Christina Rossetti

A Daughter of Eve

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;

Defloration imagery

Rose and lily are Victorian code for virginity. 'Too soon' and 'snap' suggest sexual experience before marriage—the unforgivable sin for respectable women.

A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It's winter now I waken.

Summer/winter shift

The seasonal metaphor tracks her fall: summer = innocence/virginity, winter = social death after losing respectability. Not gradual autumn—instant exile.

Rejecting consolation

She dismisses the Christian promise of redemption ('future spring'). Unusual for Rossetti, a devout Anglican—this speaker sees no way back.

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Fallen Woman's Monologue

Rossetti wrote this in 1849, the same period she volunteered at St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a home for 'fallen women'—prostitutes and unmarried mothers society had cast out. Unlike most Victorian poems about ruined women (written by men, dripping with pity), this comes from inside the experience. The speaker isn't begging forgiveness or dying picturesquely. She's angry at herself, yes, but also stripp'd bare of the polite fictions that might comfort her.

The garden-plot she hasn't kept is her virginity, her reputation, her marriageability—the only real currency Victorian women had. The metaphor runs through the whole poem: she slept at noon (was careless in broad daylight), plucked her own flowers (made her own choice, wasn't forced), and now faces comfortless cold exile. The repetition of fool in stanza one isn't self-pity—it's brutal self-assessment. She knew the rules and broke them anyway.

What's startling is the finality. Most Victorian redemption narratives offered fallen women a path back through repentance, suffering, and death. This speaker rejects that script entirely. When others offer sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow, she shuts them down: Talk what you please. She sits alone with sorrow, not shame—there's a distinction. She's not asking for forgiveness because she knows the social death is permanent. Victorian England didn't forgive women who 'fell,' even once.

What Rossetti Does With the Ballad Form

The poem uses ballad meter (alternating 4-3-4-3 beat lines) and a tight rhyme scheme, but watch what Rossetti does with the rhythm. Traditional ballads move forward—they tell stories. This one circles. Each stanza restates the same fact: I'm ruined, it's permanent, don't talk to me about hope.

The rhymes lock her in place: noon/moon, soon/lily (slant rhyme that feels deliberately off), slept/wept, spring/sing. She rhymes to-morrow with sorrow, which tells you everything about her future. The form itself becomes a cage—she can't break out of the pattern any more than she can break out of her social exile.

Notice the tense shifts: past (I slept, I have not kept), present (I weep, I sit), and rejected future (No more to laugh, no more to sing). The only moment of present-tense action is weeping and sitting with sorrow. Everything else is closed off—the past is done, the future is cancelled. The poem exists in an eternal, isolated present, which is exactly what social death felt like for Victorian women who lost their reputations.