Birthday

=A Birthday= by Christina Rossetti

[|Click here to hear the poem read dramatically.]

One of Rossetti’s best-known and most-often-quoted love poems, “A Birthday” is, in subject matter and tone, a departure from most of her other work. On the surface, “A Birthday” is a rhapsody on found love, an ecstatic outpouring of joy from a speaker who’s finally come to be born through emotional fulfillment. Most of Rossetti’s other poems are concerned with failed love, a morbid sense of impending death, and a lover who will not or cannot return the speaker’s feelings. “A Birthday” is such an unexpected work from Rossetti — who was known for her reserved, serious demeanor and religious intensity — that its first line inspired a cartoon by the writer and artist Max Beerbohm. In that cartoon, Beerbohm depicts Christina Rossetti, dressed all in black and wearing a large dark hat that conceals most of her downturned face, being questioned by her more flamboyant brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who asks, “‘Well, Christina, your heart may be like a singing bird, but why do you dress like a pew-opener?’”

No matter how significant a departure the subject matter of “A Birthday” is, its meter and breathless, unforgettable rhythms are characteristic of Rossetti’s poetry. “A Birthday” is a very carefully constructed poem. It consists of two octaves, or stanzas of eight lines each. The second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme, as do the sixth and eighth lines. The poem is also written in iambs, or two-syllable pairs where the second syllable is the one on which the emphasis is placed. John Hollander demonstrated how an iamb works in this line from Rhyme’s Reason: “Iambic meter runs along like this.” Often, as in Hollander’s example, iambs have such a strong rhythm that they can propel the poem forward in a rush of energy, a pattern that perfectly suits the excited speaker in Rossetti’s poem.

In the first octave of “A Birthday,” Rossetti uses repetition to give the impression of someone who’s frenzied and anxiously trying to find a simile, or a comparison, that will aptly describe her happiness. The first three words of the first, third, fifth, and seventh lines are the same: “My heart is.” In the speaker’s first attempt to capture her own feelings, she compares her heart to “a singing bird / Whose nest is in a watered shoot.” The “watered shoot” is a young branch that has grown out of a bud. Just as the shoot blossomed with water, the speaker has come alive with love. In the second comparison, the speaker likens her heart to “an apple-tree / Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit.” In a third try at finding a simile, the speaker compares her heart to “a rainbow shell.” These three comparisons are similar in that they’re derived from nature. In the seventh line, the speaker begins with the exact same pattern only to abruptly abandon it. Here she notes that the similes from nature are not sufficient because her emotions are more intense than these images can convey:

My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me. The first octave ends in a hint that language can’t fully capture the thrill of emotions that the speaker is experiencing. The second octave confirms that point by taking up a new strategy for expressing her emotions. Instead of searching for a simile, the speaker now suggests that a concrete action be taken — “Raise me a dais of silk and down” — so that she can convey her love in the creation of a work of art that employs elements of the natural world to her own ends. There is a suggestion that the carved representations will last, unlike the things of nature which are fleeting. Instead of comparing her love to a singing bird, the speaker now asks that the beautiful dais be carved with birds, specifically doves and “peacocks with a hundred eyes.” In the second octave, the speaker is far less tentative and is now fully in command. It’s as if the arrival of love has given the speaker a strength and confidence that she previously lacked.

Critics have noted that the shift in stanzas works very well. Theo Dombrowski said that in “A Birthday” “the comparatively subtle shift from the inward-looking first stanza to the imperative stance of the second is central to the success of the poem.” And Katherine J. Mayberry noted, “Simile has collapsed into metaphor, experimentation has given way to command, and impermanence has been replaced by stability, but all these changes have been made possible by, and occurred within, the poem itself. In “A Birthday” we see the power of poetry to express strong feeling and to put it into more stable form.”

“No matter how significant a departure the subject matter of “A Birthday” is, its meter and breathless, unforgettable rhythms are characteristic of Rossetti’s poetry.”

One mystery of “A Birthday” is the identity of the love that the speaker celebrates as having “come to me.” Critics have speculated about whom this ecstatic love poem was written. Rossetti wrote this poem in November 1857, when she didn’t seem to have close relationships with anyone outside her immediate family. Deepening the mystery is the fact that the two poems on either side of it in Rossetti’s manuscript notebook were the exact opposite in mood: gloomy and regretful, instead of ecstatic. In one of the poems, “Memory,” she writes, “My heart dies inch by inch; the time grows old / Grows old in which I grieve.” And in the other, “An Apple Gathering,” the speaker is mocked by her neighbors for being “empty-handed” when apple season comes because she’s plucked the pink blossoms from her apple tree to wear in her own hair. These poems of thwarted fulfillment suggest that perhaps the love Rossetti describes in “A Birthday” was imagined rather than known through firsthand experience. Some critics have interpreted “A Birthday” as a religious poem, one about the speaker’s rebirth through her love for Christ. Although this is a distinct possibility, neither Rossetti nor her brother William Michael Rossetti classified “A Birthday” among her other devotional poems.

No matter who, if anyone, the poem was written for, it is remarkable for its strong lyrical sense, its ability to capture in sound the heightened emotions of new love. “A Birthday” has an inescapable energy, and in that sense it’s similar to some of Rossetti’s children’s poems, including:

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I:But when the trees bough down their heads The wind is passing by. In both poems, Rossetti describes something unseen — in “A Birthday” love, and in the child’s poem, the wind — by showing the dramatic effects that these forces can have on nature and on people. The wind makes the leaves tremble and the trees “bough down their heads,” as if human. And in “A Birthday” love makes the speaker rush around to construct comparisons and then build a work of art in appreciation and gratitude. In both poems, the sounds of the words enhance their meaning. The rhythms carry the reader along with the speaker and with the wind itself.

Rossetti’s greatest achievement in “A Birthday” rests in the music of her words. Virginia Woolf, a famous English novelist, praised Rossetti for the pureness of her tone and her wonderful ear: “Your instinct was so clear, so direct, so intense that it produced poems that sing like music in one’s ears.”

And yet what’s ultimately most compelling about “A Birthday” is its strangeness. The identity of the speaker’s beloved isn’t the only mystery. The speaker’s own state of mind, despite the fact that she speaks directly and emphatically, remains uncertain. There’s an odd giddiness in the speaker’s tone, something too frenzied in her habit of rushing from image to image, from singing bird to apple tree to rainbow shell. When she discards all of those images as inadequate, the speaker’s emotions become suspect. Edmund Gosse, writing in 1896, said that “there is not a chord of a minor key in “A Birthday,” and yet the impression which its cumulative ecstasy leaves upon the nerves is almost pathetic.”

A reserved woman who never married, was often ill, and was deeply religious, Rossetti was considered almost unknowable by her family members and later by her biographers. There’s a sense that Rossetti may have learned to write what’s acceptable or expected, rather than what she truly felt. Elizabeth Bishop, a twentieth-century American poet, wrote,

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Modern readers quickly realize that Bishop isn’t saying what she means, but is in fact asserting the opposite. By putting on a brave front, Bishop shows us how unacceptable and deeply felt the pain of loss can be. Many decades earlier, Rossetti wrote words in a similar vein:

Not to be first: how hard to learn That lifelong lesson of the past Line graven on line and stroke on stroke: But, thank God, learned at last. Although Rossetti professes to be thankful for having learned to put her own desires second, this is a message that’s hard to accept at face value. Equally, there’s something in the manic ecstasy of “A Birthday” that doesn’t sound like pure and natural joy so much as a conscious decision to act joyous, to announce the rebirth of love whether it’s true or not. “A Birthday” may be a poem that apparently announces its intentions clearly, but behind the clarity lies doubt, and it’s this doubt that makes the poem haunting and memorable.

Source: Elizabeth Judd, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.