Love in Christina Rossetti's poetry

Which Christina Rossetti poems carry the theme of Love?

• Maude Clare

• Souer Louise De La Misericorde

• Echo

• Remember

Maude Clare - Love as transactional, a competition and achievement

“I’ll love him till he loves me best”

Maude Clare - Love is temporal and bound to decline, even if a relationship/love persists the original love/passion is bound to decline

“Though, were it fruit, the blossoms have gone”

Maude Clare - Love is unresolved and divided

“My lord gazed long on pale Maude Clare, or ever he kissed the bride”

How is love portrayed in Maude Clare?

• Cynical portrayal of love

• Temporal and fading

• Transactional and a achievement

• Not driven by the heart and positive emotion

• Only symbolic

Echo - Spirituality of love, it persists through the physical barriers/boundaries (of death)

“Where the souls meet brimful of love abide and meet”

Echo - Love is always intense but can be distanced through physical barriers, despite that it persists. Romantic view of love

“Come in the speaking silence of a dream”

How does Echo portray love

• Optimistic and persistent

• Spiritual over the physical

• Triumphant over its boundaries

Souer Louise De La Misericorde - Agape (God’s love) Vs Eros (Romantic Love). Romantic love is false and empty in contrast to the love that God gives.

“Oh vanity of vanities desire!”

Souer Louise De La Misericorde - Romantic/Sxual Love = Painful, faded and no longer fulfilling

“Longing and love, pangs of a perished pleasure, Longing and love, a diskindled fire”

How is love presented in Souer Louise De La Misericorde

• Romantic/Sxual love is unfulfilling and meaningless in the long term

• Intense but harmful

• Emotionally painful

• Spiritual love and a relationship with God is the superior from of love

Twice - Love is deeply emotional but also vulnerable

“(O my love, O my love)”

Twice - Romantic love amongst humans fails and falls short due to human likeliness to sin and imperfection → Agape/ Spiritual love for God is fulfilling long term and can heal what’s broken in humanity

“I toom my heart in my hand “

“You took my heart in your hand”

“My broken heart in my hand”

“This heart take though to scorn”

How is love portrayed in Twice

• Romantic love / Human love fails and causes emotional damage

• Spiritual love and the love of God prevail, it is constant, reliable and secure

How is love presented in Christina Rossetti’s poetry?

• Intense but emotionally unreliable if not from the right source

• Temporary and fleeting - Cynical view of romantic love

• Unfulfilling and disappointing in the long term

• Spiritual love as eternal