Explore the Way Rossetti Presents Nature in her Poems

In many of Christina Rossetti’s poems, including ‘Shut Out’ and ‘Paradise in a Dream’, nature is presented in many ways and used to portray her love of God. Christina Rossetti, although she lived in London for all of her life, got her love of nature from the romantic poets, like John Keats, who were popular at the time and showed nature as holy and spiritual. Rossetti followed the tradition of writing about nature in this way, to communicate her love for God and also her yearning for spiritual connection.

Rossetti shows her love for Christ in ‘Paradise: In a Dream’ as she talks about the ‘Tree of Life’ which is a reference to Jesus being on the cross. This is reinforced when Rossetti says that it is ‘abundant with its twelvefold fruits’, referencing Jesus’ twelve disciples who were loyal to him. Trees are also seen as quite sturdy, so Rossetti choosing to compare Jesus on the cross to a tree shows how she believes that Christ is reliable.

 Rossetti also shows how much faith she has in God as she says that ‘its fruit the hungry world can feed’ showing how she believes that Christ has the power to save everyone spiritually, although she uses a physical metaphor for this.

Rossetti also shows her yearning for spiritual connection in ‘Shut Out’ when she says ‘from flower to flowers the moths and bees’ as flowers and bees depend on each other in order to survive and are in harmony with each other, bees need pollen to make honey and flowers need bees to fertilise them. As Rossetti never got married, even though it was expected of Victorian women, she lacked the connection that even bees and flowers had so she instead put all of her love into God.

Christina Rossetti also shows her love for God in the poem ‘A Birthday’, in which she mentions aspects of nature, that also have connections to fertility and purity, throughout it. She again uses the image of an apple tree, and says that her heart is like one ‘whose boughs are bent with the thickset fruit’, suggesting that her heart is ripe, like apples, and that she is ready to fall in love and have a spiritual connection with. Rossetti also mentions ‘pomegranates’, which have many seeds inside of them, giving the image of fertility.

Rossetti also uses ‘silver fleurs-de-lys’ to demonstrate purity and in nature, also when she mentions ‘gold and silver grapes’. As an underlining theme of this poem is that fact that she is in love with God and since she is also mentioning natural things with variations of perfection, it implies that anything in God’s image is perfect.

In conclusion, Christina Rossetti presents nature in a number of different ways throughout her poems, however she primarily presents it as something holy and spiritual, with connections to God, as many romantic poets at the time also did. However, she also uses nature to demonstrate themes of unity, as with bees and flowers, and spiritual connection, something that she is said to have lacked in her life.