Sound, Sense, and Structure in Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song

Christina Rossetti's collections of verse sequentially elaborate, according to Dolores Rosenblum, "a female aesthetic" of "poetic inexhaustibility" (134).¹ Examining Rossetti's arrangements of poetry over the course of her career, Rosenblum nevertheless fails to address the relation between sequence and meaning in Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872).² The omission is startling for a number of reasons. Rossetti's juvenile poetic progress not only occupies the central position in her oeuvre but contains several of her "best songs" (Family Letters 94). Indeed, as William Rossetti observes, "the series includes various lyrics which, though not unadapted for children, are truly in a high strain of poetry, and perfectly suited for figuring among her verse for adults, and even for taking an honoured place as such" (C. Rossetti, Poetical Works 489-90).³ Yet owing to its status as children's verse, Sing-Song has rarely received the critical attention that it deserves, especially as a unified poetic sequence.⁴ Certainly, Rossetti's playful experiments in form and language allow readers to "experience Sing-Song . . . as a coherent text" (McGillis 221), but her sequential arrangement of lyrics informs this experience with meaning. Unfolding a narrative from cradle to grave, from winter to fall, from sunrise to sunset, Sing-Song invites readers to understand life as an ordered totality.

Sing-Song begins and ends with the sleeping child in bed. In the interval Rossetti guides the reader through three different, but simultaneous, temporal sequences. Taken together, these three synchronic movements divide into three successive phases, each slightly more comprehensive than the last. Grouping her 121 lyrics within roughly twelve decades, Rossetti uses clock and calendar to posit progress within circularity.⁵ In the first three decades she treats preparations and beginnings: birth and babyhood, dawn and morning, winter and spring. In the next four decades she focuses on growth: childhood, day, summer. In the final five decades she dramatizes a ripening into maturity: adulthood, dusk, autumn. In the last of these five decades she turns the sequence back to beginnings and thus underpins her asymmetrical arrangement with a symmetrical design. Doubling temporal on textual experience, these movements provide a syntax in which the poet grounds her exploration of the endless emotive and cognitive possibilities facilitated by rhyme and rhythm, repetition and apposition, sound and silence. For all the childish charm of single rhymes, Sing-Song makes rigorous demands on readers to create meaning from the formal, thematic, and structural constituents of the volume as a whole.

"By forming part of a sequence," says Christina Rossetti in Time Flies: A Reading Diary, a "single note" becomes one "element" within an "endless progression, of inexhaustible variety": "Change, succession, are of the essence of music" (29). As the title so engagingly suggests, Sing-Song aspires to the condition of music. Appropriately, the volume opens with a fugue containing poems about the newly born child and the newly born day. In the first two cradle songs a maternal speaker assures the baby of loving guardianship. Succeeding and varying this keynote, the next two poems replace the soothing presence of angels and mother with the dispossessing absence of parents and baby. The fifth lyric blithely announces several beginnings in the conflux of "morn," "born," and "springing":

"Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!"    Crows the cock before the morn;"Kikirikee! kikirikee!"    Roses in the east are born.

"Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!"    Early birds begin their singing;"Kikirikee! kikirikee!"    The day, the day, the day is springing.

[5]⁶

"Born" describes the budding of flowers; "springing," the rising of the sun and the coming of dawn—that is, dayspring. But the position of the lyric within the sequence increases the field of semantic possibility. The prepositional phrases ("before the morn," "in the east") in the first stanza create a mood of anticipation at one equally with the seasonal and the diurnal moment. Because of the onomatopoeic repetitions, the feminine end-rhymes and the thrice-iterated "day," the momentum of the second stanza increases as Rossetti speeds toward the joyous climax of the poem.

The next several lyrics, which follow the child through early...