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Literature Annotations

Rossetti, Christina Up-Hill

	On-Line Text
Genre	Poem
Keywords	Aging, Death and Dying, Disease and Health, Pain, Society, Suffering
Summary	The poem is an exchange of questions and answers that compares life to a journey. The journey is up-hill all the way, but at the end is an inn, a resting place, that cannot be missed and which has a room for everyone.
Commentary	The poem is typical of C. Rossetti's religious poetry and the more tight-laced aspects of the Victorian period. Life is recognized as a painful task (it's up-hill all the way), yet it is the duty of mankind to undertake the trip in hopes of a peaceful rest in heaven as a reward. This message had social ramifications in the mid-late Victorian period, when many were sacrificed to the unceasing demands of growing capitalist production and imperialism. The starving seamstress ought not complain, but travel on. Pain and suffering are to be expected, not resisted; one benefits from them in the end.
Source	The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, Vol. 1
Publisher	Louisiana State Univ. Press
Edition	1979
Editors	R. W. Crump
Place Published	Baton Rouge
Alternate Source	Victorian Prose and Poetry
Alternate Publisher	Oxford Univ. Press
Alternate Edition	1973
Alternate Editors	Lionel Trilling & Harold Bloom
Place Published	New York
Miscellaneous	First published: 1862
Annotated by	Moore, Pamela
Date of Entry	08/08/94