Shut Out

• • Garden -  garden of Eden - edenic imagery
• • Structure -  7 stanzas reflect the seven cardinal vices - man's inherent connection to sin // ballad + ABBA rhyme scheme - entrapment of women - cyclical - self restriction 
• • Title - ‘shut out’ - her romantic alienation - ode to ‘fallen women’ / previous title was ‘what happened to me’ - reflection of aging 
• Context

  • broke off engagement with James Collinson - he reverted to Roman Catholicism  / written after volunteering at a prison Found - by Dante - a driver discovers his form beloved being a prostitute having a conflict between leaving this life and personal independence 
  • Sacrificial lamb 
  • Loss of hope
• AO1: In ‘Shut Out’, Rossetti explores… 

  • The effects of isolation from happiness (God)
  • The acceptance of fate 
  • Religious deviation 
  • The poem presents the main ideas of a free spirit, loss of love and home, and nostalgia for the lost home.
  • Reflects Rossetti’s interest in how women were excluded from society and the idea of female sin, commonly traced back to Eve in the Garden of Eden.
• AO2:

  • Rhyme Scheme: ABBAhave a regular rhyme scheme of ABBA - agitation of the poetic voice's experience. The ‘B’ are trapped within the A, representing her exile.

  Form: Iambic Tetrameter

  The seven stanzas: 7 cardinal vices

  Cyclical - takes us on a spiritual religious journey. Loss and hope.

  First person speaker
• “The door was shut” and “Iron bars” and “flowers bedewed”

  • - In media res + caesura monosyllable - urgency + alienation / disobedience - human curiosity Endstop - reversal of echo
  • beautiful imagery- narrator is being banned from entering a place that gives them happiness.
  • Idea of permanence, confinement, exclusion. Once exiled from comfort, only comfort comes from peering inside. impenetrable. The garden is not to be accessed easily. She sees "lie" in front of her suggests double meanings of deceit and openness.
• "From flower to flower the moths and bees:"

  • assonant rhyme - the perfection of God / / nocturnal juxtaposition - Gods omniscient nature / ‘moths’ - temptation + nuisance / bees - strive towards goal - idea of working collectively towards God - hypocrisy of high class men and their indulgent in sexual desire.
  • Moths - nocturnal, bees - diurnal and yet coexist - harmony and peace. The garden eliminated time and decay. It is beyond mortality; it is paradise
• “My garden, mine”

  • So possessive of the Garden - possibly because of how women weren’t allowed to win anything in the Victorian era, she wants at least something to be hers. Garden of Eden?
• Sibilance 'sh'


  • Ethereal whispering ghost
  • Finality of God's judgement
• "he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden [a] cherubim… to guard the way to the tree"


  Religious significance
• "Spirit" and "Grave"


  • Religious significance
• In these lines, we see Rossetti's devotion to her Catholic faith
• "Shadowless" spirit


  • Supernatural, being invisible it is more like a ghost creating a sense of fear
  • Not real but exists in the poet's imagination
  • Sibilance - Presence of sin + an ethereal whispering ghost
• "He answered not” and “The spirit was silent;”

  • Spirit is man? Spirit is God? Loss of God's voice and connection. No one can give you an answer - self discovery and spiritual journey.
  • masculine pronouns - male domination OR rejection of womanhood + desire  
• “He left me no loophole great or small / Thro’ which my straining eyes might look:” and “Blinded with tears;”

  • Desperate - greed is a sin. God punishes and distances her from the garden she is possessive of. Eve was desperate for knowledge - parallel? Loss of Adam and Eve’s relationship with God. But: Jesus is the second Adam? who reinstates the possibility of reconciliation with God- possibility of entering the garden? ‘Blind’ - biblical symbolism (Matthew 23:16) spiritual inability to perceive the truth or God.
• “And dear they are, but not so dear.”

  • These lines convey a feeling of acceptance which tells the reader that the poet has finally accepted her fate.Symbolic of how Eve and Adam were sent down to Earth? Earth is dear, but not as good as Eden
  • settlement / glory of God - rejection of human desire and lust - separation if self - freudian ideas of ego
  • 7 stanzas reflect the seven cardinal vices - man's inherent connection to sin
• "So now I sit here quite alone"

  • man’s isolation / intensifier - spiritual blame which was allocated to eve 
• A violet bed is budding near,

  • juxtaposition - God's nature - restoration God God's hope - violet - faithfulness and modesty 

  
  

  Wherein a lark has made her nest:

  • freedom and joy / rossetti being ‘born again’ via Christianity - Oxford movement / symbol of femininity 
• The title suggests a sound memory. This is a poem about communicating with something which is now in the past or dead. The poem describes how she can communicate with her dead lover while she is dreaming. The echo is the sound he has left for her. 
• The first stanza is full of urgency. She repeatedly begs him to "Come to me". Although it is an instruction, it sounds desperate rather than authoritative because of the repetition. 
• She begs him to come in the silence of the night - but this is ironic - as it is when it is apparently quiet that she is able to hear him and communicate with him. This paradox is highlighted in the oxymoronic image of the "speaking silence" of a dream. The dream is able to communicate with her although it is quiet and no one else can hear it. 
• The 

  way she imagines her dead lover with rounded cheeks and bright eyes suggests that in the dream he is not dead or sick, but looking healthy and alive. She uses the simile of his eyes as bright "as sunlight on a stream". The image suggests daytime and life which are the opposite of what he now is. 
• The "O" is an exclamation of extreme emotion. She is desperate. 
• She wants him to come back even if it causes sadness - tears - she wants the love of the time which is now over or "finished".
• The second stanza begins with more emotion - "Oh" - but this time she is happy because she is in the dream world which brings him to life. The dream is sweet but the repeated "too" suggests that the fantasy is so good it is damaging. The oxymoron of "bitter sweet" shows the confusion of emotions. When she wakes from sleep, she is no longer in "Paradise". Paradise seems to be both being with her lover and death, as that would bring the two of them back together. It is the place where their souls can live and meet. 
• She imagines in the place where her dead lover is her "thirsting longing eyes" - they are hungry and full of desire for him. She is describing immense passion and desire.