Rossetti analysis

• Some ladies dress in muslin full and white

  
  

  • Iambic pentameter - society is controlled and rigid
  • Sestet CDEECD rhyme - creates her own scheme and rejects tradition, like society
  • Metaphor - enforces gender roles through alliteration and harsh sounds
  • Simile - ill fitting, not a woman's place
  • Colour imagery - emphasises traditional differences
  • Context - was 18 which explains the satirical tone, suffered mental health breakdown 3 years earlier, grew up the child of exiled immigrants and home-schooled
• Remember

  
  

  • Enjambment and caesuras - flowing nature of life and its finality
  • Strict iambic pentameter - stoicism of speaker and acceptance of death
  • Imperatives - starts as strict but calms down throughout as she realises she's being selfish
  • Pronouns - reflects passive role of women
  • Context - published a year after Queen Victoria's husband died so whole country in extreme grief, she was caring for her dying father and her brother William called her 'sadly smitten invalid'
• The world

  
  

  • Petrarchan sonnet - paradox between innocent love and erotic desire
  • Anaphora - day and night shows duality
  • Biblical references - garden of Eden and fatal nature of erotic desire
  • Devil imagery - dehumanizes her
  • Rhetorical question - Rossetti questioning choices
  • Context - romanticism inspired by Pre-Raphaelites, Collinson and reflets Rossetti's own struggle
• Echo

  
  

  • Irregular rhyme - shows lack of direction
  • Anaphora of imperatives - shows passion and yearning
  • Sibilance - reflects echoing and emptiness without a lover
  • Oxymorons - reflects disillusionment
  • Personification - longing for missed souls to enter Heaven and no common shows extent of longing
  • Plosives - urgency and passion
  • End rhyme - 'death' and 'breath' instability of life and death
  • Full stop - end of long enjambment shows finality
  • Context - life without a lover, rejection of Collinson or death of father
• May

  
  

  • Truncated sonnet - life or potential cut short
  • Internal rhyme - mirrors pregnancy or reproduction
  • Personification of May - sense of reminiscing
  • Fertility imagery - Spring associated with rebirth
  • Enjambment - enforces theme of potential
  • End stops - volta in stanza 2 showing death and finality
  • Context - nature imagery inspired by Pre-Raphaelites and death of father in 1954
• A Birthday

  
  

  • Iambic tetrameter - disruption of meter suggests an urgency to celebrate love
  • Full rhyme - genuine and consistent in her faith
  • Volta - 1st stanza is natural and 2nd stanza is materialistic
  • Anaphora - shows an inability to articulate due to being overwhelmed
  • Context - possibly Rossetti longing for love and regretting decisions
• An apple gathering

  
  

  • Iambic pentameter to tetrameter - mirrors change in societal view
  • Line length - last line of each stanza feels cut short, mirrors feeling of lost potential in society as a fallen woman
  • Extended metaphor - apples are a euphemism for sex and the fall out represents the lives of fallen women
  • Enjambment - shows passing of time and emphasises how long she's been alone
  • Plosives and sibilance - sounds like kissing and hissing
  • Context - Collinson, she was 26 at the time, considered old for a single person, volunteering at St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary 2 years later
• Maude Clare

  
  

  • Rhyme - ABCB reflects unconventional ballad focused on the splitting of a relationship rather than the formation of one
  • Natural imagery - reflective of natural, pure, true love
  • Caesura - shows Thomas' shame, guilt and anxiety
  • Voice - Nell gets last word in and wins against Maude, also challenges traditional view of male dominance
  • Context - criticising the treatment of fallen women
• At Home

  
  

  • 1st person autobiographical - shows lack of change and isolation
  • Iambic trimeter - final line of every stanza, shows reflection of past
  • Caesura - fluctuates the rhythm and creates feeling of uneasiness
  • Repeated personal pronouns - seeking pity after death
  • Context - Her views left her feeling isolated in her social circle
• Up-Hill

  
  

  • iambic metre - perpetual forward motion mirrors spiritual journey
  • Rhyme - ABAB reflects laborious nature if the journey to Heaven
  • Questions - shows uncertainty of voice 1
  • End stops - shows absolutes of voice 2
  • Pronouns - anonymity ensures that this is a lesson all can learn from
  • Context - idea of the 'reserve' being that to be rewarded in the afterlife you had to work for it
• Goblin Market

  
  

  • Asyndetic list - theme of temptation
  • Animalistic description - criticising men in society
  • Language - Laura starts using goblin's language, shows corruption
  • Close rhyme - shows goblin's chaotic excitement
  • Imperatives - goblins aggressively desperate to corrupt Lizzie
  • Context - work at St Mary Magdalen Penitentiary in Highgate and Dante's GF Lizzie suffered from illness and died from an opioid addiction
• What would I give?

  
  

  • Asyndetic list - emphasises yearning
  • Caesura - break of pace shows lack of direction or purpose
  • Metaphor - 'heart of flesh' is a biblical illusion from the book of Ezekiel, linking her need for spiritual love
  • Internal rhyme - shows internal emotional repression
  • Anaphora - shows how much she wants to resolve her emotional repression
  • Context - she was in love with Charles Bagot-Cayley but rejected him due to her unorthodox Christian views
• Twice

  
  

  • Regular rhyme scheme - reflects the control she tries to keep over her heart
  • Iambic metre - natural rhythm of the heart
  • Brackets - Lover in them but God isn't, shows whose love she keeps secret and whose she is open about
  • Biblical pronouns - 'Thou' at the start and end of the line shows omnipresence
  • Context - rejection of Collinson
• Memory

  
  

  • part 1 structure - iambic pentameter and ABAB rhyme gives sense of constraint
  • Part 2 structure - more free and less pressure
  • Repetition of 'alone' - reinforces isolation
  • Oxymoron - shows struggle of love and faith
  • End stops - final line of 'when we're together.' suggesting the only finality when with God is Heaven
  • Context - she broke off a marriage when writing part 1, wrote second part 8 years later as a reflection
• A Christmas Carol

  
  

  • Stanzas - each 8 lines long, represents new life in the Bible
  • Simile - Earth is lifeless without Jesus
  • Assonance - reinforces idea of miserable state of the world
  • Personification of weather - unwelcoming cold without Jesus
  • Rhetorical question - highlights Jesus' importance as human kind can't think of a way to thank him
  • Volta - last stanza has spring imagery to show change with Jesus
  • Context - written around Darwin's 'Descent of Man' which opposed religion with science
• Passing and glassing

  
  

  • 3 octaves - traditional structure reflects the eternal nature of ageing that concerns the women in the poem
  • Rhyme - first and last line in each stanza represents cyclical process of life
  • Irregular rhythm - puts reader off balance like the women watching their lives fade
  • Floral imagery - suggests rotting and abandonment and also beauty in age
  • Context - diagnosed with graves disease and confronted with the idea of ageing at a fast rate and loosing her beauty
• "A Helpmeet For Him"

  
  

  • Title - sounds like women are subservient but actually means 'strong' and 'rescuer' in Hebrew
  • Syntax - places women centrally
  • Biblical reference - idea of 'made' links to story of Adam and Eve
  • List - emphasises a woman's virtues and implies men are immoral
  • Context - written same year (1888) that she signs Mary Ward's anti-suffrage petition
• As froth on the face of the deep

  
  

  • Similes - describing hope without god
  • Trochaic trimeter - soften the ending and shows how life without God is weak
  • Biblical reference - first line is in reference to Earth's water before God shapes the world
  • Exclamatives - 'O' is a religious exclamative reflecting awe and devotion to God
  • One sentence - emphasises the reach and extent that God influences the natural world
  • Context - written in 1892 when Rossetti was suffering from breast cancer, influencing the importance of religion in her life
• Our Mothers, lovely women pitiful

  
  

  • Iambic pentameter sonnet - soft structure mirroring the mothers as older and fragile women
  • Collective pronouns - 'our' shows united front of women
  • Sibilance - creates bitter tone of injustice in patriarchy
  • Imperatives - evoke imprisonment and restrictions
  • Oxymoron - shows how women are experts of suffering in silence and disguising pain
  • Context - women lacked education or the same opportunities as men in Victorian era, Rossetti's own mother passed in 1886
• Babylon the Great

  
  

  • Title - city the represents rebellion against God, suggests Victorian London is modern version
  • Iambic Petrarchan sonnet - ironic as it subverts romance
  • Feminine personification - London described as a 'she' due to the perceived domination of demonic women through the male gaze
  • Greek reference - allegory to Medusa and the dangers of temptation
  • Imperatives - men attempting to get the women to conform
  • Context - private spheres of London started shunning prostitutes
• Piteous my rhyme is

  • Iambic tetrameter - interrupted shows unreliability or romantic love
  • Stanzas - 1 about romantic love, 2 about spiritual love
  • Rhyme - similarities across stanzas shows façade of romantic love, trying to be wholesome but actually toxic
  • Asyndetic list - how overwhelming romantic love is
  • short lines - limitations of romantic love
  • Enjambment - shows longevity of God's love
  • Context - 61 when she wrote this, already lost family and lovers, feels closer to spiritual love than romantic