A Birthday (Christina Rossetti 1848)

Halcyon:
calm, peaceful

Dais: a platform for a

throne or for a position
from which a speaker can
address an audience.

Fleur-de-lys

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset 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 dais of silk
Hang it with vair and
Carve it in doves and
And peacocks with a
Work it in gold and silver
In leaves and silver fleursBecause the birthday of
Fleur-de-lys symbol
Is come, my love is come to me.

Possibly a reference to
Botticellis 1486 painting
The Birth of Venus

5
Vair: fur, usually squirrel,
used for lining garments

and down;
purple dyes;
pomegranates,
hundred eyes;
grapes,
de-lys;
my life
15

10

This happy poem, written when the English poet Christina Rossetti was 27 years old, expresses the
tremendous joy and excitement we may feel when we see or meet the person we truly love. She says that
her love coming to her is the birthday of my life, the day, she suggests, when her life really begins.
There is a marked amount of repetition:
Each alternate line in the first verse begins My heart is like (lines 1, 3, 5, 7), emphasising the
speakers struggle to find words to describe her emotions, which she compares with nature.
The poem ends, Is come, my love is come to me (line 16). By drawing attention to the word come,
the speaker expresses her joy at the return of her lover and highlights the end of her waiting.
The first verse of A Birthday is written in strict iambic tetrameter. This creates a song-like rhythm and
means that a stress consistently falls on the word heart. In the second verse, 4 out of the 7 lines begin
with a dactyl (long-short-short). Here, the stress falls on the verbs Raise, Hang, Carve and Work
(lines 9, 10, 11, 13). By breaking out of the regular metrical scheme of the first verse, these dactyls
highlight the urgency of the speaker to create something new to celebrate the return of her love.
ASSIGNMENTS
1. The first stanza speaks of the happiness she sees around her. The repeated expression My heart is like
. . . stresses this joy. Yet she is even happier than all of these things why?
2. The second stanza says that she would like to surround herself with the richest and most exotic things
to celebrate the arrival of my love. The language changes to reflect this. For example, the first
stanza makes simple statements about ordinary things, with the repeated verb is, while the second
gives varied commands about more exotic things. Quote examples to illustrate this point.
3. What is the effect of concluding the both stanzas with the same phrase?
4. Compare this poem with Song, written when she was just 18 years old; in this she writes of the
contrast between another womans true happiness, and her own sense that this cannot continue:
She sat and sang always
By the green margin of a stream,
Watching the fishes leap and play Beneath the glad sunbeam.
I sat and wept always
Beneath the moons most shadowy beam,
Watching the blossoms of the May Weep leaves into the stream.
I wept for memory;
She sang for hope that is so fair:
My tears were swallowed by the sea; Her songs died on the air.

Adapted from englishlanguageliterature.com and crossref-it.info/textguide/The-poetry-of-Christina-Rossetti