42 Poetry for Students
But when the trees bough down their heads
The wind is passing by.
In both poems, Rossetti describes something
unseen—in “A Birthday” love, and in the child’s
poem, the wind—by showing the dramatic effects
that these forces can have on nature and on people.
The wind makes the leaves tremble and the trees
“bough down their heads,” as if human. And in “A
Birthday” love makes the speaker rush around to
construct comparisons and then build a work of art
in appreciation and gratitude. In both poems, the
sounds of the words enhance their meaning. The
rhythms carry the reader along with the speaker and
with the wind itself.
Rossetti’s greatest achievement in “A Birth-
day” rests in the music of her words. Virginia
Woolf, a famous English novelist, praised Rossetti
for the pureness of her tone and her wonderful ear:
“Your instinct was so clear, so direct, so intense
that it produced poems that sing like music in one’s
ears.”
And yet what’s ultimately most compelling
about “A Birthday” is its strangeness. The identity
of the speaker’s beloved isn’t the only mystery. The
speaker’s own state of mind, despite the fact that
she speaks directly and emphatically, remains un-
certain. There’s an odd giddiness in the speaker’s
tone, something too frenzied in her habit of rush-
ing from image to image, from singing bird to ap-
ple tree to rainbow shell. When she discards all of
those images as inadequate, the speaker’s emotions
become suspect. Edmund Gosse, writing in 1896,
said that “there is not a chord of a minor key in “A
Birthday,” and yet the impression which its cumu-
lative ecstasy leaves upon the nerves is almost pa-
thetic.”
A reserved woman who never married, was of-
ten ill, and was deeply religious, Rossetti was con-
sidered almost unknowable by her family members
and later by her biographers. There’s a sense that
Rossetti may have learned to write what’s accept-
able or expected, rather than what she truly felt.
Elizabeth Bishop, a twentieth-century American
poet, wrote,
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; So many things
seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is
no disaster.
Modern readers quickly realize that Bishop is-
n’t saying what she means, but is in fact asserting
the opposite. By putting on a brave front, Bishop
shows us how unacceptable and deeply felt the pain
of loss can be. Many decades earlier, Rossetti wrote
words in a similar vein:Not to be first: how hard to learn
That lifelong lesson of the past
Line graven on line and stroke on stroke:
But, thank God, learned at last.
Although Rossetti professes to be thankful for
having learned to put her own desires second, this
is a message that’s hard to accept at face value.
Equally, there’s something in the manic ecstasy of
“A Birthday” that doesn’t sound like pure and nat-
ural joy so much as a conscious decision to act joy-
ous, to announce the rebirth of love whether it’s
true or not. “A Birthday” may be a poem that ap-
parently announces its intentions clearly, but be-
hind the clarity lies doubt, and it’s this doubt that
makes the poem haunting and memorable.
Source:Elizabeth Judd, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Kimberly Lutz
Lutz is an instructor at New York University
and has written for a wide variety of educational
publishers. In the following essay, she explores how
the simplicity of “A Birthday” masks its deeper
meanings.The short poem “A Birthday” by Christina
Rossetti diverges in tone from many of her other
works. The feminist literary critics Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe Rossetti’s style
as an “aesthetic of renunciation.” In other words,
they see in Rossetti’s poems a desire to renounce
her own desire and to deny her feelings of passion
and love. Again and again in her poetry do Gilbert
and Gubar see Rossetti turning away from pleasure
or fulfillment. In their assessment, “Rossetti, ban-
queting on bitterness, must bury herself alive in a
coffin of renunciation.” “A Birthday” stands in
stark contrast to this aesthetic. This poem seems
purely celebratory as the narrator relishes the com-
ing consummation of her love, a love that on the
surface appears to be both passionate and physical.
The first stanza begins with three similes that
are separated by semicolons: “My heart is like a
singing bird / Whose nest is in a watered shoot; /
My heart is like an apple tree / Whose boughs are
bent with thickset fruit; / My heart is like a rain-
bow shell / That paddles in a halcyon sea.” The ef-
fect of these three clauses is to compare the narra-
tor’s heart with images found in nature. By
connecting her emotions to the physical world, the
narrator suggests that it is natural to express her
love. She could no more suppress her feelings than
the bird could stop singing or the apple not weigh
down the bough. Such a love seems unbidden, notA Birthday