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    A Study Guide for Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday"
    A Study Guide for Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday"
    A Study Guide for Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday"
    Ebook25 pages15 minutes

    A Study Guide for Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535816458
    A Study Guide for Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday" - Gale

      1

      A Birthday

      Christina Rossetti

      1862

      Introduction

      While nearly all of Christina Rossetti’s other love poems focus on themes of loss and isolation, A Birthday, which was first collected in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), articulates the ecstasy of found love. In it, the speaker grasps joyously to identify those images and comparisons which might accurately express her exhilaration. She searches first in the realm of the natural, attempting to equate her emotions with a singing bird, an apple tree heavy with fruit, and a rainbow shell in the sea. But none of these natural wonders can compare: in love, her heart is gladder than all these. In the second stanza, the speaker abandons the search for the perfect simile, or comparison, and instead demands action. In honor of her figurative birthday, she demands the construction of a lush dais replete with silk and down, doves and peacocks with a hundred eyes, gold and silver. Such a construction, ornamented with images from nature, can better represent her love because it is a lasting artifact, like poet John Keats’ Grecian urn in his Ode on a Grecian Urn. Unlike nature, which perishes, the dais will always mark the day in which love has come to the

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