Christina Rossetti's : Song
Christina Rossetti’s ‘Song’: Death and grief.
Love and tragic loss are key themes of the Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature movement, and ‘Song’ combines the two beautifully in a way that neither glorifies nor portrays a detrimental idea of death and the outcomes it brings.
Rossetti uses a variety of natural imagery to beautify the idea of life. She tells the reader to ‘plant no roses at my head’ where the symbol of the ‘rose’ embodies the theme of love, which was key in such a Romantic Era of poetry. Further use of the idea of living nature is used by ‘shady cypress tree’ which defines the idea of death as the branches of such a tree were traditionally carried at funerals in symbol of mourning, yet Rossetti’s orders to the reader to not plant such a thing shows that she does not wish the reader to ‘grieve’ over her as such. Through the tripled repetition of ‘I shall not’ in the first three lines of the second stanza, (which are followed by one of the five senses ‘see’, ‘feel’, ‘hear’), Rossetti tells the reader that she will not be able to witness such notions and mournful gestures (i.e. ‘sing no sad songs for me’) and instead metaphorically tells the reader to ‘be the green grass above me’ where the alliteration of the ‘g’ is used to create power and meaning, where the connotations of describing somebody as grass creates the idea of growing, moving on, flourishing in one’s own life. The following line created by enjambment ‘with showers and dewdrops wet’ continue the theme of naturally occurring weather and climate, yet have connotations and inferences of tears, as oppose to materialistic gestures, yet the idea of ‘showers’ and ‘rain’ (which is used again in the second stanza) create the pathetic fallacy thus conforming to the melancholy state which one would associate with a funeral. The continued use of such ‘natural’ language throughout the first stanza provokes the idea that the deceased are gone (as no religious references are made in this poem as to
Love and tragic loss are key themes of the Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature movement, and ‘Song’ combines the two beautifully in a way that neither glorifies nor portrays a detrimental idea of death and the outcomes it brings.
Rossetti uses a variety of natural imagery to beautify the idea of life. She tells the reader to ‘plant no roses at my head’ where the symbol of the ‘rose’ embodies the theme of love, which was key in such a Romantic Era of poetry. Further use of the idea of living nature is used by ‘shady cypress tree’ which defines the idea of death as the branches of such a tree were traditionally carried at funerals in symbol of mourning, yet Rossetti’s orders to the reader to not plant such a thing shows that she does not wish the reader to ‘grieve’ over her as such. Through the tripled repetition of ‘I shall not’ in the first three lines of the second stanza, (which are followed by one of the five senses ‘see’, ‘feel’, ‘hear’), Rossetti tells the reader that she will not be able to witness such notions and mournful gestures (i.e. ‘sing no sad songs for me’) and instead metaphorically tells the reader to ‘be the green grass above me’ where the alliteration of the ‘g’ is used to create power and meaning, where the connotations of describing somebody as grass creates the idea of growing, moving on, flourishing in one’s own life. The following line created by enjambment ‘with showers and dewdrops wet’ continue the theme of naturally occurring weather and climate, yet have connotations and inferences of tears, as oppose to materialistic gestures, yet the idea of ‘showers’ and ‘rain’ (which is used again in the second stanza) create the pathetic fallacy thus conforming to the melancholy state which one would associate with a funeral. The continued use of such ‘natural’ language throughout the first stanza provokes the idea that the deceased are gone (as no religious references are made in this poem as to