Poem of the Day: ‘A Birthday’

Today’s Poem of the Day continues the Sun’s week-long celebration of the Victorian poets. Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was the youngest in a family of literary siblings, the most notable of whom, besides herself, was the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her 1862 collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, established her, in contemporary critical and popular appraisal, as the England’s premier female poet and the obvious successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who had died the previous year). After her death, her poem “In the Bleak Midwinter” became the Christmas carol familiar to us in settings by Gustav Holst and Harold Darke. While Rossetti’s religious faith, flavored by the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement of the day, informs her body of work, many of her poems are marked by a certain morbidity, associated with a lifetime of indifferent physical and mental health. Today’s poem, “A Birthday,” however, with its tetrameter lines and its complex abcbdcec rhyming pattern, gives us Rossetti — self-characterized as “calm and sedate” — in a lyric outburst of intensely imagined joy, a compressed Pre-Raphaelite revision of the Song of Songs.