Yesterday the sun shone, today another bitterly cold wind blows in from the east. Is it foolish to seek hope of spring in poetry? There’s a kind of answer in the Scottish Poetry Library.
Christina Rossetti’s Good Friday was the Scottish Poetry Library ‘poem of the moment’ before Easter but it’s her Another Spring that captures today’s mood.
If I might see another Spring,
I’d laugh to-day, to-day is brief;
I would not wait for anything:
A sad-sweet longing mixed with remorse at wasted time. That fits well with the frustration I feel both with the weather, stuck in seemingly endless winter, and the suspended animation of today’s politics stuck somewhere between nightmares of catastrophe and dreams of utopia. Politics, that tiresome word! The opiate of our time should not be mentioned in the same breath as poetry. Yet, look a little closer and Christina Rossetti’s poetry is no simple escape from the reality of Victorian Britain.
Frosty wind made moan
Winter hangs heavy over Christina Rossetti, a December child. She was born 5 December 1830 and died 29 December 1894 after six decades of global upheaval which formed the world we live in today. Interesting to rediscover that she also wrote the Christmas carol, In the Bleak Midwinter:
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Religion and nature are recurring themes in her work (as illustrated in SPL’s two examples ) but the extraordinary life outlined on the Poetry Foundation website shows why this very Victorian woman is also a feminist icon. Christina Rossetti – daughter of the poet Gabriele Rossetti, sister of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti – is by no means defined by the males of her family. Unsuccessful in applying to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses in the Crimea, she worked as a volunteer among prostitutes in the Highgate Penitentiary for ‘fallen women’.
Redemption, sexuality and desire are the suggestive stuff of her best-known poem, Goblin Market, with critics feasting on different, often conflicting, interpretations.
Morning and evening
Maids hear the goblins cry:
Come buy our orchard fruits
Come buy, come buy
Hidden life
From apparently happy childhood to womanhood without marriage or lasting partnership (the ‘mateless nightingale’ perhaps of Another Spring). Bouts of depression interwoven with increasingly fragile physical health – it’s a brief glimpse of a complex life during another time of social and political turmoil.
Is April the cruellest month? Like TS Eliot in the Wasteland, ‘breeding Lilacs out of the dead land’, Rossetti sees the bursting of hidden life ‘nursed in its grave by Death’. The hymn-like last verse of Spring ends with Spring passing by, ‘Now newly born and now/Hastening to die.’
No graves, however, in Another Spring just lingering regrets of a life not fully lived. In that case there’s no time to be wasted. What if, what if… if/when winter finally lets go, we should be wholeheartedly glad, and hear ‘music in the hail’ today.
Another Spring
If I might see another Spring
I’d not plant flowers and wait:
I’d have my crocuses at once,
My leafless pink mezereons,
My chill-veined snow-drops, choice yet
My white or azure violet,
Leaf-nested primrose; anything
To blow at once, not late.
If I might see another Spring
I’d listen to the daylight birds
That build their nests and pair and sing,
Nor wait for mateless nightingale;
I’d listen to the lusty herds
The ewes with lambs as white as snow,
I’d find out music in the hail
And all the winds that blow.
If I might see another Spring –
Oh stinging comment on my past
That all my past results in “if” –
If I might see another Spring,
I’d laugh to-day, to-day is brief;
I would not wait for anything:
I’d use to-day that cannot last,
Be glad to-day and sing.
Featured image: Better days to come? Wild garlic in unfurling beech wood, by Fay Young.
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