Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (review)

Recently we have seen a number of studies that discuss mainstream literature alongside children's literature, and this cross-border writing is welcome. Even if we decide that the conventions of children's and young adult literature differ from those of mainstream (for lack of a better term) work, we must recognize that many of our canonical writers crossed over and wrote for the young. The nineteenth century is rich in such writers, from Dickens and Thackery to MacDonald and Gaskell. Novelists often wrote for children as well as for adults. Poets, however, seem less inclined to cross over. As far as I know, the likes of Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, and so on did not write for children. The recent A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002) does not contain a chapter on children's verse. The only mentions of children's poetry are in the chapters on "Nonsense" and on "Hymn." Thus, a study such as Hassett's is doubly welcome: it reminds us that Victorians wrote poetry for children, and it notices that one of the period's premier poets practiced her craft for children as well as for adults. In Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, Rossetti emerges as a poet accomplished for the strength of her vision and the intricacy of her form. The poetry she wrote for children contains the same delicacy, or what Hassett calls "patience of style," as does her poetry for adults. The argument has to do with Rossetti's formal grace: "if we wish to understand a poem as a response to an issue, we must treat it not only as a statement but as an action; what it says is inseparable from how it moves" (3). Hassett's book demonstrates just how subtle and meaningful even the most ostensibly simple poem can be.

What makes this study invaluable are its demonstrations of close reading. Hassett is attuned to nuance, subtlety, and delicacy. She notices intricate formal beauties, from the working of alliterative affect to the suggestiveness of language. She knows a rhetorical turn when she sees and hears one. For her, poems such as Rossetti's develop organically, like surprising blossoms from familiar shoots. For example, she notices the "watchfulness that underlines" many of Rossetti's images and Rossetti's "empathetic heeding of what evolves" (213). The stanza Hassett scrutinizes here is

   Joy is but sorrow,       While we know    It ends tomorrow:-       Even so!    Joy with lifted veil    Shows a face as pale As the fair changing moon so frail and fair.

Of course, Hassett acknowledges the paradox of a joy that is not really joy. But her interest is in the movement of the stanza from the opening paradox to the turn at "Even so," to the potentially clichéd unveiling. Hassett goes on to examine the second stanza of this poem, where she lights on the "evolving sound pattern" that "turns pain into a tenderly intricate cleansing" (214). We could press these stanzas harder than Hassett chooses to do, noticing the intertextual connections of the "lifted veil" in Novalis, Shelley, MacDonald, and others, or commenting on Romantic joy, or praising the finely balanced central line with its gentle punning. Like her subject, however, Hassett knows how to let silences speak. She nicely relates Rossetti's poetic evocation of change to the manner in which her poetry slowly and ever so lightly reveals its meaning.

I might cite many instances of Hassett's deft reading, but for our purposes the important aspect of her study deals with children's literature. Rossetti wrote both poetry and prose for children; scholarship usually identifies "Goblin Market," Speaking Likenesses, and Sing-Song as Rossetti's contributions to children's literature. The mixture of prose and verse Rossetti wrote in 1850, Maude, might be included in this list; Hassett mentions Maude once in passing, but she does not consider it in her examination of Rossetti's work. Its absence indicates Hassett's interest in Rossetti as a poet and not...