Christina Rossetti's Life In The Life Of Christina Rossetti

Born in1830, Christina Rossetti grew up as the youngest of four children. Her mother, Frances Polidori Rossetti, and her father, an Italian exile, Gabriele Rossetti raised their children in London, England. Rossetti’s family was well versed and talented when it came to literature. Her grandfather owned a printing press and produced her first book of poetry when she was just seventeen years old. Her father wrote Italian poems, her sister was a well respected scholar of Dante Alighieri, she had a brother who was a famous Pre-Raphaelite poet, and another who wrote books about Pre-Raphaelites, as well as editing many of Rossetti’s own poetry books (Rossetti, 7).

With heavy literary influence, it is no wonder that Rossetti got her start when writing her very first poem at the age of eleven. With the decline of her father’s health at the age of thirteen, she witnessed horrific scenes, introducing ideas of death, decay, and mutability into her poetry. Most of her poems at this time had themes of hopelessness. Though she experienced a bout of dark times early on in her life, she began turning out of it and started to write of subjects relating to love and happier times (Packer, 22-23). During this time, she had just accepted the proposal of marriage from a man by the name of James Collinson. In her work, she talks a great deal of his personality (Packer, 33). Unfortunately, this engagement didn’t last until marriage. In her brother’s writings, the termination of their relationship was credited to religious qualms on his part, to which she was unable to reconcile with. He declared himself as Catholic, while she was a devout High Anglican (Packer 41). Rossetti’s religion played a significant role in her writings, and subjects of such com...

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... forget their life together. The fear of being forgotten trumps her fear of death, being more accepting of that notion. As the poem comes to an end, her tone changes, wishing only for happiness for her beloved, even if it means forgetting her. She is sacrificing her own desire for her beloved’s sake, expressing true love. This acceptance of the possibility of being forgotten is ironic, considering the poem’s title, “Remember.”

Rossetti is one of the great poets of the nineteenth century, best known for her ballads and religious lyrical poems. Her writings include heavy symbolism and intense emotion, reflecting her strong commitment to her Christian faith. Christina Rossetti is often regarded as the greatest Victorian woman poet for her beautiful ballads and compelling allegories and is increasingly being recognized for her flawless compositions and lyrical purity.