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The Full Text of “Shut Out”
1The door was shut. I looked between
2Its iron bars; and saw it lie,
3My garden, mine, beneath the sky,
4Pied with all flowers bedewed and green:
5From bough to bough the song-birds crossed,
6From flower to flower the moths and bees;
7With all its nests and stately trees
8It had been mine, and it was lost.
9A shadowless spirit kept the gate,
10Blank and unchanging like the grave.
11I peering through said: "Let me have
12Some buds to cheer my outcast state."
13He answered not. "Or give me, then,
14But one small twig from shrub or tree;
15And bid my home remember me
16Until I come to it again."
17The spirit was silent; but he took
18Mortar and stone to build a wall;
19He left no loophole great or small
20Through which my straining eyes might look:
21So now I sit here quite alone
22Blinded with tears; nor grieve for that,
23For nought is left worth looking at
24Since my delightful land is gone.
25A violet bed is budding near,
26Wherein a lark has made her nest:
27And good they are, but not the best;
28And dear they are, but not so dear.
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“Shut Out” Introduction
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The speaker of Christina Rossetti's "Shut Out" is a mourner in exile. Once, they say, they had a beautiful secret garden. But one day, without warning, they arrived at that garden to find its gate barred and guarded by a remorseless spirit—a silent figure who refused to let the speaker pluck even a single twig as a souvenir of the place they loved. This mysterious poem's picture of exile might be read as an image of many kinds of suffering, from a serious depression to a creative block to a heartbreak. However one reads it, it's a harrowing picture of what it feels like when grief drains the world of meaning. "Shut Out" first appeared in Rossetti's important 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems.
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“Shut Out” Summary
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The door was closed. I peeked between its bars, and saw my garden—mine—laid out beneath the sky, with its dewy flowers of all colors and its green grass.
The songbirds flew from branch to branch; the moths and bees from flower to flower. This garden, with all its nests and its elegant trees, had been mine, and now it was lost to me.
A spirit that cast no shadow guarded the gate, its expression as flat and eternal as death. Peeking through the bars, I asked the spirit: "Please, let me have some flowers to cheer me up in my exile."
The spirit didn't answer me. So I asked: "Or if I can't have a flower, give me just one little twig from a bush or a tree—and tell my home to remember me until I return."
The spirit said nothing. Instead, he walled up the gate with stone and mortar. He left not a single crack through which I could look, no matter how I strained my eyes.
So now I sit here all alone, crying so hard I can't see. But that doesn't bother me: for there's nothing in the world worth looking at since my beautiful garden is lost to me.
Nearby, a bed of violets is budding, and a lark has made a nest among the flowers. And those things are good, but they're not the best, and they're lovable, but not so lovable as my lost garden.
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“Shut Out” Themes
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Loss and Grief
The miserable speaker of "Shut Out" mourns a lost paradise. Once upon a time, they remember, they had a gorgeous garden, a secret place of their own, alive with flowers and birds. But one day, without warning, they found themselves locked out by a cruel "spirit" who refused not only to let them in but to give them even the tiniest souvenir of the garden "home" they loved. Richly symbolic, this poem might be read as a picture of many different kinds of loss, from a dreadful creative block to a deep depression to a heartbreak. In any reading, the poem suggests that loss can feel like being suddenly exiled, forbidden forever to return to the place you were happiest.
Like Adam and Eve, the poem's speaker is locked out of a private paradise; unlike Adam and Eve, they have no idea why. All they know is that, one day, they find the gate to their beloved garden shut and guarded by a terrible "shadowless spirit." This figure arrives out of nowhere, refuses even to let the speaker have "some buds" or "but one small twig" to remember their paradise by—and goes so far as to wall up the gate with "mortar and stone" so that the speaker can't even peek in. This image of an implacable guardian as silent as the "grave" suggests that loss can descend mercilessly, inexplicably, and conclusively as death. The speaker isn't shut out of their garden because they've done wrong; they're just shut out, and that's that.
The speaker's grief for their garden is so deep that even the loveliest sights in the outside world make no impression on them. Nearby, they say, a lark is building its nest in the midst of a "violet bed"—but the speaker can only see this charming springtime vision as "not the best" and "not so dear" as the garden they've lost. When people have lost certain precious things, the poem thus suggests, they also lose their wider ability to take pleasure in the world.
Grief, then, can feel like an inexplicable exile—like being driven away from one's only home with no hope of returning. Such an exile drains life of pleasure and meaning; nothing means anything next to the memory of what's lost.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Shut Out”
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Lines 1-4
The door was shut. I looked between
Its iron bars; and saw it lie,
My garden, mine, beneath the sky,
Pied with all flowers bedewed and green:"Shut Out" begins with a terrible discovery. The poem's speaker arrives at a place they know very well: a secret garden of their own. This is a beautiful place, "pied with all flowers," a fountain of color and scent. And it's very much theirs: "My garden, mine," the speaker calls it, with insistent polyptoton. But though this is their own special, private, beautiful place, someone else seems to have intruded on it: for unaccountably, the gate is shut and locked.
The shape of the first lines mirrors the speaker's dilemma and their feelings. Listen to the powerful caesurae here:
The door was shut. || I looked between
Its iron bars; || and saw it lie,The first line comes to an abrupt halt in the middle, just as the speaker comes to an abrupt halt at the locked door of their garden. And the semicolon in the second line slices through the speaker's vision just as those "iron bars" do.
Meanwhile, persistent assonance—"iron," "lie," "mine," "sky," "pied"—keeps a /eye/ sound pulsing through the lines like a thin high cry.
These pained, shocked, frustrated lines open a poem about an exile both literal and symbolic. The speaker will tell their story of loss in a form Christina Rossetti borrowed from In Memoriam A.H.H.—Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous elegy for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam:
- Both poems are built from quatrains (or four-line stanzas) of iambic tetrameter. That means that each line uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "My gard- | en, mine, | beneath | the sky").
- And both poems use the same rhyme scheme: a circling ABBA pattern that means each stanza returns to the rhyme it started on.
- That's a suitable form for poems about loss and grief. Just as each stanza's rhymes circle back on themselves, Tennyson returns and returns to thoughts of his dead friend, and Rossetti's speaker returns and returns to their lost garden—both in fact and in thought.
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Lines 5-8
From bough to bough the song-birds crossed,
From flower to flower the moths and bees;
With all its nests and stately trees
It had been mine, and it was lost.
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Lines 9-12
A shadowless spirit kept the gate,
Blank and unchanging like the grave.
I peering through said: "Let me have
Some buds to cheer my outcast state." -
Lines 13-20
He answered not. "Or give me, then,
But one small twig from shrub or tree;
And bid my home remember me
Until I come to it again."
The spirit was silent; but he took
Mortar and stone to build a wall;
He left no loophole great or small
Through which my straining eyes might look: -
Lines 21-24
So now I sit here quite alone
Blinded with tears; nor grieve for that,
For nought is left worth looking at
Since my delightful land is gone. -
Lines 25-28
A violet bed is budding near,
Wherein a lark has made her nest:
And good they are, but not the best;
And dear they are, but not so dear.
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“Shut Out” Symbols
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The Garden
The poem's garden is a rich and mysterious symbol. It can be read as an image of any number of things the speaker might have lost: from simple happiness, to love, to childhood, to creativity, to a sense of self.
The garden's privacy—and the speaker's insistence that it was "my garden, mine"—invites readers to see it as something in the speaker's inner life, a safe and lovely place in the speaker's soul that they could withdraw to. The arrival of the "shadowless spirit," then, might symbolically suggest the descent of what we might now call depression, a horrible blank nothingness that cuts the speaker off from their deepest and most personal joys.
However, that's just one possibility among many in this wonderfully flexible poem. Perhaps it would be simplest to say that the garden symbolizes all that is private, beautiful, and beloved—all that the speaker most fears to lose.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Shut Out” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
Flashes of imagery give readers the merest dreamlike glimpse of the speaker's lost garden, suggesting that this was a place as private as it was beautiful.
The garden, the speaker reminisces, was "pied with all flowers bedewed and green"—an image that gets more complex the longer one looks at it. At first glance, it sounds as if the speaker is saying something pretty commonplace: that the garden was full of "pied" (or multicolored) flowers and dewy grass. But without a comma between "flowers" and "bedewed," the phrasing here might also imply that the flowers themselves are "bedewed and green"—an image that hints at a paradise as uniformly, richly green as the Emerald City. Perhaps this just suggests the tangle of green stems holding all those pied flowers up. But for a dreamlike moment, the colors of this scene waver, the greenness swelling out over everything.
If the garden sounds like something from a strange and lovely dream, its guardian is straight out of a nightmare. Barring the gates one day stands a "shadowless spirit." If it casts no shadow, this spirit must be transparent or immaterial; it's a ghostly figure with a horribly "blank" face. In short, this spirit isn't so much a thing in itself as an embodiment of nothingness. Barring the speaker from the beloved garden, it literally offers them nothing in return. This creature is the very picture of despair.
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Caesura
Unlock all 307 words of this analysis of Caesura in “Shut Out,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Repetition
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Allusion
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Assonance
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“Shut Out” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Pied
- Bedewed
- Bough
- Stately
- Peering
- But
- Bid
- Mortar
- Nought
- Wherein
Pied-
Multicolored.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Shut Out”
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Form
"Shut Out" is built from seven quatrains (or four-line stanzas) of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "My gar- | den, mine, | beneath | the sky").
That stanza form, combined with a distinctive ABBA rhyme scheme, might lead readers to suspect that Rossetti modeled this poem on an earlier one: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). That great book-length poem of mourning (an elegy for Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam, dead too young) is written in precisely this stanza form.
Tennyson didn't invent this shape, but he certainly produced one of the most memorable and influential examples of it; the poem was famous from the moment of its publication. (Queen Victoria herself turned to In Memoriam when she was mourning her husband Albert, and it doesn't get more Victorian than that.) Like many poets of her generation, Rossetti deeply admired Tennyson, and In Memoriam would likely have been fresh in her mind when she was writing Goblin Market and Other Poems, the 1862 collection in which "Shut Out" appears. It only makes sense that she would pick up on the simple, echoing sorrow of In Memoriam in this poem—in its own way an elegy for a grievous loss.
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Meter
"Shut Out" is written in iambic tetrameter. That means that each of its lines uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's now that sounds in line 21:
So now | I sit | here quite | alone
Sometimes, though, Rossetti breaks from this pattern. One good example comes in lines 9-10:
A sha- | dowless spir- | it kept | the gate,
Blank and | unchang- | ing like | the grave.Line 9 throws in an extra unstressed foot as it introduces the eerie "sha-dow-less" spirit—an effect that makes that ghostly guardian's arrival sound shivery. Line 10, meanwhile, starts with a trochee (the opposite foot to the iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm)—and thus lays extra stress on the shadowless spirit's terrible "blank[ness]," its nothingness.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of "Shut Out" runs as follows:
ABBA
Rossetti might have borrowed this pattern from Tennyson's famous 1850 elegy for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, In Memoriam A.H.H. An ABBA pattern is a fitting rhyme scheme for any poem of grief: the rhymes keep returning to where they started just as the mourner keeps returning to thoughts of what they've lost. Just as this poem's speaker longs and longs for their lost garden, their thoughts never straying far from that bricked-up gate, the rhyme scheme returns and returns to where it started.
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“Shut Out” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a soul in mourning. Once, they were the lone inhabitant of a beautiful garden—according to more than one poet, the best possible way of life. Now, though, the speaker finds that they've been locked out without so much as a bud or a twig to remember their haven by. Though they plead with the "shadowless spirit" who stands at the gate (and who eventually walls it up so the speaker can't even peep in), that grim guardian remains as silent as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and the speaker can't even discover why they've been exiled.
While this speaker's tale echoes the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, then, it's very different in one important particular: Adam and Eve know exactly what they did to get kicked out of Eden. This speaker's exile is all the more painful because it's unexplained. All that they know is that they once lived in a private paradise, and now live in a world that can never quite match their memories.
Readers might be tempted to see the speaker as a voice for Rossetti herself, who suffered from what would likely now be termed severe depression. This speaker's misery and desperation might be read as those of a person who remembers what it was like to have a joyous, creatively fertile inner world that all at once (and for no apparent reason) feels blocked off. For that matter, though, the speaker might be a voice for anyone remembering better, sweeter times—for instance, a person who (like William Wordsworth) recalls the brighter and more beautiful world of childhood, or a lover remembering their days with a lost beloved.
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“Shut Out” Setting
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This poem is set in the ordinary world—for the speaker, a world of disappointments. It appears to be spring; a bed of violets is budding near where the speaker sits, and a lark has picturesquely built its nest amid the flowers. To anyone but the speaker, this would be a lovely vision from a lovely season. But the speaker has seen a better place, and they know that this one is just a muted, lesser version of that other.
In some sense, the poem's real setting is the secret garden in which the speaker once lived all alone. This was also a springy place, full of birds and bees and leafy boughs—and somehow, it was brighter and more beautiful than anything in the ordinary world. Even the nicest sight outside this garden only reminds the speaker of how much lovelier everything was inside.
Readers might be inclined to read the garden symbolically, and the poem offers many rich possibilities for such a reading. Perhaps the garden represents a joyous, creative way of experiencing the world—a perspective that the bewildered speaker has lost, for no reason they can understand. Perhaps it represents a time of life: bright childhood, a first love. All of these possibilities exist at once. Fundamentally, though, what matters is that the garden is now shut. Like the Garden of Eden, this is paradise lost; unlike the Garden of Eden, it's paradise lost without reason or explanation.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Shut Out”
Literary Context
Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was born in England to a large and talented family and grew up surrounded by art. (Her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also a well-known poet and painter.) Rossetti began her poetic career young; her first poems appeared in literary journals when she was only a teenager. "Shut Out" comes from the mature collection that made her name: Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).
That collection (and especially its title poem, which started a Victorian vogue for sinister fairy tales) was hailed right away as something wild and new. As one contemporary critic said:
To read these poems after the laboured and skilful, but not original, verse which has been issued of late, is like passing from a picture gallery with its well-feigned semblance of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors which greets us with the waving grass and the pleasant shock of the breeze.
Rossetti was influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning—another popular woman poet with strong ties to Italy—and some of her contemporaries saw her as the elder poet's natural successor. As this poem's shape suggests, Rossetti was also deeply influenced by an earlier Victorian great: Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Rossetti here borrows the stanza form Tennyson used to write his famous elegy In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850).
She was also connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the artistic school of which her brother Dante Gabriel was a founding member. Her father's work as a scholar of Italian literature meant she was exposed at an early age to the great Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, whose influence may be seen in her fondness for the Italian sonnet form.
Rossetti's reputation as a brilliant lyrical poet has never tarnished, and she's still much studied today. Her poetry has been a major influence on writers from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.
Historical Context
Christina Rossetti lived in a world marked both by revolutionary change and reactionary conservatism. The Victorians were innovators and empire-builders, and England reshaped itself considerably under the reign of Victoria, its first truly powerful queen since Elizabeth I. A primarily rural population began to move into the cities as factory work outpaced farm work. Writers from Dickens to Hardy worried about the human effects of rapid change and rapacious commerce.
Perhaps in response to this speedy reconfiguration of the world, Victorian social culture became deeply conservative. Women were expected to adhere to a strict code of sexual morals: a woman must be chaste, pliant, and submissive, and any deviation could mean social exile. But within this repressive landscape, women writers began to flourish, asserting the complexity and meaning of their own lives. Rossetti's work was part of a tide of bold and moving poetry and fiction by Victorian women; Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are only a few of the writers whose work achieved contemporary recognition against the odds.
But being a woman writer in this period wasn't easy. Rossetti, for instance, found herself stuck with one of an unmarried Victorian woman's traditional burdens: as a teenager, she was charged with staying home to care for her father when he fell seriously ill. The strain made Rossetti herself collapse only a couple of years into these duties. She would suffer from severe mental and physical health problems for the rest of her life—some of which struggles, readers might suspect, are reflected in this poem. In her manuscript notebook, Rossetti entitled this poem "What happened to me."
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More “Shut Out” Resources
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External Resources
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Rossetti at the Victorian Web — Visit the Victorian Web to find a treasure trove of information on Rossetti.
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short essay on Rossetti's life and work.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Contemporary Response — Read critic William Sharp's admiring reminiscence of Rossetti, written not long after her death.
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Portraits of Rossetti — See some images of Rossetti via London's National Portrait Gallery.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
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