Doves and Pomegranates: Poems for Young Readers

by Christina Rossetti, Margery Gill (Illustrator)

Doves and Pomegranates

Genres: Poetry

1 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1969

About the author

Christina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as "Up-hill" (1861).

Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.

Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.

When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.

All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.

After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems were selected by someone called David Powell, and are apparently aimed at the younger reader. Which makes sense. It starts with a pretty decent introduction about Rossetti for those who don't know her. There were a few poems that I liked, with 'An Echo From Willow-Wood' being my pick of best, but on the whole this collection wasn't really my favourite type of poetry. I still totally respect Rossetti as a poet though.

Three poems below.

MAY

I cannot tell you how it was;
But this I know: it came to pass
Upon a bright and breezy day
When May was young, ah pleasant May!
As yet poppies were not born
Between the blades of tender corn;
The last eggs had not hatched yet,
Not any bird forgone its mate.

I cannot tell you what it was;
But this I know: it did but pass.
It passed away with sunny May,
With all sweet things it passed away,
And left me old, and cold, and grey.

BOATS SAIL ON THE RIVERS

Boats sail on the rivers,
And ships sail on the seas;
But clouds that sail across the sky
Are prettier far than these.

There are bridges on the rivers,
As pretty as you please;
But the bow that bridges heaven,
And overtops the trees,
And builds a road from earth to sky,
Is prettier far than these.

AN ECHO FROM WILLOW-WOOD

Two gazed into a pool, he gazed and she,
Not hand in hand, yet heart in heart, I think,
Pale and reluctant on the water's brink,
As on the brink of parting which must be.
Each eyed the other's aspect, she and he,
Each felt one hungering heart leap up and sink,
Each tasted bitterness which both must drink,
There on the brink of life's dividing sea.
Lilies upon the surface, deep below
Two wistful faces craving each for each,
Resolute and reluctant without speech:
A sudden ripple made the faces flow,
One moment joined, to vanish out of reach:
So those hearts joined, and ah were parted so.

[Sonja Isaacson · Rating 2 out of 5]

For some reason, I have a number of Christina Rossetti books on my library list. I don't remember putting them there or how I cam across her name. So I got one to see what they are like.

This book contains poems or parts of poems from a number of her publications. Naomi Lewis wrote the introduction giving information about Rossetti and her family.

Really, poetry doesn't do anything for me. I don't see that deeper meaning. If there is no rhyme or beat that appears, I am even more lost. Some have rhyme, but really I read this just to get it done.

While this is "Poems for young readers" I am glad I didn't end up reading with the girls. Especially the last chapter "Another World Than This" seemed to include a number about death.

There were a couple that I was starting to like as I read, but then didn't appreciate the ending. At this point, I am not sure if I am going to try another other of her poetry books or just delete from my list.