Christina Rossetti's Art of the Devotional Sonnet

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The third lecture in our May mini-course on devotional poets focuses on Christina Rossetti’s “Later Life” Sonnets. Sonnets demand intellectual as well as bodily attention; they require us to think with our minds and our bodies, our eyes and ears. The word “sonnet” comes from the Italian sonnetto, which means “little sound.” As a practicing Anglo-Catholic, Christina Rossetti’s religious life was full of little sounds. Anglo-Catholicism involved a restoration of Roman Catholic liturgical practices in the Protestant Church of England. This was brought about by the Oxford Movement, a group of clergymen who wanted to restore some of the medieval and Roman Catholic traditions as a way to enrich practical piety and to return to a more native, English style of worship, a worship that blends the sensual and sensuous—with bells, candles, tinted glass, a pre-Raphaelite penchant for medieval luxuriousness of symbolism and decoration.

So when reading Rossetti today, we must experience her poems the same way we would experience an Anglo-Catholic liturgy. We must think with not only our minds but also our senses. Hers is a poetry that is vividly pictorial and, at the same time, distinctively ascetic; at times, passionate and even erotic and equally chaste in its austerity.