Christina Rossetti’s Questions: Riddles, Catechisms, and Mystery

When do lyrics ask questions, and why?

If you are a lyric reader who has adopted John Stuart Mill’s argument that poetry is something “overheard,” a form of “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude,” questions would seem out of place.¹ Why ask a question when no one is listening? Certainly literal questions, of the sort we ask every day, seem unsuited for lyric poetry. Literal questions, defined by the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language as asking about something “one does not know . . . with the aim of obtaining the answer from the addressee,”² seem reserved for dramatic or narrative poetry. Lyrics uttered in solitude lend themselves better to speculative questions, expressions of wonder that do not expect a straightforward response. Susan Wolfson’s The Questioning Presence, for instance, focuses on Romantic poetry that offers questions where the “answers, if they are accessible, are often ambiguous, inadequate, unstable.”³ These questions are an expression of Keats’s negative capability, the idea of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”⁴ Lyrics can also include rhetorical questions, which linguists generally define as disguised statements: the “tactic of ‘posing questions that expect no answer.’”⁵ When Dante Gabriel Rossetti, translating François Villon, asks “but where are the snows of yesteryear?” he is not requesting an explanation of the water cycle; the question is a disguised statement that the past is irrevocably gone.⁶ Like speculative questions, rhetorical questions need no listener. If we view lyrics as autonomous, overheard expressions of personal feeling, we might expect that all their questions are either speculative or rhetorical.

But this restrictive view of lyric questions only emerges if we adopt Mill’s view that poetry is essentially autonomous, isolated, overheard. As Virginia Jackson has argued, genres like “riddles, papyrae, epigrams, songs, sonnets, blasons, Lieder, elegies, dialogues, conceits, ballads, hymns and odes” have been “considered lyrical,” and not many of these genres conform to this more restricted definition of poetry.⁷ The poems we call “lyric,” then, should be understood as a heterogeneous mix of many different genres of short poetry, all capable of different things and aiming at different ends. This paper explores how Christina Rossetti offers kinds of lyrical questions that can only be understood if we look at how “lyric poetry” draws on one of these sources above—the riddle—as well as one not included in Jackson’s list—the catechism. I argue that many of Rossetti’s poems enact a process of moving from rhetorical question or riddle to catechism: a question/answer routine designed to form a community grounded in shared belief and faith. These questions exemplify what Jonathan Culler has called the “ritualistic elements of lyric,” partaking in the “foregrounding of linguistic patterning” and “performative character” that Culler sees as intrinsic to lyric poetry.⁸ Rossetti’s catechistic questions are in fact explicitly ritualistic, a communal affirmation of faith. In these poems, Rossetti introduces questions that tempt us to read them as highly personal rhetorical or speculative questions, or as enigmatic riddles; the poems then reveal their questions to be catechistic questions, forming a community around faith in mysteries that are accepted without being fully understood. Rossetti’s questions invite us to remain in mysteries in a very different way than Keats’s “negative capability”: instead of lingering in areas where knowledge is uncertain or unavailable, Rossetti invites us to join her in affirming theological beliefs while contemplating the mystery they bring.

Rossetti’s devotional poetry, then, sees itself as addressing two key “imagined communities”: readers and writers of poetry, on the one hand, and her fellow Christians on the other. As Bonnie Costello has argued, poetry need not always be envisioned as a solitary speaker; instead, we can see how poetry “imagines and formulates potential community,” developing ways to move from the lyric “I” to a collective “we.”⁹ And these poetic communities are created not simply through the obvious fact that poems have readers, but through the forms of address that exist in the poem’s language. Here I follow Justin...