Why not then begin?

the feast of Christina Rossetti, the gifts of a sustained gaze, open workshops, and more

Apr 30, 2025

I. From the Desk of Lauren Winner

Amy sent me a photograph of a peony, and I replied that she should write the peony the way Christina Rossetti did and she wrote:

How’s this: I have two peony bushes— one planted long before I was here, and one only put in the ground a year or two ago. I’ve noticed that the older, more established plant blooms earlier in the spring than the younger one does (this is true of many plants, not only peonies). Today, the older plant has blossomed, while the younger plant is still in bud. So too those who have sojourned longer in the soils of God and God’s Word are quicker to bear forth the beauty of His promises.

It was, in fact, Sunday when Amy and I had that exchange, this past Sunday, when the Church of England observed Rossetti’s feast day. The collect appointed to be prayed in her honor names her as one whom God “inspired…to express the mystery of the Incarnation through…poems,” and she did, of course, write poems, and two of them became Christmas hymns — that is to say, when the church sings with most focus the Incarnation, we are sometimes singing Rossetti: “In the Bleak Midwinter” was first a Rossetti poem, as was “Love Came Down at Christmas.”

*Poems* by Christina Rossetti with illustrations by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie. 1910

But I am more drawn to Rossetti’s prose than to her poetry — and to the books in which she blends poetry and prose, or in which she blends prose and prayer (are the prayers poetry? prose? in their insistence on thinking in allusion and figure, they veer, at least, toward the former).

Time Flies is the book of Rossetti’s I’ve read the closest, the longest. The book is overtly a devotional guide, the page-a-day kind that emerged in the nineteenth century, as Christians in England and America reckoned with the ways the Industrial Revolution and all its clocks changed people’s experience of time.1

On some days, Rossetti ruminates the life of a saint; on others, she considers a seemingly quotidian episode in her own life, often her encounter with a bird or an insect or an artifact of human hands, finding in the episode some insight about how our desires go wrong, or about the vexations of being a finite creature who’s yet beckoned by eternity.

The book is little read today, perhaps because Rossetti sounds so moralistic. Because so many of the short daily entries end with a pointed rhetorical question or a decided assertion: The devil whom St. Dunstan foiled will end by foiling us. Or: what becomes of the wayfarer who strolls along not on the alert in any sphere? These are not the oblique, underdetermined caesurae of our era.

But I find myself more and more an admirer of her artistry. I first encountered Time Flies as a reader. This year — for the second time — I’m trying to encounter the book also as a writer — I’m trying, that is, to daily write a response to Rossetti’s rumination du jour. Perhaps if I try this over three or four years, I might end up with a complete batch of 366 devotional replies.

On July 17, she gives us the story of a wild strawberry:

To this hour I remember a certain wild strawberry growing on a hedgerow bank, watched day by day while it ripened by a little girl and by my yet younger self.
My elder instructed me not to pluck it prematurely, and I complied.
I do not know which of us was to have had it at last, or whether we were to have halved it. As it was we watched, and as it turned out we watched in vain: for a snail, or some such marauder, must have forestalled us at a happy moment. One fatal day we found it half-eaten, and good for nothing.
Thus then we had watched in vain: or was it altogether in vain? On a very lowly level we had obeyed a counsel of prudence, and had practised self-restraint.
And shall the baulked watches of after-life prove in vain? "Let patience have her perfect work."

I, too, have strawberries growing on the bank in front of my house — but I don’t stay still long enough to receive a parable from them. That’s one reason these devotional vignettes are not so easy to write. You may believe—as Rossetti did; as I, under her tutelage, am coming to see—that “any good creature of God may convey a message” (that’s from March 31’s rumination on some Scottish jackdaws) or that “All creation would teach us spiritual lessons” (from April 4’s reflection on an encounter the infant Ambrose had with a swarm of bees). But you have to pause and look at the jackdaws, the strawberries, long enough for them to disclose a parable, and I rarely do.

The July 17 episode seems to tie up neatly with that quotation from James, but July 18 reveals the lesson in patience to be the first octet of a sonnet. The second stanza turns our attention somewhere else:

July 18.

"Half-eaten and good for nothing," said I of the strawberry. I need not have expressed myself with such sweeping contempt.
Some snail may have been glad to finish up that wreck. Some children might not have disdained the final bite.
Yet to confine my reflections to snails and their peers: why should not they have a share in strawberries?
Man is very apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings: true, he is "much better than they," yet have they also their assigned province and their guaranteed dues.

In the first half of the strawberry diptych, Rossetti writes a piece of fruit the way she often writes a plant, an animal — as the bearer of instruction, even revelation. But as Rossetti scholar Todd O. Williams notes, “Rossetti shifts her perspective to that of the snail,” and in wondering “why should not they have a share in strawberries?”, Rossetti unsettles the “anthropocentric world view” latent in her habit of receiving instruction from plants and animals, a habit that can seem to imply that the strawberries’ and jackdaws’ relationship with God is finally for us. It’s not, as July 18 shows. The snail didn’t eat the strawberry chiefly to teach two little girls—or, rather, one of the girls’ later, reflective selves—something about patience and prudence and the hereafter. The snail ate the strawberry because God provides for the snail.

The two essays’ sustained gaze on the strawberry — on the imagined encounter between the strawberry and the snail — suggests a certain inexhaustibility. I admire the essays’ tripled looking — the first day gives a child’s view of the situation (“watched day by day while it ripened by … my…younger self”) and an adult’s later view (“was it altogether in vain?”), and then the strawberry appears yet again, on day two, as a wholly different kind of thing, rethought once more. Perhaps what’s most satisfying about these essays as a piece of writing is Rossetti’s refusal to erase the first two sightings — rather than leave behind her earlier depictions of the berry, she overlays, layers, and refigures. She looks again, and allows the reader to look again, too. The child and the adult at first see the strawberry for their potential delight or instruction. Finally, we are shown the strawberry in a world that has nothing to do with us.

One thinks of Auden, ending his meditation on the fall of Rome thus:

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Once, in Time Flies, Rossetti writes about writing. It’s January 27th.

“Nemico del bene e il meglio." (Better is foe to well).
Much good work has been hindered by such an anxiety to do better as deters one from promptly doing one's best.
Acquiescence in remediable shortcoming degrades: resignation to unavoidable shortcoming ennobles.
When we so set our hearts on doing well that practically we do nothing, we are paralysed not by humility but by pride. If in such a temper we succeeded in making our light to shine, it would shine not in glorification of our Heavenly Father but of ourselves.
Suppose our duty of the moment is to write: why do we not write? — Because we cannot summon up anything original, or striking, or picturesque, or eloquent, or brilliant.
But is a subject set before us? — It is.
Is it true? — It is.
Do we understand it? — Up to a certain point we do.
Is it worthy of meditation? — Yes, and prayerfully.
Is it worthy of exposition? — Yes, indeed.
Why then not begin? —
"From pride and vain glory, Good Lord, deliver us."

So — again, the heavy moral gloss at the end; perhaps Rossetti would object to my saying she’s written about writing and insist that writing is merely the occasion for writing about pride. But she’s also writing about writing, and one imagines she is, perhaps, writing to herself.

She’s also writing to me. Since January 1, I have fallen away at least three times from my stated aspiration to daily write a reply to Rossetti. And then I despair and tell myself, as I have at least twice a month for the last 25 years, that I am not a real writer because real writers have discipline, &c., &c.

But: “Nemico del bene e il meglio.”

Suppose our duty of the moment is to write: why do we not write? — Because we cannot summon up anything original, or striking, or brilliant.