ABSTRACT
Rossetti’s earliest poetry, written in her teens and early twenties, displays many of her core beliefs about God and nature, and employs many of the images and aesthetic strategies that she would revisit in the years to come. This chapter considers multiple poems from her first book, Verses, which was privately published in 1847. It also looks at her contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ and her submissions to Blackwood’s Magazine. Included here are “The Dead City” and “Repining,”examples of Rossetti’s wayfinding narrative poems, and “Symbols,” an early example of her therapeutic, redemptive poetry.
