Rossetti+Reflection

= //Reflection // =

“In An Artist’s Studio” By Christina Rossetti is about a painter who paints the same girl over and over again. “ One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans.” In her first two lines Rossetti stresses that this girl is the same every time, no matter what pose she is in. She uses the word “selfsame” to emphasize how each face he paints is exactly identical to the next. Even her attire changes from painting to painting; “A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens (5-6),” but still, “The same one meaning, neither more nor less (8).” Not only do all the paintings show that same girl, but they show only how the painter imagines her to be and not the way she really is. “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream (14).” The line “Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright (13),” suggests that she has changed over time; she’s lost her hope, and possibly aged since then, but he still paints her the way he wants to see her. One of the most interesting lines is, “Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim (12),” because it could mean a couple different things. You could read it as him never seeing her sad or when she is tired from sitting there being painted all the time and never painting her this way. However, this line can also be read that she never got tired of waiting and she never showed she was sad, just continued to look at him with her “true kind eyes.” Also, this could express how she remained patient with him the entire time, waiting for him to see her as she really was and not how he dreamed her to be. She never got tired or irritated from waiting for this, and it never made her sad that he did not see her how she truly was. I also believe that these two loved each other. They could be lovers, or they could just admire each other from afar because the poem never really distinguishes, just hints that they cannot get enough of each other. The way he “feeds upon her face by day and night (9),” suggests that he is hungry for whatever he may see in her. He eagerly looks at her while he paints, as if she is his obsession, which is quite clear by the way he paints only her. In return, “she with true kind eyes looks back on him (10),” as if she also loves him. If her eyes were only “kind,” you might think that she was simply being polite. However, Rossetti uses the word “true” to describe her eyes which suggests that her gaze back is genuine and meaningful. I believe that she is not looking back because of manners but because she wants to. The first thing I did when I read this poem was pull out a sheet of paper and take notes on how certain lines made me feel and what I thought they meant. I spent a lot of time trying to see the poem from different aspects, and trying to read it the way others might. I have noticed since taking this class that the simplest lines in poems and even lyrics can mean so many different things to different people, even when you think there is only one obvious meaning. Once I had my own opinion and interpretation of the poem, I did some research and found some poem discussion boards to see how others read it. I did not focus too much on other’s opinions of the poem however because I wanted to show everyone else my perspective on the poem and let them make up their own minds about it. I believe that the most beautiful thing about poetry is the way everyone understands it differently. Next I looked up words that I was unfamiliar with to get a better understanding of the poem. In this poem, there were a lot of words in which I knew the meaning of, but meant something completely different in the context of the poem. For example, in the line “that mirror gave back all her loveliness (4),” I do not believe that there was a mirror in that room. The mirror was the portrait of herself that made her look just as lovely as she actually was. Another example is that the word “feeds” cannot be taken literally, but as him gazing at her as if he absolutely needed to. When I looked up Rossetti’s biography, I got a better understanding of who she was and was able to imagine how she saw this scenario play out. Rossetti was once engaged to a painter, and she herself sat for her brother’s paintings many times. When I learned this, I realized that she must know very well how a painter can paint something, not literally how it is, but how he portrays it to be. I liked that this project used technology to provide a better understanding of poems. Books and essays can get very tedious when it comes to essays, and I feel that the use of technology was refreshing and made the entire project more new and exciting than the traditional way of reading and writing about poetry. When you are interested in or excited about something, you are more likely to strive to learn more about it, and instead of simply reading, memorizing, and reciting the meaning of a poem, you are learning about it and making up your own mind about it, and are more likely to remember it. The requirements for the project were not overly difficult or stressful and instead were purely helpful in understanding the poem to its fullest. I did not have difficulty answering any of the questions about my poem and I felt that everything that I had to answer made me understand it better. My favorite thing about making a website about my poem was not that it was fun and constructive all at once or that it helped me to understand my poem better. It is that I have created a way for others to learn about my poem. All my classmates can go onto my wiki and read my poem, and click different links for definitions and information about the writer and the poem. So not only have I broken down different parts of a poem for my own understanding, I have made it easier to share with someone else. My hope is that anyone who reads my wiki will not see a poem, they will see a meaning to a poem, possibly even a different meaning that mine, and they will love the poem as much as I do now that I have deciphered a personal meaning to it.



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