SOURCE: "Sequence and Meaning in Christina Rossetti's Verses (1893)," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn, 1979, pp. 259-64.

In the following essay, Kent arques that Rossetti's devotional verses must be read as a whole, as the poet intended, in order to fully comprehend their structure and meaning.

Thanks to such critics as Robillard, Fredeman, and Baker, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life is no longer thought to lack "systematic arrangement" or a "principle of grouping," as even a sympathetic estimation had earlier asserted. The stubborn ghost of biographical criticism has been successfully exorcized, and the poet's conscious artistry in his sonnet sequence rediscovered and more fully appreciated. The devotional poetry of Christina Rossetti has, unfortunately, never benefited from any comparable redemption. If her religious poems are not completely ignored by today's readers, they are probably regarded with the same kind of patronizing condescension that Dorothy Stuart voiced fifty years...