A Birthday
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
—Christina Rossetti
About Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti was born in London to Italian immigrants in 1830. She grew up in a literary environment, as her father was a poet. Her mother, a governess, educated her at home. Her brother Dante Gabriel was a poet as well as a painter, while her brother William Michael an art and literary critic and editor. Her sister Maria also wrote an important work on Dante. As children, the Rossetti siblings produced their own newspaper.
Rossetti’s first poems were printed privately by her grandfather as early as 1842 and distributed to friends and family. Two of her poems were published in The Athenaeum in 1847 and she had several poems printed in The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelite journal founded by her brother and his friends. She published her first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1862, followed by The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems in 1866 and Sing-Song, an illustrated collection for children in 1872. She fell ill in the 1880s and was unable to work or maintain an active social life but continued writing poems, with additional collections published in 1881 and 1892.
Her poems—most often ballads and lyric poems—were marked by themes of religion, mortality, and loss as well as the inconstancy of love. Her work is known for its emotional intensity and its economy. She is often compared to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among the most prominent Victorian poets. She died in London in 1894.