Poetry for Students Vol. 10

A Birthday

While nearly all of Christina Rossetti’s other love

poems focus on themes of loss and isolation, “A

Birthday,” which was first collected in Goblin Mar-

ket and Other Poems(1862), articulates the ecstasy

of found love. In it, the speaker grasps joyously to

identify those images and comparisons which

might accurately express her exhilaration. She

searches first in the realm of the natural, attempt-

ing to equate her emotions with a “singing bird,”

“an apple tree” heavy with fruit, and “a rainbow

shell” in the sea. But none of these natural won-

ders can compare: in love, her heart “is gladder than

all these.” In the second stanza, the speaker aban-

dons the search for the perfect simile, or compari-

son, and instead demands action. In honor of her

figurative “birthday,” she demands the construction

of a lush dais replete with “silk and down,” “doves”

and “peacocks with a hundred eyes,” gold and sil-

ver. Such a construction, ornamented with images

from nature, can better represent her love because

it is a lasting artifact, like poet John Keats’ Gre-

cian urn in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Unlike na-

ture, which perishes, the dais will always mark the

day in which “love has come” to the speaker.

Christina Rossetti’s work is representative of

the Pre-Raphaelite movement founded by her

brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The movement,

which started in 1848 and influenced both poetry

and painting, celebrated the devotional spirit found

in Italian religious art of the pre-Renaissance. Some

characteristics of the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility ap-

parent in “A Birthday” include pictorial richness

Christina Rossetti

1862

32 Poetry for Students