Shut Out by Christina Georgina Rossetti
Shut out of a garden once possessed, the speaker asks its silent spirit guardian for buds or a twig, but the spirit builds a wall that blocks even the view. Alone and weeping, the speaker finds nearby violets and a lark’s nest less dear than the lost garden.
By Christina Georgina Rossetti · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Melancholic Poetry · 293 words
First lines
The door was shut. I looked between / Its iron bars; and saw it lie, / My garden, mine, beneath the sky, / Pied with all flowers bedewed and green:
From bough to bough the song-birds crossed, / From flower to flower the moths and bees; / With all its nests and stately trees / It had been mine, and it was lost.
A shadowless spirit kept the gate, / Blank and unchanging like the grave. / I peering through said: "Let me have / Some buds to cheer my outcast state."
He answered not. "Or give me, then, / But one small twig from shrub or tree; / And bid my home remember me / Until I come to it again."
Genres
- Lyric Poetry — Seven rhymed quatrains give the speaker’s first-person account of exclusion, pleading, and grief.
- Melancholic Poetry — The speaker weeps over the inaccessible garden and finds the nearby flowers and nesting lark insufficient consolation.
Tags
gardens · exclusion · loss · longing · solitude
What this Textopian page supports
Shut Out is listed on Textopian as a poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti, dated Date unknown.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Christina Georgina Rossetti
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Melancholic Poetry
- Length: 293 words
- Structure: 1 section, 7 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)
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- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
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