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Daughter of Eve

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It’s winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow:
Stripp’d bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

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Rossetti was born in London and educated at home by her mother. In the 1840s her family was stricken with severe financial difficulties due to the deterioration of her father’s physical and mental health. When she was 14, Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown. At least one biographer has suggested that this, combined with internal evidence within her poetry, suggests she may have been a victim of sexual abuse, possibly at the hands of her father.

Her breakdown was followed by bouts of depression and related illness. During this period she, her mother, and her sister became seriously interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement that was part of the Church of England. This religious devotion played a major role in Rossetti’s personal life: in her late teens she became engaged to the painter James Collinson but this ended because he reverted to Catholicism; later she became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley but did not marry him, also for religious reason

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti

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