christina rossetti goblin market and other poems

She is playful and coy suggesting that she may ‘some day’ be willing to tell all, but ‘not today’, rather unusually citing the cold weather as the reason. Winter: My Secret opens with the line ‘I tell my secret? No indeed, not I’, which means that she is responding to an undisclosed listener who has asked her to reveal or divulge her secret. The speaker, however, refuses to do so: she claims that the day is too cold for her to reveal her secret, and rebuffs the listener playfully but a little impatiently. The first stanza of the poem, Winter: My Secret by Christina Rossetti, brings to us its premise: the speaker gets herself/himself engaged in a form of dialogue with her listener and, though we only hear the speaker’s side of this dialogue, we can assume that the listener is begging the speaker, rather persistently, to divulge a particular secret. Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. The rhyme scheme is largely constructed of rhyming couplets or triplets, which increase the pace at which the poem is read and adds to a sense of passion and playfulness.īut not today it froze, and blows and snows, The poem is not formally structured, consists of four stanzas of varying length and irregular rhyming patterns. While the gender of the speaker is not clear, some believe it to be a woman, citing as proof the references to a ‘shawl’ and a ‘veil,’ which are items of clothing typically associated with women.

The speaker playfully addresses an unknown listener, engaging him or her in dialogue as she refuses to reveal a closely-guarded secret, despite the listener’s obvious pleading. The tone of Winter: My Secret is, without a doubt coy and teasing in nature. Modern readers can only guess at what she is hiding!

While there are many interpretations and speculations associated with this poem, there exists no definitive explanation of the secret the speaker is so closely guarding.

The poem, Winter: My Secret by Christina Rossetti, has confounded contemporary and modern critics as well as readers, as there is no apparent secret to which the poem can be related, and Rossetti’s verse resists revealing its subject. The most typical thing about this poem is Rossetti’s innovative experimentation with form, imagery, and metaphors, a trait for which she is known.

This collection largely consisted of non- devotional poetry and differs from the more religious verses on which Rossetti concentrated in her later publications. Winter: My Secret was published in Rossetti’s first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems.

Christina rossetti goblin market and other poems