"Singing Songs In Their Own Tongue":A Study Of Musicality In Christina Rossetti's Poems

As one of the significant poetess in Victorian era,Christina Georgina Rossetti has been reassessed during the last three decades with renewed interest in women writers and in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.Among all her contributions to English poetry,the musicality of her poems cannot be neglected,for which many of her hymn poems have been sung in the church,and more than one hundred poems have been set to music by composers since 1864.This thesis aims at identifying the musical characteristics in Rossetti's poetry and analyzing and interpreting her poems frequently setting to music to explore Rossetti's musical aesthetics and her understanding of the relationship between music and poetry.This thesis can be divided into six parts: Introduction,Chapter One to Four,and Conclusion.The Introduction gives a brief description of Christina Rossetti and her works,the literature review,central argument,methodology and research significance of the thesis.Chapter One explores possible sources of Rossetti's musical inspiration of composing poetry from her family background,education background and social background.Next,in Chapter Two and Chapter Three,the thesis attempts to identify musical quality in Rossetti's poems from two aspects: chapter two discusses musical sounds in words or phrases,including the pitch,rhythm and timbre of sounds;and chapter three discusses musical images in general these poems presenting us.Then Chapter Four gives a brief introduction of the discussion of music genres in the nineteenth century in order to put forward the aesthetic concept,“Gesamtkunstwerk”,which Wagner used to illustrate the relationship between music and poetry,and by analyzing the structure and theme of two frequently set poems,the thesis endeavors to illustrate Rossetti's understanding of the relationship between music and poetry.At last,the Conclusion generalizes and summarizes the thesis as a whole.