Monday 2nd December -Advent Book Club 2

Today's  Poem from 'In the Bleak Midwinter - Through Advent and Christmas with Christina Rossetti by Rachel Mann
you can find the poem here

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rossetti/christina/goblin_market/chapter39.html

To begin with, I jumped to the conclusion that it was about someone who had died, as in, laid out, ready for burial. The words and phrases are cleverly chosen - it took me another couple of readings to get through the words and into the poem.

Paying attention to the title would have given me a Big Clue....

Now I discovered someone who, having had to face huge disappointments in how life turned out, closed the door on all possibility of happiness. They have become dead to life long before the real time for death will come.

I read in this poem a dreadful warning to not pin all our happiness to the fickleness of this life on Earth, and therefore fall into a black resentment and despair when the reality takes over our dreams.
   
I think almost everyone I know has had to face a sharp, even cruel, dismantlement of hopes and plans, for themselves or family or friends.

No hint of how to recover from this bitter state is given in the poem.

Who could possibly help one rise from this untimely death, emerge from the tomb and find life?

That sounds familiar...

Afterthought;
(Cousin Helen, in the children's book  'What Katy Did' by Susan Coolidge showed Katy how to live in spite of life. Also, Fay Weldon's 'Letters to Alice on reading Jane Austen' talks about Jane Austen's life as an unmarried daughter, past all hope of marriage, and living as a dependant with her family.)

 AdventBookClub is raising money for the Trussell Trust at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/adventbookclub2019, and is even in a group on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1220319721395793/?ref=share. We are running from Advent Sunday Dec 1st to Candlemas in January, and using Rachel Mann’s “In the Bleak Midwinter“