Christina Rossetti and the Bible

Waiting with the Saints

Elizabeth Ludlow

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472510952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through theologically-engaged close readings of her poetry and devotional prose, this book explores how Christina Rossetti draws on the Bible and encourages her Victorian readers to respond to its radical message of grace. Structured chronologically, each chapter investigates her participation in the formation of Tractarian theology and details how her interpretative strategies changed over the course of her lifetime. Revealing how her encounter with the biblical text is informed by devotional classics, Christina Rossetti and the Bible highlights the influence of Thomas a' Kempis, John Bunyan, George Herbert and John Donne and describes how Rossetti adapted the teaching of the Ancient and Patristic Fathers and medieval mystics. It also considers the interfaces that are established between her devotional poems and the anthology and periodical pieces alongside which they were published throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century.

1

Attuned to the Voices of the Saints: Rossetti’s Devotional Heritage

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.

(Rom. 8.15–17)

Christina Rossetti’s ‘aesthetic mysticism’ forms the subject of an essay that Alice Law contributed to the Westminster Review in 1895.1 Law claims to perceive ‘in all’ Rossetti’s work ‘the medieval heroine herself looking out at us, from an almost cloistered seclusion, with sad patient eyes’; she is, Law writes, ‘consciously or unconsciously […] her own medieval heroine’.2 This image of Rossetti as a secluded mystic whose musings on the world emerge from an otherworldly vantage point characterises the reviews of her poetry in the late Victorian periodical press. In the 1888 piece that she wrote for Oscar Wilde’s Woman’s World, Amy Levy uses the imagery of ‘A Birthday’ to convey the impression that Rossetti ‘is at one moment intensely human, intensely personal; at another, she paddles away in her rainbow shell, and is lost to sight as she dips over the horizon-line of her halcyon sea’.3 William Michael Rossetti perpetuates this popular image of Rossetti composing poetry that flits between expressions that are ‘intensely personal’ and ineffable when, in the 1904 preface to his edition of her poetry, he describes her work more in terms of emotional outpouring than with any intellectual engagement with sources:

Theology she studied, I think, very little indeed: there was the Bible, of which her knowledge was truly minute and ready, supplemented by the Confessions of Augustine and the Imitation of Christ. She also knew and liked Pilgrim’s Progress. I question whether, apart from this one book of Augustine, she ever read any ‘Father’, Latin or Greek, or desired to read him. (WMR, p. xlix)

While Antony Harrison recognises that William Michael was ‘simply wrong – or at least significantly misguided’ when he describes his sister’s lack of critical acumen in poetic composition, this book demonstrates that he was also wrong or misguided in equating her meditative approach with mystical otherworldliness rather than with theological aptitude.4 From Rossetti’s devotional writings and letters, we learn that she did study significantly more than a ‘little’ theology and that she not only ‘liked’ but engaged intellectually with St Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397–8), Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418–27), and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Building on the scholarship of the last thirty years, my analysis reveals that, rather than a ‘medieval heroine’, Rossetti can more appropriately be described as a creative theologian concerned with bringing her perception of God’s love and justice to an ‘arrogant England’ that she perceived as increasingly enmeshed in consumerism and imperialism (FD, p. 422).

Commenting on Rossetti’s ‘cultural literacy’, Mary Arseneau draws attention to her scholarly acumen:

she read in English, Italian, German, and French; knew Italian poets […] and read the important poets, novelists, and critics of her century including Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Scott, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Barrett Browning, Browning, Tennyson, and many more. Her letters also make clear that she was a tireless reader of periodicals […] As an adult she approached Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenser as a scholar, spending innumerable afternoons at the British Museum.5

Although it is not clear how many ancient and patristic texts Rossetti read in their entirety, we know that anthologies and collections such as John Mason Neale’s Medieval Preachers and Medieval Preaching (1856) provided her with knowledge of various forms of ancient and medieval exegesis.

In addition to contributing to and possessing several of the Lyras, Rossetti wrote for other collections and anthologies. The popularity of these volumes meant that they were central to the consolidation and dissemination of Tractarian precept. The interpolation of poetry with exegesis indicates the central place of verse in the Movement’s self-articulation. Chapter 3 of this book considers Rossetti’s significant contribution to one such volume: John Mason Neale and Richard Frederick Littledale’s four-volume Commentary on the Psalms (1869–83). Despite the recent surge in Rossetti scholarship, this contribution has not previously been registered and, apart from the analysis offered in Kirstie Blair’s recent monograph, her affinity with anthologised collections remains largely neglected.6 Notwithstanding the helpful article by Andrew Maunder and book by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, more work on the periodical publication of Rossetti’s verse needs to be done in light of the recent wave of scholarship in this area and the new digital accessibility of the journals and volumes for which she wrote.7 Responding to critical gaps and bringing to light the key place of religious debates in the periodical press, this chapter explores Rossetti’s intervention into Victorian literary and devotional spaces and highlights her strong awareness of different audiences.

Rossetti’s devotional writings are particularly timely in their contribution to the second phase of the Oxford Movement, which saw a greater (and less contentious) emphasis on ritual and the publication of anthologies that included ancient, medieval and modern poetry. By using the devotions offered in the Lyras as a springboard for her own developing hermeneutic, I suggest how Rossetti not only disseminates but also helps to shape what A. M. Allchin terms the Tractarian ‘perception that we need to be freed from the temporal parochialism which shuts us up in the assumptions of our own particular era.’8 E. Milner-White comments on this perception in his recognition that, by ‘freely accepting’ the outputs of ‘St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales, [and] Augustine Baker’, the Tractarian leaders were able to revive and transform the prayer life of England.9 An examination of what it means for ancient and medieval texts to be ‘freely accepted’ in the Victorian era opens up insights into the kind of trans-historical dialogue Rossetti sets up in her devotional writings and reveals the alternative perceptions of temporality that contemporaneous reading practices promote.

The gestures across time that Rossetti makes in her poetry can be understood as indicative of a kind of existential apprehension. Following George Herbert’s sonnet ‘Prayer [1]’ – which speaks of how ‘Christ’s side-piercing spear’ (5) opens up the possibility of prayer in ‘The six-days world-transposing in an hour’ (6) – Rossetti articulates through poetry a vision of the a-temporal space in which she perceives the praying community.10 Echoing ‘Prayer [1]’s recognition of ‘Heaven in ordinary’ (11), she suggests – in Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets – ‘it may be that | This spot we stand on is a Paradise | Where dead have come to life and lost been found, | Where Faith has triumphed, Martyrdom been crowned’ (CP, p. 346–56: 10.2–4). Contemplating the possibility of incarnate grace entering the present temporal order, she repeatedly indicates that the human condition is best felt in the rhythms of liturgical practice.

As Karen Dieleman demonstrates, liturgy shapes perceptions of personhood. Registering the ‘intersections between an individual’s participation in communal worship practices and his/her practices of writing’, she applies to her investigation Liam Corley’s recognition that ‘though directed toward the Other’, devotional reading involves ‘intense scrutiny of self and critical thinking about the actual world’.11 The discussion I offer in the first section of this chapter responds to Dieleman’s article and her recent monograph Religious Imaginaries (2012) as it investigates how Rossetti details intersections between liturgy and poetry. Assessing what it means for Rossetti to write in a devotional way, it details her engagement with the work of John Keble and demonstrates how she re-orientates the worshipper and investigates the nature of personhood. The next section then extends an appreciation of Rossetti’s engagement with the interface between liturgy and personhood with a close reading of two sonnets, ‘Sonnet/ from the Psalms’ (1847) and ‘After Communion’ (1867). The third part details Rossetti’s poetic delineations of the historical church and considers the influence of Augustine, her foremost theological mentor. The remainder of the book builds on the overviews offered here and approaches each phase of Rossetti’s development as a theologian with full awareness of the interface between her devotional writings, the tradition of liturgical practice and ...