Poem of the Day: ‘A Dirge’

As we move through the rounds of the year, reading poetry, we are inescapably accompanied by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894). Not that we want to escape her, mind you, but at every turn of the season, there she is with a poem appropriate to the time. Regular Poem of the Day readers will have already noticed that one might compose a Book of Days entirely of Christina Rossetti poems, celebrating Christmas, keeping winter secrets, meditating with joy on the coming of spring. Readers will have seen, too, her capacity for lyric intensity, the opening of the heart’s floodgates as a kind of self-giving, in love, to both some imagined human subject and to the act of writing itself.Today finds us reading another seasonal Rossetti poem, to mark the end of summer. This past Wednesday, the Sun ran Robert Hillyer’s comic end-of-summer poem, “Moo!,” told in the voice of a cow. Christina Rossetti’s dirge, however, isn’t simply, or even primarily, a notice of “summer dying.” It is a heart’s lament for the out-of-jointness of human time, the arc from birth to death, which runs, all too unfairly, counter to the seasons. Ultimately, the poem, in two sestets composed of diminishing couplets in tetrameter, trimeter, and dimeter, laments some particular human subject whose life has kept its own seasons, out of time with time. A Dirgeby Christina RossettiWhy were you born when the snow was falling?You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,Or when grapes are green in the cluster,Or, at least, when lithe swallows musterFor their far off flyingFrom summer dying.Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?You should have died at the apples’ dropping,When the grasshopper comes to trouble,And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,And all winds go sighingFor sweet things dying.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum 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 are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always 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 Dirge’

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