A woman in her late twenties moved her own birthday

In November of 1857, a woman in London in her late twenties sat down and wrote a poem of sixteen lines. Her name was Christina Rossetti, and she was not married.

She had already ended one engagement, years before. Later she would turn down another man, and she would never marry at all.

Nobody knows who this poem was written for. People have argued about it for well over a century, and nobody has settled it.

What we do know is what a woman in her position was expected to sound like. Grateful, modest, and quietly resigned to whatever had not come.

She wrote the opposite. She wrote as though the most important day of her life had not happened yet, and had just this minute arrived.

She published it in 1861, in Macmillan's Magazine. The following year, it appeared in her first commercially published collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems.

So you are about to. I envy you.

The birthday of my life. Read that again, slowly, the way you would read a letter you were not meant to open.

She does not mean the day she was born. Nobody asked her about that one.

She is saying a life can have a second birthday, and it falls on the day love walks in. Everything before it was the hallway.

Now listen to me. We are handed one birthday and told to count forward from it, and every year the number climbs and somebody tells us what we are still allowed to want.

She threw that out. In two lines, a woman nobody was going to marry moved her own birthday to the day her heart was answered.

Look at what she asks for. Not a ring and not a promise, but a dais of silk, peacocks with a hundred eyes, silver fleurs-de-lys, the whole room built for the arrival like a queen is expected.

And she is the one giving the orders. Raise me, hang it, carve it, work it, four commands in a row and not one please.

Do not skim the first stanza either. She tries a bird, a tree bent with fruit, a shell on a calm sea, and then admits her heart is gladder than every one of them.

She ran out of comparisons. Joy used up her words, and she put that on the page instead of pretending otherwise.

Look where she put the reason. Both stanzas end on the same six words, my love is come to me, as if she could not stop saying it.

We are taught to keep a want like that quiet. To mention it lightly, if at all, and never to decorate for it.

She decorated. She ordered gold grapes for a guest before anyone else in the world knew he existed.

The want you carry, the one you do not say out loud, has no idea what number is on your cake. It never did.

The birthday of your life is not behind you. It has simply not been scheduled.

This is sixteen lines, it is free, and it has been waiting for you since 1862.

Today. Copy the second stanza by hand, all eight lines, every silk and every grape. Take your time over the list, because she did. Then underneath it, write one line of your own that begins with the words "Raise me," and ask for one thing, as extravagantly as she did. Nobody reads it but you.

In March of the year I could not write, I copied a paragraph of North and South in pencil, because I could not find a pen that worked. Underneath it I put two words. "Tomorrow, then."

I do not know what I meant by it. I think I was making an appointment with myself.

The next evening I copied another paragraph and wrote the same two words underneath. I did it for eleven evenings in a row.

The pencil has gone grey and soft now. I can still read every one of them.