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.A Birthday by Christina RossettiMy heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water’d shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me.Raise me a dais of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘A Birthday’

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