Christina Rossetti: A Portrait

怀抱花朵的孩子

A Portrait
Christina Rossetti

I

She gave up beauty in her tender youth,
Gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways;
She covered up her eyes lest they should gaze
On vanity, and chose the bitter truth.
Harsh towards herself, towards others full of ruth,
Servant of servants, little known to praise,
Long prayers and fasts trenched on her nights and days
She schooled herself to sights and sounds uncouth
That with the poor and stricken she might make
A home, until the least of all sufficed
Her wants; her own self learned she to forsake,
Counting all earthly gain but hurt and loss.
So with calm will she chose and bore the cross
And hated all for love of Jesus Christ.

II

They knelt in silent anguish by her bed,
And could not weep; but calmly there she lay;
All pain had left her; and the sun's last ray
Shone through upon her, warming into red
The shady curtains. In her heart she said:
"Heaven opens; I leave these and go away;
The Bridegroom calls, - shall the Bride seek to stay?"
Then low upon her breast she bowed her head.
O lily flower, O gem of priceless worth,
O dove with patient voice and patient eyes,
O fruitful vine amid a land of dearth,
O maid replete with loving purities,
Thou bowedst down thy head with friends on earth
To raise it with the saints in Paradise.

From: A Portrait
You can read more poems from here

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-5-30 00:05 编辑 ]

怀抱花朵的孩子

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) - Pseydonym Ellen Alleyne  



One of the most important of English woman poets, who was the sister of the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a member of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement. 'A Birthday,' 'When I Am Dead,' and 'Up-Hill' are probably Rossetti's best-known single works. After a serious illness in 1874, she rarely received visitors or went outside her home. Her favorite themes were unhappy love, death, and premature resignation. Especially her later works deal with somber religious feelings.

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
(from 'Up-Hill', 1861)

Christina Rossetti was born in London, one of four children of Italian parents. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), professor of Italian at King's College from 1831. He resigned in 1845 because of blindness. All the four children in the family became writers, Dante Gabriel also gained fame as a painter. Christina was educated at home by her mother, Frances Polidori, a former governess, an Anglican of devout evangelical bent. She shared her parents' interest in poetry and was portrayed in the paintings and drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites. Christina was the model for his brother's picture The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), which was the first picture to be signed P.R.B. Jan Marsh has proposed in her biography Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life (1995) that Christina was sexually abused by her father, but "perhaps like many abuse victims she banished the knowledge from conscious memory." However, this kind of speculative claims become highly popular in biographies in the 1990s.

Rossetti's first verses were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which was founded by her brother William Michael and his friends. When the family was in a financial trouble, she helped her mother to keep a school at Frome, Somerset. The school was not a success, and they returned in 1854 to London. Except for two brief visits abroad, she lived with the mother all her life.

Rossetti's deeply religious temperament left its marks on her writing. She was a devout High Anglican, much influenced by the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement. Rossetti broke engagement to the artist James Collison, an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, when he joined the Roman Catholic church. She also rejected Charles Bagot Cayley for religious reasons.

By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder, had made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a governess. Rossetti's illness restricted her social life, but she continued to write sonnets and ballads. Especially she was interested the apocalyptic books, and such religious writers as Augustine and Thomas à Kempis. She also admired George Herbert and John Donne. Among her later works are A PAGEANT AND OTHER POEMS (1881), and THE FACE OF THE DEEP (1892). She was considered a possible successor to Alfred Tennyson as poet laureate. To accept the challenge, she wrote a royal elegy. However, Alfred Austin was appointed poet laureate in 1896. Rossetti developed a fatal cancer in 1891, and died in London on December 29, 1894.

In 'After Death', which she wrote in 1849, the poet-speaker lays on a bed, with a shroud on her face, observing the surroundings before the burial. "He did not love me living; but once dead / He pitied me; and very sweet it is / To know he still is warm tho' I am cold." The theme of death appears next year also in her brother's poem 'My Sister's Sleep', (1850), in which death visits a family on a Christmas Eve. Rossetti's best-known work, GOBLIN MARKET AND OTHER POEMS, was published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant voice in Victorian poetry. The title poem is a cryptic fairy-tale and tells the story of two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who are tempted the eat the fruit of the goblin men. After eating the fruit, Laura cannot see the goblins. Lizzie, whose refusal have angered the goblins, is attacked by them, and she saves her sister in an act of sacrifice. Laura, longing to taste again the fruit, licks the juices with which Lizzie is covered. "For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather." THE PRICE'S PROGRESS, AND OTHER POEMS, appeared in 1866. SING SONG. A NURSERY RHYME BOOK was illustrated by Arthur Hughes in 1872. Rossetti also wrote religious prose works, such as SEEK AND FIND (1879), CALLED TO BE SAINTS (1881) and THE FACE OF THE DEEP (1892).

Rossetti's brother William Michael edited her complete works in 1904. He once said that "Christina's habits of composing were eminently of the spontaneous kind. I question her having ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write something or other, and then, after thinking out a subject, having proceeded to treat it in regular spells of work. Instead of this, something impelled her feelings, or "came into her head," and her hand obeyed the dictation. I suppose she scribbled lines off rapidly enough, and afterwards took whatever amount of pains she deemed requisite for keeping them in right form and expression." Rossetti's work has suffered from reductive interpretations, but she is increasingly being reconsidered as a major Victorian poet. Typical for her poems was songlike use words and short, irregularly rhymed lines.

A birthday
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose heart is in a watered shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That Paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.


From:http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rossetti.htm

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-6-1 12:58 编辑 ]

怀抱花朵的孩子

The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
1848-9
83.2 x 65.4 cm
oil on canvas

The lily, a flower symbolising Mary's purity, is here being grown in a pot and carefully tended by a child angel. This refers to the Angel Gabriel who will later announce to Mary that she is to bear the Son of God.

Rossetti gives us a snapshot of Mary as a child, seated with her mother St Anne and embroidering a lily while her father St Joachim prunes a vine in the background.

The painting is rich in Christian symbolism: the dove alludes to the Holy Spirit, the vine to Christian truth, the rose on the windowsill is another flower associated with the Virgin, and the lamp is a symbol of piety. Even the colours of the books that the lily pot stands on refer to Christian virtues, such as gold for charity and green for hope.

You can get more details from: here

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-6-1 10:56 编辑 ]