Until I began this one-poem-a-week project, I hadn't realized how many of my favorite poets are female. Christina Rossetti is one of these. She was a special person, coming from a remarkable family of creative people. She was born in London, the youngest of four children. Her father was Gabriele Rossetti, a poet, expert on Dante, and professor at King's College, who fled Italy in 1820 after having been sentenced to death as a revolutionary. One brother was poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The other was art critic and essayist William Michael Rossetti. Her sister Maria Francesa was a talented writer before becoming an Anglican nun.

Christina led an unusual life. She fell in love and was engaged to be married twice, once when she was 17 and again at the age of 36. Both times she was said to have been deeply in love. But she terminated both engagements, saying that she could not bring herself to marry because of her "religious scruples." Both times she was said to have been devastated. Her brother Michael described the first incident as a "staggering blow" to her. Her biographer said the second was "probably responsible for what is most moving and most exquisite in her poetry."

Throughout her life, which in her later years was marked by morose, guilt-ridden religious pursuits, she wrote poetry. She wrote literally hundreds of hymns and more than a thousand poems. As one might expect, the prevailing note is melancholy. Unrequited love and death figure frequently. But there are some great poems and the following is one of them. As with so much of her poetry, it contains a moral message, this one about the ease with which one can yield to temptation and the difficulty of finding one's way back to redemption. It was written in 1865 and published ten years later.