In the Bleak Midwinter

This seems like an appropriate time to be reading Christina Rossetti, like reading Larkin at Whitsun, Thomas Hood in November or R.S. Thomas at the year's turning. The Collected Poems is 1216 pages but the notes begin on page 881. Finding a poem again once you've left the page isn't always easy. At first I thought I'd made a mistake in buying quite so much mawkish Victorian rhyming but one needs to give her a chance and there are things worth having, and very much 'of their time', to be found beyond her famous desolate carol.

What soon becomes clear in Christina is a problem that besets any poet who believes so fundamentally in rhyme. What she writes is to a great extent dictated by that necessity. The lines are written because they rhyme and wouldn't have been written if they didn't. The cart is before the horse. As Edward Thomas was later to write of Ezra Pound's more sophisticated strategy, 

If he is not careful he will take to meaning what he says instead of saying what he means. 

She is by no means the only rhymer who suffers from the affliction but it's rarely more apparent than in her work. Nonetheless, in among the pre-free verse, pre-blank verse fashion that applied to all English C19th poetry and the piety and the morbidness is a quiet, thoughtful soul devoted to her art.

The biography that hasn't arrived here yet is likely, like those of Charlotte Mew and Stevie Smith, to reveal a more engaging and admirable lady than is to be found in only her poems and they all three have their admirers, Christina to the extent that she was thought of as a possible Poet Laureate on the death of Tennyson in 1892. Where I am happy to take a long break from writing poems after composing one sonnet, Christina writes a Sonnet of Sonnets based on Dante and Petrarch as well as a later double sonnet of sonnets, clearly not as anxious about wearing out the language as I am. It represents some of the best of her work I've so far found, opening the book like a lucky dip to see what one finds, which is mostly an awareness of this life being fleeting and fragile beneath and before an eternity she is uncertain of. You can't help but like her while not imagining that any deepening of one's acquaintance with her work is going to yield anything better than In the Bleak Midwinter or catapult her into the echelons of one's favourite poets.