"Dream Land"
We are going to analyse a poem written by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894). It is called “Dream Land”, it was written in April 1849, and printed in the periodical “The Germ”, under the pseudonym of Ellen Alleyn. The poem was reprinted in Christina Rossetti's “Globin Market and Other Poems”, in 1862. [“RPO Library” 28/02/2006, <http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1752.html>]. It deals with the topic of “death”. The picture is called, as well, “Dream Land” , was painted by Emma Florence Harrison circa 1990. [“Ocean's Bridge”, 28/02/2006, <http://www.oceansbridge.com/artist-lists/emma-florence-harrison/Dream-Land-Circa-1910.php>]
The poem is composed by four stanzas of eight verses each one. All of them have the same rhyme structure: aaabcccb. It has iambic true rhyme as we can see: “weep”/ “deep”/ “sleep”; “star”/ “far”/ “are”; “not”/ “lot”; “morn”/ “corn”/ “lorn”; “veil”/ “pale”/ “nightingale”; “springs”/ “sings”; “rest”/ “breast”/ “west”; “grain”/ “plain”/ “rain”; “land”/ “hand”; “evermore”/ “shore”/ “core”; “wake”/ “break”/ “overtake”; “cease”/ “peace”. Each verse has six syllables, except 4th and 8th of each stanza, which has four. The poem's meter is iambic, so the structure is: unstressed > stressed > unstressed > stressed > unstressed > stressed: “where – SUN – less – RI – vers – WEEP”; etc.
In the first stanza, Christina Rossetti describes the “travel” of a person (female) throughout a river: She is sleeping, a charmed sleep. She is near the end of the river, the waves drag her into the sea. The poet asks the reader not to awake her because she can only wake up when she would find that was looking for. In this stanza, Rossetti shows the topic dealt with: “the Death”. The poem starts with a river, it is a metaphor of life. Rivers flow to the sea as life flow to death. A person is flowing along a river. “She sleeps a charmed sleep” /“Led by a single star” / “She came from very far”: The sleeping person is the human Soul. It is sleeping while we are alive, it came from “above” and is led by “God” (“single star”).
Second and third stanzas deal with the travel to Heaven and the abandonment of the worldly elements: “She left the rosy morn” / “She left the fields of corn” / “For twilight cold and lorn” / “And water springs”; “She cannot see the grain” / “Ripening on hill and plain” / “She cannot feel the rain” / “Upon her hand”. The Soul is looking for the “purple land”, it means heaven (purple is the colour of nobility: reference to God's kingdom), so it cannot see the material world. Its feelings and its knowledge (“brow and breast”) is also sleeping, therefore, it cannot think about the world it left: “Rest, rest, a perfect rest” / “Shed over brow and breast” / “Her face is toward the west” / “The purple land”.
In
the last stanza, the poet describes where the Soul will wake up:
“upon a mossy shore”, “...at the heart's
core”. Until the time will
cease. Nothing can wake it up: “Sleep
that no pain shall wake” / “Night that no morn shall
break”. Just:
“Till joy shall overtake
Her perfect peace”.
So, the waves flow the Soul upon
a mossy shore, at the heart's core, that is deep inside us, in a
deeply sleep, - into a "waiting time" between death and
the reunion of the soul and body on the Last Day. During this waiting
period, the soul enters a suspended state outside of time and
awareness. Only on the Last Day does the soul awake and receive its
eternal reward.
[“RossettiArchive, 28/02/2006, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/crossetti001.raw.html].
As we said before, the author of the painting is Emma Florence Harrison, who lived at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th. It is said this painting was done about 1910, so it was done after the composition of the poem (1849). [“Ocean's Bridge”, 28/02/2006, <http://www.oceansbridge.com/artist-lists/emma-florence-harrison/Dream-Land-Circa-1910.php>]. The picture shows a women floating in water. The waves flow her to the shore. She seems alien to the surroundings, she looks like a death body. She is not happy, nor sad: she does not show any feeling, she is outside awareness.
Her dress is purple. That means she comes from the “purple land” = “God's Kingdom”. This is her origin, but also her destiny. She is a Soul, and it is waiting for The Last Day to awake her.
Christina Rossetti was born in a family of poets, so she inherited the talent of her father and her brother. Her mother, however, aroused her interest towards religion. While her brothers were educated at the College and in Academies, she was educated solely at home (gender differences of the epoch). In the 1840's her family had economical difficulties due to the breakdown of her father's, and Rossetti herself suffered a nervous breakdown, depression and other illness. It was during this period that she became Anglo-Catholic, and this religious devotion played an essential role in Rossetti for the rest of her life. In 1848, Rossetti engaged to J. Collinson, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but she cancelled it because of religious matters (some years later she did the same with Charles Cayley). She never was a member of the Brotherhood, but she contributed writing some poems in “The Germ”, the periodical of the Brotherhood.
Due to her devotion to religion, Rossetti spent fifteen years in a convent, place where she wrote part of her work. She continued to write and in the 1870s worked for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894. [“Wikipedia” 28/02/2006 <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti]
Therefore, despite the fact that Christina Rossetti was not an official member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, she was an important member of this circle, and her work was really close to the Pre-Raphaelite interests.
The thematic fields of her poems were love, religion, Gothic, children's, gender issues, etc. Most of them were religious: the disclaim to the worldly love and the worry towards death, desire and renunciation, temptation and sin, etc. ["The Rossetti Archive", 28/2/2006, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/crossetti001.raw.html]
Óscar Fernández Adriá
Bibliography:
"The Rossetti Archive", 28/2/2006,
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/crossetti001.raw.html
"Morganof the Lake", 24/2/2006
http://www.morganofthelake.tomasweissbarth.com/
"Representative Poetry Library", 28/2/2006,
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1752.html
"Wikipedia", 28/02/2006, last modified 22:32 16/02/2006,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti
"The Victorian Web"
"Ocean's Bridge”, 28/02/2006,
http://www.oceansbridge.com/artist-lists/emma-florence-harrison/Dream-Land-Circa-1910.php>
 |
|
Academic year 2005-06
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Óscar Fernández Adrià
Universitat de València Press
osfera@alumni.uv.es