Uommibatto

When Dante Gabriel Rossetti acquired a wombat (circa 1869), his sister Christina was amongst the most enraptured Londoners in her response to the Antipodean creature. As usual with Christina, she immediately penned an Effusion, others would say an Ode, this time in Italian. All good odes open with an O. “O Uommibatto,” she exclaims, “Agil, giocondo, / Che ti sei fatto/ Irsuto e tondo!” Let’s unpack that. Her impression is spontaneous (D.G. himself said she was the more spontaneous poet), espying how the wombat is agile and carefree. One biographer, Mary Sandars (1930), translates ‘giocondo’ as frisky, which I suggest she’s used to rhyme with tricksy, however ‘giocondo’ comes closest to joyous, Betty Flowers’ word in the Penguin Complete Poems (2003). Fans of Leonardo da Vinci will notice the connection with his most famous portrait, and who is to say Christina does not have La Gioconda in mind upon meeting this mysterious and happy being? How you have grown hairy and round, is the gist of the next line, as one would but wonder who had never before seen such a creature. The addressee, Uommibatto, is a most curious coinage to anyone halfway familiar (like me) with Christina’s writings, strikingly using the word for man (uomo) in connection with bumping or beating (battere), conjuring a picture of boisterous liveliness. D.G.’s frontispiece to her extraordinary poem ‘Goblin Market’ features a wombat, amongst other creatures, while one of the goblins in the story is likened to a wombat. The main rhyme thread is giocondo-tondo-vagabondo-mondo-pondo, which is worth pondering when we notice how the second half of the poem shifts, via these rhymes, from lightness to heaviness, from initial delight at the vision glorious to the weighty meaning of the wombat’s very existence. Because Christina knows what they all know, this being, “hairy and round”, came from the other side of the world, down under. Sandars translates, “Pray run not from us/ A vagrant wild,/ Pray do not vanish”, expression of a fear of loss, even perhaps the death of the wombat far from home. “Deh non fuggire/ Qual vagabondo,/ Non disparire/ Fornado il mondo,” this last phrase “piercing the globe” thinks Sandars, while Flowers sees that Christina is talking about burrowing. For burrowing is, as every Australian knows, a basic characteristic of wombats, though the poet is not just thinking about digging. How do we imagine the world? “Pesa davvero/ D’un emisfero/ Non lieve il pondo,” she concludes, this creature embodying the reality of our hemispherical planet, grace and then gravity. The lines are almost untranslatable. Sandars goes, “the weight ‘tis clear/ Cannot be told.” Flowers too bumbles about, close to the gist, saying: “It’s really the weight of/ a hemisphere/ Not a light burden.” How do we imagine the world?

Foambow

 

Image: ‘The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen’ by J. M. W. Turner. 

Undated. Pencil, red ink, and watercolour on paper.

“Once as we descended a mountain side by side with the mountain torrent, my companion saw, while I missed seeing, a foambow.” A what?, I asked the page, a foambow? Clearly Christina Rossetti knows about foambows, even if she has never seen a foambow. The OED lists its first use in ‘Oenone’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1832: “And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens.” While Rossetti uses the word in the entry in her daily devotional ‘Time Flies’ (published 1885) for September 16, continuing: “In all my life I do not recollect to have seen one, except perhaps in artificial fountains; but such general omission seems a matter of course, and therefore simply a matter of indifference. That single natural foambow which I might have beheld and espied not, is the one to which may attach a tinge of regret; because, in a certain sense, it depended upon myself to look at it, yet I did not look.” So, this is about missing a marvel because we were looking in the opposite direction at the time. Her biographer Mary Frances Sandars (1930) is strangely chiding, saying “if Christina Rossetti’s mind were set on some poem which would add to the beautiful literature of the world, if even she were allowing sway to fancies and feelings which would lead to such a composition, it was foolish to blame herself for being unmindful of a foambow.” Which is not Rossetti’s point we know, because the poet increases the emotional meaning in the next tense sentence: “I might have done so, and I did not: such is the sting today in petty matters.” Rossetti is reflecting on how minor losses and mishaps have a way of returning to memory, sometimes years later without warning, causing pangs or stings. All of which leads, with a leap, to a typical Rossetti concluding refrain: “And what else will be the sting in matters all important at the last day?” Foambow is not that important! Indeed, the word itself appears in lines by subsequent Victorian poets – William Morris, Charles Kingsley and H. B. Cotterill, to wit “in the sun-lit mountain slopes, the pine-woods and the glittering walls of rock, and in the colours of the foam-bow suspended amidst the spray of the swift down-thundering cataract,” before evaporating without trace. Google Image delivers a mere half-page for foambow, pictures of girls’ glitter foam bow hair accessories and boys’ DIY bow-and-arrow kits with foam tips. Not a foambow in sight. Helpfully though, Sandars identifies where Rossetti missed the foambow on her continental tour with her mother and brother William: “At any rate she saw the Falls of Schaffhausen, of which William gives an enthusiastic description.” Christina may have missed the iris formed by sunlight upon foam or spray, as of a cataract, but she knew her Tennyson.

Rossetti

 

Reading Christina Rossetti widely for next month’s Poets and the Faith paper at St. Peter’s, I rediscover her ‘reading diary’ of 365 daily reflections, published in 1885 in London under the title ‘Time Flies’. Wondering what she has to say in this daily devotional about the coming week, I turn to her entry for July 22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, of whom she notes in her terse manner: “The date of her death is unknown.” 

Rossetti writes: “A record of this Saint is a record of love. She ministered to the Lord of her substance, she stood by the Cross, she sat over against the Sepulchre, she sought Christ in the empty grave, and found Him and was found of Him in the contiguous garden.” 

Contiguous here means the touching or adjoining garden, but also especially surely a place of meeting, where one meets another without touching. This is a place where death meets life. The relationship, listed by the poet with such rhythm and concision, is brought into stronger focus in the next sentence: “Yet this is the same Mary Magdalene out of whom aforetime He had cast seven devils.” 

Rossetti’s lifetime knowledge of Scripture is everywhere given voice in ‘Time Flies’, as in all her poetic output. Likewise, her invaluable talent for attending to the story, choosing salient details, making vital connections, and turning them into something deeper. As she continues: “Nevertheless, the golden cord of love we are contemplating did all along continue unbroken in its chief strand: for before she loved Him, He loved her.” Subtly Rossetti introduces the suggestion that we, the reader or listener, are sharing this example and possibility ourselves in a state of contemplation. 

“Thus love it was which brought Christ and that soul together, and bound them together first and last. Or rather, first and not last: for time must end in eternity, and eternity must end which never endeth, before the mutual love of Christ and His saints shall end.” 

Gifted with sensitive insight and language skills, Christina Rossetti here also demonstrates the experienced method of the homilist. She may move from the particular to the general, the here-and-now to the universal, even as she identifies the message of unconditional love, concluding: “To love first is God’s prerogative. But blessed be He Who humbles not His least saint by loving last.” 

[Reflections on Christina Rossetti for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, the 21^st of July 2024, in the pew notes at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey. Image: ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and their World’ an illustrated collection of writings by her brother William Michael Rossetti (The Folio Society, 1995) and ‘Time Flies’, by Christina Rossetti (first edition, SPCK, 1885).]