‘Twice’ by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

I took my heart in my hand
    (O my love, O my love),
I said: Let me fall or stand,
    Let me live or die,
But this once hear me speak
    (O my love, O my love)—
Yet a woman's words are weak;
You should speak, not I.   8

You took my heart in your hand
    With a friendly smile,
With a critical eye you scann'd,
    Then set it down,
And said, 'It is still unripe,
    Better wait awhile;
Wait while the skylarks pipe,
Till the corn grows brown.'  16

As you set it down it broke—
    Broke, but I did not wince;
I smiled at the speech you spoke,
    At your judgement I heard:
But I have not often smiled
    Since then, nor question'd since,
Nor cared for cornflowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing bird.  24

I take my heart in my hand,
    O my God, O my God,
My broken heart in my hand:
    Thou hast seen, judge Thou.
My hope was written on sand,
    O my God, O my God:
Now let thy judgement stand—
Yea, judge me now.   32

This contemn'd of a man,
    This marr'd one heedless day,
This heart take thou to scan
    Both within and without:
Refine with fire its gold,
    Purge Thou its dross away—
Yea, hold it in Thy hold,
Whence none can pluck it out.  40

I take my heart in my hand—
    I shall not die, but live—
Before Thy face I stand;
    I, for Thou callest such:
All that I have I bring,
    All that I am I give,
Smile Thou and I shall sing,
But shall not question much.  48

Considering the Poem

Christina Rossetti’s poem contrasts human judgement with God’s judgement and its first three verses are a stark contrast to the final three verses. Really, you could say it was an exercise in antithesis (as the title of the poem suggests) in both its content and its form.

But the antitheses and contrasts are held together by Christina Rossetti’s word-craft: she repeats words from the first part of the poem in its second half; she uses key words and phrases over and over again to relate one part of the verse with another; she adopts a personal, confessional voice throughout and, most importantly, she never loses concentration on the poem’s subjects – trust, vulnerability in close relationships, and judgement.

The first three verses, the first formal part of the antithesis on which the poem is built, use a past-tense narrative form – ‘I took my heart in my hand’ – to embody Rossetti’s feelings and to establish the themes in our minds.

The story is interrupted, however, before it has really begun, by a crying out, marked off in parenthesis as if unspoken or whispered as an aside (2) to an unnamed hearer. The speaker pleads for an answer from the hearer, an answer which will allow her to stand or fall, to survive or to collapse and die away (3-4). We don’t yet know what the question needing an answer is, though that becomes clear in the following verses. She wants to say something herself and, when the attempt to speak is, again, immediately overwhelmed by her own passionate outburst – repeated from the second line (6) – she gives way to the ‘You’ (8) to whom she speaks. She defers on the grounds of her sex so we now assume that the interlocutor is a male lover.

Echoing the first line of the poem, the opening line of the second verse takes the story one step on. We are told that the man was courteous in his manner; he viewed her heart, assessed its readiness, and ‘set it down’ – a gentle action. His judgement, expressed in rural images from the common stock of Victorian language (13-16), is that her heart is unready – for what we don’t know exactly but can infer, given the situation, that it involves a more formal continuation of the relationship, perhaps marriage, but, whatever is involved, the rejection breaks the offered heart. The poet sustains this narrative climax as long as possible by repeating of the key word (17-18), by the dramatic effort of self-control and by repeating of nature imagery just used by the man but this time turned to dramatize her alienation from the natural world (22-24).

The themes of judgement, vulnerability and trust have been firmly established by the story so now the story can stop and the second, contrasting part of the poem begin.

The fourth verse starts with the same image of open-palmed vulnerability as the first, except for the change from the past tense of the story to the present tense. What is being described is now immediate and happening at the same time as the words of the poem are being spoken. The man has gone and, while the relationship of supplicant to superior carries over from the encounter in the first three verses, the interlocutor is now God.

The ecstatic tone of the opening verses is paralleled in the exclamation here (26, 30). This time, though, not as an aside in brackets but, perhaps reflecting the trust she has in God, in open statement. Her pleas now are for God’s, not a man’s, judgement. They are expressed with a similar intensity but they have a trusting, personal intimacy that was missing in the narrative in the first three verses of the romantic relationship. The increased vulnerability that goes with increased intimacy might suggest greater danger but in the poem the danger is now balanced by an equal and opposite increase in trust.

With this confidence, she pleads to God to judge her and her ‘broken’ (27) heart – the words ‘judge’ or ‘judgement’ appear three times in the fourth verse – and to renew this ‘marr’d’ (34) heart by a fierce purging (36-40) of the residue of worldly disappointments and accidents of fate so that only its ‘gold’ (36), the permanent metal, remains. She has found a chance for the true judgement that she desired and so, for the fourth and final time, at the start of the last verse, she takes her heart in her hand (41), proffering it for judgement.

At the very beginning of the poem, she had asked for the chance to be tested and understood so that she could ‘fall or stand’ (3). How telling it is, then, that she is able now to say confidently to her God that ‘Before Thy face I stand’ (43); she stands now, a confident person, known but neither misjudged, nor misunderstood.

Rossetti has successfully taken us through a process of thought and feeling with a careful and highly controlled use of narration, lyricism and dramatic interaction. At the end of this process, we no longer see a passive victim of judgement but someone witty and confident enough to suggest to God (again echoing an earlier line [22]) that, in her future, she might disagree about some judgements that are made about her, adding with a final flick of humour, but, well, ‘not … much’!