World Poetry Day 2023

Today is World Poetry Day. We celebrate poetry as the world’s oldest form of storytelling but who was the world’s first poet? What was her name? That we don’t know. But today we want to honour Christina Rossetti.

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Christina Rossetti is so utterly of today that we need to lift her out of the 19th century and into our own.

In Entrapment she writes: 

I wish and I wish I were a man.

This is not about wanting to be transgender. It is about longing for equal power.

 Her thoughts continue as she writes that she wishes to be  

Not a body and not a soul:
Not so much as a grain of dust
.

What a sense of self-abnegation she projects and how familiar this is.

 In an Artist’s Studio she captures the objectification of the model:

Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

How sharply Rosetti critiques female stereotypes.

A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,

A saint, an angel.

The model isanonymous, pure and sexless.

Rosetti’s genius has been forgotten for too long. Was she ahead of her time or are we still way behind our own? Patriarchy rules forever?

Entrapment

Read by Julia Pascal: 

From The Antique Lyrics – Christina Rossetti

It’s a weary life, it is, she said:
Doubly blank in a woman’s lot:
I wish and I wish I were a man:
Or, better then any being, were not:


Were nothing at all in all the world,
Not a body and not a soul:
Not so much as a grain of dust
Or a drop of water from pole to pole.


Still the world would wag on the same,
Still the seasons go and come:
Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.

woman framed by a man:

In an Artist’s Studio – Christina Rossetti

Read by Julia Pascal: 

One face looks out from all his canvases,

One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

We found her hidden just behind those screens,

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,

A saint, an angel — every canvas means

The same one meaning, neither more or less.

He feeds upon her face by day and night,

And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:

Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.