Today’s Poem: Winter, My Secret

Christina Rossetti declines to bare her soul

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Lair of the Lynx, 1906 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Winter: My Secret

by Christina Rossetti

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I; 
Perhaps some day, who knows? 
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows, 
And you’re too curious: fie! 
You want to hear it? well: 
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. 

Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: 
Suppose there is no secret after all, 
But only just my fun. 
Today’s a nipping day, a biting day; 
In which one wants a shawl, 
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps: 
I cannot ope to everyone who taps, 
And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall; 
Come bounding and surrounding me, 
Come buffeting, astounding me, 
Nipping and clipping thro’ my wraps and all. 
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows 
His nose to Russian snows 
To be pecked at by every wind that blows? 
You would not peck? I thank you for good will, 
Believe, but leave the truth untested still. 

Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust 
March with its peck of dust, 
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers, 
Nor even May, whose flowers 
One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours. 

Perhaps some languid summer day, 
When drowsy birds sing less and less, 
And golden fruit is ripening to excess, 
If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud, 
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud, 
Perhaps my secret I may say, 
Or you may guess.
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Like the speaker in her famous Christmas poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) seems, as a poet, all too willing to “give [her] heart.” This poetic heart behaves, habitually, more “like a singing bird” than like a creature defined by self-regulation. Its thin skin is its most prominent characteristic. We imagine it as a thing exposed to all the emotional elements, not likely to survive.

Yet Today’s Poem, published in Rossetti’s 1862 Goblin Market and Other Poems, gives us a coy speaker whose heart has gone into hibernation. At least, it has learned to play hard-to-get, wrapping itself in “a shawl / A veil, a cloak, and other wraps,” preferring the air of mystery to the cold threatening wind of self-revelation. The poem’s formal patterns, continually upsetting expectation, extend this vacillation between teasing, or frightened, half-revelation and the self-protective impulse to take cover.

The rhyme scheme of the opening stanza, ababcc, sketches the outline of the heroic sestet, an import from medieval Italian poetry sometimes known as the “Venus and Adonis stanza,” after the Shakespeare poem in that stanza form. But here the meter — lines 1, 3, and 6 in pentameter, the rest trimeter — feints with the fulfillment of that form, without actually fulfilling it.

Lewis Carroll’s photograph of Christina Rossetti with her mother in 1863 (Wikimedia Commons)

As if that resistance were not enough, the first stanza establishes a contract — heroic sestet, albeit with variations — which the next stanza proceeds to violate utterly. Expectations set up by the opening are immediately frustrated. After that first tight, unforthcoming sestet, the second stanza, in sixteen lines that introduce tetrameter into the overall scheme, opens like a floodgate. Its cascading, overlapping rhyme scheme of dedfeggehhebbbii both expands the speaker’s argument and circles back, toward the end of the stanza, with the repetition of the first stanza’s b rhyme, to the initial refusal to spill the secret. I may talk a lot, the speaker intimates, but I’ll never tell.

Following that sixteen-line outburst — an outburst of not divulging anything beyond excuses for not divulging, leaving “the truth untested still” — the succeeding two stanzas batten things down again. Stanza 3’s five lines consist of a couplet and a triplet, the rhymes static, as well as emphatic, in their repetition. What these lines emphasize is the speaker’s fundamental mistrust of shifting conditions. The May flowers open in trust and vulnerability, only to be zapped by an unexpected late frost. Again, no thank you, the speaker says.

Finally, in the closing septet, the rhyming pattern seems almost to close in on itself, the two couplets bracketed by the first line’s rhyme — but the poem as a whole finishing on the stanza’s second end-rhyme, in a dimeter line that seems to leave some door ajar. I have a secret, the speaker says, but I won’t tell you. Or maybe I don’t have a secret at all. In any case, for now I prefer to keep this scarf wrapped around my face. Maybe “some languid summer day,” I’ll actually tell you what’s on my mind. “Or you may guess.”

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