Christina Rossetti always intrigues me. A High Church Anglican in the 19th century, she is nevertheless best known to many for her highly unusual Goblin Market, a poem which while cautionary is also undeniably sensual, dealing with goblins forcing their attentions on the pure and sisters who loved each other with a depth that seems very un-High Church (and a bit un-sisterly, at that), and I can’t imagine that the poem went unremarked… Anyway, my favorite Rossetti poem is not the In the Bleak Midwinter which has been turned into a Christmas hymn, but a stark Easter offering titled Beneath Thy Cross. (It is also known as Good Friday.)
Instead of offering an abundance of sentiment as many other traditional poems on the subject and of the time, it is instead, bleak in the face of tragedy, and acknowledging it. I think I like religious poems best that don’t describe any happy piety, but more reality, and this, for the 19th century, is as good as it gets.
Beneath Thy Cross
Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon–
I, only I.
Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.
–Christina Rossetti