Rossetti poems key quotes

Question 1

Winter: My secret

Answer 1

‘I wear my mask for warmth’
‘my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell’
‘Nor April with its rainbow crowned showers’

Question 2

Maude Clare

Answer 2

‘He faltered in his place [..] and hid his face’
‘I’ll love him till he loves me best’
‘For he’s my lord for better or for worse’

Question 3

Shut Out

Answer 3

‘A shadowless spirit kept the gate,/ Blank and unchanging like the grave’
‘For nought is left with looking at / Since my delightful land is gone.’
‘iron bars’
‘My garden,mine, beneath the sky’

Question 4

Twice

Answer 4

‘Purge thou’
‘My hope was written on the sand’
‘Now let thy judgement stand-‘
‘Yet a woman’s words are weak: / You should speak, not I’
‘It is still unripe’

Question 5

No Thank You John

Answer 5

‘No ,thank you, John’
‘Here’s friendship for you if you like’
‘I have no heart?’
(Male speaker denied a voice, gives female speaker assertion)

Question 6

Rossetti giving fallen women a voice in Maude Clare

Answer 6

‘That day we waded ankle-deep for lilies in the beck’ which are ‘budding now’
Connotations of innocence, illegitimate pregnancy

Question 7

Maude Clare as a proud fallen woman

Answer 7

• She has a ‘lofty step and mien…like a queen’
• speech opens with confident interjection ‘Lo’

Question 8

Goblin Market Lizzie and Laura living in domestic bliss

Answer 8

• ‘Neat like bees, as sweet and busy’
• They ‘set to rights the house’
In some ways epitomise Patmore’s influential idea the ‘Angel in the House’ , but in the absence of men act more as a parallel of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (sisterhood, one that Rossetti is included in)

Question 9

Laura and Lizzie returning to convention at the end of Goblin Market

Answer 9

‘Both were wives with children of their own’

Question 10

Laura and Lizzie not conforming to convention at the end of Goblin Market

Answer 10

Laura tells the children of her experience of liberty: ‘fruits like honey to the throat but poison in the blood’ and ‘how her sister stood in deadly peril to do her good’
However no explicit warning against it

Question 11

Importance of sisterhood in Goblin Market

Answer 11

‘Joining hands to little hands’ - women through generations looking out for each other
‘there is no friend like a sister.. To fetch one if one goes astray’ a manifestation of a ‘pre-Raphaelite sisterhood’?

Question 12

Stis in Goblin Market

Answer 12

‘No grass will grow where she lies low’

Question 13

Redemption/ return to Christianity in Goblin Market

Answer 13

• cautionary tale - Laura’s ‘lips began to scorch,/ That juice was wormwood to her tongue’ (metaphor drawing from Revelations 8:11-12)
• ‘Life out of death’ when Lizzie sacrifices herself for Laura - Christian paradox
• Lizzie is ‘like a beacon left alone in a hoary roaring sea’

Question 14

Economic dependence of Laura Goblin Market

Answer 14

‘I have no coin’

Question 15

Ray Cluely on the impact of patriarchal system

Answer 15

Rossetti illustrates that women seeking to establish a sexual identity before marriage are doomed

Question 16

Men absent from Goblin market but patriarchal structures aren’t:

Answer 16

The sisters are like ‘two wands of ivory tipped with gold for awful kings’

Question 17

Up-hill on struggle of religion

Answer 17

• life is long and hard - ‘up-hill all the way’
• the journey is painful - those arriving to heaven are ‘travel-sore and weak’
• heaven is guaranteed - there are ‘beds for all who come
• Catechistic structure (reinforcing key messages of Christianity in each stanza)
• Reassuring AB narration

Question 18

God providing more true and fulfilling love than men in Twice:

Answer 18

• God judges her ‘both within and without’ whilst her lover takes a ‘critical eye’ and only judges her exterior
• Speaker distraught after male rejection, has ‘not often smiled since then’, God makes her value self worth: ‘I, for Thou callest such’

Question 19

Question of faith Twice

Answer 19

‘Smile thou and I shall sing /But shall not question much’
(Negotiation between religion/ gender)

Question 20

Male oppression Shut Out

Answer 20

‘He left no loophole great or small/ Through which my straining eyes might look’

Question 21

Winter my secret: flirtiness to achieve assertion

Answer 21

‘You’re too curious: fie!’

Question 22

From the antique frustration with female role

Answer 22

‘It’s a weary life[..]doubly blank in a woman’s lot: I wish and wish I were a man’

Question 23

Nihilism in From the Antique

Answer 23

‘None would miss me in this world […]I should be nothing’

Question 24

Goblin market redemption from sun

Answer 24

‘Life out of death’

Question 25

Key quotes from A Triad

Answer 25

• ‘one shamed herself in love’
• ‘one temperately grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife’
• ‘one famished died for love’

Question 26

Key quotes from echo

Answer 26

•‘Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live my live my very life again though cold in death’

Question 27

Maude Clare - Wife Nell sticking by lord Thomas

Answer 27

• ‘I love him till he loves me best’

Question 28

Rejection in twice

Answer 28

•‘With a critical eye you scanned’
• ‘As you set it down it broke, broke but I did not wince’
•

Question 29

Resilience in twice

Answer 29

•‘I shall not die, but live’

Question 30

Twice questioning religion

Answer 30

‘Smile Thou and I shall sing, but shall not question much’

Question 31

Key quotes : In an Artist’s Studio

Answer 31

Muse - ‘A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens’
‘A saint’ and an ‘angel’
• reflects how model is designed to fill out artists fantasies, no identity of her own

Question 32

What is significant about the setting in Maude clare?

Answer 32

Takes place at a church - reflects conflict between female position and religious beliefs