SOURCE: "Simple Surfaces: Christina Rossetti's Work for Children," in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent, Cornell, 1987, pp. 208-30.

In the following essay, McGillis analyzes Rossetti's for children, arguing that these works offer lessons and insights for adults as well as children.

In almost everything Christina Rossetti wrote for young readers we hear an authorial voice strong in ambiguity, whispering secrets beneath what Jerome J. McGann calls "those deceptively simple poetic surfaces" [Jerome J. McGann, "Christina Rossetti's Poems: A New Edition and a Revaluation," Victorian Studies 23 (1980)]. As we allow our minds to play upon the surfaces, what appears straightforward becomes richly complex, so much so that meaning often becomes of doubtful certainty and of less importance than the simple surfaces themselves. We look less for meaning in this work than for the subtleties of form and language. In other words, Rossetti's work for children treats...