At Home

Context

• Use of a revenant motif: the poem’s speaker is a ghost returning to observe the living – a quintessential Gothic trope. The revenant embodies the boundary between life and death, suggesting both fascination and anxiety about what lies beyond. 

• This links to the Victorian interest in spiritualism and crisis of faith, destabilised by advances in science. Due to high mortality rates they sought out spiritualism as a chance to contact with the deceased. Spirit photography, seances were popular – obsession with the occult and the inexplicable.  

• Unconventional depiction of afterlife: no heaven or ‘soul sleep’ - Victorian fear of spiritual emptiness  

Structure

• Iambic tetrameter with the exception of the final line being one foot shorter in each stanza, creating not only a downbeat rhythm, but also referencing a sense of being cut off or truncated too early. Represents visually and structurally the loss of the speaker’s life - fragmented, unfinished and unresolved. The truncation creates a feeling of abruptness or silence, emphasising the poem’s theme of exclusion and the finality of being forgotten 

• Rhyming pairs in even lines = the living, truncated lines = the dead 

• Dramatic monologue – popular choice of form for Victorian readership 

‘Green orange-boughs' ‘sucked the pulp of plum and peach’ 

• Rossetti creates a lexical field of words relating to fruit and vivid colours, evoking the succulent, sensual pleasures of life embodied by juicy fruits 

• Alliterative, plosive consonance of ‘p’ in ‘plum’ and ‘peach’ emphasise these hedonistic pleasures through a physically sensory experience. ‘Sucking’ could have erotic undertones, engagement in sensual activities – intimacy and indulgence heighten the excitement and vitality of the living world 

• ‘Sucking’ can be polysemic – referencing the enjoyment of life, sucking the joy from life – Carpe Diem ideologies 

• Sense of decadence and opulence  

• The intense detailed imagery reflects Pre-Raphaelite sensibilities, and the decadence and opulence of the world  

• In this poem, Rossetti hypothetically evaluates the contrast between the sensuous joy of her friends’ way of living, and her own ascetic choices – constructing a poignant mediation on life 

‘They say, they jested, and they laughed’ ‘hand to hand’ 

• Verbs of movement and vitality 

• Interaction and togetherness of the living is emphasised through the diacope ‘hand to hand’, emphasis on physical body parts suggests closeness  

• Creation of a stark dichotomy and contrast between living and dead (seen through collective pronoun ‘they’ and individual pronoun ‘I’). ‘They’ as a homogenisation and collective

‘For each was loved of each’ ‘said one’ x3 

• Epanalepsis (starting and ending on the word ‘each’) creates a cyclical structure to the line, reflecting interdependence within the group – they are all connected, reflecting the strength of their emotional bond 

• This close dynamic references close relations to the romantic lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, idealisation of community and mutual support 

• Anaphora of repeated ‘said one’ homogenises the group into a shared voice, constructing them as a collective entity  

‘Featureless sands’ ‘miles and miles of sea’ ‘achieve the eyrie-seat' 

• Diacope of ‘miles and miles’ emphasises the distance of ‘miles’ that they can travel - underscores the freedom of life at their disposal – unbound by geographical and temporal constraints

• Aspirations and ascensions, all dimensions and progressions are available – endless possibilities 

• Contrasts to the speaker, who is unable to experience the freedoms of the living world 

‘To-morrow’ ‘yesterday’  ‘their life stood at blessed noon’ 

• Contrasting temporal markers, heightening the fact that the living have a future, whilst the ghost does not – clear dichotomy between the living and the dead 

• Tomorrow repeated as an anaphora throughout the text 

• ‘Tomorrow’ represents the united group of the living, ‘yesterday’ becomes an embodiment of the speaker. Links to the Victorian obsession with memory and being remembered 

• Repetition of ‘tomorrow’ could either depict the persona to be insignificant and forgotten by their friends (‘all-forgotten’ as the best epithet for the ghost), or alternatively this could be an excess focus on the future as a coping mechanism – moving on, looking forwards. This contradiction explores the liminal state of the ghost - between life and death, but also between memory and forgetting 

• Rossetti’s choice to conclude the stanza with an end-stopped line after ‘yesterday’ explores the irrecoverable nature of the past, and finality of death  

• The sun is at its highest point at midday – becoming a metaphor for her friends as being in the prime of their lives, a metaphor for hope at its highest. The sun bears connotations of light and brightness 

‘I shivered comfortless, but cast no chill across the table-cloth' 

• Poltergeist (a ghost/spirit that is responsible for physical disturbances)

• One reading is that the ghost is powerless, insignificant to the living and unable to affect the living, or alternatively they are choosing not to out of kindness 

• Alliterative consonance of ‘comfortless but cast no chill’ reflects inner pain or discomfort