Twice
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This poem could be compared with “Maude Clare”
What is at issue here is this notion of betrayed lovers or betrayed
expectations of love and the inability to obtain fulfilment.
As we have seen, Rossetti often stresses ideal love's distance from reality by
describing the experience of love with images of mutability.
Seasonal images, images of planting and harvesting, images of ripeness and
over - ripeness, all appear as natural analogues (where things are similar) to
naturally impelled passions, whether these are clearly erotic or more vague
and ethereal.
Her characters' predictable failures enduringly to fulfil passion often result
in the renunciation not only of specific disappointed love relationships but
also of any belief at all in attainable earthly ideals of love.
We find her speakers turning away from nature and toward an internal
space that can be filled with attainable spiritual ideals of love (God).
This complete movement is the subject of her lyric,"Twice," a poem that
exemplifies the transition, common to many of Rossetti's poems, from the
pursuit of Eros to its renunciation in favour of agape (love of God).
"Twice" is spoken by a courageous woman who, with some reluctance, has
made overtures to the man she loves.
Her lover's response has shattered her faith in the value of erotic love:
You took my heart in your hand
With a friendly smile,
With a critical eye you scanned,
Then set it down,
And said: It is still unripe,
Better wait awhile;
Wait while the skylarks pipe,
Till the corn grows brown.
[Poems, 1:125]
She cannot, however, wait till harvest time.
Indeed, this experience has altogether destroyed her capacity to pursue
earthly passion.
Her lover "set [her heart] down" and "it broke." As a result,
... I have not often smiled
Since then, nor questioned since,
Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing bird.[123/124]
"Twice" operates at a level of cultural criticism which is similar to “Maude
Clare.”
The attack, implicit in its four brief stanzas, is upon the powerlessness of
women in a rigid patriarchal society.
The man's words are spoken with absolute and final authority.
But the poem subverts the premises underlying that authority by appealing
to a higher one who can be imaginatively idealized as a worthy judge and
lover.
He can be constructed in the image of a genuinely sympathetic and
receptive — that is, an ironically non-sexist being.
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Along with the sanctions of love in approved social forms and contexts, the
speaker here indignantly and impatiently renounces the natural world, and,
now penitent for her presumptuous erotic quest, she approaches God:
I take my heart in my hand,
O my God, O my God,
My broken heart in my hand:
Thou hast seen, judge Thou.
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God;
Now let Thy judgment stand —
Yea, judge me now.
This contemned of a man,
This marred one heedless day,
This heart take Thou to scan
Both within and without:
Refine with fire its gold,
Purge Thou its dross away —
Yea hold it in Thy hold,
Whence none can pluck it out.
[Poems, 1:125]
She thus acknowledges the uncertainty of Eros, but also, aware that her
quest for earthly love was misguided, she acknowledges her need to be
chastened and "purged" in order to become worthy of God’s superior love.
Alienated from the arbitrary and insensitive values of her patriarchal
society, the speaker in "Twice," like the persona of "A Birthday" finds herself
removed from the natural world as well.
She perceives her heart, finally, as an artefact that can be "refined with
fire" and perfected only when it is once out of nature, projected wholly
either into the world of art or the realm of the ideal.
Such is the case in all of Christina Rossetti's poems whose focus is not on the
possibility of fulfilling earthly love, or upon betrayal in love, but rather
upon the apparently inevitable culmination of all compulsive amatory
passions — renunciation.
In other words by renouncing all earthly passions she can succeed in finding
a higher love.
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