Shnaidruk Anastasia
Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University named after Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky
Scientific Supervisor: Ph.D. Malashchuk-Vyshnevska N.V.
COMPOSITION OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S NURSERY RHYME BOOK
Abstract. ‘Sing-Song’ written by K. Rossetti is famous for its unusual composition when all of the poems are composed in a coherent text. The compositional compilation gives the opportunity to the reader to trace the child’s life, starting with his infancy. The arrangement of the lines in verses provide a syntax in which the poet grounds her exploration of the emotive and cognitive possibilities facilitated by rhyme and rhythm.
Keywords: compositional compilation, nursery rhymes, rhythm.
Text of the article
‘Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book’ [1] was published by Christina Rossetti in 1872. The compositional compilation gives the opportunity to the reader to trace the child’s life, starting with his infancy. And at the same time, the composition gives the impression that it is one day from the life of the child. Christina Rossetti places poetry so that we see this day (which is actually years invested) from awakening to falling asleep.
As the title suggests, ‘Sing-Song’ aspires to the condition of music. Appropriately, the volume opens with a fugue containing poems about the newly born child and the newly born day.
Owing to its status as children’s verse, Sing-Song has rarely received the critical attention that it deserves. Very often people consider it to be the usual collection of poems but not a unified poetic sequence as it really is. Certainly, Rossetti’s playful experiments in form and language allow readers to experience ‘Sing-Song’ as a coherent text, but her sequential arrangement of lyrics informs this experience with meaning. Unfolding a narrative from cradle to grave, from winter to fall, from sunrise to sunset, ‘Sing-Song’ invites readers to understand life as an ordered totality [2].
‘Sing-Song’ begins and ends with the sleeping child in bed. In the interval Rossetti guides the reader through three different, but simultaneous, temporal sequences. Taken together, these three synchronic movements divide into three successive phases, each slightly more comprehensive than the last. Grouping her 121 lyrics within roughly twelve decades, Rossetti uses clock and calendar to posit progress within circularity. In the first three decades she treats preparations and beginnings: birth and babyhood, dawn and morning, winter and spring. In the next four decades she focuses on growth: childhood, day, summer. In the final five decades she dramatizes a ripening into maturity: adulthood, dusk, autumn. In the last of these five decades she turns the sequence back to beginnings and thus underpins her asymmetrical arrangement with a symmetrical design. Doubling temporal on textual experience, these movements provide a syntax in which the poet grounds her exploration of the endless emotive and cognitive possibilities facilitated by rhyme and rhythm, repetition and apposition, sound and silence.
For all the childish charm of single rhymes, ‘Sing-Song’ makes rigorous demands on readers to create meaning from the formal, thematic, and structural constituents of the volume as a whole [2].
References
- Rossetti, Christina. Sins-Song. – К: Видавничий дім «Перископ», 2008. – 244 с.
- Smulders, Sharon. Sound, Sense, and Structure in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song. Johns Hopkins University Press. – 1994. Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/246291/pdf