‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness’ is startling in its assertion of self and its criticisms of the patronizing superficiality of ordinary romantic relations. Rossetti, doubtless aware of the poem's outspoken and erotic content, suppressed the original text composed in 1857, only publishing a radically modified version in 1885, entitled ‘ “Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive” ‘ (CP ii. 267). The unrevised poem is, however, much more interesting and intense in its charting of the process by which frustration generates first repression and then redirection of libidinous energy towards Christ. In common with many of Rossetti's explicitly devotional writings, which form the focus of this chapter, ‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness’ is insistent, challenging, and unexpected.

The speaker of ‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness’ makes it clear that she has multiple desires, that she wants both to give and to receive, to ‘pour herself’ and to be penetrated. She articulates a wish for equality and reciprocity seemingly impossible in Victorian culture, where human men appear hopelessly fixed in sexual attitude: their ‘vessels’ cannot ‘hold’ the flood of female sexuality, and so the speaker 's ‘fountain’ must remain virginally ‘sealed’ until self can join other in heavenly plenitude.