Conclusiones

I do not expect the general public to catch these refined clues; but there they are for such minds as mine.

Christina Rossetti to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 3 March 1865

In Seek and Find, Rossetti states that “[a]ll creation begins by enforcing a negative lesson: “The depth saith, It is not in me:” nevertheless in that negative is latent an affirmative: Not in me, then elsewhere.”²⁴⁹ This reference to elsewhere suggests a place of otherness at the same time as it is a place of negation and unfulfillment (as something inexistent here). This subtle difference provides a key to Rossetti’s works as this reversal coupled with displacement (elsewhere-ness) offers a glimpse into her own poetics. There are two processes that go hand-in-hand in her texts: split/ multiplication of the narratorial self (through repetition and layering) and absence of action and proper definition (through negation and unfulfillment). As contradictory as it seems, this pairing corresponds to Turner’s scheme of the communication of the sacral knowledge in the liminal which I have previously mentioned. In the previous chapter I have traced the use of repetition and challenging rhythm and rhyme patterns through which Christina Rossetti develops her overlaying narratives. A slip of rhyme or unbalanced rhythm often serves as a marker of the apocalyptic and the threshold, being marginal per definition and thus not entering any structure. Due to its marginal status, it also converts any spatial arrangement into the liminal “elsewhere.” In this chapter I continue working with Rossetti’s poetics of layering, but focus on the concepts of absence and unfulfillment in order to explore the boundaries and functions of her “negative affirmative,” exploring her language and her techniques in addressing it.

Isobel Armstrong, in her Language as Living Form in Nineteenth Century (1982), describes language as “a model of consciousness or being itself,” where appealing to the Hegelian model for knowing through self-objectification. She vests the language with active powers as it “discloses a concern with the relationship of subject and object,”

249 Christina Rossetti, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (London:

Society for promoting Christian Knowledge,1879), p. 60.

“restructures its own elements” and “discovers itself through repetition.”²⁵⁰ On a similar note, Dorothy Rosenblum suggests that Rossetti creates her own language “by piecing together fragments of ready-made language,”²⁵¹ and thus, through repetition of the known, creates new reality. This coinage reminds me of Turner’s ideas. In Turner’s liminal stage, “elements are withdrawn from their usual settings and combined with one another in a totally unique configuration,”²⁵² a configuration that structurally arranges them in relation to the new reality. Rossetti, as I showed in the previous chapter, creates a polyphonic spatio-temporal setting and imposes thresholds and liminal markers within the text. With this in mind, we can distinguish two stages in Rossetti’s poetry: layering and repetition of components of the pre-liminal, and then actual dissolution, or withdrawal of some of the elements to enable the speaker to reflect and challenge the new reality. The poet multiplies “speaking likenesses,” to use the title of her prose work for children, until that they become unfamiliar and confusing. The constitutive elements are constantly being flipped around, fitted and refitted, as if in a desperate attempt to find the right one through echoes and repetitions. The continuity of this process stresses the impossibility of fitting in, inability to achieve wholeness. The discovery we are left with is the blank space, the gaping absence of a reference point that makes us question the overall structure and the validity of suggested answers.

Rossetti’s way into the liminal transgression and disintegration of the reference system is marked by use of verbs of unfulfillment (as we have seen in “Spring”) and negative constructions that suppress or silence the speaker’s experience and cancel out the expected development of the story. The two main characteristics are specific negative temporal and spatial arrangements (non-space and anti-temporality²⁵³), similar to the

250 Isobel Armstrong, Language As Living Form in Nineteenth Century Poetry (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 35.

251 Dolores Rosenblum, “Christina Rossetti’s Religious Poetry: Watching, Looking, Keeping Vigil,”

Victorian Poetry 20.1 (Spring 1982): 33-49, p. 36.

252 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (ed), Reader in Comparative Religion (New York: Harper and Row Publications, 1979), p. 240.

253 A term used by Victor Turner in relation to the opposition between measurable everyday time and rituals that deny it in Victor Turner, “Images of Anti-Temporality: An Essay in the Anthology of Experience”, The Harvard Theological Review, 75.2 (April 1982): 243-265.

process of shutting out as described in the first chapter, and a conscious refusal to carry out an expected sequence of actions that is supposed to be gratified with a certain result.

To illustrate this technique, I offer close readings of “Somewhere or Other” (1863),

“Hollow-Sounding and Mysterious” (1882), “Where never tempest heaveth” (1893), “A Castle-Builder’s World” (1886), “Life and Death” (1863), “Easter Day” (1886), “If I Had Words” (1864), supported by discussion of two better known poems, “Cobwebs”

(1855) and “May” (1855). This range of poems was chosen to highlight the omnipresence and importance of the pattern in Rossetti’s writing. It will also help to prepare the basic ideas of the chapters to follow, which track the same technique in relation to the construction.

Both layering and negation are aiming at one thing – veiling the subject of the poem and making it more difficult to bare its core. Reserve, secrecy and skilful avoidance of positive constructions are among recurrent themes in Rossetti scholarship. Thus, Constance Hassett in her reassessment of Rossetti’s poetry brings together ideas of

“muteness, understatement, gently restrained rhythms and rhymed stanzaic shape” as highlighting the speaker’s inability to communicate. She suggests that, as the necessity of being silent moves into the sphere of having no words, “the silence itself is Rossetti’s medium.”²⁵⁴ For other critics, including Anne Jamison and Dolores Rosenblum, Rossetti’s language is subversively aimed at reinscribing the dominant patriarchal discourse through silence, or resisting it through ventriloquizing the “silent dead girl,”

giving her the opportunity to speak. From this perspective, the death/ silence of the female subject does not follow the male-oriented pattern and no longer signifies the unattainability of the quest, but suggests a direct withdrawal from the quest.²⁵⁵ In this chapter I develop this gender-influenced vision, and expand it to discuss the relationship between silence, form and unfulfillment as employed by Rossetti on formal, textual and conceptual levels.

254 Constance Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005) p. 1.

255 Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univeristy Press, 1986), Anne Jamison, Poetics En Passant (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

In my close readings, I focus on silence and unfulfillment as key elements in Rossetti’s poetics. It can be argued that by repetition and interchanging rhythm patterns Rossetti seems to be constructing a narrative through silence, in other words, through omitting action and names. Amy Christine Billone in Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-century Sonnet observes that the poet keeps stressing the speaker’s presence, and thus defies silence: on one hand, the female speaker stresses that her marginal position bars her from expressing her views (“stated silence”), on the other, textual contradictions make communication difficult, if not impossible (“semantic silence”). At the same time she follows Hassett and suggests that, as “the speaker’s personality both takes the place of “stated”/ “semantic” silence and also stays unspecified, the lyric subject becomes the equivalent of silence itself.”²⁵⁶ With this in mind, I would suggest that silence and incongruity of speech marks the speaker as a threshold persona, deprived of all ties with the real world, including the ties of speech and coherence.

Silence makes the speaker void, absent – and the object of the (unpronounced) speech is also the equivalent of silence. Thus we have a narrative defeated twice, where both the action and its verbal actualization are deferred or reversed. This conscious dissolution of presence is essential for entering the liminal space; it is also one of the key features of Christina Rossetti’s poetry. I will expand Hassett’s argument that “the withholding of speech is constitutive”²⁵⁷ for the poet and suggest that, on all levels of the text, this withdrawal is not an acquiescence or submission, but a tool to shape liminal experience surpassing ordinary human perception.

The inability to name, or unwillingness to speak implies an unspeakability of the highest kind, similar to the principles of apophatic theology where God is described only in terms of what He is not. In this sense Rossetti’s repetitive technique carries a double function of unnaming and undoing the object; her negatives are more sophisticated than simple negations. As Reginald Gibbons puts it, “[t]he apophatic…

can imply something that is in fact present despite the absence or inadequacy of a name for it – such as the nature of God – or present as an absence, like meaningful negative

256 Amy Christine Billone, Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-century Sonnet (Columbus:

Ohio State Univeristy Press), p. 84.

257Constance Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, opus cit., p. 52.

space in a sculpture.”²⁵⁸ The opposition between cataphatic and apophatic writing is an opposition between naming, referencing, and fixing, on one hand, and focusing on whatever is missing on the other. Christina Rossetti’s poetry, with its evident inclination towards the latter, is poised inbetween the two, cataloguing and referencing instances of absence.

Surprisingly, it is not Rossetti but Emily Dickinson who is celebrated as the queen of the poetic silences. Thus Harold Bloom in his commentary upon Dickinson praises her work with absence and unnaming as a way to intellectual complexity which demands an active participation on behalf of the reader: “her unique transport, her Sublime, is founded upon her unnaming of all our certitudes into so many blanks; it gives her, and her authentic readers, another way to see, almost, in the dark.”²⁵⁹ In this context omission becomes a textual politics allowing the readers to build upon their guesses; the non-presence becomes material. This description would well suit Rossetti’s poetry as her texts deploy carefully constructed omissions through which they recuperate the marginal elements. By not naming an object/ not letting the action be carried through, Rossetti makes us question the logical order that we are used to taking for granted and builds up inner suspense, a process similar to Turner’s liminal re-actualisation of symbols. By analysing Rossetti’s techniques in constructing non-spaces and using unfulfillment as a narrative strategy, I hope to reclaim Rossetti’s place as a poet of absences and omissions.

In a number of Rossetti’s poems we see that they represent a catalogue of things that are not there. In “Cobwebs” (1855), a poem which appeared only in William Michael’s posthumous edition, the tense emotional space is built up through a list of things it lacks.

The poem starts with a descriptive opening (“It is a land”), but then goes on through an enumeration of what it is not. Almost every line starts with a “no,” creating an enclosed negative parallelism. There are twenty three objects missing. Although they all describe lack of change, they intrinsically signify change. None is a direct negation of action:

heat/cold implies change in temperature, hills/valleys - change in heights. The only positive description lacking inner change is that of a plain that “stretches thro’ long

258 Reginald Gibbons, "On Apophatic Poetics", American Poetry Review 36. 6 (2007): 19-23, p.20.

259 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 308-309.

unbroken miles” (4), and the brooding “twilight grey” (5): both refer to inconspicuous, amorphous entities that lack any definitive features. Repeated [br] in “unbroken” and

“broodeth” (5) highlights the inner conflict of the poem: devastation does not necessarily originate in a break, it often comes from quiet desperation. There is a certain air of liminality, in-between state in the language itself: grey is a colour between black and white, twilight is time between night and day. The air is “sluggish” (5), lacking movement and alertness; further emphasis on the liminal state is made through the implied opposition between “twilight” (having soft glowing light) and “broodeth” (6) (engaging in dark thoughts, appearing darkly). Ensuing reference to the absent moon only strengthens the feeling of being shut out from both light and darkness. At the same time the inner movement of the poem is not one-directional, but cyclical – it dwells on

“wax and wane” (6) and “ebb and flow” (7) as a reference to natural/ seasonal expansion and contraction. The seasonal theme is continued through reference to the absence of buds and falling leaves. This is the first mention in the list of absences that refers not to spatial deficiency, but to the natural order of things.

Kathryn Burlinson reads it as “empty space reflecting psychic stasis” where “the “I” or

“aye” is stranded, abandoned by every elemental, natural and human force, stripped of memory.”²⁶⁰ However, I would draw attention to the movement within the poem. It is reminiscent of “the philosophy of a Moebius loop,” suggested by Karen Alkalay-Gut in relation to Swinburne’s poetry.²⁶¹ All development within the poem is locked upon itself in a reversed way. Rossetti’s absences are neither static, nor invisible in this sense;

I suggest that they are physically present. Rossetti moves on from universal laws to personal reactions as she goes through various types of movement, from the unfulfilled inevitability of moons and waters to the seasonal modality of leaves; then switches to environment-dependent ripples in the water or shifting sand and closes it with the flutter of wings (of a bird? a butterfly?) that stresses life’s frailty and fleetingness. Moreover, if previously listed types of movement are caused by exterior conditions (leaf-falling or ripples on the water), this last example reverses the causal relationship and triggers the

260 Kathryn Burlinson, Speaking Silence: Indeterminate Identities in the Writings of Christina Rossetti, (a PhD thesis submitted at Birbeck College, London, 1994), p. 86.

261 See Karen Alkalay-Gut, “Swinburne’s Twisted Circle: The Logic of ‘A Match’” in Victorian Institutes Journal 24 (1996): 141-163.

movement in its turn (“to stir the stagnant space”(10)), thus making the loop complete.

The flutter of wings implies life in its purest form – birds in Christian imagery symbolize a soul’s ascent to the skies and the spiritual as opposed to the material.²⁶² Then the whole poem could be read as describing the soul’s journey towards redemption. But the redemption is failed. The world is lacking its spiritual push and is out of tune with God’s will. I have briefly discussed the importance of regular rhythm in Victorian perception in the previous chapter; here we see that by defying seasonal, gravitational, elemental and other natural forces the landscape is falling out of the rhythm of life. In the last stanza the poem moves from the physical (non-)movement to emotional stagnation. Both land and sea are “loveless” (11, 12) – and have no “pulse of life” (a rhythm/ movement deficiency again). Rossetti meticulously notes the disruption of all emotional systems – there are no memories, no home, no resting place, no future, no hope, no fear. The landscape is deconstructed through listing various features it lacks; the speaker is deconstructed through the feelings she lacks; and it is this lack – the void - that constitutes the core of the poem.

The repetitive list of objects in “Cobwebs” provides a frame to Rossetti’s non-scape. Moreover, she manages to find inspiration in what initially appears negative, inspiration transgressing denial and transcending all things. Still, it would have been too easy if negative spaces were created by simple negation. Rossetti is no poet of easy ways, and her usual defiance is subtle. While “Cobwebs” is indeed a perfect example of direct unnaming and undefining, this straightforwardness is rare for the poet. The only other instances of this technique of negation are liminal landscape passages in “From House to Home” (79-86) and “The Prince’s Progress” (129-156), and a short poem

“Where never tempest heaveth” (1893).

Appearing in The Face of the Deep as a commentary on Revelation 11:8, “Where never tempest heaveth” utilizes imagery and grammar of negation similar to “Cobwebs” and reads as a description of a negative space. There are two stanzas in the poem, each constructed as a negation in the first four lines and an affirmative refrain. The first stanza is focused around the long [i:] in

262 See George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

“sleep” (and the visual rhyme “death”). Lack of open vowels and emphasis on fricative [s]/[h] and plosive [t]/[d] creates a feeling of enclosedness, as if the world is being trapped up in its own grief and shrinking to fit into the imposed limits. The second stanza is based on [ei]-rhymes with

“shame”-“bewaileth”-“traileth”-“prevaileth”-“faileth.” This contraction of the vowels creates an additional tension, as Rossetti looks forward to completing the full circle of time. It builds up textual tension and then releases it with “death” being the climax in both stanzas. In the first stanza, from

“sorrow” we plunge into “death” and rise with “hope.” In the second stanza, it is even more dramatic: from “serpent” to “death” again, and ending with “harvest.” “Sorrow”

and “serpent” (alliterative [s]-[r]) suggest betrayal and pain, “hope” and “harvest”

(stressing [h]) imply resolution and fulfillment.

In contrast to “Cobwebs,” where the narration is deployed through negation and the speaker figure is omitted, in “Where never tempest heaveth” there exists a well-defined relation between the speaker and the addressee, although they both remain on the margins of the poem. Their lurking present is felt through the imperatives (“Sleep” (5) and “Reap” (10) closing each stanza), thus framing the non-emotional landscape both with a gaze and an overruling will, evident in the commanding tone and the accepting silence. The poem is constructed as a dialogue where the replies are omitted; and both interlocutors are shrouded in mystery – we have no clue as to who demands obedience and who is the one to obey. Moreover, while negative constructions bring about a positive change (tempest will not heave, hope will not deceive), even grammatically positive imperatives are poised between fulfillment and hesitancy. We have seen in the previous chapters that sleep in Rossetti’s image patterns can imply a liminal state of re-construction of consciousness supposed to bring about unity with God and with self.

The time of harvest – the time to reap – seems to open a similar place of liminality where all definitions are reversed. Yet there is an ambiguity about this harvest that does not allow us to accept it as a positive development. Surrounded by negative affirmatives, we know nothing about the essence of what we are going to reap – and it might turn out to be as poisonous as the goblin fruit.

The imagery of (non-)harvest also plays an important role in “A Castle-Builder’s World”

(before 1886). The poem was recorded following a double entry on 30 March and 31 March discussing Rossetti’s stay at a friend’s castle in Scotland. The first part of the

entry describes the poet’s experience trying to throw away a millipede only to discover a whole family of millipedes in her hand. A rather uncanny episode made the poet muse over our false estimations and inability to assess the full extent of our influence: “it seems to me a parable setting forth visibly and vividly the incalculable element in all our actions.”²⁶³ In the second part she describes how she believed herself to be called by

entry describes the poet’s experience trying to throw away a millipede only to discover a whole family of millipedes in her hand. A rather uncanny episode made the poet muse over our false estimations and inability to assess the full extent of our influence: “it seems to me a parable setting forth visibly and vividly the incalculable element in all our actions.”²⁶³ In the second part she describes how she believed herself to be called by