Christina

Christina Rossetti wasn't an obvious choice to be added to my shelves of poetry biographies but one does well to occasionally step outside of one's 'comfort zone'. The austerity - misery, even- and Victorian piety are at odds with the hedonistic ethic of Thom Gunn but he's no longer the same object of reverence for me as he once was. It was some tangential correspondance with Larkin that encouraged me to read this, and some of the 880 pages of her poems, and proved to contain something admirable which might be summarized as self-denial.

I don't know that Christina and Larkin's versions of self-denial were much the same or even so willingly undertaken. Perhaps one can in some way take satisfaction in such a thing but it is for the most part enforced by character and/or circumstances. Both of them clearly had romantic feelings but in their contrasting ways tried to deny them. With our, or at least my, more ironic mindset by now, Christina's poems are not so easy to appreciate but in their disciplined, uncomplicated music and their embrace of something bleak in this life the best of them are to be admired.

One of the great things about biographies is the view they offer of the strange old worlds they took place in, like the dour, god-fearing atmosphere of Victorian England. The Rossetti's grandmother, we are told, 'was a permanent invalid' and the family was looked after by the youngest daughter, Eliza, who was,

an outspoken and unconventional woman who wore coal-scuttle bonnets twenty years after they had gone out of fashion and whose greatest comfort was that a day only lasted twenty-four hours.

Christina genuinely seems to have believed in a better world beyond whereas Dante Gabriel was the same old, self-styled high priest of making the most of being in the vanguard of a fashionable art movement indulging himself to the limit. Like Clara Schumann compared to Robert, Fanny Mendelssohn compared to Felix and even, who's to say, Nannerl compared to Wolfgang Mozart, there is a bit of evening up to do in the reputations of male and female artists from the same families.

One might not envy Christina the life she had but it's not for us to say. There is fulfilment to be had in a desolate attic and art can be its own reward. Christina Rossetti is not going to crash into any list of my most favourite poets but I'm glad to have made her acquaintance, as encouraged to by 'Anecdotal Evidence', the greatest literary website on the internet.

 

And now, with Christmas approaching and it being too late to order in anything new to read, I fall back on the stockpile or perhaps the library for sustenance between horse races. It's likely it will be the last of the Kundera's re-read to complete that cycle. It might be a bit more of Vasari reporting on the endless genius of Renaissance painters. I think I'd better finish proof-reading what there is of C20th, the 23000 words of it that don't look too bad, before deciding that that is as good as it's going to get. 

And then what. A wide open field can either be seen as full of opportunity or a daunting prospect.