Today’s Poem: A Birthday

The intense interior life of Christina Rossetti

Bird on a stalk, singing (Wikimedia Commons)

It might not surprise us too much to learn that according to her father, Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) and her brother, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), were human “storms” in the family weather. Another brother and sister, William and Maria, were the corresponding “calms.”

By all accounts, Christina was a passionate girl, thin-skinned, full of nerve endings, given to tantrum meltdowns. It was the work of her life — a work her brother William would lament as a self-abnegation — to subdue her emotions. In later life she was able to console a similarly tempestuous niece that the aunt she saw before her had not always been a model of self-regulation. The niece, too, could hope to learn to control her feelings.