Christina G. Rossetti, who refused to be photographed and yearned, occasionally, for oblivion, likely would have wished her poems to be spared the political aegis. But her feeling for the isolation of independence, and her wariness towards the bonds of the world and its cares, extended also to an awareness of the bonds of words that threaten freedom of mind and deed: the commitments that, made in privacy, are subject to political dispositions. For the Victorians, man proposed, and the state disposed. Her (biographical) refusal to marry, not intended as a gesture of political defiance, could not but strike at the pieties of house and hearth that coursed through Victorian Britain’s bourgeois professions of national welfare. Where the marriage union is paradigmatic of the sanctity of contracts and oaths, as it was in a Britain whose poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, crowned his career with an uneven epic of national and connubial betrayal (Idylls of the King), Rossetti’s refusal of the promissory act that is the premise of that and any contract dredges up suspicions that her skepticism towards worldly bonds extends to the social contract. Better, she might think, to be left alone, to contract only with an otherworldly God. Taking its titular cue from the wifely work of baking, her “Promises Like Pie-Crust” leaves unsaid the proverbial continuation, “are meant to be broken,” because it does not need to be said and it is in the spirit of the poem to say less rather than more:

Promise me no promises,

So will I not promise you:

Keep we both our liberties

Never false and never true:

Let us hold the die uncast,

Free to come and free to go:

For I cannot know your past,

And of mine what can you know?

You, so warm, may once have been

Warmer towards another one:

I, so cold, may once have seen

Sunlight, once have felt the sun:

Who shall show us if it was

Thus indeed in time of old?

Fades the image from the glass,

And the fortune is not told.

If you promised, you might grieve

For lost liberty again:

If I promised, I believe

I should fret to break the chain.

Let us be the friends we were,

Nothing more but nothing less:

Many thrive on frugal fare

Who would perish of excess. 

.

It is a preemptive break-up poem, better not to fathom what will inevitably be lost. But the grounds for the refusal are not especially particular to him or to her. It’s not him, it’s it: the promise. The trouble with the poem’s argument is that it depends on the notion that friendships do not implicitly involve promises, cannot be betrayed, and do not constrain liberties. This cannot be what she means, and so it is not the act of commitment exactly that she spurns but instead the saying it aloud—and what is entailed by the classic example of a “performative utterance.” It is the word made bond that is “excess,” and when she writes “perish of excess” she hints at the social castigation entailed by a broken engagement and the political violence she would risk at a broken marriage vow. It is not him, or her, it is the nature of things not to stay put; given the flux of the world, it is futile to hold to true and false. John Donne might have agreed. But whereas Donne’s fear of inconstancy becomes misogyny, Rossetti’s is caution: we do not need to go as far as promise when we can have the safer, saner lesser thing that is friendship. Friends, like lovers, can be true or false, but they are not, as Rossetti knew, haunted in their union by the possibility of “false” and “true.” Friends do not dwell, as spouses do, upon these terms, even if they dwell within them (once friends dwell on them, the friendship is over).

“Let us hold the die uncast,” is shrewd in its singular: “die.” There is only one to cast and only the man could cast it, but she, imploring in a phrase that disingenuously denies him action, takes hold of his hold, clasping it closed on the die—not the joining of hands that he would ask, as in the figure, the open palm that casts the die is the hand offered and opened to her in marriage. Like the title, the figure of speech invokes a cliché: homespun wisdom to deny a shared domesticity, but also a softening of the edges that the poem cannot but show. The rejection of promises is so abrupt and forceful, it is mitigated by the easeful trust she places in the phrases that do less, deprived of performative potential. 

“Free to come and free to go” feels nearly as haphazardly facile as a cliché—“come and go” is so neat and common a pairing—but it is feelingly worded, nonchalant and breezy as she would be. Being something of a cliché, it excuses itself from saying just what it means, irresponsible in a poet, but to the point here, where freedom to come and go is a freedom from having to explain. Explain what? Why she is leaving or why he is leaving, and the following line offers a glimpse of what such an explanation might involve, a past that requires one to flee or chase: “For I cannot know your past | And of mine what can you know?”  Biographers would scratch their heads at how this could be true; it must exceed the facts of their circumstance and refer instead to any I and any you, where the acceptance of the other is an acceptance of a past that one never knows. To promise oneself to another is to promise blindly, not because of what may come (she has just offered that excuse) but because of what has been: her conception of the self is insistently present, a moment of being together before they are dispersed, before they answer to what they were or to discover what they might become. The fatalism that underlies these lines—a reverse fatalism, a profound skepticism about knowledge of others—is disclosed like a wound, and the question mark that follows defies any attempt at a response but also achingly reaches out for one.  Memory, hope, understanding are voided.

The inability to know would, on its own, present an insufficient ground for refusing to promise: it’s what the past might have been, the lingering doubt of his having cared for another, her having been warmed by her solitary life that baffles her faith in promising. He, warm now, may have been warmer to another; she, cold now, may have been warmer once. The interlacing of warm and cold is as varied as their feelings might be, with the suggestion that he, as husband, would assume a place of devotion better occupied by the sun. The piercing phrase is “may once”: despair at not knowing, the tyrannical absolutism whereby even “once” is enough to mar the present. In these lines, she grants space to the ideology that imbues Tennyson’s song from Idylls of the King:

In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,
Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

    ‘It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.

    ‘The little rift within the lover’s lute
Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all.

    ‘It is not worth the keeping: let it go:
But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.
And trust me not at all or all in all’.

Better to offer no word than to risk a word that can be broken by what has come before, even if it is offered. The reasoning in what Rossetti fears—dare it be called “logic”—is very odd, but not incoherent: if a promise of marriage contains the promise that one feels most intensely devoted to this person, more than any other, and will continue to do so, then one is binding oneself to a future self, and the person that is being bound contains, as a mirror image, the people he or she once was. To bind oneself to the future, is to bind oneself to one’s past: if the former is possible, the latter follows. The anxiety she feels is about what a promise means about identity itself, about personhood and continuity in time. She would be free from these, if she could. 

“Fades the image from the glass | And the fortune is not told” is more relief than regret, though as is often the case with Rossetti’s relinquishing of the world, her tonal mastery accommodates the possibility of both at once; in this case, it is the abruptness of “fades” that contains eagerness and catches in the throat with sadness. Most telling is the article: “the image” and “the fortune,” not “my image” or “my fortune.” The personal pronoun would tether her or him, whereas “the” detaches; it is neither of them. She would not have them be their past, any more than she would have their future selves be the present promising versions of who they are: “If you promised, you might grieve | For lost liberty again.” The meaning is clear: you might grieve to be unable to reclaim your lost liberty. But “again” creeps with the suggestiveness that he has done so once already, and that in doing so again, he would in the future state be repeating his past, rather than freeing himself from either. The liberty she seeks is a liberty from such repetition, the repetition that is being the same person over time, which is perhaps why she allows this odd phrasing’s suggestive potential air to breathe: he would be grieving not so much the lost liberty as the recurrence “again”. Her own fate does not quite echo his: “If I promised, I believe | I should fret to break the chain.”  This is not “If I promised, I would believe”—and that exclusion is felt: she would not believe, she would doubt that she had done right, and “fret to break the chain.”  “Should fret to break the chain” holds two opposing meanings: she would be upset in order to break the chain, fretting to accomplish her end; she would worry too much at the consequences of breaking the chain, and so prove unable to do so. Either possibility is nuanced: no fretting could break the chain, and she would be consigned to a futile existence. Or else, her own worry about breaking the chain would be itself the chain, her worry would bind her to itself, as worry frequently does. “Should fret” and not “would fret” because “would” implies will power and determination, whereas “should” the simple futurity of what shall, willed or not, come to pass, and in either case, the passivity of her fate is both object of her struggle and its weakness. This is the passivity of being stuck with oneself, stuck as one is and as one was—which is why the fifth line of the stanza, always the line where she invokes “us,” bring them together in the poem to deny them a union in life, is especially disingenuous: “Let us be the friends we were.” This is the first acknowledgement that they are no longer friends, that even without having promised, the promise of a promise has negated the friendship that she would seize back, if she could. In saying this, she courts absurdity, knowingly I believe: for she has earlier explained that she does not want to cast their relationship in any fixed for, and yet now, with “friends we were” that is just what she seems to be doing. What could it mean to willfully return to a former relationship at this point if it did not mean in effect promising to just be friends, undermining the poem’s refusal to promise? But of course that promise was undermined from the start, when in the second line, she writes “So will I not promise you,” which attempts to cleave resolve from promise, thought such a declaration of resolve cannot shed the promissory force granted by the “So.” The inversion is not for rhythm alone either: “I will” would echo the Anglican marriage rite. She reverses it to deny the phrase its conventional effect. Or is the final “Let us be the friends we were” an affirmation of the freedom that is friendship, a freedom to come and go as one or both (and who decides?) please? “Nothing more but nothing less” is taut, exacting in its demand, suggesting that their return cannot be as free as she has hoped. But it can also be heard running in another direction: they would be “nothing” itself, with nothing more and nothing less than that nothingness. Knowing the impossibility of a return, this is what such a friendship would be. This is not a primary meaning, but it is an echo in the lines. The concluding lines of the poem adopt an epicurean pose. Think of the close of Milton’s sonnet, “Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,” with its self-consciously epicurean balance of meanings:

He who of those delights can judge, and spare

                                      To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

Rossetti’s “many” offers a similar didactic note, but her ambiguity is not generated, as is Milton’s from a double meaning (“spare” as “forebear” and “afford”), but from the question of whether the “many” includes him and her. Have they already perished of excess? Is the poem already too much? As if, in an effort to pull back, the final lines invite speculation without confirming it; the prospect of a promise might do sufficient damage on its own, like Eve in the Garden who dreams of the fall before being tempted, or like Adam who dreams of Eve and wakes to find his dream true. Whether they are the “many” or not, the thought of bare life rather than a full life is not alien to Rossetti, for whom a bare life can “thrive” because it is permitted to pass away, denied the permanence of being that is humanity’s blessing and burden. 

In a poem of exact equipoise, the word “thrive” is subordinated to time’s passing, to loss, and to escape from being:

Why does the sea moan evermore?
Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,
It frets against the boundary shore;
All earth's full rivers cannot fill
The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.

Sheer miracles of loveliness
Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:
Anemones, salt, passionless,
Blow flower-like; just enough alive
To blow and multiply and thrive.

Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,
Encrusted live things argus-eyed,
All fair alike, yet all unlike,
Are born without a pang, and die
Without a pang, and so pass by.

The first question can be heard in two ways. From one perspective, it is genuine question that is answered by the poem—the sea moans because in its worldly existence it is denied entry to heaven. From another, it is nearer a rhetorical question, expressing surprise that the sea would moan: why does the sea moan evermore, given—the rest of the poem will explain—it is not burdened with eternity, but is allowed to be “just enough alive | To blow and multiply and thrive.”

“By the Sea” is not political, but the uneasiness with personal identity, being the same over time, is political. It can also be reconciled with Rossetti’s Christianity: she accepts the permanence of heaven as the only true identity, the soul bare before God, but she refuses the ersatz earthly version. This is political because our unions and commitments depend on the possibility of things enduring, and our sense of injustice cannot be explained apart from some belief in the permanence and stability of the self through change, if redress or punishment or redemption or forgiveness are to be possible. That is why when Rossetti in “From the Antique” writes of a woman’s lot, the double oppression comes from being a woman fated to be denied certain forms of recognition as women over history have been, and also being a woman fated to a constant identity over a lifespan that cannot be escaped, only endured:

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 then any being, were not:

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.

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.

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.

That same cadence as in “By the Sea”: there it was “blow and multiply and thrive” and here “wake and weary and fall asleep.” There are so many fine touches in this poem. “Go and come” so that the coming of the seasons has the last word, relentless, insistent. “Wag on the same” as tired and worn a phrase as the world is a place, dismissive of the terms of its own complaint. But not a total devaluation of the world: “Cherries ripen and wild bees hum” relishes its abundance, of which it would not be a part. When she says “None would miss me in all the world” it is without pity, and instead hints at a readiness to argue against those who would object that she would be missed: and she is relieved that it is not a valid counter to her desire for (earthly) oblivion. “I should be nothing” is without a conditional phrase, without an “if,” and so it hovers near to “ought,” but it also grants that there is an unspoken conditional, “If I had my way” perhaps. “While all the rest” is everyone else, but in a phrase that is greedy for “rest” that is more perfect than theirs, though closing as it does on “fall asleep,” she expresses her own longing in her imagination of their weariness, and brings herself nearer to all others, whose days end with sleep, sleep being the proper ends of their existences as “nothing” is the proper end of hers. She would be nothing at all, not because she would be dead, but because she would be eternal, beyond time, her existence extinguished. They “would,” and she “should” because she abnegates the will that unifies the self in the unity of action.

Rossetti does not deny something permanent in human life, but it is not ours or the world’s role to establish or assume its permanence. Hers is a radical Christianity on this reading, since her faith is inspired by a refusal to accept that the world can serve as a foundation for life; she takes a leap of faith (though she would not use the phrase) because the foundation for the world cannot be in or of it. We might think that the political implications of this vaguely Kierkegaardian Rossetti would resemble the Knight of Faith, a double consciousness, holding at once to bourgeois expectations and the prospect of salvation that resides in every moment. Instead, Rossetti, and it’s plausible that gender grants her this insight, rejected the central act of bourgeois life—marriage—not out of ascetism (which implies the presence of something tempting), but out of a more arid intellectual dissatisfaction with how incoherent time and change render earth-bound commitments to stability.  

Politics as we know it cannot happen with this view of time. But the seeds of political life are preserved in her poetry, nevertheless: “Keep we both our liberties.” Rossetti, writing this poem a decade after Mill’s classic of liberal thought, On Liberty, does not take up the word lightly. Its political valence, rather than being neutralized, reorients the poem briefly in a direction that it does not pursue: the liberty to say “no” not only to marriage, not only to the burden of a promise, but to the clinging insistence for continuity of identity when there need be none, and perhaps even can be none, has deep and wide implications for political orders founded upon binding commitments, as perhaps all we have known have been. But the implications of Rossetti’s dissatisfaction are not foreign to political thinkers.

In her excoriating (Weberian) critique of the legal framework of capitalism, The Code of Capital, legal scholar Katharina Pistor considers the foundations of law that define and protect assets.[i] Arriving at an impasse in recommending how the existing system can be transformed from within its assumptions, she considers the radical analysis of rights by German philosopher Christoph Menke. Menke analyzes the emergence of capitalism in terms of state recognition of private rights and concludes that to prevent the inequalities and inequities fostered by our current legal order, as Pistor paraphrases, “no civil rights should be sacrosanct forever…in this new order, rights are purposefully forged to achieve change and lose at least some of their power once a given purpose has been achieved to make way for new rights and new purposes.” This would not void the force of contracts, yet it would build an acceptance of change into their premises. But, she concludes, Menke’s vision lacks feasibility since “attempts to transform our current system of subjective rights…will undoubtedly trigger massive claim for compensation, because altering existing rights will likely be declared an expropriation that require adequate compensation, lest they will be deemed unconstitutional.” Best, Rossetti may respond, not to have promised in the first place—and second best to decline to do so now.