A Dirge

“A Dirge” is a poem by Christina G. Rossetti whose paired questions about birth and death introduce the novel’s opening meditation on untimely loss. Its seasonal imagery gives the death at the center of the story a stark counterpoint: nature has its recurring times, but a human life can end at a moment that feels profoundly wrong.

The poem’s seasonal structure

The poem begins by asking why someone was born while snow was falling, then imagines more fitting seasons: the cuckoo’s call, green grapes, and swallows gathering to fly away from dying summer. The movement from winter toward summer makes birth seem out of step with the world’s expected renewal, while the swallows’ departure already carries the image of an ending within the season of life.

The second question turns from birth to death. Rather than dying while lambs crop, the dead person, the poem suggests, should have died when apples fall, grasshoppers trouble the fields, wheat becomes sodden stubble, and the winds sigh for things that are passing away. The parallel stanzas make birth and death answer one another, but their seasonal calendar cannot explain why either should happen when it does.

The poem at the opening of the novel

Placed before the prologue, “A Dirge” establishes loss as a question rather than an answer. The prologue’s epigraph describes the misery of a person whose fame makes misfortune famous; Rossetti’s poem, by contrast, turns attention to the painful mismatch between a life’s ending and the season in which it occurs. Together, the two openings frame a death that is both private in its human cost and public in its exposure.

That public dimension becomes concrete in the first scene: photographers gather behind police barriers in falling snow, aiming their cameras at a white canvas tent, a tall red-brick apartment block, and the top-floor balcony from which the body fell. The poem’s opening snow therefore resonates with the scene without explaining it: the landscape offers a language for mourning, while the waiting photographers turn the death into a spectacle.

Meaning and recurrence

The poem’s chief force lies in its insistence that natural cycles do not make an individual death feel timely. Apples dropping, fields being cut down, and winds sighing offer a season for endings; against those images, the death that begins the novel appears irreducible to any orderly pattern. The poem does not identify the dead person or establish the circumstances of the death. Instead, it gives the reader a form in which to feel the question of when a life should end, before the investigation can begin to ask how this one ended.