Hello and welcome to the daily poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, May 9th.

And today I'm going to read for you a poem by English poet Christina Rosetti, who lived from 1830 to 1894, and is considered one of the most important Victorian-era poets.

And today's poem is called Sonnets are full of love and this my

tome. And this is how it goes. Sonets are full of love and this my tomb has many sonnets. So here now

shall be one sonnet more, a love sonnet from me to her whose heart is my heart's quiet home, to my first love,

my mother, on whose knee I learned to love lore that is not troublesome, whose service is my

special dignity, and she, my lodestar, while I go and come.

And so because you love me and because I love you, mother,

I have woven a wreath of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name.

In you, not fourscore years can dim the flame of love,

whose blessed glow transcends the laws of time and change and mortal life

and death.

I chose this poem because yesterday was Mother's Day and I wanted to honor the mothers that are

represented amongst our listeners.

And this is a poem that I really like about motherhood.

And it is about motherhood.

It's about the love of a mother for her child and a child for her mother.

And it's also a poem that meditates on poetry itself.

So I'm going to offer just a few remarks here that interweave those two great themes of this poem.

Mother Love is often idealized in poetry, especially in romantic and in Victorian-era poetry.

And Christina Rosetti overlaps both.

She's coming out of the romantic era, and she's smack in the middle of the Victorian era living in England, writing very Victorian poetry. And so this is a poem that does indeed idealize mother love, maternal love. This poem is no exception to that. It does present an idealized

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