"Grown Sick with Hope Deferred": Christina Rossetti's darker musings

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1996 by Sullivan, Brad

The short poem "By the Sea" (1875) also uses the image of the sea to suggest the suppressed potential of the self. In an article which claims that Christina Rossetti is intellectually shallow-a poet who says very little, but says it well occasionallyCurran dismisses this poem as an example of the "mixed quality of treatment and subject" (297) typical of Rossetti's poetry. But a reading of "By the Sea" with the sea image of "Enrica" in mind suggests that Curran himself is guilty of the shallowness that he attributes to Rossetti.

Like so many Rossetti poems, this short lyric centers on an unfulfilled longing for transcendence:

Why does the sea moan evermore? Shut out from heaven it makes its moan, It frets against the boundary shore; All earth's full rivers cannot fill The sea, that drinking thirsteth still. (1: 191)

Considering the primary concerns of Rossetti's poetry, it is hard not to identify the sea, especially in a personified image in which it "moans," "frets," "thirsteth," with the human being "shut out from heaven." Like Rossetti's sea, the human self "thirsts" and consumes, harbors a rich but often frustrated inner life, and longs for the unity and completeness that heaven promises. It beats endlessly upon the boundaries that contain it, yet has no hope of transcending them. Such a use of the sea as an image is unconventional; it departs from the broad optimism of Wordsworth's sea images in the "Intimations Ode," yet it does not approach the more fatalistic use of the sea typified by Arnold's "Dover Beach." It is both intensely personal and universal, representing the unfulfilled longing of both the persona and of the human race.

If the sea represents the longing self, fretting against its earthly boundaries and thirsting for completeness that cannot be achieved on earth, then the remainder of the poem examines our inner life. It suggests the dark and rich undercurrents of the self:

Sheer miracles of loveliness Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:

Anemones, salt, passionless, Blow flower-like-just enough alive To blow and multiply and thrive.

Shells quaint with curve or spot or spike, Encrusted live things argus-eyed,

All fair alike, yet all unlike, Are born without a pang, and die Without a pang, and so pass by. (1: 191)

The images in these stanzas suggest hidden beauty and unfulfilled or repressed potential. The sea-floor is "unlooked-on," hidden from view, yet it is covered with "sheer miracles of loveliness." The environment there is dark and briny, yet the anemones "Blow flower-like," blossoming despite their "salt, passionless" nature.

The sea both creates and consumes itself in an endless cycle in which the beauty and multiplicity of living things, "All fair alike, yet all unlike," is counterbalanced by the inevitability of their destruction. The cycle of birth and death rolls on, and these beauties are "born without a pang, and die / Without a pang, and so pass by" (1: 191). In "By the Sea," both nature and the repressed individual are represented as creative potentials forever turned against themselves.