“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.)
No comments:
Post a Comment