‘Thou Whole Burnt-Offering!’1 The Mystical Ecstasy in Christina Rossetti’s Poems

Abstract

Christina Rossetti has come to the wrong place: there is no answer. In order to while away the time, she will write poems which stage her one Passion for God, with whom she has fallen head over heels in love, more than with life itself, since she repulses men, whom she finds inadequate, in a Victorian society which yet allotted them pride of place, unwitting though it was of women, who were deemed redundant. These serial elegies chiselled by a bashful lover hence draw the graph of her desire to be possessed by a missing one, whose fullnes she extols whilst dreading his potency. The horror of their ultimate encounter is lessened thereof, through the daily disclosures of her mystical climax, which is being dutifully registered as if it were a confession of powerlessness. However unassuming she then appears to be, such moments of great feeling are her delightful way of atoning for her sins.