A Birthday Poem, by Christina Rossetti

A Birthday

Christina Rossetti, 1830 – 1894

My heart is like a singing bird  

  Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;  

My heart is like an apple-tree  

  Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;  

My heart is like a rainbow shell

  That paddles in a halcyon sea;  

My heart is gladder than all these,  

  Because my love is come to me.  

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;

  Hang it with vair[i] and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,  

  And peacocks with a hundred eyes;  

Work it in gold and silver grapes,  

  In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;  

Because the birthday of my life

  Is come, my love is come to me.

Some of the commentators on this poem by Christina Rossetti miss the point entirely. Despite the lushly romantic language this was not a poem about a relationship with some unnamed man, but with her one true Love, Jesus Christ. Christina Rossetti herself was torn by the offer of love and ultimately rejected her suitor Charles Cayley. “From the early '60s on she was in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste” (The Victorian Web: The Life of Christina Rossetti).[ii]   

The key phrase is “the birthday of my life.” She is not referring to her physical birth, but to her spiritual rebirth. Christina Rossetti had another deeper, truer, all consuming love. In her poem Good Friday she says,[iii]

O my King and my heart’s own choice,

   Stretch Thy Hand to Thy fluttering dove;

Teach me, call to me with Thy Voice,

      Wrap me up in Thy Love.

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[i] The word “vair” in line 10 refers to fur, a typically bluish-gray, obtained from a variety of squirrel, used in the 13th and 14th centuries as a trimming or lining for garments.

[ii] Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin, The Victorian Web: The Life of Christina Rossetti