As we move through the rounds of the year, reading poetry, we are inescapably accompanied by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894). Not that we want to escape her, mind you, but at every turn of the season, there she is with a poem appropriate to the time. Regular Poem of the Day readers will have already noticed that one might compose a Book of Days entirely of Christina Rossetti poems, celebrating Christmas, keeping winter secrets, meditating with joy on the coming of spring. Readers will have seen, too, her capacity for lyric intensity, the opening of the heart’s floodgates as a kind of self-giving, in love, to both some imagined human subject and to the act of writing itself.

Today finds us reading another seasonal Rossetti poem, to mark the end of summer. This past Wednesday, the Sun ran Robert Hillyer’s comic end-of-summer poem, “Moo!,” told in the voice of a cow. Christina Rossetti’s dirge, however, isn’t simply, or even primarily, a notice of “summer dying.” It is a heart’s lament for the out-of-jointness of human time, the arc from birth to death, which runs, all too unfairly, counter to the seasons. Ultimately, the poem, in two sestets composed of diminishing couplets in tetrameter, trimeter, and dimeter, laments some particular human subject whose life has kept its own seasons, out of time with time.