The poem “A Birthday” written by Christina Rossetti reflects the powerful feelings of a person when falling in love. Also it makes us visualize her passion, ecstasy, and love as an aesthetic experience. Besides, the author accomplishes this trough a masterful choice of words.
In the first stanza, we can see that is full of references to the natural world and simplicity of life in nature. We can also appreciate the uses of parallelism as in “My heart is like a singing bird” and “My heart is like an apple-tree” to put an emphasize on her passion, it also adds musicality. Besides, this two phrases show similes crating associations for love, hope and also symbols of a new life. The choice of words evokes many feeling through the entire stanza. In line one she uses words such as “singing bird” which transmits the happiness of the speaker experiences and in line five the word “rainbow” transmits exactly the same but adding joy and hope. What is more, in this stanza there is the use of two more words, these are “thickset fruit” that reflects fertility, abundance, color, life and energy, and the other word is “halcyon sea”, in the sixth line, which represents the blue sky, a metaphor and a visual image. In addition, the whole stanza evokes happiness and love.
In the second stanza, the writer refers to what is going to happen now that love appeared. Moreover, here is a change in language as it gets more elaborate, the author uses words such as “dais”, “silk”, “purple dyes”, “peacocks”, “gold and silver” that adds the importance of what she’s describing, and “fleurs-de-lys” because they all suggests royalty, power, luxury and riches wealthy. Finally we can see that this stanza is a combination of earthly power and spiritual power.
In conclusion, the poem is about someone who expresses her emotions of finding her true love and her happiness of discovering a new life. Furthermore, the author represents them by different choices of words but also, at the end we can understand why it is call “A Birthday” as at the penultimate line of the second stanza it says: “Because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me”. This means that the speaker is celebrating a new life now that she is in love.
