Poem of the Week – An October Garden by Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti was the youngest member of one of the Victorian-era’s most distinguished artistic dynasties. Her loving parents were creatively accomplished scholars who encouraged their talented children to indulge and explore their early inventive impulses.
Every Rossetti child was steeped in classical and modern culture, and several attempted their own contributions to the continental cannon. Most notably, Rossetti’s older brother, Dante Gabriel, was an acclaimed poet who founded the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and exerted an enormous influence over European painting.
His younger sister’s often mournful, meditative and sentimental poetry, however, set her literary efforts apart from her skilful siblings and capable contemporaries, compelling some critics to crown Christina Rossetti as “the heir to Elizabeth Barrett Browning“.
This week’s poem reflects transience and loss and the strange gratitude an experience of those themes can induce.
An October Garden by Christina Rossetti (1904)
In my Autumn garden I was fain
To mourn among my scattered roses;
Alas for that last rosebud which uncloses
To Autumn’s languid sun and rain
When all the world is on the wane!
Which has not felt the sweet constraint of June,
Nor heard the nightingale in tune.
Broad-faced asters by my garden walk,
You are but coarse compared with roses:
More choice, more dear that rosebud which uncloses,
Faint-scented, pinched, upon its stalk,
That least and last which cold winds balk;
A rose it is though least and last of all,
A rose to me though at the fall.