In Our Time - Christina Rossetti

Episode Date: December 1, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. Rossetti was born into an artistic family and her siblings included Dante Gabriel, one of the leading lights of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to whose journal, 'The Germ', Christina contributed poems. She was a devout Anglican all her life and her religious beliefs are a recurring theme in her work. Christina never married, although she was engaged twice - one of her fiancés was the Pre-Raphaelite painter, James Collinson. She spent her time writing and volunteering for charitable works. It is said she even considered going to the Crimea with Florence Nightingale, but in the end ill health prevented her from doing so. Best known for her ballads and long narrative poems, she also wrote some prose and children's verses. Christina was admired by contemporaries including Swinburne, Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her work was to have an influence on later writers such as Virginia Woolf and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rossetti's poetry has a spirituality and sensitivity that has led to her redisovery in recent decades, not least by feminist critics who praise her powerful and independent poetic voice. With:Dinah BirchProfessor of English Literature and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at Liverpool University Rhian WilliamsLecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of GlasgowNicholas ShrimptonEmeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1872, Christina Rosetti wrote a poem which has since become one of our best loved Christmas carols. It begins, in the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan.

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stove. some of you will be singing along. This melancholy lyric with its deceptively simple language and form is characteristic of Rosetti's style as is its religious subject matter. She was a divide Anglican, but Christina Rosetti never married

although her life was not devoid of romance. Her poetry is passionate, sensuous, even erotic, its meaning often ambiguous and laced with mystery. She came from a celebrated artistic family. Her brother was the prominent pre-Ratholite Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Today her poetry is perhaps, even better known than his. But what do we really know about the life and works

of the woman behind such original verses as Goblin Market and the sonnet, Remember? With me to discuss the life and poetry of Christina Rosetti, a Dina Burch, Professor of English Literature and Pro-Bice Chancellor for Research at Liverpool University, Rie and Williams, Lecturer in 19th Century

English Literature at the University of Glasgow, and Nick Shrimpton, Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford. Dina Birch, can you give us something of Christina Rosetta? as background? Well, she came from a close family, a very literary family,

and a family with strong Italian roots. Her father, Gabrielle Rosetti, was a political exile, living in London, and working as Professor of Italian at King's College London. He was a Dante scholar. Indeed, his interest in Dante amounted to something pretty close to an obsession, which he maintained throughout his life, and that made a mark on the family. Her mother was Frances Pollydori,

also a woman with literary connections. She was the sister of Byron's doctor, who was famous as being the author of a short story called The Vampire. And that also had an impact on Rosetti. The home was a centre for Italian life. Exiles in London came to the house, and I think it was a very lively place. There were four children and Christina was the youngest.

The eldest was Mariah, also very interested in Dante as it happens. And a woman who published on Dante, she later entered an Anglican convent rather controversially. Dante Gabriel, you mentioned in your introduction, celebrated painter, pre-raphite, poet. William Michael Rosetti, who was a civil servant, but also an essayist and a critic. And they were a close and lively group of children. It was a happy London childhood. She was educated by her mother. It was a religious education.

Her mother was a devout Anglican, as indeed Christina became. But it wasn't a doer education. She had plenty of experience. exposure to fairy tales, ballads, nursery rhymes, and they all had an important influence on her later writing. Also, very creative childhood. She started to write early and was encouraged to do so. And she lived just around the corner from Broadcasting House.

She did. She did. Yes. Can you tell us just a little about her, what we know of her early personality? Well, she seems to have been a very cheerful, confident, bouncy child, certainly not repressed. Given to tantrums, outbursts of temper, she was thought to be rather stormy, there's a wonderful drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of her destroying a room in a fit of rage as a girl. So we're not talking about someone who was very quiet.

Later, things changed. When she hit puberty, her personality did seem to shift into something more troubled, more problematic. she had some health problems. She became more religious, and the life then acquired a kind of undertow of melancholy, which never quite left her. But she never became repressed to the point where she lost that forcefulness.

There was always an edge to Christina Rosetti's personality. Thank you. Harine Williams, her brother Dante, of course, named after the great poet, and was a prominent member co-founder of the pre-Ruffolites. how did the pre-Raphaelites affect Christina sorry, Rayne, how did the pre-Raphylites affect Christina? She was painted by three of them, including that. Absolutely, yes.

Can you just tell us a bit about the interdependence or interconnection of that? Sure. Well, as Dinah mentions, the Rossetti household was a lively one and one in which the children were close to each other. So it's not surprising, therefore, that when, as you say, Dante Gabriel and later their other brother, William, became involved with establishing then the pre-Rufflight Brotherhood in 1848. Christine was around to see this emerge,

and in fact, Gabriel wanted her to be part of the kind of literary club that was the seed to this at the beginning, but she was very concerned about display, which was, I think, a shyness, but also something to do with her way she understood her public, to control her public. exposure, let's say. So therefore she didn't want to do that,

but she was around in the home as the pre-Rathlights were meeting. They would come to the Rossetti house where they would meet in the brother's room, but she was around and about unable to watch this movement unfold and I'll also communicate with the people about it.

Could I just interject for one second? You say she was concerned about displaying, yet she is painted by Paulinson and Hunt and two or three times by her brother. She becomes one of the classical faces of the pre-Raphaelites. Indeed, she does. How do those two? Well, I think what is important is that when she was sitting for these portraits,

she is sitting to be somebody else. So she is in the painting of the girlhood of the Virgin Mary and in the painting by Dante Gabriel of the enunciation. She actually was one of the several people who sat for the Life of Christ for Holman Hunt. So she's actually, her display, she is a very contradictory as I'm sure we're going to come to understand

figure, but she's displaying herself but for a purpose of religious knowledge or depiction of the life of Christ and so on. So it's not really Christine Rosetti in that portrait. It is she's sort of be channeling a

religious sensibility. But I was going to say that she also her work, the pre-Raphaelites were concerned to return to a kind of detailed observation of nature. jewel-like colours, brightness, and a sort of authenticity that they felt had been lost in the kind of mannerist style. And I think it's significant that although Rosetti obviously was a poet rather than painted, she did try drawing, but it didn't really work for her.

Certainly her style of poetry similarly is bright, vibrant, jewel-like, very carefully observed, and that's exactly the kinds of vocabulary that reviewers used in their reviews are certainly of her first. collection. So I think it's important to see her as, you know, she is associated with their aims and understanding even if she wouldn't, she didn't want to become formally part of the brotherhood. Yes, yes, you can see that, you read that in her poetry, but there was the

devotion. She was a devout woman as Diana's hinted from adolescence onwards, if not before. Indeed. Indeed. A dutiful child, but a devout woman, how, how, can you just explain to the listeners what a religious leaner? meanings were more precisely.

Sure, well, as you say, she was a devout Anglican. But her Anglicism is of the high Anglicanism, or influenced very importantly by the Oxford movement and tractarianism. So from 1843 onwards, she and her mother and sister attended Christchurch in Albany Street, where under William Dodsworth, who had been significantly influenced by Pusey. And so there she was exposed to a particular kind of Anglicanism that was returning to certain. certain elements of the pre-Reformation church.

Bringing Catholicism back into Anglicism. Yes. Doctrine and usages. Well, certainly in terms of a focus on things like the Eucharist, Dotswitz relatively kind of restrained in some ways, but he certainly would have an interest in the Eucharist. And I think when we consider, therefore, that Christine was going to this church regularly,

then her understanding of consumption and consuming is very importantly, I think, inflected by this. tractarian return to the Eucharist. Would she believe that when she was taking Eucharist, that she was actually taking the body and blood of Christ? Well, this is exactly the debate and the thing that she meditates on very importantly. And I think, yes, this is what her position in as much as if we, I think this is, as I say, what we need to bear in mind

when looking at her understanding of eating and drinking, that although obviously it figures as a source of temptation, It's also very much a holy moment and a scene of sacrifice and communion, obviously. Just to deepen this word devout, I mean, she read every day. Absolutely. Can you just give us some idea of the sort of consistency and regularity of her devotion? Exactly.

Well, I think this is also very important, is that this form of Anglicanism is still Protestant in its focus on the Bible and the Word of God. And I don't think it's possible to underestimate the importance. of her faith. And as you say, it shaped her every day, including her daily prayer, her daily reading of the Bible.

Later on in life, she wrote considerable pieces of devotional writing that were designed to be read on a daily basis. So she's, and this I think also is an influence of the tractarian. The tracks from Puse's tracks,

called after the tracks that Pusey of the Octave movement wrote, became known as tractarian. Exactly, exactly. So she was part of a religiosity that's very scholarly. Interestingly, also allows women to be part of that scholarship, to become theologians themselves, and very much absolutely focused on reading and understanding.

Nick Shrimpton, to continue the religious theme for this moment, there were three, apparently three opportunities where she could have got married, and on those occasions she appears to have backed off for religious reasons. So it carried way into her life this religion. Can we just discuss the religious spine of her life a little more, please? Right, well, I mean, the first of her encounters, as it were, with marriage has a very interestingly complicated religious background. She was engaged. I mean, she lived and died a spinster.

She never married, but she was engaged between 1848 and 1850 to James Collinson, who was one of the original Pre-Raphaelite brothers. He was a painter. He was a high Anglican. He was a tractarian. He was part of the congregation at Christchurch, Albany Street, which is where he met the Rosetti's. However, he had already gone a further step and become a Roman Catholic,

and it's said that Dante Gabriel took him aside and said, if you're interested in my sister, she's not going to accept a proposal from someone who's not a co-religionist. So though she was a high Anglican, she nonetheless drew a very firm line before you got to Roman Catholicism as opposed to Anglo. What was the line she drew, Nick? Sorry, what was the line she drew?

Is it possible to be concise about it? If it didn't, we'll just move on. Well, the tractarians, the Anglo-Catholics, did not accept the authority of the Pope. They believe that what had happened in the 16th century was that the Reformation consisted not of a move to, for the Anglican Church, not of a move to Protestantism, but to a reformed Catholicism that rejected the errors of the papacy.

So, and Christina Rosetti, you know, the Anglican Church in its Catholic identity was the true original Christianity of the fathers of the church. And Rome was a deviant branch. That's the core of the doctrine. And so Collinson, having gone that extra step to Rome, was not acceptable. Collinson then reconverted back to high Anglicanism. Because of Christina? Yes, as far as we can see.

So what did she say about that? Well, she accepted his proposal. And for two years, they were engaged. I mean, there was never any prospect of an immediate marriage. It was going to be a long engagement because neither had any money. But in the course of the two years, his religious feelings overcame his romantic feelings, and he went back to Rome again. Indeed, he went up to Stonyhurst to live with the Jesuits.

And at that point, it looked as though he was intending to become a celibate Roman Catholic priest. engagement, of course, ended. He didn't, in fact. He spent a while at Stoney Hurst then became a painter again and married someone else in 1858. But that, that did not happen. In the 1860s, she became very close to another man called a scholar, really, called Charles Cayley, who proposed to her but was probably turned down because he was an agnostic. He wasn't religious enough. And what about the next one briefly, Brett? Well, Brett was in between the two. I never said I loved you, John. It's the beginning of a devastating poem, isn't it? Wow, well, that's all right.

As far as we know, John was fond of her but never actually proposed. And it doesn't seem to be religious. Doesn't seem to have been religious. Right. Now, Diane, at the outset of the programme, talked about this, let's call it an upset breakdown, whatever we want to call it, when she was 15 or 16, which seems to have marked her health for the rest of her life,

or being the first marker of ill health for the rest of her life. Can you talk about that and how it affected her? She obviously had a very serious breakdown. And even at the time, there was uncertain diagnosis. It wasn't clear whether it was physical or psychological. And, I mean, there's been a lot of speculative, retrospective diagnosis since, mostly the recent examples have stressed the possibility of a psychological crisis. And there have been attempts to suggest possible reasons for that.

it remains unclear. My own suspicion is that it might actually have been an early onset of the Graves disease, which she clearly did suffer from very seriously from the 1870s onwards. Graves disease most often occurs in women and in adolescence indeed. And it can have serious psychological consequences, including depression. It's a thyroid. Thyroid disease. Her eyes were protruding.

From the 1870s onwards, her eyes protruded. and she clearly at that point had the physical symptoms of graves. It is possible she had some of the neurological symptoms earlier on. The interesting thing in a way is that there was a kind of benign consequence for her in that once she was identified as delicate or an invalid, she suddenly had the space to be a writer. She didn't have to go out and do anything else. She could stay at home and do what she wanted to do, which was a right poem.

Excellent. Dina, poems were published for her by her grandfather and in the pre-raphalite poetry magazine. She had a couple of poems in there. But let's go straight to her first book, her own book, published when she was 31, Goblin Market and other poems. Now, Goblin Market was an instant success

and has remained something that's fascinated readers and it becomes the old... I just read it again the other day. It's bizarre, isn't it? It's extraordinary. And the older you get, you think, well, I maybe shouldn't read that. It's too disturbing.

But can you just tell us about it? It is a very powerful poem, and it's still her most celebrating. poem and certainly the poem that's most often discussed. Just to briefly describe what happens, Lizzie and Laura are two innocent sisters inhabiting a beautiful fairy tale world. In a world that's very close to what Rianne was describing, that pre-raphalite, landscape, glowing colours, a vividly evoked world of a pastoral existence.

And they hear the tempting... calls of the goblin men selling their fruit, come by, come by. Lizzie holds out, but Laura can't resist, and she buys some of the fruit with a curl of her golden hair. She's only allowed to sample the fruit once, and she pines and fades with longing for more. She's saved by her sister's devotion. Lizzie goes to visit the goblins, get more fruit for Laura. She resists their disconcertingly violent attempts to force her to eat the fruit and to share Laura's fate. She returns to her her sister, smeared with the juices from the fruit that they've tried to press on her. And this turns out to be Laura's salvation. She samples these juices.

And here again we might think about what Rianne said about the importance of the Eucharist. She samples the juices and she recovers. There is no friend like a sister. It's a religious poem in many ways. Can you read it a bit? Just a few lines. I will. You have it all marked up in front of you with your little green stickers.

I do. And we're getting there. Yep. Yep. Right. So here are the goblins trying to tempt Lizzie to eat the fruit. Laft every goblin when they spied her peeping. came towards her hobbling, flying, running, leaping, puffing and blowing, chuckling, clapping, crowing,

clucking and gobbling, mopping and mowing, full of airs and graces, pulling wry faces, demure grimaces, cat-like and rat-like, rattle and wombat-like, snail-paced in a hurry, parrot-voiced and whistler, helter-skelter, hurry-scurry, chattering like magpies, fluttering like pigeons, gliding like fishes Hugged her and kissed her Squeezed and caressed her Stretched up their dishes Panias and plates

Look at our apples Russet and dunn Bob at our cherries Bite it our peaches Sit-andes and dates We're going to be We'll be here for a while It's hard to stop

There is a bit There's a very strange bit Anyway Yeah Reanne When she goes back to her sister and her sister sort of sucks her clothes and drains her of this poison and takes what is now poison and sort of what might have been poison but restores her.

Yes. It's extraordinary lascivious, isn't it? I mean, it has been used for all sorts of illustrations of lascivious interpretations, whether it's phonographic or lesbian or so on, which seems a million miles from Christina Rossetti. So what's going on now? I mean, are we seeing her unconscious revealed or are we seeing her unconscious revealed or are we seeing a century on us interpreting things in ways which would have been unheard of, unthought of even, or not on the radar at that time?

Well, certainly I don't think she would have, you know, accepted, as you say, there's lascivious interpretations later with the illustrations and so on. I think actually a lot of Rosetti's work focuses around the idea of secrets and mysteries to be revealed. And, of course, that means that she is ripe then for people who want to reveal various. secrets. But she is very devout, absolutely, and therefore

even when things appear to be very secular, I think she is actually for her, they are always infused with a very important sense of religiosity. And as we were saying earlier, the Eucharist, I mean, is a sensual experience. It is about taking bread and wine

into the body and believing this to be Christ. And so I think that in a way, what is being evoked is a sort of intensity of experience rather than perhaps a kind of literalism. Is there any sense of autobiography here? I mean, it would be a deep dig to get to the autobiography because as Diane has given as an example of the hurrying, a scurrying,

goblin she uses lots of rhythms like that all the time and the description of the berries and the fruits are totally pre-reflight. You could put them on the painting as well. But is there any sense in which, because we all like to dig for autobiographical stuff, perhaps it's a fault of the times, but is there anything there that could be. I'm the business of anyway, away you go. Well, I would say I mean, as with quite a lot

of Rosetti's work, there's a focus around two sisters, and this is often a way for her to explore, I think, the availability of roles for women, but certainly she was very close to Mariah, her sister, and I do think that she speaks sometimes of a sense of

Moriah being somehow more religious, more devout, more good than she was. I think she's remembering her temper and so on. And so to a certain extent, I wonder whether, I mean, it has been suggested, therefore, that this is a playing out of the dynamic between those two sisters. And indeed she remembered as a child, for example, wanting to eat strawberries, Maris had careful, turned out there were cankers in them.

So she was, she did figure for Christina as somebody who would be sort of a guard, a protectoress. And so therefore that does map onto Lizzie and Laura. Having said this, I think that what she does is, as I say, to encode and make allegories. She's very playful in a lot of ways, but also extremely serious. And so what I was going to say is that she actually, in her work at the time,

was working with women, fallen women. And this is where perhaps we might be able to make a connection. Yes, we're working at the Highgate Penitentiary for fallen women, men. So, in that, is another 19th century woman who was empowered in social, socially by Christianity, by her Christianity. Yes. And I think that that's, I think we're moving slightly towards that, Nick, because we're dwelling on the religion,

which was very important. All of you say how important it was, but as Diana said at the very beginning of the programme, she was lively, kept coming through, the verses, the part of the Longish poem, that Goblin Market, the Dinah Red is full of vim and fun and spouting and parting, that sort of stuff, isn't a direct quotation,

but never mind, it goes on like that. And so we have an empowerment here, an outward goingness, even with this woman who wasn't terrifically well. And yet we come back, to the great Christian ideas. An extraordinary poems, Goblin Markets extraordinary,

but after death, she writes from the perspective of a dead woman. So it's a dead woman talking. Can you tell us about that? It's a very early poem. It's 1849, and it's absolutely of the period

of her close involvement with the Preaphylite movement. She did, after all, write poems which appeared, were printed in the Preaphylite magazine. And this little sonnet after death is sort of medieval in its setting.

I mean, there are rushes on the floor of the chamber where this woman is lying dead and being visited by a man she has loved during her lifetime, though he has not loved her. Until she was dead. What?

Oh yes, but there's a very interesting piece of curious religious background to this. William Dodsworth, the vicar at Christchurch, Albany Street, was a tractarian, a high Anglican. He also happened, rather unusually, to hold an Adventist doctrine called soul sleep, which was a theory about what happens to you after you die.

In other words, do you immediately go to heaven? No. Do you, are you completely unconscious until the general resurrection? No. According to the soul sleep doctrine, which Doddsworth was preaching, you're asleep during the interval between your own death and the last day. And Christina Rossetti makes quite a lot of use of that idea. Now, it's true.

the woman or the dead woman in after death is a bit more awake than that might suggest. She's sufficiently awake to be aware that the man is in the room. But she is dead as well. But she is dead as, but if Christina Rossetti thinks of death as a form of sleep, and I suppose there are states of sleep where you were sort of half vaguely conscious of what's going on around you. So that's going on in the poem. But there's also, of course, it's something which her great contemporary Emily Dickie, the American poet does as well.

I mean, they're exact contemporaries, curiously. And Emily Dickinson often writes poems spoken from the perspective of her own dead body. And of course, it's an interesting way of getting kind of distance on yourself. You know, you look at yourself from outside by saying, what do I look like? On the silent land.

Yeah, on the silent land. Can I just briefly go to her in? Then I want to come back to the din. This is disconnected with, again, what Nick's pointed out, that religious doctrines are not only something that's governing her devotional life, and not only infiltrating her poetry, but nourishing her poetry. Absolutely, yes.

And again, we have this notion of reserve. Now, that would be foreign to a great number of listeners. It was foreign to me to that, right? So can you say what that was briefly and how it affected the poem she wrote? There's one called Winter of My Secret. Yes, so reserve is a tractarian idea of the... from Isaac Williams' tract on reserve in communicating religious knowledge. And its concern is with the means by which knowledge of God is communicated to people.

And it stems perhaps, it can sound very elitist because its notion is that from Matthew, you must not cast your pills before swine, else they might trample them. And so the idea is that religious knowledge should be conveyed in such a way as only those who are armed with faith are able to access it. And so the idea then is that the understanding of God is coded, is put into a kind of meek, reserved type of language, which does often rely on things like figurative language and metaphor and so on, such that the reader therefore has to kind of work in order to get to its kernel.

And that is a work of faith then. And this is a doctrine that she was very interested. and the result of it is, as I was saying earlier, this sense of her writing often does seem to imply some kind of central mystery which needs to be uncovered. It means that her writing is full, absolutely full of reference to biblical phrasing, biblical verses, especially proverbs and the Psalms and so on.

So that also implies a reader who's going to recognise that, especially because quite often she actually only gives you half the verse, and so she's expecting their first. for the reader to be able to... Everlasting Hills. Exactly, yes. To fill in the second half. So that is a means of having a kind of reserved type of discourse,

which is restrained and held back. It also, as you were saying with Winter My Secret, it results in a kind of what I think of as a wintry poetic. She's very interesting, frost, and wrapping up in the cold, the way that snow covers things over and you're waiting for it to emerge later. Which also, it does link, actually,

to Doddsworth's idea of soul sleep as well. this idea that we're in a waiting period, which is like winter, for it to be revealed later. So this all infuses a lot of her poetry where she says, you know, these kinds of things of tips of tender green, telling of the hidden life that breaks forth underneath, like nursed in its grave by death. There's a sense then of that holding back and playing with its reader.

And, Diana, the poem Remember, which is a particular favourite of mine, the sonnet, remember, was written, when she was very young, 19, I think. Yes. I think it's a quite wonderful poem. And that too was popular from the start and not only popular, deeply appreciated, and still is. Can you tell us why that is, read us a few lines for it

and then tell us why you think it's so good. Yeah, it is an early poem. I agree, it's an extraordinary poem. This is how it begins. Remember me when I am gone away, gone, far away, into the silent land. When you can no more hold me. the hand, nor I half turned to go, yet turning, stay.

I think it's a wonderful example of what Rion was talking about, of her ambivalent simplicity. It's a very strong, direct poem and a generous poem. It ends by saying, I don't want you to be sad, do not grieve. for if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts that once I had, better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad. It's often read at funerals. That's one of the sources of its afterlife. But look at it closely and you find that this poem too has something of a secret.

a hidden edge to it, something troubling, beneath that apparently simple surface. There's a line, for instance, in a sonic where she says, remember me when no more day by day, you tell me of our future that you planned. And I think that's a very subtle and interesting moment, our future, that you planned. And again, that tender notion of the lover holding her by the hand Also just hints gently at a sense of constraint. And the final moment in the poem, Well, why should the mourning lover be sad?

Well, of course, because of the loss, because of her absence. But also perhaps because he might have something to regret looking back on the relations that he had with the dead woman, perhaps there is something that he might wish to change, but it's too late. And I think that that is how her poetry works. It's not that I want to suggest that that is the primary meaning of the poem, that it is in some way a statement of resentment or an accusation. It isn't that.

But it's working on different levels. It has these reverberation. of something other than a surface meaning. That's what makes her poetry so fascinating. And in 14 lines, yes. In 14 lines. That was terrific, I know. Nick, she wrote a lot for children.

Lewis Carroll was a friend of the family, and there was an interplay between them, and he was a great admirer of hers. Can we, and she addressed herself to children's poetry, some of it. Anyway, there you go. The Victorians were bizarre about children, weren't they? they said such things.

Now, can you tell us a bit about her children's poetry? Yeah, she published a volume of nursery rhymes, really, in 1871 called Sing Song, and with beautiful illustrations, actually, by the pre-raphelite artist Arthur Hughes. And it was actually rather successful. It was one of her more commercially successful books. They're very charming poems. I mean, she was interested in Blake's work, and I think she hoped to achieve something of the kind of songs of innocence

quality in these poems. They're very musical and they're designed to appeal to the ear of children. Do you want to give us a line or two? Well there's my favourite poem in Sing Song is a little two-line poem about the

desirability of adopt that orphans being adopted a topic which is back with us today which simply goes motherless baby and babyless mother bring them together to love one another and that kind of moving simplicity and also

the willingness to talk about things like death which on the whole we rather avoid in modern writing for children so it's a charming volume it has to be said that none of the individual poems has made it into the popular repertoire of established nursery writers

not even the one about the pin I'm not sure too many mothers are chanting it over cradles or buggies her other children's book is explicitly and deliberately Corollian. She wrote a book of prose called Speaking Likenesses, which are stories

I think deliberately setting out to imitate the Alice books and it's a failure. Rehan, briefly, she was very influenced by, she's a great reader, so great reader, influenced by everybody, I think, by definition to pick out. But Keats and Tennyson come most... Can you briskly tell us what she... Did she formally draw on those two poets?

I.e. imitate them. Well, there are... She uses I think in terms of her rhythms and metrical arrangements, she does sometimes use Tennyson's arrangement that he used in his very famous poem in Memorium, but I think also his poem moored, with the ways in which that's actually very experimental with its rhythm and metre and the way that it proceeds,

certainly does feed it into her also experiments with metre. She's such a fantastic metrist and her ear for beat and rhythm and so on, I think is very much influenced by 10. Hennyson. Keats, as you say, also comes through via the pre-Raphylites as well in terms of that kind of gorgeousness. But I think, as you say, she was such a big reader in general that it's very difficult to isolate anyone in particular. Certainly in terms of her contemporaries, she was very interested in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work and of, and then sort of forming

her own kind of female tradition, looking back to Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans and so on. she socialised to a sort of modest degree with poets of the period. She met Browning, who she was also an admirer of. But of course there's always in the background, Dante, as we've been saying, because of her father being a scholar and her sister, Charles Cayley too, Shakespeare, but I don't think really that you can underestimate the Bible. It's really King James Version of the Bible that is there in her every speaking almost.

Diana, can I call to you? Sorry, please. Bunyan. Pilgrins Progress. Diana, can I come to you again about a specific poem? I think it would be, I mean, against the Trade's Description Act, if we didn't mention in the bleak midwinter on this programme. Now, that seems to me to typify something that she's often accused of as being too simple, too straightforward, to be considered to be great. That is a vulgar amplification of a state of it.

But there's something in what I've said. Can you tell us why you think that poem, says more than it seems to say. Yes, it is a very powerfully simple and direct poem. You quite rightly quoted its opening lines in your introduction. They're so hard-hitting. They're so cold. Rianne mentioned her interest in...

Do you think the music rather softens it? To some extent, perhaps that's true. It wasn't, of course, written as a carol. It became a carol later after her death. when Holst set it. It then appears in the English hymnal in 1906, and that's in a sense when it enters English culture. But she wrote it as a poem,

and it is in that form, very forceful, very direct. And it works, as so many of her poems do, on the basis of a sort of duality, because you do have this sense of an uncompromisingly, hard, cold, physical world. It's no one's now. It is monosyllables brilliantly in this poem and repetition, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter,

a phrase that again is repeated later in the poem. But that's contrasted with the warmth of the stable, the breast full of milk, the manger full of hay, the kiss. So you've got that kind of almost a conversation between two different spiritual conditions. And you've also got an intellectual paradox. I mean, she's deeply interested in the paradox of the incarnation, which is that Christ is simultaneously the most powerful figure in the cosmos.

And at this moment, a powerless baby, you know, in a shack in a shantytown. Yes. I mean, that doubleness is, you know, something she develops very wonderfully. And it ends with that very direct. personal note, a question, what shall I give him poor as I am? And of course, unforgettably, that final line, give my heart. I'm now going to have to wrench this rudely into something we have to address with about three and a half minutes left, so that's the challenge. She was an empowered woman. She went out into the community, but she was not a feminist. In fact,

she was against female suffrage. Now, who's going to tell her? take that on and talk about that. Rian, do you want to kick off? Yes, absolutely. Yes, you're right. She, as we have said so many times, she is a woman of wonderful contradiction and reverberative nature between poles.

Yes, she is not, I mean, she doesn't support the suffrage, but this is because she did have a very strong sense of church hierarchy in the patriarchy of the church. So this, I think, was a point of faith for her. Having said she's so, with feminists of the period, Bessie Parks, Barbara Bodekon, Anna Howitt, and so she contributed to their publications and all of these sorts of things.

I think for the feminist recovery of a women's canon, she doesn't give that obvious statement of the likes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning who wrote Aurora Lee, which is a very much an overtly feminist poem. But having said this, what she does instead is draw attention, as you were saying, to her religiosity, which actually, It is very importantly focused on the feminine principles that need to be grounded theoretically. So I'd say that in that respect, her feminism is strong. Diana. I think it's strong too, though it is complex. And one thing worth noting is that the redemptive figures in her poems,

like Lizzie in Goblin Market, are female. And her poems are crowded with men who are in various ways inadequate, which is not exactly in itself a feminist message. But if you look at the prince's progress, a very long narrative and powerful poem, it is, I think, a very shrewd, devastating, really analysis of ways in which men do not live up to their social ideals. But I think the important point here as so often is a theological one, that her sense of the ideal human condition, the Christ-like condition, is in her poetry very often identified with femininity.

And finally, Nick, what's your view of her, as it were, a political position? Well, she did involve herself in her later life in some political causes, anti-vivisection, raising the age of consent. She didn't entirely shrink from political involvement, despite her rather modest withdrawn life. But she signed the anti-suffrage petition. She was against votes for women. though curiously there is another occasion,

and here she is being contradictory again, where she says actually women would make rather good MPs because they know what it is to run a family. Mother's, she said. Mother's. She was a sponsored on mothers and make very good MPEs. So in one sense she's a very reactionary figure, in other sense there is a kind of curious innovativeness about her.

Well, thank you very much for that. Thank you very much Nick Trimpton, Diana Birch and Rhian Williams. Next week we'll be talking about the ancient Greek philativeness of her aclitus and that's it thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it, such as Start the Week or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.