Face of the Deep: a Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse

For some time past, as the admirers... of Miss Christina Rossetti know, that lady has devoted her singular poetic genius and her deep religious feeling to the composition of works of devotion in mingled verse and prose. The skilfullest divine without a touch of poetry must blunder over the Apocalypse; and the usual poet without some tincture of divinity, though he can hardly miss its beauties, must be naturally désorienté in it. Miss Rossetti holds both keys. And it is perhaps almost more noteworthy in her that, possessing them, she does not stray, as the possessor of both might be thought likely to do, into by-paths of will-worship. The Face of the Deep is a commentary, devotional not exegetic, on the Apocalypse. It takes the text of that astonishing book (which some cool-headed judges have ranked with the books of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah as capable of challenging from the merely literary point of view anything in the literature of the world), and goes through it chapter by chapter, and verse by verse, with meditations in prose or in poetry. The key of the book is now one so little familiar that to an ordinary reader (it will, of course, be more plain song to any one versed in devotional literature) it may take some little time to find. Miss Rossetti’s fervent, somewhat mystical, thoroughly Orthodox, but thoroughly unsectarian, and — if we may say so — unschool-like religiosity, finding vent in literature that would not disgrace the great names of the seventeenth century, might seem out of our time’s way. - Summary adapted from The Saturday Review (November 26, 1892)