... period.¹

Copyright 1989 by Jeffery Triggs. All rights reserved.

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... monologue.²

Robert Langbaum has argued that the dramatic monologue was in fact conceived ``as a reaction against the romantic confessional style'' (79).

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... addressed.³

Most writers, notably Marya Zaturenska, Dorothy Margaret Stuart, and more recently Georgina Battiscombe, have followed William Rossetti's suggestion that in Monna Innominata Christina was in fact ``giving expression to her love for Charles Cayley,'' whose offer of marriage she refused on religious grounds. Lona Mark Packer's 1963 biography created something of a stir by claiming that William was in fact shielding Christina in making this assertion (225). Packer's own candidate is William Bell Scott, whose marriage to Alice Boyd at the time of Christina Rossetti's first Penkill visit presented in her opinion a more formidable, more traditional, and less respectable obstacle than any opposition to Cayley's religious views (226). It should be noted however that more recent critics such as Battiscombe have refused to take Packer's argument quite seriously. Like the controversy about Shakespeare's sonnets, it appears that the mysterious identity of Christina's ``suitor'' is not easily solvable. The fact that even William considered such an identification necessary, however, is itself an indication of the age's preoccupation with autobiographical poetry.

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... justified.⁴

On some other occasion it might be amusing to compare closely this subtle poem with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's often anthologized ``How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.'' One is of sad love, the other of happy; one is the product of a woman of deep faith, the other of a woman whose saints are all ``lost''; one is written in a quietly meditative style, the other in a burst of rhetoric. Yet what they have both in common is the conviction that the best poetry springs from the sincere expression of personal feeling, that the way to poetry lies through the self.

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... alone.⁵

The language here might bear comparison with that of the Elizabethans, particularly Donne in The Holy Sonnets. Indeed, paradoxes seem a basic religious mode of expression, and Christina's mood here, like Donne's, is steeped in religious feeling. One might note, however, that the personal form of address Donne reserved for his conversations with God is here applied to Christina's beloved. This brings into question whether the sonnets are conceived as actual addresses to the beloved or interior meditations. We remember that according to the notion of the ``two audiences,'' Elizabethan sonnets supposely addressed to a ``lady'' were in fact aimed at the same time at a public audience of courtly readers. This double motive may be detected through close observance of the many ironies, poses, and public conventions that inform the Elizabethan texts. Christina's sonnets pose a more difficult problem. The beloved is clearly not a paper figure, and there is no evidence that she is winking at a wider audience at the same time. If they are fancifully addressed to him, then they have the quality of a private meditation, like Donne perhaps, but most unlike Sidney.

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