1. Key Quote 3:
Analysis:
Summary and link to the theme: The speaker is excluded from a garden. The poem captures her feelings of loss, exclusion and sadness.
Key Quote 1:
Analysis:
Key Quote 2:
Analysis:
Key Quote 2:
Analysis:
Key Quote 1:
Analysis:
Key Quote 3:
Analysis:
Poem One: Shut Out
Summary and link to the theme: The speaker tells of the process of deciding to reject something and bury it deep within her as a memory only. The poem captures her struggle and the dilemma of the difficult decision making process.
Key Quote 1:
Analysis:
Summary and link to the theme: The speaker is calling to someone or something that she has lost, asking for it to return. The poem captures feelings of grief, loss and desperate pleading for return.
Theme:
Lyricism – capturing a feeling/emotional response rather than a specific event.
Key Quote 2:
Analysis:
Critical Views
a)June 1866, a reviewer ‘not much thinking in [Rossetti’s poetry], not much high or deep feeling’
Is this view proved or disproved by your choice of poems?
Disproved
b) In Rossetti’s poetry, God is always present, is always there’ John Bocher
Disproved – can easily be read as lyrical not devotional.
Key Quote 3:
Analysis:
Poem Four: Memory
Poem Two: Echo
Context
a) Relevant specific information about Rossetti’s life or Victorian times
- CR and DR called ‘two storms’ in childhood – violent aggressive natures
-CR suffered recurring bouts of depression, Marsh implies possibly as a result of paternal incest
-’poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality’;
b) How this information may have influenced these poems.
- These poems capture extremes of feeling that are at odds with the traditional view of CR as devout, serious, religiously obsessed.
Summary and link to the theme: The speaker is regretful that she has slept through the summer and not tended her garden. The poem captures feelings of regret, sorrow and loneliness.
Key Quote 1: ‘My garden-plot I have not kept;/Faded and all forsaken’
Analysis: Metaphor for her hope/faith/innocence. Guilt – accepts blame.
Key Quote 2: ‘I weep as I have never wept’
Analysis: Tetrameter puts stresses on ‘weep’ and ‘wept’. Devastation - loss
Poem Three:
A Daughter of Eve
Key Quote 3: ‘Stripp’d bare of hope and everything…I sit alone with sorrow’
Analysis: Foregrounded ‘strip’d’ - Shame – naked – Eve? Abandoned.

2. Theme
Poem 1
Poem 2
Poem 3
Poem 4
Death
Sweet Death
On Keats
Song: When I am Dead
Remember
Faith
A Birthday
Uphill
Vigil of St. Bartholomew
Religion
Memory
Twice
Love
Have you forgotten?
An End
Echo
Intense Emotion
Shut Out
A Daughter of Eve
Social Issues/Gender
In an Artist’s Studio
From the Antique
Maude Clare
Women
No Thank you John
Speaker
Winter, my Secret
Life as a struggle
At Last
Relationships
An Apple Gathering
Nature
Autumn Violets
Art
The PRB
Grief
Renunciation
Goblin Market
The Convent Threshold
Sex/Sexuality
Lyricism
Devotional
Tune me oh Lord into one harmony
The Vigil of St. Bartholomew