The Poet Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894
was best known for her poem “Goblin Market”, along with a number of romantic
and devotional poems including the Christmas Carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” as
well as children’s poems. Her brother
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and
later Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris formed the Pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood that sought to return to the simpler and more direct style of painting
before Raphael. Christina Rossetti’s poem
“Goblin Market” reflects the Pre-Raphaelite return to nature inspired by the
theories of John Ruskin. The Poem, “Thy
Friend and thy Father’s Friend forget not” is part of a large body of her devotional
poems, and the title is drawn from the Book of Proverbs.
“Do not forsake your friend and your father's
friend, and do not go to your brother's house in the day of your calamity.
Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away” (Proverbs 27:10).
“Thy Friend and thy Father’s Friend forget not.”
Friends, I commend to you the narrow way:
Not because I, please God, will walk therein,
But
rather for the Love Feast[i]
of that day,
The exceeding
prize which whoso will may win.
Earth is half spent and rotting at the core,
Here hollow death’s heads mock us with a
grin,
Here heartiest
laughter leaves us tired and sore.
Men heap up pleasures and enlarge desire,
Outlive desire, and famished evermore
Consume
themselves within the undying fire.
Yet not for this God made us: not for this
Christ sought us far and near to draw us
nigher,
Sought us and
found and paid our penalties.
If one could answer “Nay” to God’s command,
Who shall say “Nay” when Christ pleads all
He is
For us, and holds
us with a wounded Hand?1
Thematically
the poem divides into four sections; the first, the human predicament and the
goal; second fallen creation and fallen creatures; third, God’s design for
humankind; and fourth, the irresistible offer of grace.
Section One:
Friends, I
commend to you the narrow way:
Not because I, please God, will walk
therein,
But rather for the Love Feast of that day,
The exceeding
prize which whoso will, may win.
The author calls us friends and
commends to us the narrow way, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide
and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are
many. For the gate is narrow and the way
is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14),
but she immediately admits her inability to walk therein. Having read a great deal of her poetry I
would say that her incapacity to walk in the narrow way is not from a lack of
desire, but from a keen sense that save for the grace of God she knows that
there is no good in her.
Christina
Rossetti, by virtue of her devout Anglicanism, was a true Benedictine at heart.
In his Rule, St. Benedict says, “Just as there is a wicked zeal of bitterness
which separates from God and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal which
separates from evil and leads to God and everlasting life. This then is the
good zeal which monks must foster with fervent love.”[ii]
As a devout
Anglican and Anglo-Catholic she would be very familiar with the penitentiality
and mood of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
Collects such as the Collect for the Second Sunday of Lent make our
absolute dependence on grace very clear, “Almighty God, who seest that we have
no power of ourselves to help ourselves; Keep us both outwardly in our bodies
and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which
may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt
the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen” (BCP 1662).
With her we
acknowledge that we see the narrow way, recognize its worth, yet recognise that
apart from grace we cannot walk in it. With
grace we discover and confess that there are things we have done, and things we
have left undone, that have not only created pain for ourselves and others, but
have also grieved the heart of our loving Heavenly Father. We come as penitents before the throne of
grace trusting in the merits of Christ Jesus our Lord, Who is Himself our
Righteousness when we have none of our own.
We who have
washed our robes in the blood of the Lamb are invited to the Love Feast, the
Marriage Supper of the Lamb, “Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it
was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure"- for
the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, "Write this:
Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." And
he said to me, "These are the true words of God” (Revelation 19:7-9). To sit at table with Him Whom we adore in the
Heavenly Kingdom is the exceeding prize that we, forgetting what lies behind,
strain forward to win (Phil. 3:12-16).
Section Two:
We live in a world that has been
corrupted by the Fall of Humankind, and the
Earth is half spent and rotting at the core,
Here hollow death’s heads mock us with a
grin,
Here heartiest
laughter leaves us tired and sore.
Men heap up pleasures and enlarge desire,
Outlive desire, and famished evermore
Consume
themselves within the undying fire.
The
dangers of this half spent earth rotting at the core are evident in the
temptation and fall theme in Goblin Market where the luscious fruits offered by
the Goblins lead to addiction and death.
St. Benedict warns us, “We must be on our guard, therefore, against evil
desires, for death lies close by the gate of pleasure.”[iii]
That is not meant to be an idle warning.
Christina
Rossetti herself was torn by the offer of love and ultimately rejected her suitor
Charles Cayley. Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of
Tennessee at Martin tells us that “From the early '60s on she was in love with
Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him
because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a
Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste” (The
Victorian Web: The Life of Christina Rossetti).
What is it the
separates “milk and water Anglicans, from true Christians? The 16th
Century Anglican Divine, Richard Hooker points to the difference between the
visible Church and the mystical Church:
“The
visible Church of Jesus Christ is therefore one, in outward profession of those
things, which supernaturally appertain to the very essence of Christianity, and
are necessarily required in every particular Christian…
Our naming of
Jesus as Lord is not enough to prove us Christians unless we embrace the faith
he proclaimed…
We are speaking
now of the marks of the visible Church and they are One Lord, One Faith, One
Baptism. All those who make this external profession are Christians, even if
they be impious and excommunicable…
The mystical
Church cannot contain such evildoers, but the visible church does. Jesus uses
the parable of the net or the wheat and tares. God has always had such a mixed
visible Church.[iv]
There is a
choice between the cruel but hard option of separating oneself from the half
spent and rotting earth, or being consumed by the internal undying fire, “And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it
out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with
two eyes to be thrown into hell, 'where their worm does not die and the fire is
not quenched.' For everyone will be
salted with fire” (Mark 9:47-49). It
should be noted that Christina distrusted pleasure and desire, even desire for
things that were permissible, at one point giving up chess because she enjoyed
winning so much (Everett).
St. Benedict goes on to say, “The
second step of humility is that a man loves not his own will nor takes pleasure
in the satisfaction of his desires; rather he shall imitate by his actions that
saying of the Lord: I have come not do to my own will, but the will of him who
sent me (John 6:38).
Similarly we read, ‘Consent merits punishment; constraint
wins a crown.’”[v] For
contemporary Christians being confronted by the dangers of wilful pleasure is
like walking into a bush of stinging nettles.
Section Three:
Yet not for this God made us: not for this
Christ sought us far and near to draw us
nigher,
Sought us and
found and paid our penalties.
There is a
strong penitentiality in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer that is reflected in
Christina Rossetti’s spirituality and a number of her poems are penitential in
nature, yet she is clearly aware that God did not make us in order to have us
consume ourselves with undying fire.
Twice she repeats, “not for this . . . not for this.” No Christ went to the farthest extremes to
rescue his lost sheep. The psalmist says,
“Truly no man can ransom himself,
or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of his life is costly, and
can never suffice, that he should continue to live on for ever, and never
see the Pit.” and, “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he
will receive me” (Psalm 49:7-9, 15 RSV).
An Anglican understanding of the work of Christ comes in
part from St. Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. “There is
an apocryphal story told by St. Anselm in a sermon at Bec: Justice and mercy were arguing in heaven as
they looked down upon the fallen world in the year 1 B.C. Justice insisted that it should be destroyed,
for how else should his position be maintained?
Mercy replied that, in that case, how could his position stand? They were joined by the divine Logos who,
embracing them, said “leave it to me and I will satisfy you both.”[vi] The
1662 Book of Common Prayer, quoting from Holy
Scripture, testifies that Christ “sought us and found and paid our penalties.”
Hear what
comfortable words our Saviour
Christ saith unto all that truly turn to
him:
COME unto me all
that travail and are
heavy laden, and
I will refresh you. S.
Matth. 11. 28.
So God loved the
world, that he gave his
only-begotten
Son, to the end that all that believe
in him should
not perish, but have everlasting
life. S. John 3.
16.
Hear
also what St. Paul saith:
This is a true saying,
and worthy of all men
to be received,
That Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners.
1 Tim. 1. 15.
Hear
also what St. John saith:
If any man sin,
we have an Advocate with
the Father, Jesus
Christ the righteous; and he is
the propitiation
for our sins. 1 S. John 2. 1.
Section Four:
If one could answer “Nay” to God’s
command,
Who shall say “Nay” when Christ pleads all
He is
For us, and holds
us with a wounded Hand?
There
is in the poems of Christina Rossetti the ardent response of a loving heart to
the pleading of the Christ who died for her.
There is for Christina Rossetti no passive hearing of the offer of
Christ. In another poem she writes:
GOOD FRIDAY
Lord Jesus
Christ, grown faint upon the Cross,
A sorrow beyond sorrow in Thy look,
The unutterable craving for my soul;
Thy love for me sufficed
To load upon Thee
and make good my loss
In the darkened heaven and earth that
shook:--
In face of earth and heaven, take Thou my
whole
Heart, O Lord Jesus Christ.2
Nothing
less than the Love Feast, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb will do, that is the
exceeding prize she seeks to win. The
gate of heaven is in the suffering and wounds of Christ. “O bone Jesu, exaudi me. Intra tua
vulnera absconde me. Ne permittas me separari a te” (The Anima Christi), “O
good Jesu, hear me, In your wounds hide me.
Do not permit be to be separated from Thee”.
The Cross is not the end goal, but
rather it is the gate of life. She
prays,
O my King and my
heart’s own choice,
Stretch Thy Hand to Thy fluttering dove;
Teach me, call to
me with Thy Voice,
Wrap me up in Thy Love.3
1. Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems,
ed. R. W. Crump & Betty S. Flowers, (London: Penguin Books, 2005),
p.410-411
2. Ibid, p.
436
3. Ibid. p.
415
[ii] The Rule of St.
Benedict, Chapter 72, “The Good Zeal of Monks”
[iii] RB Chapter 7, “On Humility”
[iv] Michael B. Russell, Kindle, Hooker’s Blueprint, 31.4, 3.1.5, 3.1.7
[vi] (Martin Thornton, English Spirituality, (Cambridge: Cowley Press) p. 163).
