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Today, on November 22nd, 2009, the site contains 196 poets, 8,692 poems and 7,657 comments.
Christina Rossetti - A Birthday

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 thickset 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 dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair 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. 

Added: on June 19th, 2008 at 11:03 AM | Viewed: 8285 times | Comments (7)


A Birthday - Comments and Information

Poet: Christina Rossetti
Poem: A Birthday

Comment 7 of 7, added on February 23rd, 2009 at 1:10 PM.

Actually, this poem is about Rossetti discovering Christianity, and the love of her life is Jesus or God. This poem shows the security and joy in the newfound love, and her knowledge that her faith, her love of her faith, will never desert her.
She became deeply religious,and did not marry twice for religious disagreement with her partners.

Fay
Comment 6 of 7, added on February 15th, 2009 at 8:46 AM.

The bird singing, the bough bending, the shell floating are all suspended in time. Their fates are precarious, and as literary critic Antony Harrison has argued, “the idealized images of nature that appear in the first stanza carry with them the inevitability of their own destruction.” For the bird in its “watered shoot” is exposed to danger; the ripe apples threaten to fall to the ground or break the bough; and the shell that now floats in tranquil waters is, as Harrison shows, “vulnerable, as a delicate object, to the changing moods of the potentially destructive ocean.”

Hannah Smith from Qatar
Comment 5 of 7, added on June 19th, 2008 at 11:03 AM.

I totally agree. The poem talks about the shoot and the nest, which could be the reference to a new born child.

Jean from United Kingdom

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