“Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.” — Christina Rossetti | V2Melody

“Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.”

A reflection on the losses caused by both hesitation and incompletion · Prose remark, commonly attributed

Art
Time

Christina Rossetti

About Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830–29 December 1894

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…

More by Christina Rossetti

Poems by Christina Rossetti

More remarks by Christina Rossetti

“O dear! how willingly would I incur Income Tax for the sake of not murdering Egyptians or any one else: and our Mother would, I am sure, double or triple hers with the same object.”

A strikingly personal protest against the human cost of British military policy · Letter to William Michael Rossetti, 1882

Truth
War

“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

“The snail — I interpose a space between him and your poems! — soothes and solaces my taste.”

A whimsical aside showing her delight in a humble creature amid literary discussion · Letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, September 1881