The Feast Of Love

As a devoted Christian, Christina Rossetti performed a life-long pursuit of the religious truth; as one of the most important poets of the Victorian period, she put those thinking in her poetic works. One repeated topic of her poems was the issue of human salvation in terms of the relationships between man and God, man and Nature as well as man and man showed in the process of her pursuit.Influenced by the Oxford Movement, Rossetti was in favor of using symbols for her religious meditation rather than asserting her conclusion directly. As for the case of human salvation, she frequently applied food symbols to illustrate her ideas in her poems. This choice was the result of her religious understandings and historical background.By analyzing three food-related symbols in Rossetti's poems----"the lonely glutton", "the hungry planter" and "the holy feast", this thesis attempts to illustrate her resolution for human salvation. To Rossetti, the root of the human sins is the material knowledge with its strong appeal to human senses. To pursue more material knowledge, and to enhance a greater scientific development, material resource and secular power, the human beings fall into a state of greed, pride and selfishness. All these break up the harmonious relationships between man and God, man and Nature, and man and man, resulting in a hierarchical relationship filled with competition, destruction and oppression. Man is therefore forced into deep alienation and spiritual vacuity. The loneliness and vacuity are felt by the Divine as well, and is reflected in the appearance of Nature. The man-God relationship Rossetti holds is a relationship that requires mutual satisfaction for both man and God to feel their bilateral need and to complete each other, thus the collapse of this link would bring pain to both sides. That is the very reason for both man and Jesus to make their efforts to purify the sins of man, to restore the bond between them, and to pursue human salvation. The possibility of this kind of purification, nevertheless, lies in their having to bear pains caused by sins. These pains are like purgatorial flames, which could burn the sins, train the stained soul and reconstruct it, enabling man to be freed from the shadow of sins and to be reunited with God. After such a holy reunion, the relationships between man and God, man and Nature, and man and man could be restored back to harmony. This restoration is characterized by love. Love brings equality, sharing, and selfless sacrifice, and thus forms an unbreakable and fulfilled unity. For Rossetti, this unity of love is the essence of human salvation, the absolute purpose of Heaven, and the ideal of all relationships. This opinion comes not only from her religious thinking, but also from her meditation on social problems related to her age. In her mind, love is more powerful than material knowledge, and if man could master the development and application of material knowledge with the principal of love, many of the problems could be solved.