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.