Three Stages Squared (After Christina Rossetti’s "Three Stages")

By Jeffrey Essman

Featured in New Lyre Spring-Summer 2025

After Christina Rossetti’s "Three Stages"

1.

I fastened all my wishes on a star,
Although the physics that it satisfied
Presumed the light of stars already died
Still shimmered from afar.

And yet I wished and desperately hoped,
As even emptied light seemed bright enough
And wishes made of stronger, surer stuff
Were quite beyond my scope.

For I’d a blindness black and cold embraced
That only wasted wishing seemed to warm
And saved my sight from gazing at the swarm
Of things I wouldn’t face.

2.

And yet the real is adamant, the truth
Insistent on its cold and coldest facts,
While age’s creeping dignity retracts
The reveries of youth.

Embarrassment alone I thought could raze
The edifice of folly I had built,
But called in also bulldozers of guilt
To clear it all away.

There from its remnant stones a lonely place
I formed where I my numbered heartbeats plumbed
And first discerned a song that faintly hummed
With which I might keep pace.

3.
Yet life renewed need not be life enjoyed
And while I set my shoulder to the stone,
The barest of life’s energies alone
I had at first employed.

But life, like truth, will out and as the spring
By green and tender sweetness quick revives
The wintered world, so too to human lives
Its freshing spirit brings.

Yet faced with freshness something in me shies:
I don’t quite trust the path is really clear,
And careful though I’ll grow I’ve still the fear
Of never growing wise.