ABSTRACT
The date of composition is not known, but a date around 1840 is likely. Cristina is based on Cristina Maria (1806-78), daughter of Francis I, King of the Two Sicilies, and wife of King Ferdinand VII of Spain. Her reputation, in both politics and love, was bad: as Regent for her daughter Isabella after Ferdinand's death in 1833, she exercised her power tyrannically; she was also notorious as a flirt who was liable to imprison those who took her advances too literally. Nevertheless she secretly married a commoner, and as a result lost political power: she abdicated in 1840. DeVane (Handbook 122) surmises that the poem was inspired by, and written shortly after, Cristina's abdication. Though the poem does not refer to the event, B.'s interest in abdication at this period (notably in two plays, King Victor and Colombe, and, in a more metaphorical sense, in Sordello) makes the suggestion plausible. Cristina is written mainly in trochaic octosyllabics but with considerable variations, most of which were smoothed out in 1849 (see esp. I. 6~.). In 1872 (and its corrected re-issue, 1884) B. amalgamated each pair of lines into a single long line, making a stanza of four lines, and adjusting the punctuation and capitalization accordingly. Cp. the similar experiment with long lines in England (see headnote, II 341). The first stanza reads:
the soul and the soul's ascent of the ladder of being through love. Lines 33-4-8 esp. echo Plato's ideas in the Phaedrus and Symposium. Socrates argues that the soul is immortal, but condemned to pass through body after body for ten thousand years, rising and falling in the scale of being, until it attains purity. 'Platonic', i.e. unconsummated, love involves the soul's recognition of the beauty of the divine to which it desires to return, and helps the soul in its ascent: 'For a soul does not return to the place whence she came for ten thousand years, since in no lesser time can she regain her wings, save only his soul who has sought after wisdom unfeignedly, or has conjoined his passion for a loved one with that seeking ... for it is ordained that all such as have taken the first steps on the celestial highway shall no more return to the dark pathways beneath the earth, but shall walk together in a life of shining bliss, and be furnished in due time with like plumage the one to the other, because of their love'. (Phaedrus 248e-249, 256d-e). Note however that the speaker does not explicitly suggest the penal return of the soul into a further mortal
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body. Nor does he clarify whether he believes that the soul is destined to unite with another particular soul; the phrase 'some other soul' (1. 40) seems deliberately ambiguous, and it is therefore hazardous to connect this poem directly to the Goethean concept of 'elective affinities' advanced in e.g. Sordello (see iii 302-22).
