Volume 10 41
ile, or a comparison, that will aptly describe her
happiness. The first three words of the first, third,
fifth, and seventh lines are the same: “My heart is.”
In the speaker’s first attempt to capture her own
feelings, she compares her heart to “a singing bird
/ Whose nest is in a watered shoot.” The “watered
shoot” is a young branch that has grown out of a
bud. Just as the shoot blossomed with water, the
speaker has come alive with love. In the second
comparison, the speaker likens her heart to “an ap-
ple-tree / Whose boughs are bent with thickset
fruit.” In a third try at finding a simile, the speaker
compares her heart to “a rainbow shell.” These
three comparisons are similar in that they’re de-
rived from nature. In the seventh line, the speaker
begins with the exact same pattern only to abruptly
abandon it. Here she notes that the similes from na-
ture are not sufficient because her emotions are
more intense than these images can convey:
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
The first octave ends in a hint that language
can’t fully capture the thrill of emotions that the
speaker is experiencing. The second octave con-
firms that point by taking up a new strategy for ex-
pressing her emotions. Instead of searching for a
simile, the speaker now suggests that a concrete ac-
tion be taken—“Raise me a dais of silk and
down”—so that she can convey her love in the cre-
ation of a work of art that employs elements of the
natural world to her own ends. There is a sugges-
tion that the carved representations will last, unlike
the things of nature which are fleeting. Instead of
comparing her love to a singing bird, the speaker
now asks that the beautiful dais be carved with
birds, specifically doves and “peacocks with a hun-
dred eyes.” In the second octave, the speaker is far
less tentative and is now fully in command. It’s as
if the arrival of love has given the speaker a strength
and confidence that she previously lacked.
Critics have noted that the shift in stanzas
works very well. Theo Dombrowski said that in “A
Birthday” “the comparatively subtle shift from the
inward-looking first stanza ... to the imperative
stance of the second ... is central to the success of
the poem.” And Katherine J. Mayberry noted,
“Simile has collapsed into metaphor, experimenta-
tion has given way to command, and impermanence
has been replaced by stability, but all these changes
have been made possible by, and occurred within,
the poem itself. In “A Birthday” we see the power
of poetry to express strong feeling and to put it into
more stable form.”
One mystery of “A Birthday” is the identity of
the love that the speaker celebrates as having “come
to me.” Critics have speculated about whom this
ecstatic love poem was written. Rossetti wrote this
poem in November 1857, when she didn’t seem to
have close relationships with anyone outside her
immediate family. Deepening the mystery is the
fact that the two poems on either side of it in Ros-
setti’s manuscript notebook were the exact oppo-
site in mood: gloomy and regretful, instead of ec-
static. In one of the poems, “Memory,” she writes,
“My heart dies inch by inch; the time grows old /
Grows old in which I grieve.” And in the other,
“An Apple Gathering,” the speaker is mocked by
her neighbors for being “empty-handed” when ap-
ple season comes because she’s plucked the pink
blossoms from her apple tree to wear in her own
hair. These poems of thwarted fulfillment suggest
that perhaps the love Rossetti describes in “A Birth-
day” was imagined rather than known through first-
hand experience. Some critics have interpreted “A
Birthday” as a religious poem, one about the
speaker’s rebirth through her love for Christ. Al-
though this is a distinct possibility, neither Rossetti
nor her brother William Michael Rossetti classified
“A Birthday” among her other devotional poems.
No matter who, if anyone, the poem was writ-
ten for, it is remarkable for its strong lyrical sense,
its ability to capture in sound the heightened emo-
tions of new love. “A Birthday” has an inescapable
energy, and in that sense it’s similar to some of
Rossetti’s children’s poems, including:
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:A BirthdayNo matter how
significant a departure the
subject matter of “A
Birthday” is, its meter and
breathless, unforgettable
rhythms are characteristic
of Rossetti’s poetry.”