Song Lyric of the Day (Christina Rossetti, on Gifts for God ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’)

“What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.”— English poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), “A Christmas Carol,” in The Complete Poems, text by R.W. Crump, notes by Betty S. Flowers (2001)

The other day, while listening to Christmas music on a local New York area classical music station, WQXR, I heard the deejay identify the author of a carol that I had come to know as “In the Bleak Midwinter” referred to as Christina Rossetti. I was surprised, because, though I had come to know and love the song from Shawn Colvin’s 1998 collection Holiday Songs and Lullabies, I hadn’t recalled a specific identification with any work by the Victorian poet.

Then, as quickly as I could get hold of it, I looked up this particular poem by its famous first line, “In the bleak mid-winter.” It had indeed been written by Rossetti, with Gustav Holst adding the music that transformed this into an enduring holiday song. 

Much to my current regret, a college course I took nearly 40 years ago on Victorian Literature concentrated so much on Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning that it had no time for Rossetti (or, for that matter, her brother, the gifted poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti). What I have read so far in the Complete Poems has convinced me that I should make up for this loss promptly.

Rossetti’s work, deceptively simple, combines both enormous skill with meter and depth of feeling (often, as in the lines I’ve quoted above, with a yearning for the sacred) in nearly every line. Feminist scholars should be congratulated for bringing renewed attention to this poet of stunning purity and beauty.

(The portrait of Christine Rossetti that accompanies this post was created by the poet's brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)