It’s easy to think of Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) as a caricature of her own extremes: morbid and (as other of her poems we have run in the Sun suggest) maybe a little hysterical, certainly strange. Incongruously, given her best-known works, the poet described her own nature as “calm and sedate.” Where Wordsworth speaks of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” Rossetti — the baby of a famously intellectual family, her adult life spent first as companion to her invalid father, then as a semi-invalid herself — seems able to generate emotion from a place of self-control. Even in sentimental favorites like “In the Bleak Midwinter,” feeling never drowns out acute insight.

Some of Rossetti’s less-famous poems — today’s Poem of the Day, for example — especially show this turn of mind. “Spring,” with its loosely rhymed and metered stanzas, offers an arc of insight that observes the flowering of life out of death, in a process rather like the generation of feeling from calm. Lingering over its particulars — “seeds and roots and stones of fruits” —  the poem celebrates the freshness of the season, while meditating on the winter which has “given birth” to all this life. That life, of course, will in its own turn wither and die, but only to gestate another spring. 

Spring 
by Christina Rossetti 
 
Frost-locked all the winter, 
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits, 
What shall make their sap ascend 
That they may put forth shoots? 
Tips of tender green, 
Leaf, or blade, or sheath; 
Telling of the hidden life 
That breaks forth underneath, 
Life nursed in its grave by Death. 
 
Blows the thaw-wind pleasantly, 
Drips the soaking rain, 
By fits looks down the waking sun: 
Young grass springs on the plain; 
Young leaves clothe early hedgerow trees; 
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits, 
Swollen with sap, put forth their shoots; 
Curled-headed ferns sprout in the lane; 
Birds sing and pair again. 
 
There is no time like Spring, 
When life’s alive in everything, 
Before new nestlings sing, 
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back 
Along the trackless track, —
God guides their wing, 
He spreads their table that they nothing lack, —
Before the daisy grows a common flower, 
Before the sun has power 
To scorch the world up in his noontide hour. 
 
There is no time like Spring, 
Like Spring that passes by; 
There is no life like Spring-life born to die, — 
Piercing the sod, 
Clothing the uncouth clod, 
Hatched in the nest, 
Fledged on the windy bough, 
Strong on the wing: 
There is no time like Spring that passes by, 
Now newly born, and now 
Hastening to die. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.