The Full Text of “From the Antique”
1It's a weary life, it is, she said:
2Doubly blank in a woman's lot:
3I wish and I wish I were a man:
4Or, better than any being, were not:
5Were nothing at all in all the world.
6Not a body and not a soul:
7Not so much as a grain of dust
8Or a drop of water from pole to pole.
9Still the world would wag on the same,
10Still the seasons go and come:
11Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
12Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.
13None would miss me in all the world,
14How much less would care or weep.
15I should be nothing, while all the rest
16Would wake and weary and fall asleep.
The Full Text of “From the Antique”
1It's a weary life, it is, she said:
2Doubly blank in a woman's lot:
3I wish and I wish I were a man:
4Or, better than any being, were not:
5Were nothing at all in all the world.
6Not a body and not a soul:
7Not so much as a grain of dust
8Or a drop of water from pole to pole.
9Still the world would wag on the same,
10Still the seasons go and come:
11Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
12Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.
13None would miss me in all the world,
14How much less would care or weep.
15I should be nothing, while all the rest
16Would wake and weary and fall asleep.
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“From the Antique” Introduction
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In Christina Rossetti's "From the Antique," an unhappy speaker laments that life as a woman is blank and empty—and declares that, if one can't be a man, it might be better to be nothing at all. This speaker's vivid picture of how easy it would be to simply not exist suggests she's filled with despair. But her wistful images of the world's continuing beauty (and the presence of an almost silent but sympathetic narrator) make the picture a little more complicated. The speaker isn't alone in her misery, this poem suggests: women "from the antique," since ancient times, have been shut out of life's joys by sexist oppression. "From the Antique" first appeared in the 1896 book New Poems, a posthumous collection of verse published by Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti.
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“From the Antique” Summary
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"Life is so very tiring and discouraging," she said, "and a woman's life is twice as dull and empty. I wish desperately that I were a man—or, better still, that I were nothing at all.
"I wish that I didn't exist. I wish I didn't have a body or a soul. I wish that I didn't have even as much existence as a dust speck or a drop of water—that I didn't exist anywhere in the world, from the north pole to the south.
"If I didn't exist, the world would go on just as it always has. The seasons would change, the flowers would bloom as ever, the cherries would ripen and the bees would sing.
"No one in the world would miss me—and so no one in the world would care or cry that I was gone. I would be nothing, while everyone else in the world would wake up and get tired and go to sleep again."
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“From the Antique” Themes
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Women's Oppression
In "From the Antique," being a woman feels like a worse deal than being nothing at all. The poem's main speaker—a world-weary woman whose speech is narrated by a sympathetic, nearly silent listener—is fed up with "a woman's lot," the kind of life allowed to women. Sometimes, she wishes she were a man. But even such a transformation, she reflects, might not be enough to lift her spirits at this point. Being a woman has worn her out so thoroughly that she thinks she'd prefer to be "nothing at all in all the world" than to go on existing in any form. The poem suggests that sexist oppression has driven thinking, feeling women to despair "from the antique," since history began.
The main speaker in this bleak poem sees life in general as "weary" and tiresome, but a "woman's lot" as "doubly blank"—a hyperbolic phrasing suggesting that women's lives are blanker than blank, offering a vista of nothing but nothingness. Though she doesn't elaborate on what's so exhausting and meaningless about her life, readers might find it easy to guess—especially if they imagine her as a Victorian contemporary of Christina Rossetti's, living in an era during which women's choices were severely restricted. This speaker seems to have little to do but "wish and [] wish [she] were a man."
But wishing she were a man, at this stage, simply isn't enough: a life of oppression has made her feel it would be better to be "nothing at all in all the world" than to go on living. Her suffering is so deep that she feels prepared to renounce not just her "body," but her "soul": she doesn't want merely to die, but to never have existed, to be annihilated altogether. A constrained "woman's lot," the poem thus suggests, can be soul-destroying, robbing women of even the tiniest grain of hope or meaning. The sympathetic presence of the narrator (in whom the speaker seems to be confiding) suggests that many women suffer as the speaker does.
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World-Weariness and Despair
Despair, this poem suggests, can overwhelm a person so totally that existence itself feels unendurably tedious. The poem's speaker is so "weary" of life that she'd rather be "nothing at all in all the world" than go on existing. At this point, even death wouldn't be enough to satisfy her desire for oblivion: if she merely died, she'd still have a "soul," and (she implies) that soul would still be bored, exhausted, and miserable.
The speaker's longing for annihilation is born of a feeling that life is endlessly "blank," empty, and dull. To her, existence is nothing but an endless round of meaningless activity: people just "wake and weary and fall asleep" over and over and over, and the world never changes.
Poignantly, the speaker might have some dim memory of enjoying the world, once upon a time. When she dismissively describes a world going on just the same without her, her vision of a landscape in which "Blossoms bloom as in days of old, / Cherries ripen and wild bees hum" suggests that, at least at one time, she took pleasure in the beauty of the changing seasons. But, overtaken by her suffering, she can now see the loveliness of spring and summer only as one more dully mechanical pattern.
The poem thus implies that despair is less about feeling that the world is terrible and more about feeling that the world is "blank." The same sights that might once have delighted the suffering speaker have now become "nothing at all" to her—and so "nothing at all" is all she longs to be.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “From the Antique”
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Lines 1-4
It's a weary life, it is, she said:
Doubly blank in a woman's lot:
I wish and I wish I were a man:
Or, better than any being, were not:This poem's title—"From the Antique"—implies that this will be a translation from an ancient (or "antique") language, a fragment of an old poem in Greek or Latin. But if that were so, it would be an awfully colloquial fragment. The complaint that opens the poem—"It's a weary life, it is"—sounds more like the voice of one of Christina Rossetti's Victorian contemporaries than a classical poet.
The poem's title thus takes on some dark, ironic wit. This will be a poem about the burden of being a woman in a man's world, and a vision of despair. Such sufferings, the title might also suggest, have existed "from the antique," for as long as recorded history. This could be an ancient lament as well as a contemporary one.
The poem begins with a statement of general exhaustion:
It's a weary life, it is, she said:
Doubly blank in a woman's lot:The speaker, then, is a woman worn out by life in general and womanhood in particular. Life is a grind, but "a woman's lot" is "blank," empty. It's "doubly blank," even—an image that suggests an impossible hollowness. (What could be blanker than blank?) While life would exhaust anyone, then, life as a woman exhausts by its utter meaningless dullness.
The speaker doesn't need to explain the nature of that double blankness for readers to guess at what she might mean. Women's lives have been constrained and restricted for much of human history. If the speaker here is indeed a middle-class Victorian like Rossetti, her options would be limited indeed: homemaking or (maybe) teaching would be her only respectable life choices. Being a Victorian woman meant being dependent on men for one's safety and livelihood—and, very likely, sitting around doing nothing interesting a whole lot of the time.
This speaker certainly seems to have time on her hands. "I wish and I wish I were a man," she says, her echoing diacope suggesting just how little she has to do beyond idly longing to escape her woman's lot.
But even being a man wouldn't free her from a "weary life" altogether. Thus, she concludes, it would be "better than any being" to simply be "not"—to not exist at all.
This dream of annihilation, the poem will suggest, isn't unique to the unhappy speaker. Besides the implication that this is a problem that has been around "from the antique," there's a second, quiet, apparently sympathetic voice here. Blink and you'll miss it, but this whole poem is presented as a passage of dialogue, reported by a largely silent narrator:
It's a weary life, it is, she said:
The speaker whose voice readers will hear through most of the poem, then, is addressing a confidante—someone she clearly feels comfortable being honest with. Readers might guess that this listener is also one who knows how hard it is to bear up under a "woman's lot."
This desperate poem takes an eerily simple form, like a nursery rhyme. Like many nursery rhymes, it's written in quatrains (or four-line stanzas) with an ABCB rhyme scheme. And like many nursery rhymes, it uses accentual meter—that is, a meter that uses a certain number of beats per line (four, in this case) but that doesn't stick to any one kind of metrical foot, like iambs or dactyls. Here's how that sounds in lines 1-2:
It's a weary life, it is, she said:
Doubly blank in a woman's lot:This plain, simple form mirrors a plain, simple despair. The poem's speaker feels so very oppressed by her lot in life that a desire to be nothing at all seems to her the clear and obvious answer to her problems.
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Lines 5-8
Were nothing at all in all the world.
Not a body and not a soul:
Not so much as a grain of dust
Or a drop of water from pole to pole. -
Lines 9-12
Still the world would wag on the same,
Still the seasons go and come:
Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
Cherries ripen and wild bees hum. -
Lines 13-16
None would miss me in all the world,
How much less would care or weep.
I should be nothing, while all the rest
Would wake and weary and fall asleep.
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“From the Antique” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
The speaker's repetitions give her voice a tone of passionate despair. For instance, take lines 3-6:
I wish and I wish I were a man:
Or, better than any being, were not:Were nothing at all in all the world.
Not a body and not a soul:The diacope on "I wish and I wish" paints a picture of a person who spends most of her days sitting listlessly in a parlor, doing nothing but longing hopelessly for a different life. But that idle wishing takes on fearful energy over the next few lines:
- The anaphora on "were not" and "were nothing" sounds desperate and insistent, as if the speaker wants to make sure her listener understands her: she wants, not to be dead, but never to have existed.
- Likewise, the anaphora on "not a body and not a soul" drives that point home: the speaker doesn't just want to die and leave her body behind, but to be so completely nothing that she isn't even a soul.
- The diacope of "nothing at all in all the world" underscores the speaker's desire for annihilation.
If she didn't exist, the speaker goes on, the world wouldn't change one bit. More parallelism helps her to make that point:
Still the world would wag on the same,
Still the seasons go and come:
Blossoms bloom as in days of old,
Cherries ripen and wild bees hum.The anaphora on "still" there stresses the speaker's sense that her disappearance wouldn't change a thing, as does the parallelism in the lines tracing the undisturbed change of the seasons. Here, the speaker's insistence reveals a more complicated, poignant feeling. This picture of the world going on unchanged without her reflects her feeling for the rhythms of nature, suggesting that she knows some things about life are beautiful—and that this beauty isn't enough to save her from despair.
As the poem ends, the speaker echoes her own earlier words: if she were "nothing at all in all the world," then "none would miss [her] in all the world." This repetition reveals a sweeping but unjustified certainty: after all, as the first lines show, someone is listening to and reporting this speaker's words even now. Even if someone does care for the speaker, however, she can only see life as a long trudge. If she disappeared, she concludes, the rest of the world would be left on its own to "wake and weary and fall asleep"—a moment of polysyndeton that suggests the speaker's exhaustion with the relentless, meaningless march of the days.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Dialogue
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Allusion
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Alliteration
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"From the Antique" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Antique
- Weary
- Doubly blank
- A woman's lot
- Pole to pole
- Wag
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If something is "antique" in the sense used in this poem's title, it dates back to antiquity—to ancient times. Here, the title hints that the dejected speaker's problem is one that women have struggled with forever. The words "From the Antique" could even be a dark little joke, suggesting that this poem is a translation from an ancient language—that women have been lamenting their lot since, say, ancient Greece.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “From the Antique”
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Form
"From the Antique" takes the form of a reported speech: a narrator tells readers what an unnamed woman said to them about her exhausted desire for total nothingness. Though the speaker feels sure that no one would miss her if she vanished from the face of the earth, the sympathetic, nearly-silent presence of that narrator suggests that someone might—or even that the main speaker's exhaustion is a shared dilemma.
The speaker's hollow despair takes an oddly (and even eerily) simple form. The poem is written in four quatrains of accentual meter with an ABCB rhyme scheme—the same sort of shape a nursery rhyme might take. By containing a deep, complex, very adult feeling in this singsong form, the poem evokes the speaker's total weariness: the simple shape suggests just how clear and final her desire for nothingness feels. Perhaps the nursery-rhyme-ish form here also hints at the limitations of this speaker's "blank" life, which might not have allowed her much range beyond the nursery.
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Meter
"From the Antique" is written in accentual meter. In other words, the poem doesn't stick to any one kind of metrical foot (like iambs or anapests) but does use the same number of stressed beats per line—in this case, four. That leaves a lot of room for metrical drama: Rossetti can shift stresses around as she likes to shape the speaker's voice.
Listen, for example, to the way the beats fall in lines 5-6:
Were nothing at all in all the world
Not a body and not a soulIn these lines, stresses fall on words that describe annihilation—"nothing," "all," "not"—and the things the speaker fantasizes might be annihilated—"body" and "soul." Readers can hear her strangely energetic, urgent despair in those thumping beats.
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Rhyme Scheme
"From the Antique" uses a simple ABCB rhyme scheme. This straightforward, familiar pattern gives a poem of complex adult misery the sound of a nursery rhyme.
Rossetti often played with nursery-ish rhymes; she even wrote a collection of children's verse, Sing-Song. By appropriating such poems' simple sounds for this tale of despair, she makes an already harrowing poem feel downright eerie, like a dirge played on a music box.
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“From the Antique” Speaker
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The poem's main speaker is an anonymous, deeply world-weary woman. Being a woman, she says, has worn her out—so much that even being transformed into a man couldn't make her feel better. At this point, she'd rather be nothing at all. Much of this poem lays out her fantasy about how the world would go on turning perfectly well if she vanished altogether.
Alert readers might notice, though, that there is a second speaker here: a narrator who's reporting this woman's dejected speech. This subtle narration suggests that, though the speaker feels sure that no one would care if she disappeared from the world, she has at least one sympathetic listener. And the near-invisibility of the narration—the poem is given up totally to the unhappy woman's speech after the first line—hints that the narrator might share the main speaker's feelings. Even the poem's title ("From the Antique," which might be read to mean "translated from an ancient language" or "since long-ago times") suggests that the speaker's exhaustion with being a woman in a man's world is an ancient and shared problem.
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“From the Antique” Setting
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There's no specific setting in this poem; the speaker's jaded vision takes in the whole world, from "pole to pole," and faces a problem that has existed "from the antique," since long, long ago. Readers might, however, imagine that this poem's voices come from Rossetti's own Victorian England. Though (as the poem's title points out) being a woman has never been a picnic, Rossetti was alive to the ways in which her own society made womanhood particularly difficult. To be a middle-class Victorian woman like Rossetti was to walk a narrow tightrope: one could be a virtuous wife and mother, a burdensome spinster, or an irredeemable "fallen woman," and that was about it for options. Rossetti was one of many woman writers of her era to speak out against the soul-crushing burden (and plain "blank" boredom) of such expectations.
Perhaps there's one further hint that this speaker is a countrywoman of Rossetti's. The one specific glimpse of the world the poem offers—a vision of spring turning to summer, with "blossoms bloom[ing]" and "wild bees hum[ming]"—feels wistfully English.
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Literary and Historical Context of “From the Antique”
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Literary Context
Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was born in England to a large and talented family (her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also a well-known poet and painter) and grew up surrounded by art. She began her own poetic career young. She wrote this poem, for instance, in 1854, when she was just 24 years old—though it wouldn't appear in print until 1896, when her brother William collected her previously unpublished work in a posthumous volume called New Poems.
That collection was meant to honor a poet who (unlike many) had become wildly popular and well-known during her lifetime. Rossetti's long poem "Goblin Market," for instance, started a Victorian vogue for sinister fairy tales. Of the book in which it appeared, one contemporary critic said:
To read these poems after the laboured and skilful, but not original, verse which has been issued of late, is like passing from a picture gallery with its well-feigned semblance of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors which greets us with the waving grass and the pleasant shock of the breeze.
Rossetti was also a noted early feminist figure, and many of her works (like this one) deal with the complexities of women's lives in a restrictive society.
Rossetti was influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning—another popular woman poet with strong ties to Italy—and some of her contemporaries saw her as the elder poet's natural successor. She was also connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the artistic school of which her brother Dante Gabriel was a founding member. Her father's work as a scholar of Italian literature meant she was exposed at an early age to the great Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, whose influence may be seen in her fondness for the Italian sonnet form.
Rossetti's reputation as a brilliant lyrical poet has never tarnished, and she's still much studied today. Her poetry has been a major influence on writers from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.
Historical Context
Christina Rossetti lived in a world marked both by revolutionary change and reactionary conservatism. The Victorians were innovators and empire-builders, and England reshaped itself considerably under the reign of Victoria, its first truly powerful queen since Elizabeth I. A primarily rural population began to move into the cities as factory work outpaced farm work. Writers from Dickens to Hardy worried about the human effects of rapid change and rapacious commerce.
Perhaps in response to this speedy reconfiguration of the world, Victorian social culture became deeply conservative. Women were expected to adhere to a strict code of sexual morals: a woman must be chaste, pliant, and submissive, and any deviation could mean social exile. But within this repressive landscape, women writers began to flourish, asserting the complexity and meaning of their own lives. Rossetti's work was part of a tide of bold and moving poetry and fiction by Victorian women; Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are only a few of the writers whose work achieved contemporary recognition against the odds.
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More “From the Antique” Resources
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External Resources
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Portraits of Rossetti — See some images of Rossetti from London's National Portrait Gallery.
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Rossetti's Feminism — Read a short article discussing Rossetti's approach to issues of gender and power.
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Rossetti's Notebooks — See images of the small, elegant notebooks in which Rossetti copied out final drafts of her poems.
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's overview of Rossetti's life and work.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
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