Classic Love Poems
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Christina Georgina Rossetti, known as Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), was an English poet and younger sister of poet-artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children’s poems. Her first published poem appeared in the Athenaeum magazine when she was eighteen. She never married, refusing two suitors, James Collinson and Charles Cayley, because of religious differences (she was High Church Anglican). Her best-known collection of verse is Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Other works include The Prince’s Progress (1866), Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), and A Pageant and Other Poems (1881).
Hand-written poem
by Christina Rossetti to her mother, 1884
by Virginia Wolff, 1930
. . . There was a young painter called James Collinson, and she loved James Collinson and he loved her, but he was a Roman Catholic and so she refused him. Obligingly he became a member of the Church of England, and she accepted him. Vacillating, however, for he was a slippery man, he wobbled back to Rome; and Christina, though it broke her heart and for ever shadowed her life, cancelled the engagement. Years afterwards another, and it seems better founded, prospect of happiness presented itself. Charles Cayley proposed to her. But alas…. Read more
A Birthday
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
The First Day
I wish I could remember the first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me;
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or winter for aught I can say.
So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it! Such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow.
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much!
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand!—Did one but know!
Will You Be There?
Will you be there? my yearning heart has cried:
Ah me, my love, my love, shall I be there,
To sit down in your glory and to share
Your gladness, glowing as a virgin bride?
Or will another dearer, fairer-eyed,
Sit nigher to you in your jubilee;
And mindful one of other will you be
Borne higher and higher on joy’s ebbless tide?
—Yea, if I love I will not grudge you this:
I too shall float upon that heavenly sea
And sing my joyful praises without ache;
Your overflow of joy shall gladden me,
My whole heart shall sing praises for your sake
And find its own fulfilment in your bliss.
A Pause
They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay;
While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:
Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:—
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.
At length there came the step upon the stair,
Upon the lock the old familiar hand:
Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
Put on a glory, and my soul expand.
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