Christiana Rossetti (1830-1894) might
have written a memoir that told of a broken engagement, but she wrote poetry
instead, sometimes poems that concealed her loneliness, love and longing for
particular men. In many ways she was a bundle of contradictions. Born in
England of Italian parents, she was an Evangelical who would later become
Anglo-Catholic and always remain, as others described her, a spinster—a
spinster perhaps with too many lost loves. One of her many poems is “A Daughter
of Eve.”
A
fool I was to sleep at noon,
And
wake when night is chilly
Beneath
the comfortless cold moon;
A
fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A
fool to snap my lily.
My
garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded
and all-forsaken,
I
weep as I have never wept:
Oh
it was summer when I slept,
It's
winter now I waken.
Talk
what you please of future spring
And
sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:
Stripp'd
bare of hope and everything,
No
more to laugh, no more to sing,
I
sit alone with sorrow.
