具体描述
A captivating selection of enduring verse by one of the Victorian era’s most beloved poets
Christina Rossetti is unique among Victorian poets for the sheer range of her subject matter and the variety of her verse forms. Weaving connections between love and death, triumph and loss, heavenly joys and earthly pleasures, Rossetti’s poems startle the imagination with their extraordinary truth, beauty, and intensity. This first fully annotated collection, based on the definitive texts, brings together love lyrics, sonnets, hymns, ballads, the vast body of her devotional poetry, and fantasy poems like “Goblin Market,” Rossetti’s terrifyingly vivid verses for children.
作者简介
Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Although her fundamentally religious temperament was closer to her mother's, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Judging from somewhat idealized sketches made by her brother Dante, Christina as a teenager seems to have been quite attractive if not beautiful. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor Pre-Raphaelite brethren, but the engagement ended after he reverted to Roman Catholicism.
When Professor Rossetti's failing health and eyesight forced him into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by starting a day school, but had to give it up after a year or so. Thereafter she led a very retiring life, interrupted by a recurring illness which was sometimes diagnosed as angina and sometimes tuberculosis. From the early '60s on she was in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894.
目录信息
Forget Me Not 3
Charade 3
Hope in Grief 4
On the Death of a Cat 5
Sappho 6
Heart's Chill Between 6
Death's Chill Between 8
Lines / given with a Penwiper 9
A Pause of Thought 10
Song ['She sat and sang always'] 10
Song ['When I am dead, my dearest'] 11
Some ladies dress in muslin full and white 12
On Keats 12
Song ['Oh roses for the flush of youth'] 13
Have you forgotten? 13
Sweet Death 14
An End 14
Dream-Land 15
Remember 16
Three Nuns 17
Portraits 24
'Consider the Lilies of the Field' ['Flowers preach to us if we will hear'] 24
The P.R.B. 25
The Bourne 26
The World 26
From the Antique 27
Three Stages 27
Echo 30
My Dream 31
May 33
Shut Out 33
Amen 34
The Hour and the Ghost 35
The Lowest Room 37
A Triad 47
Love from the North 48
In an Artist's Studio 49
A Better Resurrection 49
'Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive' 50
'The heart knoweth its own bitterness' ['When all the over-work of life'] 51
A Birthday 52
An Apple-Gathering 53
Winter: My Secret 54
Maude Clare 55
At Home 57
Up-Hill 58
The Convent Threshold 59
'What good shall my life do me?' ['Have dead men long to wait?'] 63
Winter Rain 64
L.E.L. 65
Goblin Market 67
'No, Thank You, John' 83
'Out of the Deep' 84
The Queen of Hearts 85
Consider 86
The Lowest Place 87
Beauty is Vain 87
What Would I Give? 88
Who Shall Deliver Me? 88
Twice 89
Jessie Cameron 91
The Prince's Progress 94
Memory 112
Amor Mundi 114
'The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children' 115
A Daughter of Eve 131
A Smile and a Sigh 131
Autumn Violets 132
'They Desire a Better Country' 132
A Christmas Carol134
Love me, - I love you 135
A city plum is not a plum 135
A baby's cradle with no baby in it 135
Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth 136
A linnet in a gilded cage 136
If all were rain and never sun 136
If I were a Queen 136
What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow 137
Brown and furry 137
A toadstool comes up in a night 137
If a pig wore a wig 137
How many seconds in a minute? 138
What is pink? a rose is pink 138
A pin has a head, but has no hair 139
When fishes set umbrellas up 139
The peacock has a score of eyes 139
The wind has such a rainy sound 140
Who has seen the wind? 140
When a mounting skylark sings 140
An emerald is as green as grass 141
What does the bee do? 141
I caught a little ladybird 141
Baby lies so fast asleep 142
Confluents 142
'Yet a little while' 143
Manna Innominata 143
Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome 152
The Key-Note 152
He and She 153
De Profundis 153
'Hollow-Sounding and Mysterious' 154
At Last 155
Mariana 155
Passing and Glassing 156
The Thread of Life 157
Touching 'Never' 158
An Old-World Thicket 159
Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets 165
'Judge nothing before the time' 177
Joy is but sorrow 178
'Redeeming the Time' 178
'Doeth well ... doeth better' 178
A Castle-Builder's World 179
Piteous my rhyme is 179
If love is not worth loving, then life is not worth living 180
Roses on a brier 180
'Called to be Saints' 181
Of each sad word which is more sorrowful 181
Our heaven must be within ourselves 183
'A Helpmeet for Him' 183
O ye who love today 183
Lord, I am feeble and of mean account 183
What is the beginning? Love. What the course? Love still 183
As froth on the face of the deep 184
Patience must dwell with Love, for Love and Sorrow 184
Hope is the counterpoise of fear 184
'Subject to like Passions as we are' 185
Experience bows a sweet contented face 185
'Charity never Faileth' 186
Safe where I cannot lie yet 186
How great is little man! 186
'The Greatest of these is Charity' 187
'O Lucifer, Son of the Morning!' 188
Time seems not short 188
'Judge not according to the appearance' 189
St Peter 189
'Sit down in the lowest room' 190
'Consider the Lilies of the Field' ['Solomon most glorious in array'] 190
Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful 190
Babylon the Great 191
'Do this, and he doeth it' 191
'Standing afar off for the fear of her torment' 192
Vigil of St Bartholomew 192
'Who hath despised the day of small things?' 193
Tune me, O Lord, into one harmony 193
Notes 195
Index of Titles 253
Index of First Lines 258
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