‘A birthday’ by Christina Rossetti was written to express her emotions of happiness and new life after finding her true love.
The title ‘A birthday’ is ambiguous; she does this deliberately to mislead the reader and introduce a new idea to the mean of having a birthday. At first sighting of the title, readers would assume that the poem is based on someone celebrating their birthday; however the actual meaning behind it is that she feels reborn and happy after finding the love of her life. By hiding its message Rossetti was able to create suspense for the reader and only by reading the poem were the readers able to understand the real meaning of the title.
The poem is split into two stanzas, the first talks about how the relationship effects her and her emotions and the second talks about what is going to happen now that her love has come to her.
The poem splits after 8 lines because she wanted readers to wait for a long time before she talks about her love coming to her. She did this intentionally because she wanted readers to visualize what it felt like for her to wait and wanted to remind them that she also had to wait for a very long time for her love to come.
During the Victorian era many writers like Rossetti were forbidden to include any adultery in their writing therefore Rossetti used euphemism to implicate her feelings. In the first stanza, Rossetti expresses happiness by comparing her love to a number of bright and colorful things in nature that are full of life.
Rossetti opens ‘A birthday’ in lines one and two with the comparison of her heart with a ‘singing bird.’ This first analogy suggests pure happiness and energy because the voice of a bird that uses energy to sing is usually a joyful sound with which one can feel a sense of happiness. When she compares herself to a ‘watered shoot’, which is also known as a sprout from a plant, she is implying that she feels as if she were just born.
In line three and four she compares her heart to an ‘apple...