1. A Daughter of Eve

2. Linda Palazzo:
[The speaker in Shut Out is] bewildered by the loss of the garden of Eden and longing for her home…Eve is devastated’.
How can this view apply to ‘A Daughter of Eve’?

3. A Daughter of Eve
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.
Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

4. A B A A B. Overwhelming rhyme – enchantment?
Inverted syntax – ‘fool’ foregrounded and stressed by the iambic tetrameter.
A feeling of regret – she has neglected and thus missed out on something
Catalectic line
Sense of loss- incompletion.
Verbs ‘pluck’ and ‘snap’ – destructive.
‘Too soon’ – what could her ‘rose’ or her ‘lily’ represent?
Rhyme scheme:
A B A A B. Overwhelming rhyme – enchantment?
Assonance of ‘oo’- spooky – supernatural.
Alliteration of ‘c’ combined with consonance of wake and pluck – harsh, angry, aggressive.
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.

5. Personal pronouns – she owns it and it’s her fault
Personal pronouns – she owns it and it’s her fault. It was her responsibility.
Catalectic lines
Compound adjective ‘all-forsaken’ – rejected. Faded – old, abandoned.
The garden or HER?
Summer – she has missed out on ….
Alliteration of the ‘w’- Whistling? Cold?
Summer – optimism youth fertility growth joy
Winter – death age cold grief sadness
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.
Level One: Eve and the Garden
Level Two: Rossetti and her missed romantic chances
Level Three: Universal female guilt
Level Four: The general feeling of guilt/loss/regret

6. Optimism – hope – renewal.
Sibilant alliteration – soothing – gentle
Caesura – break in the seasons – the gap between her current state and the state she used to have or could have.
Juxtaposition –
Even the sibilants have a different effect
Stripped bare – Eve – shame. Sex?
Repetition of ‘no more’ emphasises finality – no way back.
Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

7. Use ‘A Daughter of Eve’ to argue either for against each of these statements.
Rossetti’s primary concern is with religion and religious doubt.
Rossetti’s primary concern is with womanhood and the state of femininity.
Rossetti is unconcerned with the poltical or social issues of the period.
Rossetti’s work is not concerned with deeper thought or meaning.
Rossetti’s personal experience influenced her poetry to the extent it has become irrelevant.
Rossetti’s rejection of earthly experience means that much of her poetry is dogmatic and didactic.
Whilst Rossetti’s religious faith and biblical knowledge forms the basis of much of her work, to read it simply as ‘devotional’ is doing it a disservice.