I take my heart in my hand,/ o my god, o my god,/ my broken heart in my hand : two aspects of female broken-heartedness in Christina Rossetti s poetry

Abstract

Critical study of Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) has long suffered from a persistent tendency to equate her poetry with a morbid religiosity, on the one hand, and facile denunciations of romantic love, on the other. Some feminist critics such as Gilbert and Gubar, for example, have even attempted to investigate Rossetti s poetry in search of evidence of patriarchal oppression shaped as dark tropes of female sexual starvation that lie hidden behind pious religious statements. In my research, I will try to show that Rossetti was neither a martyr nor a rebel. Instead, she developed a poetic mode that became ever more her own as time passed, and, as mature age approached, Rossetti was embraced by her contemporaries as a living example of John Milton s dictum that the good poet s life should itself be a good poem. By focusing particular attention on her devotional verse, I will contend that in her religious poems, more than in her secular ones, Rossetti struggles to come to grips with both the demands of adult life and the vast philosophical vistas that open up when one grapples with one s innermost doubts and fears concerning the prospects of one s own human finitude. Rather than a route of escape, Rossetti s religious faith gave her a vantage-point from which she bravely engaged with life