Nature as a ‘never-failing principle of joy’ and ‘purest passion’: Christina Rossetti’s Romantic Theorization of Nature as an Emblem of Divine Wisdom and Knowledge

Abstract

The paper attempts to show how Christina Rossetti, an ostensibly non-canonical Victorian poet, develops a poetics of Nature that transposes itself from its association with the corporeal natural reality and elevates her soul to unite with God, wherein she finds the ultimate solace from her anxiety of creation. The materiality of the mundane world could not assuage her unease and discomfiture and provide her with the necessary relief and assurance. She primarily feels decoyed by the Romantic ideology of meditating Nature and her myriad forms of beauty, but later she inconsolably seeks communion with the divine. She recognizes that Nature is God’s work and believes that the female poet’s power lies deeply entrenched in the strength and fortitude of reverencing, adulating and glorifying the sacred and the holy, often thought to be her renunciatory pose, which again may be seen as the sublimation of her imagination from the palpable and the tangible to the transcendental - a process of complete ‘desensorization’ of the natural world and an exaltation to an idealistic world of the spiritual and the eternal.