A Birthday Flashcards
singing
“my heart is like a singing bird”
A singing bird uses melody to express itself similar to the way that humans use words. The narrator relates the joy of her heart to the freedom of a bird.
nature
singing bird, apple-tree, thick-set fruit, rainbow shell
Rossetti cites a lexical field of objects of nature to bring them to life and to indicate her love of the natural world. By using similes to compare them to her lover shows the depth of her love.
heart
my heart is like
She expresses the fullness of her heart upon the occasion of her love’s “birthday” by starting every comparison in the first stanza with “My heart is like”, a device known as anaphora.
apple
my heart is like an apple-tree
The laden apple-tree promises the nourishment of fruit.
rainbow
my heart is like a rainbow shell
The rainbow signifies God’s promise to Noah and mankind in Genesis 9:17 that He will not flood the earth again.
luxury
purple dyes (roman soldiers), vair (expensive squirrel fur), silk and down (softest part of a bird)
These luxuries are a metaphor for spiritual riches associated with this religious ‘birthday’.
divine nature - gold
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys
This connection between nature and the divine is a common characteristic in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists, to which Christina Rossetti was closely connected. (Her brother was the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti).
Grapes are also food for the gods in mythology and have erotic connotations.
work
Note that Rossetti begins three sentences with ‘Hang it’, ‘Carve it’, ‘Work it’ — syntactic parallels that create rhythm and give cohesion to the poem.
F D L
The fleur-de-lys is a stylised lily used in heraldry and a symbol of the Holy Trinity. It is also connected with royalty. Gold and silver are, of course, precious metals, representing — for Rossetti — spiritual wealth.
