![]() This is not one of Christina Rossetti’s most famous poems, but it deserves to be better known. ‘A Birthday’ is a fine example of a successful poem which celebrates being in love using colourful and majestic imagery. Love poetry is obviously common enough in English literature, but there are actually few truly great poems about being in love (and being happy). Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit The poem is about Rossetti’s struggle to feel close to Christ and the teachings of Christianity, and to weep for the sacrifice he made. This poem was published in Christina Rossetti’s 1866 collection The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss, That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross, (Or as one anonymous sage once put it, ‘Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’.) ![]() ![]() We think it might best be viewed as a poem about wanting what we cannot have: as Marcel Proust observed, the true paradises are those we have lost. This poem verges on allegory, though its precise meaning remains elusive. A spirit without a shadow guards the gate, barring her from entering. Rossetti’s speaker peers between the iron bars of a garden gate and sees a garden full of flowers, and laments that this garden had once belonged to her – but not any more. ![]() So begins a poem about a paradise that has been lost. From bough to bough the song-birds crossed,įrom flower to flower the moths and bees ![]()
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