Pretty Beasts and Flowers

This chapter opens with a reading of Rossetti’s nursery rhyme book, Sing-Song (1872), in which the nonhuman world is disclosed as an evolving incarnation of the Spirit. Her close attention to the minutiae of creation in Sing-Song offers the reader a lens through which to assess Rossetti’s profound love for animals and plants. Rossetti’s London was not an urban metropolis, but comprised Regent’s Park, the newly opened Zoological Gardens, and many gardens, terraces, enclosures, and conservatories. In close readings of her mid-career poetry and prose, the chapter suggests that Rossetti imagined creation as a sacred commons of companion species, creaturely and vegetal, that evolves over time as part of the divine. It also reveals Rossetti’s horror at any practice, such as vivisection, that threatened to dismember the divine body and her consequent turn to a weakened or kenōtic form of thinking and love she identified specifically with plant being.