38 Poetry for Students
Criticism.
Katrinka Moore
Katrinka Moore teaches writing at Long Island
University in Brooklyn, New York, and is a poet
whose work appears in anthologies and literary
journals. In this essay, she discusses “A Birthday”
in light of Christina Rossetti’s conflict between her
passion for poetry and her life as a Victorian
woman.In an 1895 essay on the poetry of Christina
Rossetti published in The Westminster Review,Al-
ice Law compared Rossetti’s lyrics to the “loosen-
ing of the imprisoned notes in a bird’s throat,”
whose rich sounds “swell and fall, and burst upon
one another in their hurry to be out.” Law could be
identifying the poet with the “singing bird” in the
first line of “A Birthday.” Critics from Rossetti’s
own day to modern times have speculated on the
tension between her “imprisoned notes” and their
need to “burst” out.
Author Ford Madox Ford, analyzing Rossetti’s
body of work nearly twenty years after her death,
considered her range of subjects “limited very
strictly within the bound of her personal emotions.”
However, he adds, “within those limits she ex-
pressed herself consummately.” It is at least partly
the conflict between what Rossetti felt and what
she believed she should write about that gives her
poems their energy. As Ford explained, her “in-
fectious gaiety” shows through in the “metre of the
verse” (the rhythm of her poems). Despite her sup-
pression of subject matter that she feared was “too
pagan or too sensual,” Ford wrote, Rossetti’s “fac-
ulty for pure delight and for esthetic enjoyment was
expressed all the more strongly in her metre.”
H. B. de Groot, writing in 1985, agreed with
Ford, stating that Rossetti’s “strong lyric gifts are
often held in check by her moral and theological
scruples, but at times it is that very tension which
gives her best poems their distinctive quality.” Her
song seems determined to come out, whether in the
content or the form of her poetry.
While Ford and de Groot found in Rossetti’s
poetic rhythm a vibrant expression of her feelings,
not all her contemporaries concurred. Some, like
Alice Meynell in her 1895 New Reviewarticle, ob-
jected to the poet’s “lax metres which keep more
or less musical time.” And back in 1862 in an
Athenaeumreview of Goblin Market and Other Po-
ems, in which “A Birthday” first appeared, an
anonymous reviewer praised Rossetti’s originality
but regretted that she “should at times employ dis-cords with a frequency which aims at variety but
results in harshness.” It may come to a surprise to
modern readers, used to free verse (more loosely
structured lines) and finding Rossetti’s structure
formal, that her experimentation with rhythm was
considered daring by some of her fellow Victori-
ans.
Despite the fact that not all critics approved of
her techniques, Rossetti was popular in her lifetime,
largely because of her ability to express moods and
emotions. “A Birthday” stands out among many of
her poems for its celebratory tone. As Edmund
Gosse wrote in the 1890s, Rossetti’s “habitual tone
is one of melancholy reverie.” However, whether
she wrote of love or death, her work was charged
by her intense aesthetic appreciation of beauty. “A
Birthday” is full of detailed descriptions of beauti-
ful things that occur in nature or were made by hu-
mans through art.
This is a love poem, specifically about loving
and being loved in return. Rossetti reveals two sides
to the experience. In the first stanza she describes
the speaker’s heart, showing the intense private joy
of romantic love. This private view is symbolized
by images from nature—a bird on its nest, an ap-
ple tree heavy with fruit, a shell in the sea. In the
second stanza the speaker imagines a public pro-
nouncement of that love. This takes place in the
world of people, decorated with beautiful artistic
objects. Here the birds and fruit are carved or
formed in gold and silver. Although each stanza
has the same meter and rhyme scheme, the tone
changes dramatically. The beginning images are al-
most child-like in their view of the natural world.
The description of the dais, on the other hand, is
from the point of view of a woman directing a
scene.
The overall effect of “A Birthday” is jubila-
tion, but there is a tension between the two reac-
tions to love. One way is a quiet, pure emotion, and
the other is proud, a showing-off. In Victorian so-
ciety a woman was expected to be modest and have
humility, rather than exhibiting evidence of pride.
As long as the love is self-effacing, the emotion is
acceptable. However, the speaker first describes her
heart as “gladder than all these” images from na-
ture, then proclaims that love has brought about
“the birthday of my life.” There is a need, the poet
seems to say, for both kinds of love.
Examining this tension is helpful in analyzing
“A Birthday.” Two Rossetti scholars, Lona Mosk
Packer and Hoxie Neale Fairchild, explore specific
connections to Rossetti’s life to explain this con-A Birthday