Christina Rossetti’s Lenten Life

The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) is most celebrated for her popular Christmas carols, but her most prolific liturgical season was Lent. A fervent Anglican, Rossetti expressed in her poems a deeper understanding of suffering than pieces like “Love Came Down At Christmas” might lead you to suspect. In her Lenten poetry, she focuses not only on her own sins, but highlights how her intense brokenness united her to God.

Known as a beautiful
and charming young woman, Rossetti embraced lifelong singlehood after rejecting
three marriage proposals on religious grounds. She dressed in black, matronly
attire that suited her way of life and supported herself financially by
writing. Her status as a cultural anomaly was strengthened by her schedule: She
spent hours a day in prayer and attended church services whenever her health
permitted her, including on weekdays.

But Rossetti’s life was
marked by suffering as well as religious devotion. She was frequently the
victim of ill health (including breast cancer and Graves Disease) and had what
we would now consider depression. Despite her writing, she was always seen as a
family burden. These contrasts have made her difficult to understand—not only
for her contemporaries but for her present-day critics, who have often missed
Rossetti’s Christian understanding of suffering.

The importance of this suffering becomes clear in “Ash Wednesday,” a poem she wrote in two parts over several years. The first part of “Ash Wednesday,” published in 1885, begins:

My God, my God, have mercy on my sin,

For it is great; and if I should begin

To tell it all, the day would be too small

To tell it in.

Rossetti’s awareness of her own sin was no mere
piety. Along with depression, she suffered from a passionate temper. This
violent mental disposition took on its lifelong religious expression when, at
age thirteen, Rossetti began attending Christ Church Albany Street with her
mother Frances and her sister Maria. The three women were drawn to the Oxford
Movement, which postulated that Anglicanism, along with Catholicism and
Orthodoxy, was one of the three branches of the “one Catholic Church.” The
movement (also known as Tractarianism) was fairly short-lived, but Rossetti
would retain its “high church” Anglo-Catholic expression for the rest of her
life.

Rossetti was attracted to this fervent religious setting in part because of her youth, passion, and depression—but her overenthusiastic piety gave her occasion for self-harm. She would later recall in a letter to her niece an anecdote about tearing up her own arm with scissors after being rebuked by her mother. Faith did not cure her depression, but it freed her to experience her mental and spiritual state in a meaningful way by allowing her to unite it to the suffering of others.

Her long path toward that liberating solidarity began with her loving confidence in Christ, a sentiment that fills her poetry from a young age. We see this as the first part of “Ash Wednesday” continues:

My God, Thou wilt have mercy on my sin

For Thy Love’s sake: yea, if I should begin

To tell This all, the day would be too small

To tell it in.

Here, Rossetti is sure
of God’s mercy and love, and emphasizes it even in the most penitent of
liturgical moments. She does not need to beg. In Rossetti’s Lenten writing,
God’s justice is his mercy. Lent is a season of ascetic fasting, discipline,
and preparation, but the merciful end is never out of sight, and she mastered
that reconciliation of sober externals and interior joy in her own life.

Rossetti’s tone changes drastically in the second part of “Ash Wednesday,” which was published eight years after the first two stanzas. Over those eight years, she went through two major trials that informed her attitude toward suffering as a religious experience. Her mother, who had been her lifelong companion, died in 1886, and Rossetti’s breast cancer required a mastectomy—performed in her own home—in 1892. Her Graves Disease advanced all the while. In this pain, she wrote:

Good Lord, today

I scarce find breath to say:

Scourge, but receive me.

For stripes are hard to bear, but worse

Thy intolerable curse;

So do not leave me.

“Scourge,” Rossetti
asks, seeking solidarity with the suffering of Christ. She had occupied herself
with this suffering her whole life. After all, she was a poor girl in an
immigrant family with a great deal of financial and medical troubles, for all
their pre-Raphaelite pretensions. She also had been drawn to the suffering of
others, attempting to become a nurse with Florence Nightingale in 1854 and
failing to do so only because of her young age. After gaining experience in
school, she spent a decade working alongside the Anglican nuns (including her
sister Maria) who ran the St. Mary Magdalene House of Charity reformatory for
former prostitutes in Highgate.

Rossetti identified with these women by uniting her own suffering with their own. This was rough work with rough consequences—associating with prostitutes and nuns did not elevate her socially. But that was a benefit, if anything, for her. Her voluntarily assumed profession of fellow sufferer freed her little by little from societal expectations. Her service of others as a lay celibate Christian allowed her to fulfill her own vocation as writer and servant of the community. It was a phenomenon firmly in tune with Christianity, a religion that preaches exactly that liberation of those who take up their cross.

Rossetti voluntarily assumed fellow-suffering
with these women freed her little by little from societal expectations. And so Rossetti felt her own burden lightened by this communal suffering, as she finished the poem:

Good Lord, lean down

In pity, tho’ Thou frown;

Smite, but retrieve me:

For so Thou hold me up to stand

And kiss Thy smiting hand,

It less will grieve me.

It was no small thing
for Rossetti to feel less grieved. Yet her poetry is filled with proclamations
of the Lord’s joy and her life’s meaning in His light (many of them are
positively cheerful). Contemporaries and biographers remained mystified, but
her Lenten religiosity sees no difficulty in synthesis. Her reclusive writing
and communal service were two expressions of a single mission: To use asceticism
to engage, rather than to escape. In this, Christina Rossetti is the very model
of the Lenten spirit.

Various
speculations about the cause of Rossetti’s depression have plagued her
biographies. Jan Marsh, for instance, theorized that her father had sexually
abused her, while feminist critics in the 1970s chalked up her late adolescent
breakdown to generic Christian repression. Even Rossetti’s family doctor
condescendingly diagnosed her with “religious mania” at age eighteen. But no
one really knows what exacerbated her depression. What we realize in reading
“Ash Wednesday,” however, is how little that matters.

When Christ Church
Albany Street was built, its brick and stucco were painted bright yellow. They
have since chipped away to a stale brownish-red. In one sense the church has
been darkened and beaten, but it has also been stripped down to a bare honesty
that matches the surrounding discarded alleys. The church meets its
neighborhood on its own battered terms.

Rossetti’s Christianity
did not necessarily lose its youthful joy and vibrance as a post-traumatic
response to a single event. Rather, she realized over time that the central
symbol of her religion was a crucified man, a realization we can see form over
the course of “Ash Wednesday.” What remains through the poem, however, is her
steadfast hope in the God that she knows hears her.

Lent is a season of
preparation, and it takes two forms: penitent examination of self and communal
observance of fasting and liturgy. But a season of preparation is also a season
of hope. Rossetti’s poetry, filled as it is by her suffering, can help us to
understand what this season means. Though Rossetti’s Lenten life has ended, her
example can still help us join our suffering to that of others through the transformative
power of the cross.

Catherine Addington is a writer currently based in New York. She tweets here. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

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