Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Cecil Frances Alexander
Christina Rossetti
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Cecil Frances Alexander, born Cecil Frances Humphreys on 14 April 1818 and dead on 12 October 1895, became one of the most widely sung and influential hymn writers of the nineteenth century. Her name may be less immediately familiar than the opening lines of her best-known hymns, yet “Once in Royal David’s City,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” and “Jesus Calls Us o’er the Tumult”…
“You see what I wanted to say is just so and so, not something else.”
To read Christina Rossetti is to enter a world of exquisite tension, a realm where the sacred and the sensual wage a quiet but ferocious war. She is the poet of renunciation who wrote some of the most sensuous verse in the English language, the devout Anglo-Catholic who filled her pages with goblin fruits that drip with irresistible juice, and the reclusive Victorian spinster whose inner life was a tumultuous landsca…
“She had (for she is dead) a wonderfully Blakean gift, but therewithal a startling recklessness of poetic ways and means.”
About 461 km separate Dublin, Ireland from 38 Charlotte Street, London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Cecil Frances Alexander: anglo-irish protestant, william alexander, once in royal david's city, all things bright and beautiful, there is a green hill far away, jesus calls us o’er the tumult, hymns for little children, verses for holy seasons. Christina Rossetti: pre-raphaelite brotherhood, goblin market, the girlhood of mary virgin, dante gabriel rossetti, james collinson, charles bagot cayley, anglo-catholic, sing-song: a nursery rhyme book.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Cecil Frances Alexander: Spirituality, Wonder, Joy. Christina Rossetti: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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