Poem of the Day: ‘Spring’  

It’s easy to think of Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) as a caricature of her own extremes: morbid and (as other of her poems we have run in the Sun suggest) maybe a little hysterical, certainly strange. Incongruously, given her best-known works, the poet described her own nature as “calm and sedate.” Where Wordsworth speaks of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” Rossetti — the baby of a famously intellectual family, her adult life spent first as companion to her invalid father, then as a semi-invalid herself — seems able to generate emotion from a place of self-control. Even in sentimental favorites like “In the Bleak Midwinter,” feeling never drowns out acute insight.

Some of Rossetti’s less-famous poems — today’s Poem of the Day, for example — especially show this turn of mind. “Spring,” with its loosely rhymed and metered stanzas, offers an arc of insight that observes the flowering of life out of death, in a process rather like the generation of feeling from calm. Lingering over its particulars — “seeds and roots and stones of fruits” —  the poem celebrates the freshness of the season, while meditating on the winter which has “given birth” to all this life. That life, of course, will in its own turn wither and die, but only to gestate another spring.