| English poet Christina Rossetti born in London (1830) to Italian parents. She grew up in a family that loved literature. She and her sister and two brothers wrote sonnets together as children, and all four of them grew up to be writers. One brother, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, helped Christina get her first poems published in a London magazine.
Christina was home-schooled and lived with her mother her entire life. She was a deeply devout Protestant. She gave up chess because she was worried that she enjoyed winning too much. She broke off an engagement to the artist James Collison in 1848, after he joined the Catholic Church. Later, she fell in love with a man named Charles Cayley but wouldn't marry him because he wasn't religious enough. She stayed at home and read religious texts, and occasionally, in bursts of inspiration, wrote the poetry for which she is known. She's best known for her poem "Goblin Market" (1862), a dark fairy tale in which a girl is attacked by a pack of goblins after refusing to buy their fruit. "Remember," by Christina Rossetti, from The Complete Poems (Penguin). Remember Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. |
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