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Summary Christina Rossetti_ Religious Poetry Notes
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Summary notes on Christina Rossetti's religious poetry.
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NOTES: With close readings of 'Up-Hill' and 'A Birthday', Dr Simon Averyexplores the tensions and questions that characterise the quest for spiritual
fulfilment found in Christina Rossetti's religious poetry.
Introduction:
- Her writings show her constantly interrogating religious ideas and beliefs,
often with a degree of tension and anxiety.
- Certainly, the speakers of Rossetti’s poems repeatedly struggle with religious
doubt, frustration and fear as they seek a reassurance that might never come,
or attempt to understand their sense of exclusion from God or Christ.
- Writing at a time when established religious beliefs were being challenged by
new developments in science – particularly the theory of evolution as it was
advanced in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of
Man (1871) – Rossetti demonstrates one way in which a key Victorian writer
examined the ambiguities of faith in a time of major change.
Temptation & Struggle:
- Rossetti depicts the disastrous consequences of being attached to worldly
pleasures rather than remembering the importance of spiritual devotion.
- Language emphasises the fear of being turned into a devil-like figure.
- Sonnet – that poetic form traditionally used to write about love – in which
Rossetti emphasises the need to resist being taken in by earthly temptations.
- Image of emptiness and lack of spiritual sustainability. Yet in the poem’s final
lines, there is hope of renewal and transformation as the speaker calls on
Christ to turn the ‘broken bowl’ of herself into something new.
- This is something (resurrection, remoulding) that has to be constantly fought
for. Indeed, the difficulty of the process is clearly articulated.
- Language indicates the exhausting force and effort with which Rossetti’s
speakers strive to achieve a meaningful relationship with God. The repeated
use of the question format here also emphasises the longing for this
relationship to be affirmed and the fear of ultimately being shut out from
salvation.
Reassurance & Celebration:
- Poem uses a series of questions and answers to explore the idea that, after
life’s hardships, a place with God might be achieved.
- It works through one long metaphor of life as a journey towards the
‘resting-place’ (l. 5) or ‘inn’ (l. 8) of heaven, a version of that religious quest
motif.
- The halting metre and alternating short lines effectively emphasise the
struggle of the journey through the ‘day’ of mortal existence, even while the
answering voice affirms that at night (in death) security will be assured.
- The austere, deceptively simple language here – many of the words are
monosyllabic – typically masks the complexities of religious thought that
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