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Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. By Constance W. Hassett. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005.
Recently we have seen a number of studies that discuss mainstream literature alongside children's literature, and this cross-border writing is welcome. Even if we decide that the conventions of children's and young adult literature differ from those of mainstream (for lack of a better term) work, we must recognize that many of our canonical writers crossed over and wrote for the young. The nineteenth century is rich in such writers, from Dickens and Thackery to MacDonald and Gaskell. Novelists often wrote for children as well as for adults. Poets, however, seem less inclined to cross over. As far as I know, the likes of Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, and so on did not write for children. The recent A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002) does not contain a chapter on children's verse. The only mentions of children's poetry are in the chapters on "Nonsense" and on "Hymn." Thus, a study such as Hassett's is doubly welcome: it reminds us that Victorians wrote poetry for children, and it notices that one of the period's premier poets practiced her craft for children as well as for adults. In Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, Rossetti emerges as a poet accomplished for the strength of her vision and the intricacy of her form. The poetry she wrote for children contains the same delicacy, or what Hassett calls "patience of style," as does her poetry for adults. The argument has to do with Rossetti's formal grace: "if we wish to understand a poem as a response to an issue, we must treat it not only as a statement but as an action; what it says is inseparable from how it moves" (3). Hassett's book demonstrates just how subtle and meaningful even the most ostensibly simple poem can be.
What makes this study invaluable are its demonstrations of close reading. Hassett is attuned to nuance, subtlety, and delicacy. She notices intricate formal beauties, from the working of alliterative affect to the suggestiveness of language. She knows a rhetorical turn when she sees and hears one. For her, poems such as Rossetti's develop organically, like surprising blossoms from familiar shoots. For example, she notices...