Rossetti poems key quotes Flashcards
Winter: My secret
‘I wear my mask for warmth’
‘my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell’
‘Nor April with its rainbow crowned showers’
Maude Clare
‘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’
Shut Out
‘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’
Twice
‘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’
No Thank You John
‘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)
Rossetti giving fallen women a voice in Maude Clare
‘That day we waded ankle-deep for lilies in the beck’ which are ‘budding now’
Connotations of innocence, illegitimate pregnancy
Maude Clare as a proud fallen woman
• She has a ‘lofty step and mien…like a queen’
• speech opens with confident interjection ‘Lo’
Goblin Market Lizzie and Laura living in domestic bliss
• ‘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)
Laura and Lizzie returning to convention at the end of Goblin Market
‘Both were wives with children of their own’
Laura and Lizzie not conforming to convention at the end of Goblin Market
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
Importance of sisterhood in Goblin Market
‘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’?
Stis in Goblin Market
‘No grass will grow where she lies low’
Redemption/ return to Christianity in Goblin Market
• 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’
Economic dependence of Laura Goblin Market
‘I have no coin’
Ray Cluely on the impact of patriarchal system
Rossetti illustrates that women seeking to establish a sexual identity before marriage are doomed
Men absent from Goblin market but patriarchal structures aren’t:
The sisters are like ‘two wands of ivory tipped with gold for awful kings’
Up-hill on struggle of religion
• 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
God providing more true and fulfilling love than men in Twice:
• 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 of faith Twice
‘Smile thou and I shall sing /But shall not question much’
(Negotiation between religion/ gender)
Male oppression Shut Out
‘He left no loophole great or small/ Through which my straining eyes might look’
Winter my secret: flirtiness to achieve assertion
‘You’re too curious: fie!’
From the antique frustration with female role
‘It’s a weary life[..]doubly blank in a woman’s lot: I wish and wish I were a man’
Nihilism in From the Antique
‘None would miss me in this world […]I should be nothing’
Goblin market redemption from sun
‘Life out of death’
Key quotes from A Triad
• ‘one shamed herself in love’
• ‘one temperately grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife’
• ‘one famished died for love’
Key quotes from echo
•‘Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live my live my very life again though cold in death’
Maude Clare - Wife Nell sticking by lord Thomas
• ‘I love him till he loves me best’
Rejection in twice
•‘With a critical eye you scanned’
• ‘As you set it down it broke, broke but I did not wince’
•
Resilience in twice
•‘I shall not die, but live’
Twice questioning religion
‘Smile Thou and I shall sing, but shall not question much’
Key quotes : In an Artist’s Studio
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
What is significant about the setting in Maude clare?
Takes place at a church - reflects conflict between female position and religious beliefs
