Today’s Poem: After Death

He still is warm though I am cold

Léon Cogniet, Tintoretto Painting His Dead Daughter, 1843 (Wikimedia Commons)

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After Death

by Christina Rossetti

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say,
“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.
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Joseph Bottum writes:

The thing that must be said first about Amit Majmudar is that he is a treasure of American literature, and we’re lucky to have him as a friend of Poems Ancient and Modern. He is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator — and, in whatever time that leaves, he is also a medical doctor: a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children.

His books include the recent poetry collection, What He Did in Solitary, and a memoir, Twin A, along with the forthcoming hybrid work, Three Metamorphoses. But it was his work in his new collection, The Great Game: Essays on Poetics, that prompted us to reach out to him again for thoughts on Today’s Poem. (Dr. Majmudar had written on Wilfred Owen’s “Hospital Barge at Cerisy” for us earlier.) In The Great Game, he writes on the likes of Milton, Byron, and Dickinson, while reaching as far as Robert Ludlum and Ray Bradbury in sweeps of literary history and interpretive brio. It was in particular his thoughts on science and poetry — a topic of much interest for me — that caught my eye, for he argues that anyone trying to create a fresh sense of reality, from John Milton to Johannes Kepler, is engaged in a poetic activity.

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Amit Majmudar writes:

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) opens her poem “After Death” by mentioning plants. Rushes, for example, were used for rushlights, brief and fragile. Rosemary, famously, stood for remembrance. “May” might mean, paradoxically, the “mayflower” that symbolized new beginnings by the time Rossetti wrote Today’s Poem in 1862 — a gesture toward the “life to come,” since the dead speaker seems to have posthumous speech.

The herbs on her sickbed must cover some odor: perhaps a festering wound in an age before antibiotics or stale fever sweat. Ivy-shadows creep over her sickbed, implying the darkness of death. There is a sense that this poem exists in the moment immediately after death, in the interval during which the guillotined head was said to blink and remain aware of the mob around it, a latent sentience. The shroud covers the narrator’s face, but the half-drawn curtain allows a space through which the communication of this sonnet — a dead person speaking — slips through.

The man — distant while the speaker lived, pitying but still not loving after the speaker’s death — says “Poor child.” This seems to imply a father regretting his daughter’s death (I am assuming the speaker, like the poet, is female), and indeed childhood mortality was much higher — though I note that age gaps were not uncommon between married couples in that time; one study of parish registers revealed that one in twenty marriages had an age gap of twenty years or more.

An interesting point here is that the speaker says the man thinks she is asleep — yet she also states that her face is covered. That may gesture at the emotional barrier that interposed between the man and the speaker while she lived. Another barrier-image appears earlier, with the lattice of the fourth line. The detail of the floor being swept, placed in the very first line, hints at a housekeeper or someone else taking care of the speaker during her illness. (If the male figure in the poem had swept the floor, that small act of caregiving and tidying her sick room, she would no doubt have mentioned that.)

Even at this moment of pity, he does not try to look under that covering, or touch her, or perform the tender kindness of adjusting her pillows. His distance remains, implying a love that never lived at all, at least in him. I knew he wept. Did she really? Notice that the speaker reads weeping into the man’s “deep silence.” She doesn’t see it or hear it; he has turned away.

The speaker seems to love the man, enough to take solace in his continued life even after her own death. Paradoxically, now that he speaks of her (not to her), she is incapable of answering him. She can only narrate the moment as it happens, to the listener or reader of the poem. Rhymed abba-abba cde-edc, the poems is a Petrarchan sonnet, the original and consummate form of the love poem in her immigrant father’s native Italy. (Gabriele Rossetti, father of both Christina and the pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel, worked as a Dante scholar and Italian teacher in London.) This is a poem of unrequited love, continuing after death. Petrarch, too, had his Rime in morte di Laura.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1848 portrait of his sister, Christina Rossetti (Wikimedia Commons)

In Rossetti’s final line, the speaker is the one who is physically cold but emotionally still warm, while the man remains physically warm but emotionally cold. They are mirror images of one another, an exquisite and consummating inversion.

Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, Sally Thomas has already looked at Christina Rossetti’s “When I Am Dead, My Dearest” and “A Birthday.” Today’s Poem — by a poet who, contemporaries speculated, would have been Tennyson’s successor as Poet Laureate if she had not died of breast cancer — is an excellent example of how the flexibility and efficiency of a sonnet can reclaim territory lost to the short story. The density of eloquent detail, the ambiguity that permits many potential stories to be told with the same words, and the memorability of rhyme and meter all hint at an alternative destiny for literature in which prose did not come to dominate storytelling. Dickens would have taken fourteen pages to convey the pathos that Rossetti has conveyed in fourteen lines

Jan Matejko, Jan Kochanowski Over the Dead Body of his Daughter, 1862 (Wikimedia Commons)

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