Christina Rossetti: Essay Response

From reading this essay I was able to extract information about Rossetti and her inspiration which seemed otherwise esoteric. What struck me as peculiar was that Rossetti was a devout Christian, from the subject matter of her poetry which seems questioning and critical of the religion I assumed that she had an Agnostic/Atheist understanding of the world. Especially in poems such as Goblin Market which effectively warp Biblical stories such as that of Adam and Eve to portray the characters as less evil and even in some cases the victim rather than the perpetrator. The revelation that Rossetti was devoutly religious and tried to reflect this in her work shows her poems in a new light and allows me to understand the presence of contextual factors. In addition to this, poems such as Jessie Cameron which present the ocean as an almost human presence is reminiscent of Pagan concepts of nature spirits and bodies of water having personalities of their own, reflected in how these things behaved (i.e. the sea is fickle, can be angry or calm); knowing of her religious affiliations suggests that choosing to depict the sea in this way could be a sort of veneration for God’s creations rather than more ‘spiritual’ perceptions.
The fact that Rossetti suffered from mental disorders and her being forced to accept denial of entry to the Pre-Raphaelite order (by her own brothers) and still was able to produce poems of the calibre she did is testament to her skill and talent as a poet and shows that regardless of how odd her poems may seem to the uninitiated her poems are to be read not at face value or with baseline inference but deeply read and understood whilst taking contextual factors into account during analysis.
What I learnt from this essay has significantly changed my perception of Rossetti and I now class her as one of my favourite poets: not only because of her work but because of her story.