SONG: " The Fairy Queen by Loreena McKennitt "
Form:
It's a form of hymn metre, with alternating longer and shorter lines.
Analysis:
Rossetti gives her loved one permission to remember or forget her once she's dead, and acknowledges that she will no longer be aware of what transpires in the world once she is buried. She goes on to indicate that she believes in some sort of immortality of the soul with the phrase "And dreaming through the twilight/that doth not rise nor set", but it appears she does not hold out hopes of heaven or belief in hell, and is uncertain what sort of consciousness her own soul will have - maybe it will remember her loved one, maybe not. To me, this is the reading of the poem on its face, which I find fascinating because Rossetti has a reputation as a devout Anglican, who refused to see one of Wagner's operas because it was based in paganism and gave up chess because winning gave her too much pleasure.
A Few Words:
Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830. Christina was educated at home by her mother, Frances Polidori, a former governess, an Anglican of devout evangelical bent. Rossetti's first verses were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather.
By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder, had made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a governess. Rossetti's illness restricted her social life, but she continued to write sonnets and ballads. Rossetti's brother William Michael edited her complete works in 1904. He once said that "Christina's habits of composing were eminently of the spontaneous kind.
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