A Birthday (Themes)

Themes

Love and Passion

“A Birthday” celebrates romantic love. The speaker expresses the joy of falling in love and knowing that she is loved in return. In the first stanza the poet describes the private emotion of realizing and recognizing love. The speaker seems to be treasuring her feelings, perhaps not ready to share them with the world. In the second stanza, though, she demands a public celebration, with elaborate decorations, of her happiness.

The poet begins by developing similes in which the heart is compared to something in nature. Each simile shows a different aspect of falling in love. In the first, the speaker is jubilant and wants to sing out. In the next simile (lines 3-4), her heart is full, like a tree with ripe fruit. The third comparison is slightly more complex: the speaker’s heart is a beautiful shell on a halcyon, or calm, sea, as if she finds peace by being in love. However, halcyon also means carefree, so the poet may be showing that she no longer worries of whether or not she is loved in return.

As beautiful as these images are, they are not enough to express this feeling of love: the speaker must share her feelings with the world. In the second stanza the poet’s images come from works of art, and the setting is public. Now love is honored with lush materials — the purple of royalty, designs in gold and silver. All of this decorative art commemorates the speaker’s new life, which is brought on by love.

Nature and Its Meaning

Rossetti’s nature imagery ranges widely in this short poem; she describes inanimate objects, plants, and animals. All these images reveal the poet’s sensuous experience of the natural world. The singing bird connotes (suggests) ecstasy, providing a picture of a bird opening its beak and trilling with abandon. The images in lines two through four relate to growth and reproduction. The nest, the site of eggs or just-born birds, sits on a young branch of a tree that is watered and thus healthily growing. The apple tree is glutted with fruit, proof of its fertility. These descriptions of the nest and trees represent the happy development of love and imply sexuality and reproduction that may be a part of love. The love grows like plants and animals in nature, and the lovers may experience ecstasy and fruit, or children of their own. The nature of human love is portrayed as something as beautiful and innocent as the seasonal rebirth that takes place in the natural world.

With the image of the “rainbow shell,” the poet turns to a quieter aspect of nature — and of love. The shell is beautiful — many-colored, possibly shining — and it moves in a gentle sea. Here the inanimate object, which also represents the speaker’s heart, “paddles” in the body of water, which symbolizes love. After the singing and growing of the earlier lines, this image describes peacefulness.

At the end of the stanza, Rossetti includes human nature in this scenario. Despite the beauty and joy of the natural world, the human speaker is more fortunate than all the images meant to express her joy. Love between people is a deeper emotion than can be expressed even by natural images of rapture and abundance.

Topics for Further Study

• In a poem that has a distinct rhyme scheme, describe what you think would be the best possible celebration of your birthday?
• Read “Silent Noon,” which was written by the author’s brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. What similar concerns do you see in the works of these two siblings? What is different in their styles? What is the same?
• What is the relationship between the nature imagery in the first stanza and the imagery in the second? Are they to be considered opposites? Or part of the same thing?