"dance With The Ghost"

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) is one of the most eminent Victorian poetess in the nineteenth century. She wins wide recognition in her time, but her reputation suffers with the rise of New Criticism. Even today, she is undervalued and neglected most of the time. The author of this thesis studied Christina across-the-board to get a glimpse of her excellent achievement. Her death poems are speculated and analyzed particularly in this thesis because Christina Rossetti was pursued by the thought of death throughout her life. Many of her poems, especially her later poems, display her concerns about death. Her early poems show death as the destroyer of mortal things, reflecting her pessimism and her sometimes naturalistic views on life. Her death wish is sometimes associated with her thwarted desire for absolute love in the world. Her religious poems describe death as the gate to heaven or to hell, the final resting place from the pains of her life. Either as her religious yearning for a better place of Resurrection or as her way of expressing her unfulfilled desire in the world, her persistent theme of death is an expression of the conflict between a sometimes skeptical, sometimes religious view.Thus Chapter one explores first Christina Rossetti's early pessimism and her childhood experiences forming her ideology of death. One major element that could have caused her to concentrate on the idea of death can be found in her childhood experiences and in her family tradition. Most of her religious poems seem to depict her earnest desire to end her present life. However, in many of those poems, the tone of hopeful expectations surprisingly mingles with sudden touches of melancholy and elegiac moods. In some of her poems, her desire for sleep is linked with her death wish because she sought in death the place of rest.Chapter two proposes to see Christina Rossetti's lyric poems as a self-sufficient subject without investigation on whether it has autobiographical nature or not. In other words, the author defines the lyric subject and all characters in the poems as "the other". The author treats lyric subject as "the other", showing Christina Rossetti's concern for human sufferings and caring on the ultimate evil—death. Corresponding to "the other", chapter three in this paper will illustrate "the self. The poetess expresses directly her fear of death through the subject of "the self, as well as the pursuit towards a better life. Under the lyrical subject of "the self", Christina Rossetti expresses emotions to arouse human resonance and her concerns on human beings. The death themes of "the other" and "the self"are the death theme of human beings, as well as all reflections on death in Christina Rossetti's lyrical poetry.This researching method is to avoid duplication of previous research, and to get rid of getting entangled in the issue of characters, which reflects directly the poetess's general attitude toward things, especially on the theme of death. The thesis adopts the researching methods of symbolism and imagism to explore the death theme of Rossetti's poetry, which can never be reduced into a simple formula.