Rossetti Pierces My Heart (Ninth Day of Christmas)

She wrote a poem that became a carol, but do not limit Christina Rossetti. She more than Dickens is the Christmas writer you should read.

I have been asked why I am a Christian, even though at one time I did not want to be. One reason is Rossetti who saw more clearly than most the horrors of a mechanized world and prevailed with humor, wit, and romance in avoiding it nearly altogether. She is the triumphant leader of those who hate ugliness in the name of utility. Dickens railed against such things in his many novels, especially Hard Times, but mostly profited from the system he spiritually loathed. Rossetti refused to compromise and made greater beauty as a result. She stood athwart history and lived her life as she pleased. She was the reality to Jane Eyre’s cry for an independent woman who finds happiness  and sweet liberty in choosing the laws of nature and nature’s God.

When I failed, she was an ideal that helped pull me back to the right road.

Those of us who fail like Dickens to live up to our own standards can turn to Rossetti who did and yet never became inbred, harsh, or a prude. Rossetti described the world as it is and as it could be. She could do this, because she was both joyful and depressed, romantic and courageous. She brought together the tensions of living as a feeling person in a broken world.  Do not make the mistake of reading her poems as if they were propositions that happen to appear in poems. She is not doing prose lost in a poem. Begin with her poetry as poetry. When she says that Jesus came in the bleak midwinter and talks about snow, this London bred child of a global Empire knows that there is not snow in Palestine in December. She is not making a mistake, but using images of her own region to produce the proper feeling of the world when Jesus came.

The iron of the Roman Empire made the world bleak and cold. The Mediterranean may be sunny, but to be a God-loving Jewish person at the turn of history was to face hardness, oppression, and temptation to hopelessness. One response was to give up and accomodate to power: the Virgin said “no.” Another response was to retreat into legalisms mixed with hypocrisy: the Virgin said “no.” Christmas came when the first Christian heard the word of God and said “yes.” She became the mother of God, because she said “yes” and so the bleak midwinter became Christmas. 

This is just so. There has never been a more emotionally accurate description of the fate of a good person under Rome than In the Bleak Midwinter. 

There was not literally “snow on snow on snow”, but that is the best way to understand the world of Jesus if you are from a culture with snow. This much was literally true:

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

Mary warmed the world with a  mother’s kiss. She broke iron Rome with soft lips. She was an independent woman.

Rossetti knew that an iron age must hate the sacrifice of motherhood: it is not for profit. An iron age can only allow Christmas as a profit center so when the spending is done, the holiday is over. Rossetti insisted on all Twelve days.

As Candlemas approaches, we can end the feast with her words:

 

Feast of the Presentation

Source: The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with a Memoir and Notes by William Michael Rossetti (1904), Page 172

 

O firstfruits of our grain,
Infant and Lamb appointed to be slain,
A Virgin and two doves were all Thy train,
With one old man for state,
When Thou didst enter first Thy Father’s gate.

 

Since then Thy train hath been
Freeman and bondman, bishop, king and queen,
With flaming candles and with garlands green:
Oh happy all who wait
One day or thousand days around Thy gate!

 

And these have offered Thee,
Beside their hearts, great stores for charity,
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh; if such may be
For savour or for state
Within the threshold of Thy golden gate.

 

Then snowdrops and my heart
I’ll bring, to find those blacker than Thou art:
Yet, loving Lord, accept us in good part;
And give me grace to wait,
A bruised reed bowed low before Thy gate.

 

Circa 1877

 

The Feast of the Presentation, The Feast of the Purification, and Candlemas are celebrated February 2 in the Latin rite.

 

Amen.

 ————————————–

Christians now have Christmas mostly to ourselves. That is too bad and anybody is free to join us, but let’s keep the feast!