Life and Death
Life is not sweet. One day it will be sweet
To shut our eyes and die:
Nor feel the wild flowers blow, nor birds dart by
With flitting butterfly;
Nor grass grow long above our heads and feet,
Nor hear the happy lark that soars sky high,
Nor sigh that spring is fleet and summer fleet,
Nor mark the waxing wheat,
Nor know who sits in our accustomed seat.
Life is not good. One day it will be good
To die, then live again;
To sleep meanwhile: so not to feel the wane
Of shrunk leaves dropping in the wood,
Nor hear the foamy lashing of the main,
Nor mark the blackened bean-fields, nor where stood
Rich ranks of golden grain
Only dead refuse stubble clothe the plain:
Asleep from risk, asleep from pain.
– Christina Rossetti
This sensuous lyric is disturbing; its elegant formal form a vessel for bleak thoughts. Each stanza begins with a blanket denial of a positive view of life: life is not sweet, nor is it good. Sweetness & goodness will only follow death; in the first stanza, it is specifically losing sight of the world, followed by death, that will lead to sweetness. What follows then is a loving list of things worth seeing, things that would seem to make the world & life in it sweet: wild flowers, birds & butterflies flitting past, the happy lark (that recurring symbol in English poetry of a joyful dawn breaking afresh), the fields of wheat growing. These are not things obviously calculated to convince us that death is preferable to life, even though some of the details point us towards understanding the poet's distress: the grass is growing long, but above our heads & feet (we are buried beneath it, in other words), we are sighing at the brevity of the sunny, burgeoning & fruitful seasons (even the flitting butterflies can be read as a sign of transitoriness), someone else (a friend, a rival, some new person unknown to us) has taken our usual place with our friends. We are given a list of beautiful things, but all of them pass from us. Rather than enjoying them while they last, or seeing their passing as part of their beauty, the poet, despite her obvious admiration of these things, her loving cataloguing of natural abundance, rejects them (though perhaps with some residual longing).
The second stanza maintains the inventiveness & formal perfection of the first (each of them uses only two rhymes throughout, a wonderful thing to achieve without visible strain in famously rhyme-poor English), though it does darken the picture: this time the catalogue of nature moves from the spring & summer of the first stanza to fall & winter, times of bleakness & decay: the dead leaves are dropping, the sea lashes the coast, the harvest (the bean & wheat fields) are blackened & filled with stubble. (The waxing of the wheat in the first stanza is balanced & undercut in the second by the waning of the shrunk leaves). Again the narrator denies that goodness can have a part in this on-going cycle: what is good is to die. But then she adds, almost parenthetically, then live again.
Perhaps as we read this stanza's list of decaying nature, we are keeping in mind the first stanza's springtime, & its usual return after the time of fallen leaves & fields emptied after the harvest. This thought does not seem to be enough for the poet, though; it seems to be the endless cycling that troubles her. So what is the living again that would be as good as death? Given Rossetti's strong Christian beliefs, it is presumably life after death, the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment, when the world will be purged into a new & perfected entity.
It is the feeling of decay, the sighing over the fleetness of beauty, that leaves the poet stricken; at the end, she longs to be Asleep from risk, asleep from pain. It is stasis she longs for, respite from the constant shifting of the world, something solid to stand on, some beauty that isn't passing away before our eyes. We are, at least at this cultural moment, so cued to embrace & celebrate risk & change (often in ways that seem designed to make us accept unacceptable & avoidable social, political, or economic states) that it's kind of breathtaking & refreshing to read someone who rejects the premise, even as she balances it with what is clearly a sense of the sweet & good things in life.
But it's also disturbing to hear someone say such things, because life is unavoidably filled with risk, & loss, & pain, & so rejecting them is rejecting existence. If a friend expressed these sentiments, one might suggest counseling, or even medication for deep depression. (Though no work of art, particularly one as gorgeously wrought as this, can be truly despairing; a true, devastating belief in worthlessness & futility wouldn't see the point, or have the strength, of creation). Or one might admire the strength of her philosophy, an unflinching Christian stoicism that, while it may cut her off from some pleasures, also helps shield her from some pain (though, given the agonized divergence between how lovingly she notes the world & how bleakly she considers it, the reader might question how much pain she is really protecting herself from).
Perhaps it is significant that the poem's title is Life and Death, not Life or Death: there is no choice forced between the two; life & death are balanced. It's not that unusual for someone in the midst of life to realize we are in death: media vita in morte sumus, as the Gregorian chant has it, a phrase also translated into the Book of Common Prayer, & so surely well known to Rossetti. And it's not unusual to have that realization, & to turn from it in horror, or pain, & to long for some good thing unchanging. But then we counterbalance that with the realities of life, including the beauty of much of it (or at least of the natural world; it's significant that all of Rossetti's examples come from nature; humanity is only implied in things like the accustomed seat or the harvested fields or, of course, the grave). I can see someone having very different reactions to this poem depending on their faith tradition & personal beliefs or their life experience or just their current mood: one person might have very different reactions at different times. In this world, even our reading of a single poem is constantly shifting, changing, uncertain.
I took this from the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti.
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