Poem of the Week - When I am Dead, My Dearest
Christina Rossetti began writing at age 7 but she was 31 before her first work was published. She continued to write and publish for the rest of her life although she focused primarily on devotional writing and children's poetry. She maintained a large circle of friends and for ten years volunteered at a home for prostitutes. She was ambivalent about women's suffrage but many scholars have identified feminist themes in her poetry.
Rossetti remained largely unnoticed and unread until the 1970s when feminist scholars began to recover and comment on her work. In the last few decades Rossetti's writing has been rediscovered and she has regained admittance into the Victorian literary canon.
In her "Song" ("When I am dead, my dearest"), the speaker is not a man reliving the loss of a beloved woman. Rather, the departed woman addresses her soon to be grieving lover. Given Rossetti's status as a female poet, it is tenable to conjecture that she reverses the gender roles. Rossetti's female speaker abjures melancholy poetry and the male conventions of memorialization:
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant though no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree. [lines 2-4]
Christina's brother and editor, William Michael Rossetti, commented: "This celebrated lyric ... has perhaps been oftener quoted, and certainly oftener set to music, than anything else by Christina Rossetti."
Portrait of Christina Rossetti, by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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