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| Portrait of Christina Rossetti from The Poetical Works (1904) |
I’m preparing to teach a medievalisms class, and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) came back across my attention-field. Among her various offerings is this:
“Echo” (by Christina Rossetti)*
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking
silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as
bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O
memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet,
too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in
Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where
thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening,
letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams,
that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come
back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath
for breath:
Speak low, lean low
As long ago, my love, how
long ago.
(18 December 1854)
Here Rossetti’s silence is that of the “speaking silence” of a dreamed-of love, a memory of one who has passed through “that slow door” of death. She acknowledges the bliss of a paradisiacal state – where others’ love will greet the newly entered soul – but asks the beloved instead to haunt her dreams, enlivened through an energizing memory. Pulse (hers) for pulse (the lover’s) and breath for breath, her dream self will recreate a simulacrum of the lover. And the payoff? The silence of night and parallel silence of a dream state together allow her to imagine the whispered confidence of the past as still present in her life.
Loss and longing are intertwined with the hush of night, with the quiet togetherness of lovers, and with the superimposition of past and present in a world beyond wakefulness. The poet emphasizes the remoteness of the memory, the “finished years” and the doubly-emphasized long-ago nature of their time together.
From the perspective of silences, it is the silence of night – not just the absence of daytime conversations and engaged world of the waking self, but also the silence of solitude – that allows the speaker’s remembering dream state to evoke memory and pastness. Indeed, we are invited to consider whether wakefulness is antithetical to memory, since it is only the narrator’s dream state that can re-imagine the embodied other. Wakefulness is distracting; the dream state and the silence that go with it allow for introspection. While the speaker imagines the utterances from long ago, it is silence that allows her to do so. Moreover, she may imagine that spoken voice from the past, but she continues to exist in a world of silence and nighttime. No words are spoken in her here and now in spite of her repeated command to the beloved to “come” to her.
Likewise, that re-imagined other is known to be “cold,” their corporeal body – corpse – no longer reflecting the wished-for sparkle of eye like a dappled brook. Instead, the once seeing eye becomes the silent tear, first of the speaker herself and then, perhaps, in stanza 2, the brimfull nature of the beloved’s community, their eyes too lingering on the spot of transition from life to death, from this place to that one, a transition still ongoing, and yet one that happened “long ago.”
It is the silence, the absence of active hearing, that allows this recreation of the visual sense, along with the implicit story of how the narrator and beloved once rejoiced in each other, making palpable and poignant the loss that is still ongoing these many years later. Cold body vs warm memories, silent nighttime vs thoughts of whispered confidences, the presence and poignant absence of the beloved—the invocation of silence compels the reader to “come” with the speaker on a journey into profound yearning.
* Image and poetic text from The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, Macmillan and Co, 1904, https://books.google.com/books?id=C_k_VgeqssMC
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