Remarks by Christina Rossetti | V2Melody Quotations

“Be sure my heart is with you in your grief, desolation, and general harass and anxiety.”

One of her late expressions of steadfast sympathy with her brother's suffering · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 18 April 1894

“I go on extremely tolerably, yet I think with a gradual downward tendency.”

A restrained and characteristically unsentimental assessment of her declining health · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, April 1894

“Is any book ever absolutely accurate?”

A compact question about the inevitable imperfections of books and scholarship · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 4 December 1893

Art
Truth

“So much of my heart is yours that you may be sure of my sympathy.”

A simple statement of the enduring closeness between brother and sister · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 2 January 1893

“I am surprised to see the suggestion that (perhaps as a devout self-denial) I forbore to make my verse as good as I could: neither as praise nor as blame do I deserve the imputation.”

Rossetti firmly rejects the idea that religious humility made her deliberately weaken her poetry · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 9 November 1892

“You see, all too late I am being sucked into the Dantesque vortex.”

A playful description of her growing absorption in Dante · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 19 July 1892

“Come what will I am in Better Hands than either yours or my own; I desire to realize and to rest in this.”

Her response to grave illness centres on trust rather than control · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 20 May 1892

“I beg prayers of every one who will pray for me.”

A plain request for spiritual support during serious illness · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 20 May 1892

“I send on your note to Theodore Watts unread, thinking it wiser on this occasion to peruse neither my own praises nor dispraises.”

An unusual determination to keep both praise and criticism at a distance · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 20 May 1892

“Time will show, and I only wish what God wills; but I do not run up like quicksilver at the announcement.”

Facing uncertain health, she combines submission to providence with emotional restraint · Letter to Lucy Rossetti, 20 March 1892

“I am open to a hope that I am wrong about our poet: time will show.”

Rossetti leaves room for time to correct even a firmly expressed literary judgement · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 18 February 1892

“I regret my opinion, but being mine it has to be given: consign me to discreet oblivion.”

Critical honesty is combined with a comic wish to escape the consequences · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 18 February 1892

“I think him clever, — but what is the use of cleverness in matters poetic?”

A memorable distinction between technical cleverness and genuine poetic value · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 18 February 1892

“I am feeling at 60 very much as I did at 59, though not quite as relieved and exhilarated by the circumstance as when at 30 I gazed in the looking-glass, and discerned no marked change from 29.”

Ageing is treated with humour, perspective and a refusal of melodrama · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 6 December 1890

“She had (for she is dead) a wonderfully Blakean gift, but therewithal a startling recklessness of poetic ways and means.”

A compact and perceptive early judgement on Emily Dickinson's poetic originality · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 6 December 1890

“I enclose 3 photographs; the idiotic I for contempt and cremation, the other 2 for your American.”

Her reaction to an unflattering photograph displays sharp self-deprecating humour · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 6 December 1890

Fame
Joy

“I am looking through Aunt C.'s journals, and have found a small — very small — proportion of sentences to preserve: amongst these some which it would have been a pity to destroy.”

A glimpse of Rossetti acting as a careful custodian of family memory · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 26 March 1890

Art
Memory

“This has justly worried me, as the inaccuracy told in my own favour.”

What troubles Rossetti is not merely an error but an error that flatters her · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 26 March 1890

Truth

“A great slice of my heart travels about with him now, he being the only one of his own standing left to me.”

Loss has concentrated her affection on her surviving brother · Letter to Lucy Rossetti, January 1887

“Beyond all possibility of dispute he petted and worshipped our Mother with exuberant fondness.”

A vivid remembrance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's devotion to their mother · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 6 October 1886

Love
Memory

“Please do not fancy me bearing this bitter trial so much better than I really am bearing it.”

Rossetti resists any sentimental picture of effortless spiritual endurance · Letter to Lucy Rossetti, 21 April 1886

“I can still say 'us' and look forward to the end of our separation.”

A small pronoun carries both surviving companionship and Christian hope of reunion · Letter to Lucy Rossetti, 21 April 1886

“This is the last moment at which I could wish to loosen the ties which remain to me.”

Bereavement deepens rather than diminishes her attachment to those still living · Letter to Lucy Rossetti, 21 April 1886

“Yet I rejoice that it is I who am left in the grief of this separation, and not my dearest Mother.”

Her grief is tempered by gratitude that her mother did not have to endure the separation · Letter to Lucy Rossetti, 19 April 1886

Pronunciation

Also Known As

Definition

Detailed Definition

Example

Additional Notes

Related Terms