hierarchy in the heavenly order, where “many last be first.” This inversion of earthly and heavenly status appears again in “The Lowest Place,” the final poem in the collection. The richness of this well-known lyric comes largely from its curious blend of timidity and temerity, for self-abnegation promises to be rewarded with exaltation, and thus the speaker’s humble request is also an audacious one.”

    In 1876 Rossetti, her mother, and her aunts left William’s Euston Square home and moved to Torrington Square, Bloomsbury. In November, Maria died of cancer; Christina’s reminiscence in Time Flies portrays her death as an example of spiritual confidence and anticipation of salvation. Biographers have often commented on its contrast to Christina’s deathbed anguish.”

    Rossetti’s next book, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies on the Benedicite (1879), was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), which published the rest of her devotional prose works as well as Verses (1893), her collection of devotional poems. Seek and Find consists of two series of studies on the Benedicite, a long poem praising a catalogue of God’s works that is included in the Book of Common Prayer as an apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel. The first series of studies in Seek and Find, “Creation,” contemplates each item in the Benedicite—heavens, waters, the sun, birds, other animals, and human beings—in the context of its creation by providing and discussing scriptural passages that are generally, though not exclusively, from the Old Testament. The second series, “Redemption,” considers the same items in relation to Christ and cites mainly New Testament passages.”

    Like many of Rossetti’s poems, her devotional works are double-edged swords of submission and assertion: while they urge obedience to divine will, they also encroach into the traditionally male territories of theological study, biblical exegesis, and spiritual guidance. Similarly, Rossetti’s views on gender issues combine the conservative with the radical. Citing biblical teaching on woman’s subordination to man, Rossetti had written to the poet Augusta Webster in 1878 that because she believed that “the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes,” she could not sign a petition for women’s suffrage. She went on, however, to suggest that suffrage is not enough to protect women’s interests and that female representation in Parliament would be more consistent with the aims of the women’s movement. She also argued for the heroic possibilities of maternal love and its potential to sweep away “the barrier of sex.” It is not uncommon to find such traces of subversiveness in Rossetti’s apparently conservative statements on gender roles. An extended discussion of the subject in Seek and Find begins with a quite traditional discussion of woman as a lesser light—a moon to man’s sun. But Rossetti then moves from a statement about the feminine lot being one of obedience to a paragraph-long comparison between the feminine role and the position that Christ voluntarily assumed on earth, and she ends with a leveling of gender hierarchies: “one final consolation yet remains to careful and troubled hearts: in Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one (Gal.iii.28).”

    Biographers have painted an overly simplistic portrait of the middle-aged Rossetti as narrowly conservative, reclusive, and overly pious. Her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism certainly intensified, and it took some odd forms, such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord’s name printed on them. From 1876, when she moved to Torrington Square, until her final illness Rossetti worshiped at Christ Church, Woburn Square. Mackenzie Bell relates the impression that she made on a fellow member of the congregation: “A friend informs me that towards the close of her life Christina always sat in the very front pew in church. She remained until the very last before leaving the building, and it was evident from her demeanour that even then she strove to avoid ordinary conversation, evidently feeling that it would disturb her mood of mind.” Never comfortable socially, by this time she was reluctant to venture beyond her intimate circle of family and friends: she was aware that she possessed a degree of fame, and she felt self-conscious in conversations that bore the aspect of an interview. She also dreaded receiving unsolicited poems from aspiring writers, because she was torn between kindness and honesty regarding the merit of the work. Though increasingly reclusive, however, Rossetti was more politically outspoken in these later years. Critical of slavery, imperialism, and military aggression, she was most passionately committed to the antivivisection movement, at one point breaking with the S.P.C.K. over its publication of a work condoning animal experimentation. She also petitioned for legislation to protect children from prostitution and sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent.”

    Rossetti’s next work, Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, published in 1881, had been completed by 1876; Macmillan had turned it down under its previous title, “Young Plants and Polished Corners.” A devotional accompaniment for the red-letter saints’ days, Called to Be Saints provides for each day an account of the saint’s life, a prayer, an intricate “memorial” in two columns linking the saint’s life with biblical texts, and descriptions of the emblem, precious stone, and flower associated with the saint and discussions of their appropriateness. Although biographers have tended to emphasize the narrowing of Rossetti’s interests in her later life in that she then wrote in an exclusively devotional vein, one might note that she dealt with a wide array of topics within this framework. In Called to Be Saints she ranges from the biblical and hagiographical to the botanical and petrographical.”

    As her poetic creativity decreased, Rossetti cultivated a modest scholarly impulse. Earlier instances of her scholarly writing include her entries on Italian writers and other celebrities in the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857-1863); in her article on Petrarch she claims to be a descendant of Laura. In 1867 she had published the first of two articles on Dante, a commendatory piece written in support of Cayley’s terza rima translation of The Divine Comedy (1851-1855). After attending lectures on The Divine Comedy at University College, London, from 1878 to 1880 she wrote a more ambitious article, “Dante: The Poet Illustrated out of the Poem” (1884). In 1882 she considered undertaking literary biographies of Adelaide Proctor and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and she took a commission and began to research a life of Ann Radcliffe, but a lack of materials prevented her from completing it. She agreed to trace allusions to Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio for Alexander Balloch Grosart’s scholarly edition of The Faerie Queene in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser (1882-1884), a project from which she withdrew because of ill health. She spent many afternoons at the British Museum and was a tireless reader of periodicals, including The Athenaeum, Macmillan’s Magazine, The Saturday Review, Blackwood’s, and The Edinburgh Review.”

    Rossetti’s research on Petrarch and Dante informs one of the most important poems of her maturity, “Monna Innominata,” which appeared in her third commercially published poetry collection, A Pageant and Other Poems (1880). A sequence of fourteen sonnets— thus subtitled “A Sonnet of Sonnets”—”Monna Innominata” draws attention to its links to the medieval amatory tradition both in its prose preface and in the epigraphs from Dante and Petrarch that introduce each sonnet. In his notes in The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti William Michael Rossetti attested that the introductory prose note was “a blind interposed to draw off attention from the writer in her proper person” and that the sonnet sequence was an “intensely personal” utterance. The subject matter of love deeply felt, reciprocated, and yet unfulfilled is generally taken to refer to Rossetti’s relationship with Cayley, but its import is not limited to this context. Recent criticism of “Monna Innominata” has explored its complex intertextual operations, particularly its revisionary treatment of the sonnet form, whose gender roles Rossetti deliberately and self-consciously reverses by having the unnamed lady, traditionally the silent object of the male sonneteer’s desire, express her love. In doing so, Rossetti is emulating the gender subversion of Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to whom she refers in her preface as “the Great Poetess of our day and nation.”

    Although it is not the title poem, “Monna Innominata,” with its valedictory mode, its questioning of the very possibility of fulfilled desire, and its reappraisal of the sonnet form, sets the tone for A Pageant and Other Poems. Rossetti opens the volume with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to her mother, drawing attention both to the expectations raised by the tradition of the genre— “Sonnets are full of love”—and to the preponderance of sonnets in her collection: “and this my tome / Has many sonnets.” But in the sonnet sequences that follow— “Monna Innominata,” “Later Life,” “‘If thou sayest, behold, we knew it not,’“ “The Thread of Life,” and “‘Behold a Shaking’“ — Rossetti veers away from the amatory tradition by dwelling on the love of and aspiration for union with God. These sonnet sequences are complemented by the abundance of multipart poems in the volume, such as “The Months: A Pageant,” “Mirrors of Life and Death,” and “‘All thy works praise Thee, O Lord.’ A Processional of Creation,” as well as smaller poetic sequences, such as the seasonal sequence “An October Garden,” “‘Summer is Ended,’“ and “Passing and Glassing” and the three Easter poems, “The Descent from the Cross,” “‘It is finished,’“ and “An Easter Carol.”

    Anticipating the final farewell to youth, beauty, and song in “Monna Innominata,” in “The Key-note” Rossetti laments “the Winter of my year” and the silencing of “the songs I used to know.” Similarly, desire is relinquished in “Till Tomorrow”:”

    Long have I longed, till I am tired
    Of longing and desire;
    Farewell my points in vain desired,
    My dying fire;
    Farewell all things that die and fail and tire.

    By reiteration and accretion the passing months, the progression of seasons, and blooming and fading flowers become poignant and nostalgic symbols of the process of aging. Some poems provide consolation, as when the robin in “The Key-note” “sings thro’ Winter’s rest” or in the title poem, “The Months: A Pageant,” a performance piece consisting of a procession of personifications of the twelve months, where “October” offers comfort: “Nay, cheer up sister. Life is not quite over, / Even if the year has done with corn and clover.” But the real movement of the volume is toward relinquishment of love, beauty, Italy, hope, and life itself. The final poems of the non-devotional section return to the seasonal, vegetative cycle. “An October Garden” begins, “In my Autumn garden I was fain / To mourn among my scattered roses,” while the next poem, “‘Summer is Ended,’“ asks if bliss will inevitably end as the rose does, a “Scentless, colourless, . . . meaningless thing.” The following poem, “Passing and Glassing,” confirms the human analogy readable from “withered roses . . . the fallen peach,” and “summer joy that was,” saying that “All things that pass / Are woman’s looking glass; / They show her how her bloom must fade.”

    Familiar Rossetti themes are in evidence in the devotional pieces: renounced desire, weariness with this life, the “vanity of vanities” refrain, and God’s love for the unworthy supplicant. Rossetti’s youthful verses had been called morbid, and death remains a central theme in A Pageant and Other Poems but with an altered emphasis. While in earlier verses death was presented in its more-sentimental aspect, often intruding into the frailty of romantic love, in A Pageant and Other Poems it is contemplated in a subdued and personal way, as a foreseeable and inevitable event. In the sonnet sequence “Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets” Rossetti writes, “I have dreamed of Death:—what will it be to die / Not in a dream, but in the literal truth / With all Death’s adjuncts ghastly and uncouth.” Always doubting her worthiness of salvation, Rossetti imagines her deathbed and acknowledges the possibility that she “May miss the goal at last, may miss a crown.” In “The Thread of Life,” a sequence of three sonnets, the speaker contemplates the essential and solitary self, aloof from external objects and bound by “inner solitude,” and realizes that “I am not what I have nor what I do; / But what I was I am, I am even I.” This self, her “sole possession,” she offers to God. The relation of the self to the external world is again contemplated in “An Old-World Thicket,” which begins with an epigraph from Dante and is obviously engaged with the legacy of Romanticism.

    In “‘All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord.’ A Processional of Creation” all aspects of the created world declare God’s glory, each according to its nature. In “Spring and Autumn” the two seasons declare, respectively, “I hope,— / And I remember,” and these vernal and autumnal attitudes resonate through the volume. In “Later Life” the speaker is “glancing back” on “Lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack, / Hopes that were never ours yet seemed to be.” The devotional poems trace the yielding of unfulfilled earthly hopes in exchange for the heavenly reward. This life is full of “promise unfulfilled, of everything, / That is puffed vanity and empty talk.” Paradoxes abound in “Later Life” as Rossetti writes, “This Life we live is dead for all its breath,” “Its very Spring is not indeed like Spring,” and she looks for rebirth through “Death who art not Death.” The conundrum/insight is reiterated in the pair of sonnets titled “‘Behold a Shaking’“: “Here life is the beginning of our death, / And death the starting-point whence life ensues; / Surely our life is death, our death is life.” The final poems bring a satisfying closure to the volume, looking past the end of this life and ending with a divine embrace in “‘Love is as strong as death.’“ Though sales were sluggish, A Pageant and Other Poems was a critical success: the sonnet sequences, in particular, were praised by reviewers, and “Monna Innominata” was compared favorably with Sonnets from the Portuguese.

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in Birchington on Easter Sunday 1882. Christina’s commemorative poem, “Birchington Churchyard,” was published in The Athenaeum (25 April 1882). The following winter she composed her fourth book of devotional prose, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883), in which she considers the Ten Commandments in terms of Christ’s two great commandments, to love thy God and thy neighbor. “A Harmony on First Corinthians XIII,” first published in the January 1879 issue of New and Old, a church magazine, was revised and included as an appendix.

    Rossetti’s next book, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, published in 1885, is both the most readable and the most autobiographical of her devotional works. As the subtitle suggests, the book is diarylike in structure, with daily entries consisting of meditations on religious feast days and saints’ days, poetic compositions, or personal reflections and reminiscences. The most often quoted passages are those in which Rossetti describes her experiences of nature and elaborates on the moral and symbolic meaning suggested by them. She regards a spider attempting to escape its own shadow as “a figure of each obstinate impenitent sinner, who having outlived enjoyment remains isolated irretrievably with his own horrible loathsome self.” One glimpses Rossetti’s affection for God’s smallest creatures in the pleasure she took in visiting a garden where she “sat so long and so quietly that a wild garden creature or two made its appearance: a water rat, perhaps, or a water-hunting bird.” She goes on, “Few have been my personal experiences of the sort, and this one gratified me.”

    After her mother’s death in 1886 Rossetti continued to keep house for her elderly aunts Charlotte and Eliza until their deaths in 1890 and 1893, respectively, while working on a commentary on the Book of Revelation. The last of Rossetti’s six devotional studies, The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, published in 1892, bears the familiar dedication to her mother, but now “for the first time to her beloved, revered, cherished memory.” A substantial work, The Face of the Deep consists of wide-ranging, free-association meditations on each verse of Revelation. While some passages engage in traditional exegesis, others are more personally contemplative and address issues of spiritual and moral duty. More important for today’s reader, The Face of the Deep includes more than two hundred poems; Rossetti combined them with poems from Called to Be Saints and Time Flies into a volume of devotional poems titled simply Verses. Published in 1893 by the S.P.C.K., this collection of 331 religious lyrics was Rossetti’s last volume to appear during her lifetime. She undertook extensive revisions and arranged the poems into eight sections that form a double poetic sequence: spiritual progress is traced in terms of the individual’s relationship with God in the first four sections and from a universal perspective in the final four. Rossetti’s devotional poems have received scant critical attention, but Verses enjoyed great popularity and continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century.

    In 1892 Rossetti was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy that was performed in her own home. The cancer recurred the following year, and after months of acute suffering she died on 29 December 1894. Rossetti had attained fame as a poet and had earned high regard as a spiritual guide; some had even speculated, after Tennyson’s death in 1892, that she would make a suitable successor to the laureateship. After her death many articles appeared with personal reminiscences, expressing admiration of her saintliness and assessing her poetry and prose. The sole surviving sibling, William made special efforts to document his sister’s life and edit her work. In New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected he made available carefully edited and annotated texts of poems from periodicals and anthologies and many unpublished ones, some written late in Rossetti’s life and others that she had written earlier but had not published presumably because she deemed them either too personal or not up to the standard of her best work. Maude appeared in 1897 and The Poetical Works in 1904; the latter remained, despite its awkward divisions and arrangement, the standard edition of her poetry until Rebecca W. Crump’s The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1979- 1990), which prompted a modern reassessment of Rossetti’s poetry.

    While many other women poets are still in the process of being “rediscovered,” Rossetti is undergoing a radical revaluation which promises a new appreciation of the complexity and variety of her work. In the century after her death her reputation survived largely on the strength of “Goblin Market” and a handful of lyrics. Her lyric gift has never been doubted, but the unassuming tone and flawless finish of these compositions has sometimes led critics to suggest that their lyric purity is achieved at the expense of intellectual depth and aesthetic complexity. Such assessments have been bolstered by William’s description of her as a “casual” and “spontaneous” poet to whom verse came “very easily, without her meditating a possible subject,” and without her having to undertake substantial revisions. More recently critics have expressed suspicion of William’s reconstruction of his sister’s life, his censorship of her letters, and his revisionist editing in the posthumous collections of her poetry.
    For several decades after her death Rossetti criticism tended to be narrowly biographical, her mournful lyrics and fantastic allegories being used to construct narratives of agonizing conflict between secular and sacred impulses, renounced love, and repressed passion. In the 1980s a Rossetti renaissance began as feminist critics undertook a reexamination of her poetry, addressing particularly “Goblin Market” and exploring Rossetti’s representation of sororal bonds, female creativity, and sexuality and her critique of patriarchal amatory values and gender relations. The trends today run toward a proliferation of critical approaches, many of which re-contextualize Rossetti in Victorian culture, and toward critical interest in a wider range of her works, including her fiction, nonfiction, and children’s poetry. Critics continue to study Rossetti’s response to and influence in a women writers’ tradition; also under discussion are gender-conscious models for positioning Rossetti in the mainstream (that is, predominantly male) canon. Christina Rossetti has often been called the greatest Victorian woman poet, but her poetry is increasingly being recognized as among the most beautiful and innovative of the period by either sex.
    Bibliography

    BOOKS

    Verses (London: Privately printed at G. Polidori's, 1847).
    Goblin Market and Other Poems (Cambridge & London: Macmillan, 1862).
    The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1866).
    Poems (Boston: Roberts, 1866).
    Commonplace and Other Short Stories (London: Ellis, 1870; Boston: Roberts, 1870).
    Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (London: Routledge, 1872; Boston: Roberts, 1872; revised and enlarged edition, London: Macmillan, 1893).
    Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (Oxford & London: Parker, 1874).
    Speaking Likenesses, with Pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes (London: Macmillan, 1874; Boston: Roberts, 1875).
    Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems (London & New York: Macmillan, 1875); republished as Poems (Boston: Roberts, 1876).
    Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies on the Benedicite (London & Brighton: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge / New York: Young, 1879).
    A Pageant and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1880; Boston: Roberts, 1881).
    Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (London & Brighton: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge / New York: Young, 1881).
    Poems (Boston: Roberts, 1882; enlarged edition, London & New York: Macmillan, 1890).
    Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (London & Brighton: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge / New York: Young, 1883).
    Time Flies: A Reading Diary (London & Brighton: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1885; Boston: Roberts, 1886).
    The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (London & Brighton: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge / New York: Young, 1892).
    Verses: Reprinted from "Called to Be Saints," "Time Flies," "The Face of the Deep" (London & Brighton: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge / New York: Young, 1893).
    New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected, edited by William Michael Rossetti (London & New York: Macmillan, 1896).
    Maude: A Story for Girls (London: Bowden, 1897; enlarged edition, Chicago: Stone, 1897).
    The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. With Memoir and Notes, &c., edited by William Michael Rossetti (London & New York: Macmillan, 1904).
    The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, 3 volumes, edited by Rebecca W. Crump (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979-1990).

    OTHER

    John Francis Waller, ed., The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, includes contributions by Rossetti, 3 volumes (London: Mackenzie, 1863).

    SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS--UNCOLLECTED

    POETRY
    "Versi" and "L'Incognita," Bouquet from Marylebone Gardens (June 1851-January 1852): 175, 216.
    FICTION
    "Corrispondenza Famigliare," Bouquet from Marylebone Gardens (January-July 1852): 120-121, 218-219; (July-December 1852): 14-15, 55-57.
    "True in the Main: Two Sketches," Dawn of Day (1 May 1882): 57-59; (1 June 1882): 69-70.
    NONFICTION
    "Dante, an English Classic," Churchman's Shilling Magazine and Family Treasury, 2 (1867): 200-205.
    "A Harmony on First Corinthians XIII," New and Old, 7 (January 1879): 34-39.
    "Dante: The Poet Illustrated out of the Poem," Century, 27 (1884): 566-573.

    LETTERS

    Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870, edited by William Michael Rossetti (London: Sands, 1903).
    The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, edited by William Michael Rossetti (London: Brown, Langham, 1908).
    Three Rossettis: Unpublished Letters to and from Dante Gabriel, Christina, William, edited by Janet Camp Troxell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937).
    The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, edited by Lona Mosk Packer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).
    The Owl and the Rossettis: Letters of Charles A. Howell and Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael Rossetti, edited by C. L. Cline (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978).
    Christina Rossetti in the Maser Collection, edited by Frederick E. Maser and Mary Louise Jarden Maser (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Bryn Mawr College Library, 1991).
    The Letters of Christina Rossetti, edited by Antony H. Harrison, 3 volumes published, 4 volumes projected (Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 1997-).

    "

    See also the Rossetti entries in DLB 35: Victorian Poets After 1850, and DLB 163: British Children's Writers, 1800- 1880.

    Christina Rossetti's notebooks are held by the British Library; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; and the King's School, Canterbury; the contents of the various collections are listed by Rebecca W. Crump in Appendix A, volume 3, of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1990). Significant manuscript collections are also at Princeton University, the University of British Columbia, and Bryn Mawr College. Holograph poems are scattered among various public and private collections, also listed by Crump. Antony H. Harrison notes in his edition of The Letters of Christina Rossetti (1997-) that more than 2,100 autograph letters are dispersed in more than one hundred public and private collections. The most substantial collections of letters are at the University of British Columbia, Princeton University, the British Library, the Harry Ransom Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Kansas, the New York Public Library, the Wellesley College Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Bryn Mawr College Library.
    Further Readings

    Bibliographies:

    William E. Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 176-182.
    Fredeman, "Christina Rossetti," in The Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research, edited by Frederic E. Faverty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 284-293.
    Rebecca W. Crump, Christina Rossetti: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976).
    Jane Addison, "Christina Rossetti Studies, 1974-1991: A Checklist and Synthesis," Bulletin of Bibliography, 52 (March 1995): 73-93.

    Biographies:

    Ellen A. Proctor, A Brief Memoir of Christina G. Rossetti (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1895).
    Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (Boston: Roberts, 1898).
    Mary F. Sandars, The Life of Christina Rossetti (London: Hutchinson, 1930).
    Eleanor Walter Thomas, Christina Georgina Rossetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931).
    Marya Zaturenska, Christina Rossetti: A Portrait with a Background (New York: Macmillan, 1949).
    Margaret Sawtell, Christina Rossetti: Her Life and Religion (London: Mowbray, 1955).
    Lona Mosk Packer, Christina Rossetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).
    Georgina Battiscombe, Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life (London: Constable, 1981).
    Kathleen Jones, Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti (Gloucestershire: Windrush Press, 1991).
    Frances Thomas, Christina Rossetti: A Biography (London: Virago, 1994).
    Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Cape, 1994).

    References:

    Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 344-367.
    Mary Arseneau, "Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry, 31 (1993): 79-93.
    Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, eds., The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).
    Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, "Christina Rossetti: Sister to the Brotherhood," Textual Practice, 2 (1988): 30-50.
    Joseph Bristow, ed., Victorian Women Poets: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti (London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).
    Jerome Bump, "Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelitism," Victorian Newsletter, 57 (1980): 1-6.
    Kathryn Burlinson, "'All Mouth and Trousers': Christina Rossetti's Grotesque and Abjected Bodies," in Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virgina Blain (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 292-312.
    Burlinson, Christina Rossetti (Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1998).
    Elizabeth Campbell, "Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," Victorian Studies, 33 (1990): 393-410.
    Mary Wilson Carpenter, "'Eat me, drink me, love me': The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry, 29 (1991): 415-434.
    Alison Chapman, The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 2000; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
    Steven Connor, "'Speaking Likenesses': Language and Repetition in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry, 22 (1984): 439-448.
    Stuart Curran, "The Lyric Voice of Christina Rossetti," Victorian Poetry, 9 (1971): 287-299.
    Diane D'Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gener and Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).
    D'Amico, "'Equal before God': Christina Rossetti and the Fallen Women of Highgate Penitentiary," in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, edited by Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. 67-83.
    Theo Dombrowski, "Dualism in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti," Victorian Poetry, 14 (1976): 70-76.
    Ifor B. Evans, English Poetry of the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1933), pp. 65-80.
    Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry IV: 1830-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 302-316.
    Barbara Fass, "Christina Rossetti and St. Agnes' Eve," Victorian Poetry, 14 (1976): 33-46.
    Mary E. Finn, Writing the Incommensurable: Kierkegaard, Rossetti, and Hopkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
    Barbara Garlick, "Christina Rossetti and the Gender Politics of Fantasy," in The Victorian Fantasists, edited by Kath Filmer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 133-152.
    Pamela K. Gilbert, "'A Horrid Game': Woman as Social Entity in Christina Rossetti's Prose," English, 41 (Spring 1992): 1-23.
    Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 539-580.
    Edmund Gosse, "Christina Rossetti," Century Magazine, 46 (June 1893): 211-217.
    Eric Griffiths, "The Disappointment of Christina G. Rossetti," Essays in Criticism, 47 (April 1997): 107- 142.
    Lila Hanft, "The Politics of Maternal Ambivalence in Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song," Victorian Literature and Culture, 19 (1991): 213-232.
    Antony H. Harrison, "Christina Rossetti and the Romantics: Influence and Ideology," in Influence and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, edited by G. Kim Blank and Margot K. Louis (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 131-149.
    Harrison, "Christina Rossetti and the Sage Discourse of Feminist High Anglicanism," in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, edited by Thais E. Morgan (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 87-104.
    Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
    Harrison, ed., "Centennial of Christina Rossetti: 1830- 1894," Victorian Poetry, 32, nos. 3-4 (1994): 201-428.
    Constance W. Hassett, "Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Reticence," Philological Quarterly, 65 (1986): 495-514.
    Elizabeth K. Helsinger, "Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," English Literary History, 58 (1991): 903-933.
    Dawn Henwood, "Christian Allegory and Subversive Poetics: Christina Rossetti's Prince's Progress Reexamined," Victorian Poetry, 35 (1997): 83-94.
    Kathleen Hickok, Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women's Poetry (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 197-219.
    Terrence Holt, "'Men sell not such in any town': Exchange in Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry, 28 (1990): 51-67; republished in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, edited by Angela Leighton (London: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 131-147.
    Margaret Homans, "Syllables of Velvet: Dickinson, Rossetti, and the Rhetorics of Sexuality," Feminist Studies, 11 (1985): 569-593.
    Nilda Jimenez, The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti: A Concordance (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).
    David A. Kent, ed., The Achievement of Christina Rossetti (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
    U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Avenging Alice: Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll," Nineteenth-Century Literature, 41 (1986): 299-328.
    Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, "The Jael Who Led the Hosts to Victory: Christina Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelite Book-Making," Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, new series 8 (Spring 1999): 50-68.
    Sharon Leder and Andrea Abbott, The Language of Exclusion: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).
    Angela Leighton, "'Because men made the laws': The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet," Victorian Poetry, 27 (1989): 109-127.
    Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (London & New York: Harvester, 1992), pp. 118- 163.
    Linda E. Marshall, "Mysteries beyond Angels in Christina Rossetti's 'From House to Home,'" in Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, pp. 313-324.
    Marshall, "'Transfigured to His Likeness': Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," University of Toronto Quarterly, 63 (1994): 429-450.
    Marshall, "What the Dead are Doing Underground: Hades and Heaven in the Writings of Christina Rossetti," Victorian Newsletter, 72 (1987): 55-60.
    Katherine J. Mayberry, Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
    Jerome J. McGann, "Christina Rossetti's Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation," Victorian Studies, 23 (1980): 237-254; republished as "Christina Rossetti's Poems," in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, pp. 97-113.
    McGann, "The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti," Critical Inquiry, 10 (1983): 127-144.
    Dorothy Mermin, "The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet," Critical Inquiry, 13 (1986): 64-80; republished in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, pp. 198-214.
    Mermin, "Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry, 21 (1983) 107-118.
    Helena Michie, "'There is no friend like a sister': Sisterhood as Sexual Difference," English Literary History, 52 (1989): 401-421.
    Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976).
    David F. Morrill, "'Twilight is Not Good for Maidens': Uncle Polidori and the Psychodynamics of Vampirism in Goblin Market," Victorian Poetry, 28 (1990): 1-16.
    Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "Feminine and Poetic Privacy in Christina Rossetti's 'Autumn' and 'A Royal Princess,'" Victorian Poetry, 31 (1993): 187-202.
    Psomiades, "Whose Body? Christina Rossetti and Aestheticist Femininity," in Women and British Aestheticism, edited by Psomiades and Talia Schaffer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 101-118.
    Joan Rees, "Christina Rossetti: Poet," Critical Quarterly, 26 (Autumn 1984): 59-72.
    Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).
    Rosenblum, "Christina Rossetti's Religious Poetry: Watching, Looking, Keeping Vigil," Victorian Poetry, 20 (1982): 33-49; republished in Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, pp. 114-130.
    Linda Schofield, "Displaced and Absent Texts as Contexts for Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata," Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, new series 6 (Spring 1997): 38-52.
    William Sharp, "Some Reminiscences of Christina Rossetti," Atlantic Monthly, 75 (June 1895): 736-749.
    Virginia Sickbert, "Christina Rossetti and Victorian Children's Poetry: A Maternal Challenge to the Patriarchal Family," Victorian Poetry, 31 (1993): 385-410.
    Sharon Smulders, Christina Rossetti Revisited, Twayne English Authors Series (New York: Twayne, 1996).
    Smulders, "'A Form that Differences': Vocational Metaphors in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins," Victorian Poetry, 29 (1991): 161-173.
    Smulders, "Woman's Enfranchisement in Christina Rossetti's Poetry," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 34 (1992): 568-588.
    Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 78-122.
    Deborah Ann Thompson, "Anorexia as a Lived Trope: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market," Mosaic, 24 (1991): 89-106.
    Winston Weathers, "Christina Rossetti: The Sisterhood of Self," Victorian Poetry, 3 (1965): 81-89.
    Joel Westerholm, "'I Magnify Mine Office': Christina Rossetti's Authoritative Voice in Her Devotional Prose," Victorian Newsletter, 84 (Fall 1993): 11-17.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Dragging the Lake
    ----------By Thomas James
    They are skimming the lake with wooden hooks.
    Where the oak throws its handful of shadows
    Children are gathering fireflies.
    I wait in the deep olive flux
    As their cries ricochet out of the dark.
    Lights spear the water. I hear the oak speak.

    It foists its mouthful of sibilants
    On a sky involved with a stillborn moon,
    On the stock-still cottages. I lean
    Into the dark. On tiny splints,
    One trellised rose is folding back
    Its shawls. The beacon strikes the lake.

    Rowboats bob on the thick dark
    Over my head. My fingers wave
    Goodbye, remember me. I love
    This cold, these captive stars. I shake
    My blanket of shadows. I breathe in:
    Dark replenishes my two wineskins.

    My eyes are huge, two washed-out mollusks.
    Oars fall, a shower of violet spray.
    When will my hosts deliver me,
    Tearing me with their wooden hooks?
    Lights flicker where my live heart kicked.
    I taste pine gum, they have me hooked.

    They reel me in, a displaced anchor.
    The cygnets scatter. I rise, I nod,
    Wrapped in a jacket of dark weed.
    I dangle, I am growing pure,
    I fester on this wooden prong.
    An angry nail is in my tongue.

    Thomas James, "Dragging the Lake" from Letters to a Stranger, published by Graywolf Press. Copyright © 2008 by Thomas James. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
    Source: Letters to a Stranger (Graywolf Press, 2008)
    Entire poem is brilliant and fascinating but the closing stanza is incredible beyond belief, in my opinion..-Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Natures Gift



    It's how the stars are lit at night
    and how the dew drops glisten
    How evening shadows mock the light
    and it's how the silence listens

    From the gentle sway of trees
    that bid such fond adieu
    Songs in a summer breeze
    a voice so clear, so true

    The glory of such symmetry
    so more than fills the eye
    To the beauty of such poetry
    this hopeful heart draws nigh

    In natural peace all love is born
    To live and thrive each blessed morn

    03/14/2017

    Copyright © Charlie Smith | Year Posted 2017
    From the golden and greatly wizened pen of my good friend Charlie!!--Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Grieve Not, Ladies
    --------- by Anna Hempstead Branch

    Oh, grieve not, Ladies, if at night
    Ye wake to feel your beauty going.
    It was a web of frail delight,
    Inconstant as an April snowing.

    In other eyes, in other lands,
    In deep fair pools, new beauty lingers,
    But like spent water in your hands
    It runs from your reluctant fingers.

    Ye shall not keep the singing lark
    That owes to earlier skies its duty.
    Weep not to hear along the dark
    The sound of your departing beauty.

    The fine and anguished ear of night
    Is tuned to hear the smallest sorrow.
    Oh, wait until the morning light!
    It may not seem so gone to-morrow!

    But honey-pale and rosy-red!
    Brief lights that made a little shining!
    Beautiful looks about us shed --
    They leave us to the old repining.

    Think not the watchful dim despair
    Has come to you the first, sweet-hearted!
    For oh, the gold in Helen's hair!
    And how she cried when that departed!

    Perhaps that one that took the most,
    The swiftest borrower, wildest spender,
    May count, as we would not, the cost --
    And grow more true to us and tender.

    Happy are we if in his eyes
    We see no shadow of forgetting.
    Nay -- if our star sinks in those skies
    We shall not wholly see its setting.

    Then let us laugh as do the brooks
    That such immortal youth is ours,
    If memory keeps for them our looks
    As fresh as are the spring-time flowers.

    Oh, grieve not, Ladies, if at night
    Ye wake, to feel the cold December!
    Rather recall the early light
    And in your loved one's arms, remember.

    Anna Hempstead Branch
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Fairer, Indeed
    ---------------------------------------------by Greg Barden

    WOMEN ...

    Truly amaze me ...
    They possess the super-human

    Strength to birth a child - one of
    The most painful and demanding
    Feats of endurance known to our
    Species - yet they have the
    Self-confidence to be meek and

    Tender, with the gentle and sweet
    Fortitude needed for motherhood ...
    They have the extraordinary insight
    To look into your eyes and know
    What you're feeling ... they can be

    Completely confident in who they
    Are, and yet totally vulnerable in
    Who they want to be ... they can
    Have the strength of ten men in
    Bearing young, and the sexuality to

    Bring a hundred men to their knees ...
    They are at one moment the most
    Simple creatures in their need for
    Love, and at the next so complicated
    That they are unfathomable ...

    They can be the most loving and
    Accepting people you've ever
    Known, or the most frighteningly
    Fierce and formidable foes
    Imaginable ... they can lay bare

    Their soul before you and give it
    Up with passion, or build walls so
    Strong that nothing but time can
    Bring them down ... they can let
    You believe, in their confidence,

    That you are the strongest being
    Alive, or remind you that the very
    Fires of Hell are at their beck-and-call ...
    They are EACH and ALL an amazing
    Creation of utter perfection and

    Grace, and like brittle snowflakes,
    Uniquely wondrous and different
    In every way, at one moment a
    Mystery beyond comprehension,
    And at the next, the most delightfully

    Familiar soul you've ever encountered ...
    Their tears flow as freely as their
    Laughter, and they are as spiritual as
    They are sensible ... they measure
    Their own elegance by how they

    Feel INSIDE ... about themselves.
    They are at once outspoken and
    Demure ... they may need to be
    Held and told everything will be
    Alright, or they may need to take

    The lead and be honored ... they
    May want to hear about your
    Wildest dreams, or need you to
    Really LISTEN to how they feel ...
    They may want YOU to take control

    And show them your deepest desires,
    Or they may need to have their
    Every wish fulfilled ... they may want
    You to be endlessly mysterious, then
    Lay bare your broken spirit on the

    Altar of their passion. A woman may
    Want to look perfect, with every hair
    And detail in place, or she may run wild
    Through the rain ... she may share the
    Fires of her deepest lust and desires,

    Or she may make you feel the cold
    Regard of her wrath ... she may want
    You to be firm and forward, and then
    Desire only tenderness and care ...
    She may cry at your funniest joke,

    Or laugh at your saddest story, and
    Expect you to understand ... she
    May howl at the moon in madness,
    Yet require you to keep her sane ...
    She may endear you with her ferocity,

    Then frighten you with her kindness.
    She may love you more in her anger
    Than she ever could in her joy, or
    Adore you for your carelessness,
    Yet despise you for your attention.

    A woman is the perfect vessel and
    The ultimate contradiction, on
    The pedestal one moment, and
    At your feet the next. Their bodies
    Are warm and cold, salty and sweet,

    Rough and smooth, with hidden
    Wonders and responses all their own,
    First trembling at your lightest touch,
    Then needing the firm press of flesh,
    Every soft inch a sublime adventure,

    Every subtle curve a joy ... but
    Their minds are keen and as
    Sharp-edged as any razor ... they
    Can cut you with their words and
    Their stare, then leave you bleeding ...

    They are elation and anger, vigor
    And vulnerability, coyness and
    Carnality ... in a moment they
    Can drag you through hell, or carry
    You to heaven ... they can be angel

    Or demon, mother or daughter,
    Temptress or torturer ... they can
    Make you the king of their heart,
    Or remind you of your absolute
    Insignificance ... they are told from

    Birth that they are inferior to men -
    Weaker, softer, more fragile - yet
    Despite that they are more determined,
    More durable, more wise, more
    Diligent, more deft, more caring,

    More tenacious, more hard-working,
    And more intuitive, than most three
    Men put together ... they can be
    Great moms or be great boxers ...
    They can be successful professionals

    Or stay-at-home wives, they can
    Do most jobs as well as any man,
    And do a hundred other things that
    Many men are never even taught!
    They can teach, fight, love, paint,

    Play drums, be weightlifters,
    Ballerinas, truck drivers, nurses,
    Army sergeants, cooks, seamstresses,
    Basketball players, florists, pharmacists,
    Doctors, lawyers ... women can

    Wear dresses or they can wear work
    Pants, they can wear toe shoes or
    They can wear hockey skates,
    They can wear ponytails or they
    Can wear hard hats, they can wear

    Steel-toed boots or they can wear
    Stilettos, they can wear overalls
    Or miniskirts. I believe that one
    Of the primary reasons that they
    Have been marginalized for so

    Many centuries, is that men knew
    That if women ever DID start doing
    The things that men have always done,
    Everyone would find out that women
    Were BETTER at 99% of those things,

    And would start demanding equal pay
    And equal rights! That is starting to
    Come to pass, and I think it scares
    Many men ... women are told their
    Whole lives what they CAN'T do, yet

    They spend their whole lives doing
    Things that many men are incapable
    Of, things that men don't care to
    Do or want to do or have to do ...
    Men are intent on making a living,

    Yet women are what we live FOR ...
    Women have forever lived in the
    Shadow of men, but men would
    HAVE no shadow without the
    Sunlight that women shine on our

    Lives ... if Woman really WAS made
    After Man, it's because the Creator
    Didn't get human beings right the
    First time, and perfected the species
    With the female version ... and most

    Of all, no matter how much you
    Learn about them, or how much
    You may know of all these things
    I've touched on, or how much you
    Listen and absorb what they tell

    You about themselves, you will
    Never, ever, EVER, understand them ...
    Yet there is absolutely NOTHING in
    Heaven or earth, that is as wonderfully
    Sexy and sublime, entertaining and

    Enticing, intently intense, or
    Imperfectly perfect, as ...

    WOMEN. <3


    Copyright © Greg Barden | Year Posted 2017
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 04-03-2017 at 02:57 PM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Previously I had no plans to ever choose any of my poems to present in this thread----but,
    this creation and my two great writing partners leads me to do so because of their verses, not mine!
    I hope you may enjoy this collaboration as they both are top poets that spent over a month writing this poem with me!

    Additional consideration is that, this poem posted at my home poetry site -only yesterday, was chosen as today's Top Poem of the Day there!
    Thus I feel, they both ( Teppo Gren and Michael P Clarke) deserve to have it showcased here as it is truly a gem, a recognized gem by many others
    ..
    I have the greatest respect for these two friends and their poetic talents!!!! -Tyr


    Remembered In Thy Full Bloom,Collaboration by Robert J Lindley, Teppo Gren and Michael P Clark

    Remembered In Thy Full Bloom
    A Collaboration By,
    Robert Lindley, Teppo Gren
    and Michael P Clarke.



    Thou art remembered in thy full bloom,
    a rose grown within my garden of life.
    Thou art lost to me and this my doom,
    Gone the tender love of my precious wife.

    Ill wind had blown, poisoned arrows of fate,
    love lost, ever I cry, we reunite.
    Tho', should such be only at Heaven's gate,
    illuminated, in true love's precious flight.

    Thine effect so lives in my lonesome cast
    as I meander in my ruthless path,
    in darkened dust of my ill-fated past,
    dying to break free from this endless wrath.

    Yet memories sighs they recall our love,
    when we did caress love's fiery desires.
    In wondrous passions our hearts flew above,
    Thou art memories ghost, kindling love's fires.

    Pray I, your dream-winds soft and fair tonight,
    eager heart leaps to melt in beauty's glows.
    With yellow-moon kisses, all could be right,
    our love's truth, written in destiny's scrolls.

    As lonely spirits found love's true accord,
    thy gentle soul caressed my heart with joy.
    It was thy gracious beauty I adored,
    for endless days thy soft caress enjoy.

    Thou comest beloved, love for to bring,
    thy wondrous beauty, darkness doth dispel.
    In divinity thy heart it doth sing,
    one moment of joy my heart did foretell.

    Within each heart's spirit, desire to come
    pray future treasures that announce their glow.
    Thy touch, paradise in love's kingdom,
    may we with grace, beg our romance to grow.

    The light of life returned from dust to dust
    be it not my destiny to abide,
    and side with mortal ways in life unjust,
    with a forlorn dream to be by my side.

    Now back to the terror of my dark night,
    once more into the pits of hell I fall.
    Despair and sorrow darken God's bright light,
    Deaths promised joys shall come, I hear death call.

    Pray true, warmth and true color to the rose,
    return pure gleam that sent my heart to thee.
    Wherein all time, forever thee I chose,
    thou art ripest flower, I thy lone bee.

    Rejoice in death to treasure thine embrace
    as end is nigh, with courage to depart.
    A halo uncovers thy beauty's grace
    to cast celestial light, and mend my heart.

    And now doth come my end, I see death's light,
    death doth touch my heart, now eternal love.
    My beloved, I see thee shining bright,
    I now praise death as I ascend above.

    As my life's last shadow so swiftly falls,
    pray I, this aching soul hears thy dear voice.
    Ancient echoes whisper love words, thy calls,
    now dear wife, I fly forth, your love my choice.

    In heaven‘s garden thy rose blooms in trine,
    as love’s eternal bond in sacred love
    is cast beyond the faith of God’s design,
    and prayers of truth are whispered up above.

    Robert Lindley,Teppo Gren,
    and Michael P Clarke.
    4-10-2017

    Notes:

    This poem was written to try and find the sadness of a man lost in deep despair. His only escape are those small moments when his memories sigh his beloved to him. He is ready to welcome death so he can be with and hold his beloved again. Death will be a release.


    I want to thank Micheal and Teppo, for the great pleasure it has been to
    engage in this three way collaboration! Both for giving me such exquisite verses to write to and with...
    I know this poem is long and took us a long time to complete, but to me it is well worth it .
    As I could not be happier or any more proud of what our combined efforts have thus created.
    I hope this fine poem gifts and pleases those that read it.. For such is the reward that any poet should hope for.
    Mike and Teppo, my good friends may God bless you both..

    Copyright © Robert Lindley | Year Posted 2017
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 04-12-2017 at 11:18 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    IN ROSE TIME
    ----- by Willa Sibert Cather

    Oh this is the joy of the rose;
    That it blows, And goes.
    Winter lasts a five-month
    Spring-time stays but one;
    Yellow blow the rye-fields
    When the rose is done.
    Pines are clad at Yuletide
    When the birch is bare,
    And the holly's greenest
    In the frosty air.
    Sorrow keeps a stone house
    Builded grim and gray;
    Pleasure hath a straw thatch
    Hung with lanterns gay.
    On her petty savings
    Niggard Prudence thrives;
    Passion, ere the moonset,
    Bleeds a thousand lives.
    Virtue hath a warm hearth—
    Folly's dead and drowned;
    Friendship hath her own
    when Love is underground.
    Ah! for me the madness
    Of the spendthrift flower,
    Burning myriad sunsets
    In a single hour.
    For this is the joy of the rose;
    That it blows, And goes.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Poems By Ambrose Bierce

    The Day of Wrath / Dies Iræ
    An Inscription
    The New Decalogue
    The Statesmen
    To the Bartholdi Statue
    With a Book

    The Day of Wrath / Dies Iræ
    ------------By Ambrose Bierce
    Day of Satan's painful duty!
    Earth shall vanish, hot and sooty;
    So says Virtue, so says Beauty.

    Ah! what terror shall be shaping
    When the Judge the truth's undraping—
    Cats from every bag escaping!

    Now the trumpet's invocation
    Calls the dead to condemnation;
    All receive an invitation.

    Death and Nature now are quaking,
    And the late lamented, waking,
    In their breezy shrouds are shaking.

    Lo! the Ledger's leaves are stirring,
    And the Clerk, to them referring,
    Makes it awkward for the erring.

    When the Judge appears in session,
    We shall all attend confession,
    Loudly preaching non-suppression.

    How shall I then make romances
    Mitigating circumstances?
    Even the just must take their chances.

    King whose majesty amazes,
    Save thou him who sings thy praises;
    Fountain, quench my private blazes.

    Pray remember, sacred Saviour,
    Mine the playful hand that gave your
    Death-blow. Pardon such behavior.

    Seeking me, fatigue assailed thee,
    Calvary's outlook naught availed thee;
    Now 'twere cruel if I failed thee.

    Righteous judge and learnèd brother,
    Pray thy prejudices smother
    Ere we meet to try each other.

    Sighs of guilt my conscience gushes,
    And my face vermilion flushes;
    Spare me for my pretty blushes.

    Thief and harlot, when repenting,
    Thou forgavest—complimenting
    Me with sign of like relenting.

    If too bold is my petition
    I'll receive with due submission
    My dismissal—from perdition.

    When thy sheep thou hast selected
    From the goats, may I, respected,
    Stand amongst them undetected.

    When offenders are indited,
    And with trial-flames ignited,
    Elsewhere I'll attend if cited.

    Ashen-hearted, prone and prayerful,
    When of death I see the air full,
    Lest I perish too be careful.

    On that day of lamentation,
    When, to enjoy the conflagration,
    Men come forth, O be not cruel:
    Spare me, Lord—make them thy fuel

    -----------------------------
    -----------------------------

    An Inscription
    ----- By Ambrose Bierce

    For a Statue of Napoleon

    A conqueror as provident as brave,
    He robbed the cradle to supply the grave.
    His reign laid quantities of human dust:
    He fell upon the just and the unjust.

    ------------------------------------
    ------------------------------------

    The Statesmen
    -----By Ambrose Bierce
    How blest the land that counts among
    Her sons so many good and wise,
    To execute great feats of tongue
    When troubles rise.

    Behold them mounting every stump,
    By speech our liberty to guard.
    Observe their courage—see them jump,
    And come down hard!

    "Walk up, walk up!" each cries aloud,
    "And learn from me what you must do
    To turn aside the thunder cloud,
    The earthquake too.

    "Beware the wiles of yonder quack
    Who stuffs the ears of all that pass.
    I—I alone can show that black
    Is white as grass."

    They shout through all the day and break
    The silence of the night as well.
    They'd make—I wish they'd go and make—
    Of Heaven a Hell.

    A advocates free silver, B
    Free trade and C free banking laws.
    Free board, clothes, lodging would from me
    Win warm applause.

    Lo, D lifts up his voice: "You see
    The single tax on land would fall
    On all alike." More evenly
    No tax at all.

    "With paper money," bellows E,
    "We'll all be rich as lords." No doubt—
    And richest of the lot will be
    The chap without.

    As many "cures" as addle-wits
    Who know not what the ailment is!
    Meanwhile the patient foams and spits
    Like a gin fizz.

    Alas, poor Body Politic,
    Your fate is all too clearly read:
    To be not altogether quick,
    Nor very dead.

    You take your exercise in squirms,
    Your rest in fainting fits between.
    'Tis plain that your disorder's worms—
    Worms fat and lean.

    Worm Capital, Worm Labor dwell
    Within your maw and muscle's scope.
    Their quarrels make your life a Hell,
    Your death a hope.

    God send you find not such an end
    To ills however sharp and huge!
    God send you convalesce! God send
    You vermifuge.




    Ambrose Bierce
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Ambrose Bierce
    Abierce.jpg
    Bierce around 1866
    Born Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
    June 24, 1842
    Meigs County, Ohio, United States
    Died Circa 1914 (aged 71–72);[1]
    last letter from Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico
    Occupation Soldier · Journalist · Writer
    Genres Satire, journalism, short story, horror fiction, war fiction, fantasy, science fiction, western (genre), memoir, humor, literary criticism, poetry
    Literary movement Realism
    Notable works "Chickamauga"
    "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
    "The Death of Halpin Frayser"
    "The Moonlit Road"
    The Devil's Dictionary
    Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
    Spouse Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day (m. 1871; div. 1904)
    Children Day (1872–1889), Leigh (1874–1901), Helen (1875–1940)
    Signature
    Military career
    Allegiance United States of America
    Service/branch Union Army
    Years of service 1861–1866
    Rank Union army 1st lt rank insignia.jpg First Lieutenant
    Unit 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment
    Battles/wars American Civil War: Battle of Philippi (West Virginia), Battle of Laurel Mountain, Battle of Rich Mountain, Battle of Corrick's Ford, Battle of Cheat Mountain, Battle of Greenbrier River, Battle of Camp Allegheny, Battle of Shiloh, Siege of Corinth, Battle of Perryville, Battle of Stones River, Battle of Chickamauga, Chattanooga Campaign, Battle of Lookout Mountain, Battle of Missionary Ridge, Battle of Resaca, Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta Campaign, Battle of Jonesborough, Battle of Franklin (1864), Battle of Nashville

    Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842[2] – circa 1914[3]) was an American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer. In Bierce’s lifetime, eminent critic William Dean Howells said “Mr. Bierce is among our three greatest writers.” When told this, Bierce responded, “I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two.”[4]

    Today Bierce is best known for his "howlingly funny"[5] book The Devil's Dictionary, which was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration;[6] for his story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which is frequently anthologized and has been adapted into stage, radio, film, and television dramas more than a dozen times; and for his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life), which was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.[7]

    In addition, Bierce has been called “the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen” by H. L. Mencken[8] and “one of our preeminent satirists”.[9] A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce has earned recognition as “at the peak of his career, one of the most influential journalists in the United States,”[10] as “arguably the most important American writer of horror fiction—whether physical, psychological or supernatural—between Poe and Lovecraft,”[11] as a pioneering writer of realist fiction[12], as a writer of war stories who “was a demonstrable influence on Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and many others,”[13] and as an influential—and feared—literary critic.[14] In recent decades Bierce has gained wider respect as a fabulist because “both the quantity and consistently high quality of Ambrose Bierce’s fables should guarantee them a place in the canon of American literature,”[15] and for his talent as “a poet, one who occupies a unique niche in nineteenth-century American verse.”[16]

    In December 1913, Bierce traveled to Chihuahua, Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.[17] He was rumored to be traveling with rebel troops, and was never seen again.

    Contents

    1 Early life
    2 Military career
    3 Personal life
    4 Journalism
    4.1 Railroad Refinancing Bill
    4.2 McKinley accusation
    5 Literary works
    6 Disappearance
    7 Legacy and influence
    8 Works
    8.1 Volumes published
    8.1.1 Published during Bierce's Lifetime
    8.1.2 Published Posthumously
    8.2 Short stories
    9 See also
    10 Notes
    11 References
    12 Further reading
    13 External links

    Early life

    Bierce was born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio, on June 24, 1842, to Marcus Aurelius Bierce (1799–1876) and Laura Sherwood Bierce.[2] His mother was a descendant of William Bradford.[citation needed] He was the tenth of thirteen children, whose father gave all names beginning with the letter "A": in order of birth, the Bierce siblings were Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, and Ambrose.[clarification needed]

    His parents were a poor but literary couple who instilled in him a deep love for books and writing.[2] Bierce grew up in Kosciusko County, Indiana, attending high school at the county seat, Warsaw.

    He left home at 15 to become a printer's devil at a small Ohio newspaper.[2]
    Military career

    At the outset of the American Civil War, Bierce enlisted in the Union Army's 9th Indiana Infantry. He participated in the Operations in Western Virginia campaign (1861); was present at the Battle of Philippi (the first organized land action of the war); and received newspaper attention for his daring rescue, under fire, of a gravely wounded comrade at the Battle of Rich Mountain. In February 1862 he was commissioned a first lieutenant, and served on the staff of General William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, making maps of likely battlefields.

    Bierce fought at the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), a terrifying experience that became a source for several later short stories and the memoir "What I Saw of Shiloh". In June 1864, he sustained a serious head wound at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain,[18] and spent the rest of the summer on furlough, returning to active duty in September. He was discharged from the army in January 1865.

    His military career resumed, however, when in mid-1866 he rejoined General Hazen as part of the latter's expedition to inspect military outposts across the Great Plains. The expedition proceeded by horseback and wagon from Omaha, Nebraska, arriving toward year's end in San Francisco, California.
    Personal life
    Ambrose Bierce, by J.H.E. Partington

    Bierce married Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day on December 25, 1871. They had three children: sons Day (1872–1889)[19] and Leigh (1874–1901)[19] and daughter Helen (1875–1940). Both of Bierce's sons died before he did. Day committed suicide after a romantic rejection,[20][21] and Leigh died of pneumonia related to alcoholism.[19] Bierce separated from his wife in 1888, after discovering compromising letters to her from an admirer. They divorced in 1904.[19] Mollie Day Bierce died the following year.

    Bierce was an avowed agnostic.[22] He suffered from lifelong asthma,[23] as well as complications from his war wounds.[24]
    Journalism

    In San Francisco, Bierce was awarded the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army. He remained in San Francisco for many years, eventually becoming famous as a contributor or editor of a number of local newspapers and periodicals, including The San Francisco News Letter, The Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, The Californian and The Wasp. A selection of his crime reporting from The San Francisco News Letter was included in The Library of America anthology True Crime.

    Bierce lived and wrote in England from 1872 to 1875, contributing to Fun magazine. His first book, The Fiend's Delight, a compilation of his articles, was published in London in 1873 by John Camden Hotten under the pseudonym "Dod Grile".[25][26]

    Returning to the United States, he again took up residence in San Francisco. From 1879 to 1880, he traveled to Rockerville and Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, to try his hand as local manager for a New York mining company. When the company failed he returned to San Francisco and resumed his career in journalism.

    From January 1, 1881 until September 11, 1885 he was editor of The Wasp magazine, in which he began a column titled "Prattle". He also became one of the first regular columnists and editorialists on William Randolph Hearst's newspaper, The San Francisco Examiner,[2] eventually becoming one of the most prominent and influential writers and journalists[citation needed] of the West Coast. He remained associated with Hearst Newspapers until 1909.[27]
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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