Rossetti’s influences were as diverse as the many poetic forms in which she wrote: sonnets, ballads, narrative poems, lyrics, even Christmas carols (‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ to name but the most famous). Several of the poems in the volume, such as ‘Remember’ and ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, were composed before she had turned twenty. The title poem is a long narrative poem which is often taken for a children’s poem because of its fairy-tale motifs and imagery Rossetti, however, always denied that the poem was intended for children. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’ Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first collection of her poetry to be published, and it was the book that brought her to public attention. Many of her poems engage with the question of religious belief, such as ‘Good Friday’ (a poem about honest religious doubt as much as faith) and ‘Twice’, about the importance of Christian forgiveness and redemption (the poem is spoken by a fallen woman, a theme that can also be seen in ‘Goblin Market’).Ĭhristina Rossetti composed her first poem while still a very young girl she dictated it to her mother. Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830, and lived with her mother virtually all of her life. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Little Nell), while Victoria herself would effectively spend the last forty years of her life in mourning for her husband, Prince Albert (who, incidentally, had died the year before Rossetti’s poem was published: Albert’s death created an appetite for poems about mourning, as had Tennyson’s popular long elegy, In Memoriam, which had been published in 1850).Ĭhristina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets. The context of the poem is the Victorian era, known for its cult of mourning: people would go into mourning for Dickens’s characters when they died (e.g. The final line, almost bathetic in its simple language (‘and be sad’ especially), is so effective partly because it is so direct and plainly phrased. The repetitions here (‘afterwards remember’ being a subtle call-back to the first word of the poem, as well as its title ‘Better by far’ offering a gentle corrective to the bleak loss of ‘Gone far away’ in the second line) tenderly transform what was imperative and beseeching in the octave into something more broadly sympathetic concerning the fraught relationship between remembering and grieving.
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