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

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

This view of nature runs counter to what many consider Rossetti's close alliance with Tractarian thought. Mayberry holds that Rossetti, like the Tractarians, saw "all natural phenomena" as "symbols of God and religious truth, God's way of gradually leading men and women to an appreciation of his truth" (112) . But it must have been difficult for Rossetti to see the threatening landscape of "Twilight Calm" or the seemingly pointless cycles of creation and destruction of "By the Sea" and many of her other poems as evidence of a universe which was "ordered, intelligible, and moral" and presided over by a "just, benevolent God" (112) . Her "secular" poems often reflect profound uneasiness with such a natural order of things; rather than offering the confident heavenly resolutions of her devotional poems, they struggle with ambiguous and troubling visions.

One finds many Rossetti poems, for example, in which the persona struggles with the awareness that her "hope deferred" might be pointless, that she might never find the fulfillment she seeks. In "Yet a little While" ( 1881 ) the speaker claims that

I hope indeed; but hope itself is fear Viewed on the sunny side;

I hope, and disregard the world that's here, The prizes drawn, the sweet things that betide; hope, and I abide. (2: 85)

Here the speaker chooses to turn away from the "world that's here" and its beauties, to "hope" and to "abide," to wait for the transcendent world to come. Yet she asserts that "hope itself is fear / Viewed on the sunny side," suggesting that at the root of her hope for future glory and transcendence is the fear of oblivion, the fear of death.

"Two Thoughts of Death" (1896) reminds us again that "hope is fear / Viewed on the sunny side," that death may be only oblivion despite our hopes. The first sonnet offers a naturalistic vision of death which centers on "rottenness" and "corruption." The speaker imagines her dead friend in the grave:

Her heart that loved me once is rottenness Now and corruption; and her life is dead That was to have been one with mine she said.

The earth must lie with such a cruel stress

On her eyes where the white lids used to press; Foul worms fill up her mouth so sweet and red; Foul worms are underneath her graceful head. (3: 183)

This is the language of transience, rather than transcendence. The "cruel stress" of the earth works to destroy the lovely corpse; the juxtaposition of "Foul worms" with a mouth "sweet and red" and a "graceful head" creates a stark contrast of what was and what is. Even the "dew dropping rose" and the grass "rank and green" (3: 183) which grow out of her friend's remains are transient and doomed to destruction:

Even as her beauty hath passed quite away, Their's too shall be as though it had not been. (3: 183)

The second sonnet offers a different view, but not a triumphant vision of Christian resolution. Here the speaker reaches to "pluck a pale anemone" (3: 183) and disturbs a "starry moth that rapidly / Rose toward the Sun" (3: 184) . The sudden jolt of seeing this living thing with "wings that seemed to throb like heart-pulses" (3: 184) alters the speaker's mood: