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| A table of Rossetti's silences -- green for positive emotions; blue for negative |
Silence is often seen as passive—a withdrawal from the world. But as Christina Rossetti reveals through her poetry, silence can also be active, chosen, and imbued with deep emotional and spiritual meaning. Whether it symbolizes fortitude, yearning, or martyrdom, Rossetti’s silences offer a window into the human heart. Here are a few of the “types of silence” she invokes.
SILENCE IN THE FACE OF SUFFERING
“A long stern silence” in the face of a storm, while others “clung together… and some wept.” The silence Rossetti evokes in Repining is the silence of fortitude, of not speaking in the face of fear and suffering; of enduring and hoping without requiring of others a kind of sharing. Silence can be an act of strength—a refusal to express emotion or reveal one’s inner life. Through silence, one can hoard interiority. Silence can be a badge of pride, a signal of the sufficiency of self.
Of course, the sufferer can endure in silence for too long, turning fortitude into a virtue taken to the point of weakness. After all, barring others’ insights is isolating. Take the case of the princess of “The Prince’s Progress,” whose “heart sat silent through the noise / And concourse of the street” through all the years as the prince dallied. His deferral of their potential joy was suffered in silence until it was “Too late for live, too late for joy, / Too late, too late!” The silent heart “was starving all this while.” The Prince’s Progress might lead us to view silence as folly. Unprotesting endurance can backfire. Silence can be deadly. And yet Rossetti also sees this silence as a signal of the princess’s purity; her willingness to endure for the sake of love is read more as a virtue than a vice.
SILENCE OF YEARNING
As we saw in a previous post, Rossetti has a yen for the silences of loss and longing. She explores both as an attribute of age in the final sonnet of Monna Innominata. Once youth and beauty are both gone, she asks, what remains for the agèd? Naught but
The longing of a heart pent up forlorn
A silent heart whose silence loves and longs;
The silence of a heart which sang its songs
While youth and beauty made a summer morn,
Silence of love that cannot sing again.
(14th sonnet, Monna Innominata)
The singing is now over, irrevocably cast in the past tense. Only the remembrances of former times remain to the narrator. Loss and longing are intertwined. This is not so much the enduring or long-suffering heart of The Prince’s Progress as it is a heart silent through the practices of inner stillness. With this silence, the poet suggests, love can invoked, its memory stirring a kind of aching wistfulness which can be treasured and tallied, counting up the successes of the past. Simultaneously, however, this silence is the silencing of the voice; the externalities of voiced love are no longer available to the speaker. Of the outer and inner worlds, only the inner remains to the speaker.
SILENCE AND SOUND
Sound and silence can intermingle, as they do in natural settings. Rossetti’s narrator goes on an emotive journey in An Old-World Thicket, but not until the stillness of the woods does rage change to despair, then self-pity, then weariness, then yearning, as the excesses of emotion gradually fall away. Only then do the sounds of nature penetrate the narrator’s attention:
Without, within me, music seemed to be;
Something not music, yet most musical,
Silence and sound in heavenly harmony.
The silence of nature is restorative, it brings sunsets and beauty, a return of visual awareness of the splendors of the world. The silence of nature is, in some ways, found inside its sounds; the eco-acoustical landscape heals, where the human self-obsessions of the regular world had merely “piled care upon my care.” Silence can be the answer to what ails us; silence can be found, unironically, in the witterings of nature. Eric Kagge would agree: “The silence around us may contain a lot, but the most interesting kind of silence is the one that lies within.”
Sound, even human sound, can also create (temporary) silence. The men of Maiden-Song are silenced by the music that they hear, as was the “herdsman from the vale,” enchanted with the merry songs of Meggan, who drew him in as she “piped a merry note,” and then “sang the heart out of his breast.” So too the result of May’s singing, that “labyrinth of throbs, / Pauses, cadence; / Clear-noted as a dropping brook, / Soft-noted like the bees.” He was transformed; “He hung breathless on her breath; / Speechless, who listened well; / Could not speak or think or wish / Till silence broke the spell.” Not until the end of the song, HER silence, does HIS muted state change. Her song controls his voice, pushing him (temporarily) into voicelessness. And the third maiden, Margaret, used her singing as a force for power:
So Margaret sang her sisters home
In their marriage mirth;
Sang free birds out of the sky,
Beasts along the earth,
Sang up fishes of the deep—
All breathing things that move –
Sang from far and sang from near
To her lovely love;
Sang together friend and foe;
Sang a golden-bearded king
Straightway to her feet,
Sang him silent where he knelt
In eager anguish sweet.
(C. Rossetti, Maiden-Song)
The challenge, of course, is that the power of song is only powerful in the moment; power reverts to the powerful once the song is ended: “But when the clear voice died away, / When the longest echoes died, / He stood up like a royal man / And claimed her for his bride.” Song may ensorcell in its magical moment, making silent the powerful and moving them into a profound space of awe, once the magic itself has faded into silence, the world goes on with its habitual practices. (Maiden-Song)
THE SILENCE OF PURITY
Martyrs may be silent in Rossetti’s world; in I Have Fought the Good Fight she contrasts the roaring crowd’s “Crying out for vengeance, crying out for blood” with the silence of the sainted; even when confronted with betrayal and the horrors of the lion’s gaping maw, the interlocutor has the silence of inner peace: He hears the crowd’s shouting “in silence, and was not afraid / While for the mad people silently I prayed.” His silence is virtue, an opposition to the mob, and a signal of a divinely-inspired faith.
Silence, she points out in “Then shall ye shout” (from Songs for Strangers and Pilgrims), can also be anticipatory. As with music, it is not always our turn; “Keep silence with a good hear / While silence fits our part”; we must, she says “Keep silence, counting time / To strike in at the chime.” Attention is not always our to own; silence can be a gift to the communal realm.
DISCOMFORTING SILENCES
Silence is not always positive; it is part of envy and of shame. “…her words reproved / A silent envy nursed within, / A selfish, souring discontent, Pride-born, the devil’s sin.” (The Lowest Room) It can also be the silence of overweening grief, a refusal of comfort “…I would not look or speak / Would not cheer up at all. / My tears were like to fall,” and, feigning sleep “no one knew I wept.” The secret kept, no one can provide comfort to those who wield silence like a shield. Not until the narrator yields to sound, that “something in her voice” that reaches past the silence into expressive sorrow, can comfort come (The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children). Silence also belongs to the haughty (Sonnet From the Psalms); the refusal to ask for “man’s help, nor kneel that he may bless” is a refusal of community, a choice of isolation.
Silence is also the language of despair; the narrator in Mirage who hangs his “harp upon a tree… wrung and snapt,” all for the sake of a dream-image. The broken heart is silent, and “Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed / For a dream’s sake.” A misunderstanding can lead, in other words, to hopelessness. The broken harp strings are shattered hopes; happiness was only ever imagined. Silence can also be the language of rejection, as with the maid of Under Willows. She merely “stood silent and still,” though it was a sunny June day, and her suitor “passed by and whistled a tune.” That silent rejection, however, will be answered by a lonely death: “Though she live to be old, so old, / She shall die at last.”
Similarly, in The Dying Man to His Betrothed, the silence of the betrothed at her fiancé’s deathbed is one of a presentiment of grief; her silence goes with her weeping and her paleness as signals of her overwrought state. And yet, while her silence is rejected by the dying man -- “One word – tis all I ask of thee… Speak out, that I may know thy will” – it is, at the end of the poem, he who rejects her comforts in favor of religious transformation. Her silence becomes the silence of memory; he sees mercy for himself while leaving her the silence of her loss. Silence here is a discomforting gift – both hers to him, as she tries to control her emotions and not burden him, and his to her, as he leaves her with the silence of an absent and erased future together.
In an age of constant communication, Rossetti’s exploration of silence feels indulgent, even nostalgic. Her poems remind modern readers that silence, whether chosen or imposed, can be a powerful response to suffering, love, and loss. And in such silences, we may find strength—or risk of isolation—or find ourselves immersed in the eco-acoustical quiet where contemplation best resides. Silences, in other words, have contexts as well as meanings.
Poetic texts from (and assessments based on) The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, Macmillan and Co, 1904, https://books.google.com/books?id=C_k_VgeqssMC
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