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Portrait of Christina Rossetti from The Poetical Works (1904)
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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
