Being unsituated: Christina Rossetti's prepositions

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay will attend to Rossetti’s poetics of place and focus on poems from different periods in her writing life, including “Italia, Io Ti Saluto!” (1865), “By the Sea”, “At Home”, “After Death”, “Dream-Land” (1849), and “Somewhere or Other” (1866). Drawing on the insights of spatial criticism, I will consider not only the figuration of place but also the experience of place and the unplaceable that they present. Following on from Heather Dubrow’s work on deictics in her study of Renaissance Lyric, I propose that attention to Rossetti’s language of location, and especially to her prepositions, can help to explain the haunting sense of place expressed in her poems. I argue that a sense of dislocation was, for Rossetti, not only a psycho-spiritual condition, but also an imaginative and poetic resource.