Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Virginia Woolf on Christina Rossetti

From The Second Common Reader:

"Yet for all its symmetry, yours was a complex song. When you struck your harp many strings sounded together. Like all instinctives you had a keen sense of the visual beauty of the world. Your poems are full of gold dust and “sweet geraniums’ varied brightness”; your eye noted incessantly how rushes are “velvet-headed”, and lizards have a “strange metallic mail”—your eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina the Anglo–Catholic. But to her you owed perhaps the fixity and sadness of your muse."

1 Comments:

Blogger Jenni said...

I like that. Although I am not a reader of Victorian novels, for the most part, I love Victorian poetry and paintings and Woolf puts into words much of the reasons why.

3:12 PM  

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