'One Sea-Side Grave'
Christina Rossetti and Charles Bagot Cayley: quite a sad story.
Christina Rossetti, a poet who wrote so much of love, death and faith, declined two offers of marriage. The first was from James Collinson, painter and Pre-Raphaelite Brother, who she turned down due to his Catholicism; he left the Catholic Church, and she agreed to his suit in 1848, but he reverted to Catholicism and she broke it off, her High Anglican principles being unable to countenance the Catholic Church. William Michael Rossetti wrote in his Reminiscences that afterwards,
A blight was on her heart and her spirits, and the delicacy of health which had already settled down upon her increased visibly. I remember that one day — it may have been within four or five months after the breaking-off of the engagement — she happened to see Collinson in the neighbourhood of Regent's Park, and she fainted away in the street.
It was some years before another offer came her way, in 1866, from Charles Cayley. Since he was agnostic, his offer was also rejected (or that is the reason that W.M.R. gave, anyway), but they formed a close friendship which endured throughout their lives. W.M.R. described Cayley as ‘the man she loved deeply and permanently’, which seems all too likely. Many biographers have concluded that Rossetti regretted turning him down, and saw him as a lost love.
Cayley was a talented linguist, born in St Petersburg where his father was working as a merchant, and educated at Cambridge. He also studied Italian at King’s College London under the Rossettis’ father Gabriele, and is best remembered for translating Dante from Italian while preserving the original metre, as well as numerous other translations. There is an unverified story that he was asked by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge to translate the gospels into Iroquois, and consequently taught himself the language in a month. After early unsuccessful business ventures he was poor all his life, and seems a rather serious, melancholy sort of chap. He clearly had quite an impact on Christina Rossetti’s life (and there is a great article about this by Diane D’Amico).
Cayley’s family lived in St Leonards, Hastings, a place that the Pre-Raphaelites visited on several occasions, and, when he died in London in 1883 (on Rossetti’s 53rd birthday, in fact), his body was brought to Hastings for burial in the family plot. I visited a family grave in Hastings recently, and discovered that Cayley was also buried in that same (huge!) cemetery. It took a while to find the grave, because it was so overgrown with brambles, but with the help of my determined cousin, we found enough to identify it. The grave contains Cayley and three of his five siblings, but he is not actually mentioned on the stone.
However, Christina remembered, and visited, his grave. The brambles which cover the plot now are a physical echo of the poem, and the poignant melancholy of her poem is all the more meaningful when one looks at the grave of this now mostly forgotten man who loved a poet.
Unmindful of the roses,
Unmindful of the thorn,
A reaper tired reposes
Among his gathered corn:
So might I, till the morn!
Cold as the cold Decembers,
Past as the days that set,
While only one remembers
And all the rest forget,--
But one remembers yet.
You can read more about my Pre-Raphaelite adventures in Hastings here,