A Birthday, my heart is like a singing bird

A Birthday was printed in 1862 in Goblin Market and Other Poems, Rossetti’s first collection. Her brother Dante Gabriel designed its illustrations and binding. Rossetti wrote the poem several years before it appeared and left no note about what prompted it. Wikisource carries the text of the 1862 edition.

Where this text comes fromThis is the shorter half of a very short poem: sixteen lines in two stanzas, and you type the first eight. They are built on one repeated opening, My heart is like, which arrives four times before the stanza allows itself a conclusion. The second stanza abandons the images from nature entirely and turns to a dais of silk, vair, pomegranates and peacocks, so the half you copy is the plain one. The edition linked below sets the title in capitals and gives the author her full name.

What you might not noticeThe 1862 edition names her Christina Georgina Rossetti, using the middle name she dropped from the spine and from later collections, where she is simply Christina Rossetti. Source

What it trainsFifty-four words in a single sentence, zero commas, three semicolons and one full stop at the close. There is nothing lighter than a semicolon to lean on and no sentence break to reset your posture, so whatever rhythm you start with is the one you finish with. At 269 characters it is short, though fourteen passages here are shorter still and one comes down to 209. Eight capitals appear and seven of them open verse lines rather than sentences, a light load but nowhere near the lightest: six passages on this shelf need Shift exactly once. The oddity is appletree, printed as one word, which a modern eye reads as a mistake and tries to correct.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource