Victorian Poetry

CYNTHIA SCHEINBERG

of total identification with nation-states that have, as history shows,
frequently reversed their favorable national policies toward settled Jewish
communities. "Song of the Spanish Jews," then, aims to convince Christian
readers that Anglo-Jewry can be good English subjects, while reminding
Anglo-Jews that their sense of safety and belonging in England may always
be threatened.

Ill

Aguilar's double voice - which communicates different messages to Chris-
tian and Jewish readers - was a technique used not only by writers from
seemingly marginal religious positions. To be sure, Christina Rossetti was
deeply aligned with High Anglicanism in almost every facet of her life. But
her poetry also engages a "double voice" to pose the question of religious
diversity in relation to the specificity of women's Christian faith. In
"Consider the Lilies of the Field," she takes on the challenge of proposing a
distinctly female Anglicanism: 25 an issue that can be obscured when one
bears in mind that Rossetti was reluctant to support both women's suffrage
and a priesthood for women.

Both the title of Rossetti's poem and its subject matter refer to a well-
known parable from Matthew 6: 27-30 and Luke 12: 27: New Testament
passages where Jesus interrogates the role that intellect plays in developing
true faith. In calling on the Bible directly, and then offering her own
reworking and interpretation of chapter and verse, Rossetti claims an
exegetical authority that is often denied to women. The passage from
Matthew upon which the poem is based reads:

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature? And why

take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;

they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon

in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe

the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall

he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? (King James Version)

The parable explores the role that thought (the intellect) plays in religious
faith. Employing the figure of raiment (clothing) for this intellectual work,
Jesus's parable argues that the toiling and spinning that create thought have
little significance in God's world. The lilies symbolize the most revered
beauty that has no need of the raiment of thought but relies instead on God
to clothe it. In "Consider the Lilies of the Field," Rossetti explores the
relationship between Jesus's allusion to lilies and the common connection
made between flowers and women that can be found in the Bible as well as

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