Who Shall Deliver Me?

Christina Rossetti · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages carrying one poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti complete, from her Poems of 1876, with a footnote pointing to Romans vii, 24 as the source of its title.

The poem is built on a single image repeated and turned. The speaker asks God for strength to bear herself, calling that the heaviest weight of all and an inalienable weight of care — since all other burdens are outside herself and can be shut out. She locks her door and bars them out, the turmoil and tedium and gadding about; then locks her door upon herself, and asks the question the poem exists for: who shall wall self from myself, most loathed of all? Two conditional stanzas follow, each imagining the impossible. If she could once lay down herself and start self-purged upon the race that all must run — and death runs apace; if she could set aside herself and start with a lightened heart on the road every man has gone before. What she asks for instead is hardness rather than relief: God harden me against myself, against this coward with a pathetic voice who craves ease and rest and joys. The self is then named in three phrases that give the poem its force — arch-traitor to myself, my hollowest friend, my deadliest foe, my clog whatever road I go. The last stanza is the only consolation offered and it is brief: yet One there is who can curb myself, roll the strangling load away, break off the yoke and set me free.

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