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Summary Notes on 'Piteous my Rhyme is' by Christina Rossetti
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Notes on 'Piteous my Rhyme is' by Christina Rossetti, including summary and analysis.
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Christina RossettiPiteous my rhyme is
Meaning:
This short poem which takes the title given by the first line was written as part of
Rossetti’s 1885 anthology Time flies in which she presents, for each day of the year
religious thought in prose and poetry. Many of these poems were considered to be
devotional often associated with some event of the ecclesiastical calendar, or
otherwise in order to make a moral point. In the case of this poem, we see Rossetti
explore this notion of ‘love’ which is used intrinsically throughout, however it is given
a certain amount of ambiguity as an abstract noun, which allows the reader to
decide for themselves whether the speaker refers to romantic and familial love of
people. Indeed, if we consider the context of Rossetti’s Tractarian beliefs, as is
evident by her use of biblical imagery, and the placement of this poem in a book of
devotional prose, it could be said that this ‘love’ referenced throughout is the
speaker’s love and devotion towards god. The poet also relates this love to the
morality of human life, perhaps in order to depict her own belief that devotion in
god is eternal, whilst most other human actions appear idle and short-lived in
comparison. Perhaps this is a poem which contrasts the briefness of human life to
that of the immortal god; loving a mortal human is a process which can only ever be
bittersweet, as when they die they leave us pained by the loss of their love, whereas
loving and showing your love for god can never because you pain. Indeed, it is no
wonder Rossetti would have chosen to write about the fragility of life, given that, by
1885 she had lost her father, her sister and her brother whilst she herself was suffering
with Graves ’ disease. It could be argued that at this time in her life, Rossetti had
already suffered the trauma of losing those she loved and had thereby increasingly
placed her love and devotion in god, hence the sombre tone of the poem.
Language/structure:
The rhyme scheme used throughout the poem follows a similar order within each
stanza of ABBBCADDDC which creates a reflective and similar pattern in each
stanza. Rossetti may have constructed her poem in this way in order to reflect the
inevitable similarities of each human life, with the use of short stanza in order to
accentuate the briefness of these loves, of these lives. Indeed we see this use of
epistrophe in which ‘is’ repeated at the end of both line one and line six of the first
stanza. Whilst in both of the stanza, lines five and ten repeat ‘then’, creating this
integrated paralleled structure, within, as well as between the two stanzas. It could
also be implied that this use of structural similarity also connotes the eternal presence
and power of god’s love in human lives, hence the use of repetition in this poem
could be said to reflect the perpetual nature god’s existence.
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