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Christina Rossetti, "A Birthday," 1862
This is not a novel. It is a poem, and it is a woman speaking at the exact moment her love arrived.
Christina Rossetti published it in 1862. She did not tell us who came. She did not tell us how long she had been waiting or what the waiting cost her.
She speaks at the moment of arrival, and everything she says is an image of fullness. Her heart is a bird in a nest near water. Her heart is a tree so loaded with fruit the branches bend. Her heart is gladder than all these, she says, because her love is come to her.
And then she asks for more.
“Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.”
"Birthday." Not return. Not reunion. Not anniversary. Birthday.
As if everything before this moment was not yet her life.
I need you to sit with that.
She is not saying the years before were wasted. She is not saying they were dark or wrong. She is saying that what arrived today is so large it renamed everything. The life before it was the life before being born.
You have been told, carefully, by people who thought they were helping, that after a certain point you should stop expecting. Scale it down. Be realistic. "At your age" is the phrase, and it comes with a reasonable smile, and it is meant to be a kindness.
This poem does not know the word realistic.
She asks for a throne. She asks for peacocks with a hundred eyes. She asks for silk and carvings of doves. She is not embarrassed. She is not proportionate. Something came to her and her response is: build me a room large enough to hold what I am feeling.
That is what arrival sounds like when a woman has not been talked out of wanting it.
And look at her verbs. "Raise me." "Hang it." "Carve it." "Work it." She is not daydreaming. She is issuing instructions. She is telling the world to catch up with what just happened inside her chest.
I do not believe any of us were built for proportion. I believe the want was always the right size and the only lie we swallowed was that it should be smaller by now.
My love is come to me. Not "has come." Is come. Still in the act of arriving. Still not finished. That is two letters' difference and it changes everything, because it means the arrival is not a moment that happened and ended. It is still happening. It is happening now.
Underneath it I wrote
I have not been waiting too long. I have been building a room large enough.
Today. Copy the second stanza by hand. All of it, including the pomegranates and the peacocks and the fleurs-de-lys. Then underneath, write one sentence about what you are going to ask for when it arrives. Not if. When.
What I wrote that year
Underneath Rossetti's last line, in March of the year I could not write, I wrote "not yet." Two words. I did not know if I meant the poem had not finished arriving or I had not. I think now it was both.
