Christina Rossetti is one of the most strategic, secretive, and mysterious of poets. As such, she is one of the most intriguing. She is fascinated by ‘The mystery of Life, the mystery|Of Death’ (‘Mirrors of Life and Death’ (CP ii. 75, ll. 1–2)), and her work deliberately cultivates uncertainty and enigma; it is slippery and elusive, sometimes flagrantly refusing to offer stability of meaning or to conform to rational paradigms. ‘What can it mean? you ask. I answer not | For meaning … ’, declares the playful, contrary speaker of ‘My Dream’ (PP 41, ll. 49–50).

Rossetti's imagination is drawn to the world of dreams and daydreams, to indeterminate states of consciousness that exist at the edges, the borders, the thresholds of the known. Her imagination ignores conventional time frames: unlike many fellow Victorians, whose religious faith was challenged by earlier geological discoveries revealing the biblical version of creation to be erroneous, Rossetti maintained absolute trust in the power of the divine and above all in its unknowable nature. The seven days of creation, she argues, should not be understood literally, but symbolically, as ‘lapses of time by us unmeasured and immeasurable’ (SF 87). The seventh day, furthermore, may not be finished, but ‘still in progress, still incomplete’, thus, ‘All the earth becomes holy ground’ (SF 89–90).

Rossetti believed from an early age that as mortal bodies we see through a glass darkly, a perspective encouraged by Tractarian teachings, to which Rossetti was directly exposed from the age of 12, when she, her mother, and her sister, Maria, began to attend services at Christ Church, Albany St. The idea that the visible world typifies the invisible was a perspective that she maintained throughout her life. In her last major prose work, The Face of the Deep (1892), she writes that, ‘matter suggests the immaterial; time eternity … the literal are no more than types of the spiritual’ (FD 215, 238). Such an imaginative connection to dimensions beyond the material is evident especially in poems such as ‘After Death’ and ‘At Home’ (PP 22, 64), texts that venture into the afterlife and speak back to the world from that necessarily unfathomable space.