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Summary Rossetti Notes For English Literature Alevel (OCR)
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Notes listing the key themes for Christina Rossetti’s poetry collection, containing key poems, quotes, critical perspectives and context points.
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THEME 1; GenderQuotes and Poems:
From the Antique-
- “I wish and I wish I were a man”
- “Doubly blank in a woman’s lot”
- “Not a body and not a soul”
- “Still the world would wag on the same”
- “I should be nothing”
Maude Clare-
- “His bride was like a village maid / Maude Clare was like a queen”
- “But he was not so pale as you / Nor I so pale as Nell”
- “He faltered in his place”
- “Hid his face”
- “Here’s my half of the golden chain / You wore about your neck”
No, thank you, John-
- “I never said I loved you John”
- “Why will you haunt me”
- “I have no heart?— Perhaps I have not”
- “In open treaty. Rise above / Quibbles and shuffling off and on”
- “Let us strike hands as hearty friends”
Winter: My Secret-
- “I tell my secret? No indeed, not I”
- “Suppose there is no secret after all”
- “To-day’s a nipping day, biting day / In which one wants a shawl”
- “Sping’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust”
- “Nor even May, whose flowers / One frost may wither through the sunless hours”
Critics:
- Maude Clare illustration by John Everett; depicts Maude Clare as strong willed and
confident, walking ahead with a regal posture. However she is also being observed
by the attendees of the wedding, demonstrating the judgement she still faces as a
fallen woman
- Simon Avery- “The oppression and alienation which many Victorian women might
have experienced due to their exclusion from key systems of power is felt strongly in
Rossetti’s poetry”
Context:
- Women in Victorian England had little social or political power, and were often
confined to household labour which gave them little autonomy as they were reliant on
male partners and relatives. Similarly unmarried women, particularly those who
, engaged in sexual relationships with men, were ostracised and deemed “fallen
women” who required rehabilitation
THEME 2; Religion
Quotes and Poems:
Shut Out-
- “The door was shut”
- “I looked between its iron bars”
- “A shadowless spirit”
- “He answered not”
- “Let me have some buds to cheer my outcast state”
A Birthday-
- “My heart is like a singing bird”
- “The birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me”
- “My heart is like an apple-tree / Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit”
- “Work it in gold and silver drapes”
- “Paddles in a halcyon sea”
Up-Hill-
- “May not the darkness hide it from my face? / You cannot miss the inn”
- “Yea, beds for all who come”.
- “They will not keep you standing at the door”
- “Is there for the night a resting-place?”
- “Of labour you shall find the sum”
Good Friday-
- “Am I a stone not a sheep”
- “But seek Thy sheep, true Shepard of the flock”
- “Smite a rock”
- “Not so those women loved / Who with exceeding grief lamented”
- “Greater than Moses”
Twice-
- “I took my heart in my hand”
- “O my love O my love” “O my God O my God”
- “With a critical eye you scanned”
- “My hope was written on sand”
- “Yea judge me now”
Critics:
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