Today’s Poem: A Birthday
The intense interior life of Christina Rossetti
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.
Although their precision of form imposes a necessary regulation, raising emotional expression to the level of art, in her poems Rossetti permitted herself the floods of feeling she had otherwise repressed. We may find those floods of feeling awkward, even alien. We may find them off-putting, like the spectacle of a stranger weeping in public. Today’s Poem, “A Birthday,” is precisely the kind of poem that could, and has, become a joke. Its emotivity — some might say its hyperemotivity— lends itself all too readily to parody. In the anonymous “An Unexpected Pleasure,” for example, Rossetti’s unironic welling-up of joy becomes the frantic irony of the married man whose semi-detached villa is big enough for two, but not for three:
My heart is like one asked to dine
Whose evening dress is up the spout;
My heart is like a man would be
Whose raging tooth is half pulled out.
My heart is like a howling swell
Who boggles on his upper C;
My heart is madder than all these —
My wife's mamma has come to tea.
And so on. The parody, accurate in imitating both Rossetti’s form and the tuned-up ardor of her voice, works as comedy. It’s good for a laugh. But then, to feel something without hedging it in ironic self-commentary is a risk a poet ought to be able to venture, even if the risk is mainly that people will laugh. That Rossetti does venture that risk is a mark of her artistic courage, especially when we remember that she viewed her passions as her enemies, not her friends. In the poem’s overspill of imagined joy, its author-speaker is not petting her emotional self as something precious. The declaration of feeling represents not a self-congratulation, but a confession, even as the controlled iambic-tetrameter lines, with their complex abcbdcec rhyming pattern, give shape and restraint to that impulse toward vulnerable self-revelation.
The birthday described in these two stanzas is not a literal one (Rossetti’s own birthday, in fact, is December 5, not April 9). What the poem invokes is a “birthday of my life,” a new beginning, “because my love is come to me.” With its ardent imagery of singing and burgeoning things, in elements of the natural world and in patterns in art, “A Birthday” seems an appropriate poem for the springtime, a birthday of life.
If Rossetti has been ignored and parodied, on the grounds that her work is sentimental and overwrought, the injustice really lies in a failure to recognize this risk of sentimentality as a form of self-giving, holding nothing back. The cool detachment of Modernist poetry, ascendant in the decades following Rossetti’s death, made an uncongenial environment for Victorianism generally, and for a Christina Rossetti in particular.
We may catch glimpses of her influence in the ultimately self-destructive intensity of a Sara Teasdale, as well as in Teasdale’s fidelity to traditional poetic forms. But by and large, it is as if the sedate, controlled exterior Rossetti had imposed on herself personally had become the controlled imagination of a succeeding era. And yet, here on the far end of that era, we may be able to work our way back around to an appreciation of Christina Rossetti: the heroism of her unironic verse, the heart that could let itself be like a singing bird.
A Birthday
by Christina Rossetti
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me. 
