The Work
The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1892, three years before Rossetti's death in 1894. It is her longest and most ambitious work - approximately 500 pages - interweaving lyric poems with prose meditations on each chapter of the Book of Revelation. The book reflects the sustained engagement with Scripture that characterized the last two decades of her life, when illness and religious devotion increasingly dominated her existence.
The title comes from Genesis 1:2 ('And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep'), suggesting that Rossetti understood the Apocalypse as a return to the deep mystery of divine creation and re-creation. The book remains the most sustained poetic-theological engagement with the Book of Revelation in all of Victorian literature.
Biblical Engagement
The Book of Revelation provides the entire structural and thematic framework. Rossetti proceeds chapter by chapter through the Apocalypse, combining close exegetical attention with lyric response.
Revelation 1:8 - 'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty' - provides Rossetti with the controlling vision of the whole: the God of the Apocalypse is the God of all time, whose sovereignty over beginning and end makes the present moment of suffering endurable. Her meditation on this verse develops the Johannine theology of divine eternity (John 1:1-3; Revelation 22:13) as the foundation of Christian hope.
Revelation 5:12 - 'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing' - is the book's devotional center. Rossetti's treatment of the Lamb is intense and intimate, drawing on her Anglican devotion and her Tractarian formation. The Lamb is both the cosmic Victor of Revelation's throne-room visions and the sacrificial figure of Isaiah 53 and John 1:29 - the vulnerability and the power held together in a single figure.
Revelation 22:17 - 'And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely' - generates some of the book's most moving poetry. Rossetti identified deeply with the figure of the Bride longing for the Bridegroom - a longing shaped by both her Marian piety and her understanding of the Church as the Body waiting for Christ's return. The poems on this verse enact the prayer they describe.
Revelation 4:8 (the four living creatures crying 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty') is treated as the model of all creaturely worship, connecting to Psalm 150's call for every creature to praise God and anticipating the cosmic liturgy of Hopkins's 'charged' creation.
Author and Context
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was born in London to a family of Italian origin; her father was a Dante scholar and patriot, and her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti became one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She was educated primarily at home and from early childhood showed extraordinary poetic gifts. Her first published collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), established her as one of the foremost poets of her generation.
Rossetti remained throughout her life a devout Anglican of Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian persuasion, shaped by the Oxford Movement's emphasis on the Church's sacramental life, Marian devotion, and the spiritual disciplines of fasting and prayer. She twice declined marriage proposals on grounds of religious incompatibility, and her poetry consistently reflects a sense of the present life as a pilgrimage toward a heavenly home rather than an end in itself.
In her last years, she suffered from Graves' disease and later cancer, and her productivity declined. The Face of the Deep was written during this period of physical suffering and spiritual intensification, and the apocalyptic hope for divine renewal and the Bridegroom's coming has a personal urgency.
Literary Achievement
The book's poems are among the best of Rossetti's late work. They are formally varied - sonnets, hymn-like stanzas, lyric cries - and their engagement with the Apocalypse is never merely decorative. Rossetti consistently uses Revelation's imagery to illuminate her own spiritual condition: the longing of the Bride, the patience of the saints, the horror of divine judgment, and the beauty of the New Jerusalem all become vehicles for personal devotional meditation.
The prose sections show Rossetti as a careful exegete who had absorbed the patristic commentators (she draws on Origen, Victorinus, Bede, and more recent Anglican interpreters) without being dominated by any single source. Her approach is typological and devotional rather than systematic: she reads Revelation as a spiritual guide for the present life rather than a predictive calendar of future events.
Theological Themes
The theology of the Bride - the Church, and the individual soul, longing for union with Christ - is the book's dominant devotional theme. Rossetti reads Revelation 21-22 (the New Jerusalem and the Bride) through the Song of Songs and the Johannine 'abiding' of John 15, and her poems on the Bride's longing are among the most intense in Victorian religious poetry.
Patient endurance - the theme of Revelation 2-3 (the letters to the seven churches) and Revelation 13-14 (the endurance of the saints) - is the other dominant theme. Rossetti's own experience of illness and limitation gives her meditations on patient waiting an earned quality: she writes not as a theorist of suffering but as one who is practicing what she writes.
Reception and Legacy
The book received respectful reviews on publication but never achieved the popular readership of Goblin Market or 'In the Bleak Midwinter.' Its length, its density, and its sustained engagement with a biblical book that most Victorian Protestants found obscure limited its appeal. In the twentieth century it was largely forgotten, recovered only by scholars studying Rossetti's complete output.
Contemporary feminist critics have found the book particularly significant for its portrait of a woman claiming the right to interpret Scripture, to write theology, and to address the whole Church on the meaning of the Apocalypse - activities that were formally closed to women in the Victorian Church. Rossetti does this not in a spirit of protest but of quiet authority, and her implicit claim to theological competence is the more striking for being so unassuming.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study the Book of Revelation alongside the book, particularly Revelation 1-5 (the vision of Christ and the heavenly throne), Revelation 21-22 (the New Jerusalem and the Bride), the Song of Songs (the primary Old Testament source for the Bride imagery), and Isaiah 65-66 (the new creation). John 15:1-17 (abiding in Christ) and Psalm 150 (universal praise) provide additional scriptural context.
Further Reading
- Diane D'Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time (1999) - the best single-volume study of Rossetti's religious life and its relation to her poetry. - Antony Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (1988) - places the devotional works in the context of Victorian religious poetry and the Oxford Movement. - Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life (1994) - the standard biography, with detailed coverage of the composition of The Face of the Deep.