Home Page    About the book    About the Editor    More about the Editor    The Dedication    Read The Foreword    Read The Introduction
 Read the List of Contents    A little about Christina Rossetti    Extracts from the book    Order Form

Here you may view various extracts from the book.

Poem: The End of the Year

The book contains a reproduction of this poem in Christina Rossetti's own handwriting. Please click on the thumbnail to view a larger picture in a new window.

The poem was published in Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862 with two other poems about the end of the year and renamed Old and New Year Ditties .1, being the first in the sequence of three poems. The manuscript poem reproduced here is kept in the British Library. It is in one of the notebooks in which Christina Rossetti wrote down and dated all her poems until 1866. Further details of the manuscript notebooks are given in the notes on the last of the dated poems Song: 'O what comes over the sea?' The third poem in the sequence - Old and New Year Ditties 3 - which begins, 'Passing away, saith the World ....' drew extravagant praise from the poet Swinburne, a great admirer of Christina Rossetti, who said of the poem "I have always thought that nothing more glorious in poetry has ever been written". Both Old and New Ditties 1 & 3 are included in the selection and have notes on them.

See further sample pages from the book

To view these extracts, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, as they are in PDF format for convenience. If you already have Adobe Acrobat Reader, please use the links Extract 1, Extract 2, Extract 3  and Extract 4 below.

If you do not already have Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it free from Adobe by clicking on this button:

Site E-mail  contacts:   The Editor       Orders Department     Webmaster    Order a copy   Order Form

Almost Paradise: ISBN 0-9546139-0-2  292 pp    All material © Andrew Rice-Oxley 2004.