today is Palm Sunday

Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830 and lived there until her death in 1894. At the tender age of fifteen, with her gifted ear she made poignant, haunting lyric poems that seem to flow from an ancient spring in an ancient wood. At the hearth of the house on Charlotte Street, where she lived with her close-knit family of three siblings, her half-Italian half-English mother, and her father, an exile from southern Italy, did she perform her poems after her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti showed off his latest drawings? Or did she sit in her father's chair, with the bible open at the Book of Revelations, listening to her sister Maria Francesca's pious musings? Or was she playing at rhymes with the other brother William Michael, who was the only one of the four to pursue profession over vocation, becoming a respectable civil servant at the Inland Revenue?

Christina Rossetti is remembered largely for her compact poems about goblins and sisters, love and aging. Perhaps it is not so widely known that in her final years she turned to the art of hymns, writing poem after poem, almost indistinguishably, about faith, hope, charity, and Love. There are also four books where she reveals her thoughts about scripture, published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.

In one or two of these books she gives her view of Eve as a type of femininity, a mixture of womanly insecurity and motherly desire to nurture and improve her man. This is typical of her manner and her ability to see the basic elements of the person, man or woman, beneath layers of historicizing, mythologizing, evangelizing, prettifying, demonizing. In one of her essays on Dante, she suggests that his name might have been an abbreviation of Durante, which conjures the double senses of duration and endurance. Only a reader who can see past the glory of Dante's laurel-wreathed achievement and taste the bitterness of the bread of exile the poet had to endure after Florence cast him out, can imagine the burden and the premonition of his first name when it was not yet a tag of fame.

When the Messiah entered Jerusalem on the Sunday two thousand and seven years ago, he was a man preparing for death. His name would have been on the lips of scorn, mockery, hatred, indifference. The name is what remains after the man did his Father's bidding and bled. On more than a whim, I thought of Christina Rossetti after noticing two women holding palm leaves outside Ghim Moh wet market. She seems the best poet to read this morning, to remember this day of entering the city of death, the necessary course of things before returning to the city of Life. I think of this poem, one of the first of hers I read and instinctively loved:

"A Birthday"

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hand it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.