Rossetti - desire and renunciation

Poems:

Echo

From the antique

Shut Out

Goblin Market

Soeur Louise

Echo

• Invocation of ‘come to me’/’come…’ is echoed throughout the poem

• The speaker is perhaps longing for something she’d once lost

• She asks that the individual ‘Come to me in the silence of the night’ - ‘silence’ is symbolic of secrecy, and suggests that this desire is supressed and hidden. This further indicates the speaker is a woman as she struggles to vocalise her emotions due to the social confinements during that era.

• The idea of repressed desire is also echoed in the speaker asking for the individual to ‘come to me in dreams…’ - ‘dreams’ are intangible and figments of our imagination. They cannot be manifested into reality and can be characterised as short, pleasant escapes from reality and into our innermost desires.

• ‘Pulse for pulse, breath for breath’ - interconnectedness, interlinked

• Rossetti wrote this poem soon after James Collinson failed to become a Jesuit spirit, suggesting that perhaps the poem is ‘resonating memories of that time’, as Frances Thomas said, and is in fact her grieving the innocent and pure love she once had, one which she renounced due to her strict religious beliefs.

• This links to the theme of renunciation in Rossetti’s poetry as throughout her life, 'She seldom spoke of [her religion’s] joys’, as William Rossetti described in his memoir, due to the its intensity. For example, Rossetti had renounced theatre visits and playing chess as she thought them to be sinful.

• William described that ‘in innate character, she was vivacious and open to pleasurable impressions…what came to pass was the opposite of course.’