The Secret Trimesters of Winter: A Secret, a Post-Modern Reading of Christina Rossetti

Rossetti’s full possession of the ability to don masks in her poetry, borne out of a number of

her poems that speak within a character resounds allusively in Winter: A Secret. The speaker

of the poem laces intrigue from the first line, in her vibrancy of language alive with the

energy of a secret of which is never fully made explicit to the reader. While there is ample

criticism by way of Rossetti’s secret keeping, it should be noted that interpretations of the

post-modern impregnated woman are few and far between. This essay will attempt to read

Winter: My Secret in terms of the modern woman cradling the secret of a pregnancy as a way

of protecting herself from judgements of the “other”. The playful, light-hearted mask of the

speaker smooths over the cracks of doubt and uncertainty that so often weighs heavy on the

sensibility of a single pregnant woman in the modern world. Yet the metaphors and verb play

of the poem, woven deep into the speaker’s rhythm and rhyme scheme identifies with a

feminine truth that will inevitably emerge as one of the speaker’s best-kept and empowering

secrets.

The anaphoric use of the first person, ‘I tell my secret? No, indeed not I’ (1),

immediately frames the poem’s essence of the self in what Jerome McGann observes as

Rossetti’s employment of ‘the symbol of the personal secret, as an imitation of individuality’

(qtd. in Chapman 145), certainly reinforced by the iteration of the speaker’s ‘I’. A further

rhetorical question continues the speaker’s playful tone into the second line, ‘perhaps some

day. Who knows?’ (2), speaks to the unknown listener whilst still holding tight to the allusive

object of the poem. The use of “perhaps” in this instance is interesting, particularly in relation

to Rosetti’s proliferation of speculation in her poems. As Adam Hazel writes, ‘this “hap” is

not only a game of chance – it is the “hap” of the “happening”’, therein striking a forked path

in Rossetti’s use of the word (Hazel 84). The repetition of “perhaps” throughout the poem

however suggests that the speaker’s speculation airs more towards the latter than the former
of Hazel’s statement. In this sense we must then assume that the speaker does indeed have a

concrete secret on the tracks to unravel.

Criticism in the Foucauldian sense would suggest that the speaker engages with

disciplinary powers of mystery to produce secrets to reveal in order to identify with certain

social or individual “truths” (Foucault ). As the poem progresses, so will the speaker’s

identity, and the propensity to release the secret into the regulated confines of society. While

it can be observed that the secret is deployed for autonomous means, therein manifesting the

Foucauldian disciplinary, the speaker’s tone does not coalesce as uninviting, rather the

speaker is using intrigue and questions to draw in and connect with the listener. Kevin

Morrison supports this analysis of the speaker’s use of secrecy as a social relation as ‘less a

mode of resistance than it is of enticement’, that lays the foundations for communal

knowledge (Morrison 97). The rhythmic triple rhyme of ‘But not today; it froze, and blows,

and snows, (3)’ builds momentum in its iambic, monosyllabic energy as if the harbouring of

the secret grows stronger with every passing minute. The speaker’s allusion to the weather is

first introduced here, the symbolism of which gains further clarity as the poem goes on, as if

the secret itself is tied to the conditional change of the seasons (and by extension her

trimesters), along with the speaker’s social connection with the listener and her developing

assurance of the secret itself.

The second stanza is where we learn that the speaker is a woman, with the secret

growing ever fervently inside of her. ‘Today’s a nipping day, a biting day; / In which one

wants a shawl’ (10-11), the clothing implies her femininity but also the active gerunds of

‘nipping’ and ‘biting’ allude to physical sensations of discomfort that, combined with the

speaker’s self-protective like punctuation in this stanza suggests that the speaker is in fact

pregnant. Indeed the speaker’s use of anaphora and assonance in her human-esque gerunds of

the ensuing lines, ‘Come bounding and surrounding me/ Come buffeting, astounding me’
(15-16) gives the image of a woman embracing the knowledge and wonder of a baby, but in

her repetition of the object pronoun ‘me,’ the speaker reaffirms the shielded and private

knowledge of her pregnancy. The speaker’s coyful yet omissive tone works as a double

edged intention, particularly when the speaker informs the listener that ‘I wear my mask for

warmth,’ (18) she is first of all continuing to play with the listener but also, as Marianne

Skoczek observes, she is wearing the mask to prevent ‘the revelation of the unconforming

living woman underneath- in short, the unacceptable’ (Skoczek 3). In this sense the speaker is

wearing her mask of deception out of playfulness but also as ‘a form of protection,’ as she

transitions through the tumultuous phases of pregnancy (Skoczek ). Rossetti’s secretive

nature as a literary device works as a mask against societal judgement, implying that the

speaker may be pregnant out of wedlock which, in modern times would not be so unusual but

in the time of Rossetti’s writing would be deemed a scandalous act and certainly a catalyst of

ruin. Kevin Morrison confirms this with his view that secrets are deployed ‘as a sign of the

inherent entrapment of the subject within a matrix of ideology’, ergo the speaker’s secret

keeping is harnessed to the disciplinary measures of Foucault to protect her identity before it

is safe to be revealed (Morrison 97).

The control of the speaker’s rhyme and metre shapes her rationality of the secret, as

she engages with her seasonal metaphor of pregnancy we can see the irregularity of the

rhyme scheme reflects the irregular nature of her pregnancy, presumably it is a secret because

the Father is unknown, absent or that the child is illegitimate. Rossetti’s play between

pentameter, tetrameter and trimeter throughout the poem, particularly in the stanza that

enumerates the months of the year, resonates a focus on the temporality of the speaker’s

secret. Ksenia Shcherbino affirms Rossetti’s ‘rhythmical lapses and repetitive constructions’

of metre as ‘a means of controlling and shaping reality’(Shcherbino 2).

 The sonority of ‘who ever shows/ His nose to Russian snows/ To be pecked at by

every wind that blows?’ (18-19) recalls the triple rhyme of the first stanza that emphatically

locks in the growing secret of the speaker. What’s pivotal here is the use of the male pronoun,

particularly with the bird-like ‘pecking’ in nature. The speaker is invoking the fused image of

a male presence with a bird’s inseminate act of pollination, combined with the assonance of

the recurring rhymes we are inclined to believe that the knowledge within the rhymes and the

masculine act of insemination are inextricably connected.

Rossetti’s repeated use of the physical verb ‘peck’ opens up alternative readings of

the verb use, ‘You would not peck? I thank you for good will / Believe, but leave the truth

untested still’ (21-22) makes implications that the “pecking” can also be read as an invasive

pry for information from the listener as the speaker continues to rhythmically dissuade her

audience from any further “pecks” into her secret. The succinct full rhymes, and the double

rhymes in the final line maintains the speaker’s control whilst also retaining a sense of

playfulness who assuredly tells the listener that she ‘cannot ope to everyone who taps’ (13)

yet her tone does not deter the listener from “tapping” at the speaker.

‘Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust’ (23) alludes to her transition into the second

trimester, as the early stages of Winter gives way to growth and new life. The latter half of

the line however loops back to the uncertainty of the first stanzas in her first trimester, as she

shares her unease with the listener in the flowing enjambments of the stanza’s full-rhymes we

can see that she is hesitant to publicise her condition until the baby has, so to speak,

“weathered the storm” of the ensuing months. As Morrison observes, the speaker constructs

‘a series of conditions and rules that must be met before the speaker will divulge’ her secret,

therein assuring the identity of the speaker and her baby in the Foucauldian sense, as the

poem’s allusive nature protects itself from the external yet still continues to maintain a lure of
mystery with the speaker so that they may remain socially connected to the listener (Morrison

100).

The secret’s temporality grows more concrete in the final stanza, as the speaker

addresses the rhetorical question of the first stanza ‘perhaps some day, who knows?,’ (2) in

the first line of the final stanza, ‘Perhaps some languid day / When drowsy birds sing less and

less’ (28-29), our attention is drawn once again to Hazel’s “happening”, and the imminent

unravelling of a long-kept secret. The metaphoric trope of the seasons has evolved to the

swelling heat of summer, the baby is now in the third trimester. The interjected imagery of

the lethargic birds making less sounds reflects the decline of the intermittent, inquisitorial

‘pecks’ for information from the listener that has sown resistance from the speaker

throughout the poem.

What’s more the compounding metaphor of the ‘golden fruit… ripening to excess’

(30) asserts the very essence of seasonal fertility and reminds us of the beginning lines of

another of Rossetti’s dramatic monologue Under The Rose, wherein a mother gives birth to

an illegitimate daughter also at the height of summer, ‘Oh the rose of keenest thorn! / One

hidden summer morn / Under the rose I was born’ (1-3). Rossetti’s poetic fusion of nature

and procreation is therefore a recurring theme in her poetry, one that weaves in secret behind

a mask that protects Mother and child from the cast-iron grip of Foucault’s disciplinary

external order.

‘If there’s not too much sun or too much cloud / And the warm wind is neither still

nor loud’(31-32) again dictates to the listener the conditional pretext of Morrison’s analysis,

in which the speaker is laying down the temperament of her imminent labour through the

interchangeable forces of nature. The final lines of, ‘Perhaps I may say / Or you may guess’

(33-34) shows the resounding mystery of the speaker’s secret, in that she does not make
explicit the true nature of the poem. Yet it can be concluded from the speaker’s seasonal

endowment and excessive ripening of fruit that the final lines are indeed an allusion to the

physical appearance of a pregnancy in the third trimester or indeed the undeniable finality of

a screaming new-born baby. The speaker’s liminality is apparent through the various layers

of playful allusions to her secret and seasonal temporality, but as Shcherbino observes,

Rossetti’s technique of mystery does not transition the speaker or the listener ‘out of the

liminal space’, in fact ‘her characters are shut in there without even trying to get through’

(Shcherbino 168). In this sense ‘the tension is unresolved’ and the object unfulfilled, leaving

the listener with a ‘seemingly empty secret in a pile of definitions,’ but with the speaker’s

autonomous identity still intact (Shcherbino 165).

Winter: My Secret plays the game of secrecy exceedingly well in that the speaker’s

femininity coyly laces the poem with allusions to the truth whilst still retaining control over

her life by withholding the explicit nature of her circumstance. Even ‘Winter’ in the title, if

one were to connect the dots with Rossetti’s continual use of the seasonal metaphor, can be

replaced with the word ‘baby,’ and that the very namesake of the poem immediately spells

out the crux of the speaker’s secret. Jenny Taylor permeates the success of Winter: My

Secret, in her observation of Rossetti paradoxically achieving legitimacy as a female poet by

‘extending the scope of the dramatic monologue to explore an ‘illegitimate’ subjectivity’

(Taylor 31). Once the pregnancy reveals itself in Rossetti’s lines it cannot be unrevealed, and

that the temporal trimesters that transition the months from winter to summer enhance the

excitement of the poem until the very last line. We might not be informed verbatim, but

certainly, after nine months, we can guess.

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