English Anthology

Poets often use their work to explore the strong emotions that surround relationships and the writers of ‘Sister Maude’, ‘Praise Song for My Mother’ and ‘Nettles’ did this exceptionally well. In my opinion, I consider these poems to be the most inventive as they have used a variety of different techniques in the use of genre and form, that are unique and engaging.

‘Sister Maude’, was the first literary heritage poem that I read, it is a dramatic monologue in the form of a ballad, which is a very old traditional form for telling stories. The details of the poem are not clear, but it soon becomes apparent that the narrator had a secret lover and her sister found out and she told their parents, perhaps out of jealousy. In Victorian times when Rossetti was writing, this would have been considered shameful hence why shame is a reoccurring theme in her poetry.

The poem’s structure is regular in that all but the final stanza are quatrains; the last stanza has six lines, which allows Rossetti to comment of the fate of her parents, her lover, herself and finally her sister. The rhyme scheme follows the pattern ABCB for the quatrains. However, the last stanza follows the rhyme scheme ABCBDB; because the first and third lines have no rhymes this allows Rossetti to have more freedom in her choice of vocabulary.

I found the first stanza of the poem to be the most powerful as it starts out ambiguously with details of what has occurred slowly introduced. Rossetti engages the reader straight away by beginning her poem with two similar questions, asking who told her parents about her ‘shame’. The questions are answered by the narrator in the first quatrain, ‘Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude’ she makes it clear by repetition of her sister’s name that she was the culprit who told her parents what was happening. The quatrain ends with the narrator’s comment that Maude was spying on her sister; the word ‘lurked’ conveys the feeling of furtiveness and slyness, this makes us