Christina Rossetti Analysis Essay

This passage shows Rossetti’s ability to use an amalgamation of poetical devices to steadily increase tension in the reader. Significantly, this allows one to reflect on the association between words and their meaning. As pre-Raphaelite visual artists asked themselves what is actually seen—instead of what is imagined—Rossetti asks what is actually written. As a poet, she accomplishes this through her EXCESS detail created with the use of repetition, alliteration, consonance, the rhyme scheme, and association of words and phrases. However, for brevity, I will focus on a few that stand out to me.

The first two lines create a sense of loss. Rosetti portrays this in the repetition of “She” and the consonance in “pped” which are both “lost” in line three as well as the words “clipped,” “dropped,”
The gushing excess of the poem’s verbs soaks our imagination in the prodding of associative meaning. However, what is actually happening? In line one, Laura gets a haircut followed by a sense of sadness from the loss of her hair. Why is she sad about losing hair? Is it a loss of femininity? Nostalgia? In the next line, she begins eating sweet grapes. In line four, it’s almost as if she doesn’t know why men convert grapes into alcohol like the conversion of the words signifiers into the signified. The reinforcement of this notion shown on line six in the purity of the source material and line seven is the raw experience of eating grapes for the first time, like words without associations. Yet, in line eight, the excess of sweetness causes the opposite reaction—disgust— reinforced with the repetition of the word “sucked” which leads to the sores in her mouth; the excess of associative meaning leading to release of tension in the final line and the release of associative meaning from the words