After death by Christina Rossetti

Natalia Hernández Suárez1

Pre-Raphaelitism was a movement founded in 1849, this movement

was against the academicism in arts. In poetry they used lots of

description, as well they had a close relation with supernatural things,

lastly the topics they wrote about usually were melancholic or morbid

(Bump). Although Christina Rossetti was not an official member of

this movement, she actually has some of those characteristics in her

poetry work. That is the case of “After death” in which Rossetti

explores the sad and revengeful feelings of a dead woman.

This poem is an italian sonnet formed of fourteen verses: two

quatrains and two tercets, which rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDE

EDC. Therefore it was wrote in iambic pentameter, which means that

there are five iambic feet in each verse, the iamb structure is one

unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable:

The cur/tains were /half drawn,/ the floor/ was swept A

And strewn /with ru/shes, rose/mary/ and may B

Lay thick/ upon/ the bed/ on which /I lay, B

1
Estudiante de español y lenguas extranjeras de la universidad pedagógica nacional de colombia.
 Where through/ the la/ttice i/vy-sha/dows crept. A

However there are some lines in which the meter and the foot

change a little, such as the seventh line: “Poor child, poor child’: and

as he turned away”, in which the words ‘and’, ‘as’ and ‘he’ are

unstressed syllables, there are two possibilities: a.) we can be in font

of a pyrrhic, two unstressed syllables, and one iamb or b.) we can be

in front of a paeon, four syllables: three unstressed syllables and one

stressed syllable.

Moreover the eighth line “Came a deep silence, and I knew he

wept”. In the beginning of the verse there is a trochee because ‘came’

is stressed and ‘a’ is unstressed. Then there is a spondee two stressed

syllables which are ‘deep’ and ‘si’. Finally there is a succession of

three unstressed sylables ‘lence’, ‘and’ and ‘I’, in this case it could be

again a paeon or a pyrrhic with an iamb.

On the other hand, the first quartain describes the scene where

the poem takes place and the narrator of the story. Also in the second

quartain the narrator introduces a new character. Further in the first

tercet the narrator describes the actions of the second character.

Finally in the last tercet the narrator explains its feelings about its

situation.
 First of all, in the first quatrain there are two enjambements. The

first and second lines present the room in where the narrator is. As in

the third and fourth verses the narrator finishes the description of how

is the room and the narrator locates herself/himself in the room. This

first quatrain gives an image of a room that has not much light, but

that is clean. Also the narrator says that in its bed there are some

flowers related with death (Osorio de Parra, Hoyos, & Gomez, 2007).

In the second quatrain the narrator introduces a man who is in

the room, thanks to this character we can deduce that the narrator of

this poem is a woman. She describes the attitude of this man towards

her: “He leaned above me, thinking that I slept/ And could not hear

him; but I heard him say,” as we can see this enjambement narrates

her perspective in the scene, she is hearing what he is saying but she

is not seeing what he is doing. She is giving us a sign with the verb

sleep as with the reference of the flowers in the earlier quatrain: she is

probably not alive anymore.

Furthermore, the last two verses of the second quatrain “‘Poor

child, poor child’: and as he turned away /Came a deep silence, and I

knew he wept.” express a deep sorrow. The male character is having a

bad time because of the death of this woman. Although he is crying

the shroud, or raise the fold/ That hid my face, or take my hand in

his,/ Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:” She is feeling that

even if he is in sorrow, he is not doing a thing for her.

In addition to that, the conclusion of the poem has a strong

message: “He did not love me living; but once dead/ He pitied me;

and very sweet it is/ To know he still is warm though I am cold.”

Here, in this tercet, the narrator sums up all the previous verses and

includes the fact that he never loved her while she was alive. These

last lines turn around the earlier verses, because it changes the way

the reader perceives the male character and gives a macabre idea of

why she is dead. It could be a suicide because of her unrequited love.

In conclusion, this poem has an ironic tone, a supernatural tone

and even a revengeful tone. On one hand the ironic tone is present in

the poem thanks to the last tercet which gives the impression of a

tragic love story. In this story the dead woman was not loved in

return, as a result of that, she decides to let her body decease, while

her mind or her soul waits that her loved one goes to her funeral. At

the same time, it looks like she waited for him just to be able to

reproach him for not loving her and for showing a painful attitude
after her death. On the other hand, this poem, also, has a supernatural

tone, because the perspective of the poem is from a dead one. Who is

the one describing, analysing and reacting to the actions of her loved

one. Latly this poem has a revengeful tone because the deat woman

seems to be happy to see that her love one is suffering her death, that

is why the message of this poem could be: “You don’t know what

you’ve got until it’s gone”.

Bibliography

Bump, J. (n.d). Pre-Raphaelistism. Retrived from:

http://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/oxford/pre.html

Osorio de Parra, B., Hoyos, E., & Gomez, L. F. (2007). Great Britain

in poetry A brief anthology. Bogotá: Nomos.