25 pages • 50 minutes read
The Convent Threshold
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Symbols & Motifs
Threshold
In this poem, the speaker describes the difficulty in deciding whether to join a convent to fulfill her spiritual decision to repent. She struggles to give up her physically-pleasing past life with her lover to devote her life to God. The poem’s speaker has not committed to joining a convent but stands at a threshold between her old life and this new life. The word “threshold” both literally describes the physical structure at the bottom of a door that must be crossed to enter the building and metaphorically describes the spiritual divide between the speaker’s old life and new life.
The poem is filled with contrasting language to further support the threshold image. While the threshold is a liminal space between two worlds, the speaker makes it clear that she cannot remain in the threshold if she wants redemption. In her first dream, it “was not dark, it was not light” (Line 111). As she stood between these places, she was neither condemned nor saved.
Throughout the poem, the speaker continuously crosses thresholds between natural spaces and supernatural or spiritual spaces. She crosses over the threshold in prayer and in her dreams. In the final stanza, she imagines that she and her lover “stand safe” (Line 143) in a threshold that leads to heaven. Only by crossing the threshold will they be saved.
Blood
Rossetti uses blood to represent sexuality, family relationships, and Christ’s sacrifice for human forgiveness. The poem opens with the statement that there is “blood between” (Line 1) the speaker and her “love” (Line 1). Here, the blood suggests the loss of virginity. The speaker’s sexual encounter with her lover ultimately corrupts her spiritually, leaving a “self-same stain” (Line 12) on her heart. In connecting her sexuality to bleeding, the speaker suggests that by engaging in premarital sex, she has essentially injured her soul. Her human desire must be denied, yet she acknowledges that even after her religious experiences, this desire is only “frozen blood” (Line 135).
The speaker then describes a familial strife that somehow divides her from her lover. Between her lover and her are “father’s blood” and “brother’s blood” (Line 2). This “blood’s a bar” that the speaker “cannot pass” (Line 3). By describing it as a bar, the speaker emphasizes the difficulty in overcoming the judgment and the power of family relationships. This foreshadows her difficulty in giving up her current lifestyle to join a convent.
While Rossetti or her speaker never explicitly draw this connection, the Christian use of blood as a symbol for Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross contrasts with the speaker’s use of blood to represent her sins. Unlike her savior, her blood has condemned her to “seek the sea of glass and fire / To wash the spot” (Lines 13-14), to remove the stain and purify her soul.
Dreams
Rossetti’s use of dreams aligns with the recurrence of dreams in the Bible. Most prominently in the Old Testament, influential men including Jacob, Joseph, Solomon, and Daniel have dreams pertaining to God and the future. The New Testament, the Book of Revelations, one of Rossetti’s known favorite sources, recounts John’s dream-like vision of the Second Coming. Rossetti’s speaker, then, is part of a Christian tradition.
In her first dream, she describes a meeting with an unspecified “you.” It is possible that “you” still refers to the speaker’s lover, but it is also possible that “you” refers to God visiting her in a dream, like the biblical figures of the Old Testament. This ambiguity underscores the speaker’s conflict: Will she choose earthly pleasure with her lover or eternal salvation with God? The second dream intensifies this conflict until the speaker resolves to repent. This experience physically transforms the speaker, a reflection of the spiritual change these dreams have caused.
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