The Full Text of “Sister Maude”
1Who told my mother of my shame,
2Who told my father of my dear?
3Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,
4Who lurked to spy and peer.
5Cold he lies, as cold as stone,
6With his clotted curls about his face:
7The comeliest corpse in all the world
8And worthy of a queen's embrace.
9You might have spared his soul, sister,
10Have spared my soul, your own soul too:
11Though I had not been born at all,
12He'd never have looked at you.
13My father may sleep in Paradise,
14My mother at Heaven-gate:
15But sister Maude shall get no sleep
16Either early or late.
17My father may wear a golden crown,
18My mother a crown may win;
19If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate
20Perhaps they'd let us in:
21But sister Maude, oh sister Maude,
22Bide you with death and sin.
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“Sister Maude” Introduction
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Victorian poet Christina Rossetti's "Sister Maude" is a tale of jealousy, vengeance, and the bitterest sibling rivalry. The poem's speaker, crazed with grief after her secret (and forbidden) lover is murdered, knows exactly who she blames: her sister Maude, who squealed to their parents. The poem reflects that desire and envy alike are dangerous and irrepressible forces, and that sisterhood can be a breeding ground for deep hatred. Rossetti first published this poem in her 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems.
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“Sister Maude” Summary
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Who told my mother about my shameful behavior? Who told my father about my secret lover? Oh, it was my sister Maude, who was always snooping around, spying on me.
Now my lover lies dead, cold as a stone, with his bloody hair fallen into moist clumps around his face. He's the most beautiful corpse in the world, fit for a queen to kiss.
You could have saved him, sister. You could have saved my soul, and saved your own soul, too. There was no point in ratting us out: even if I'd never been born, he would never have looked twice at you.
My parents might go to heaven some day, but my sister Maude will never sleep peaceful in her grave.
My father might win a heavenly golden crown, and so might my mother. If my lover and I knocked on the gates of heaven, we might get in. But not you, sister Maude: to hell with you forever.
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“Sister Maude” Themes
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Sibling Rivalry
“Sister Maude” tells the tale of the speaker and her sister, the treacherous Maude. Readers get the distinct sense that there’s never been any love lost between the pair. When the speaker has a secret love affair, Maude swiftly betrays her to their parents—out of envy, the speaker is quite sure. The speaker’s rage—and Maude’s cruelty itself—show that sisterhood is no guarantee of love. The poem suggests that relationships between siblings, and especially between sisters, can be fraught with competition, resentment, and hatred.
When the speaker finds that her parents know all about her lover, she immediately knows whom she blames for ratting her out: “Maude, my sister Maude,” she says, must have been creeping around to “spy and peer” on what she was up to. Her bitter certainty suggests that this has long been the relationship between the two of them; Maude has always haunted the speaker’s footsteps and tried to get her in trouble.
The speaker is also certain that Maude torments her this way out of pure envy. Scornfully, she tells Maude that there was no point in trying to come between her and her lover. “He’d never have looked at you” even if she herself had never been born, she declares. Perhaps Maude has always been the less attractive of the two sisters; perhaps the speaker is just saying this out of spite. Either way, these lines suggest that rivalry scars the sisters’ relationship.
After Maude’s betrayal, the speaker doesn’t have a shred of familial affection left for her. For all she cares, Maude can literally go to Hell: she curses her to an eternity of “death and sin” for her treachery. Their sisterhood means nothing to her; in fact, it might be their close relationship that allows the speaker to despise Maude as thoroughly as she does. By presenting the constant opportunity for comparison and competition, sisterhood in this poem opens the door to the deepest hatred.
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The Dangerous Power of Passion
“Sister Maude” warns that passion—especially repressed or forbidden passion—is a dangerous force. The two major characters in “Sister Maude” are women driven to desperate acts by their desire. The speaker becomes crazed with grief and vengefulness after her secret lover is discovered and murdered; her sister Maude (who betrays the couple) seems likely to have turned traitor because she desired the young man. Passion is so powerful, the poem suggests, that it can easily become destructive, burning through whatever and whoever stands in its way.
The poem’s speaker is so head-over-heels for her forbidden lover that she’s willing to have a secret affair with him—cause for “shame” in a world where young women clearly aren’t supposed to have lovers at all, let alone clandestine ones. Her desire for him is so great, however, that she doesn’t think twice about breaking societal (and parental) rules to be with him. Even after her beloved dies, her passion is unquenchable: she declares that his clammy corpse is still the most beautiful man she’s ever seen, “worthy of a queen’s embrace” even in death. For this speaker, desire overcomes sense and persists past reason.
Losing your head in love isn’t the only danger of passion. As Maude’s side of the story shows, lust can overwhelm not only reason, but morality and loyalty. The speaker’s sister becomes a traitor out of sexual jealousy: frustrated in her own desire for her sister’s lover (who, the speaker cruelly assures her, would “never have looked at you”), she’s willing to betray her sister and the man she desires to find some outlet for her powerful envy and longing.
Throughout the poem, then, passion is overpowering, corrosive, and menacing. It can’t be contained by any walls the world tries to put round it: not morality, not reason, and certainly not the bonds of sisterhood. Try to thwart passion, and it will only curdle into lies, treachery, violence, and acid hatred.
The poem’s focus on two sisters in particular further warns that a world that tries to quash or control the desires of half the population might be setting itself up for trouble. Try though it might, society can’t fully repress or control women’s desire—and efforts to do so only spawn misery.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sister Maude”
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Lines 1-4
Who told my mother of my shame,
Who told my father of my dear?
Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,
Who lurked to spy and peer.This poem's speaker unveils her dramatic predicament in two short, sharp lines:
Who told my mother of my shame,
Who told my father of my dear?There you have it: the speaker had a secret lover, and someone told her parents about it. If this affair is a matter for "shame," then she was very much not supposed to have a boyfriend. Readers can guess that the poem takes place in an earlier time, perhaps Christina Rossetti's own 19th century England—a period when premarital sex was off limits for respectable women.
The speaker is not at all pleased that she's been found out; already, her anaphora on the question "who told" makes her sound eager for vengeance. As it happens, her question is rhetorical. She thinks she knows exactly who betrayed her: "Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude," she spits. Her certainty suggests that Maude has always been one to "spy and peer," a thorn in the speaker's side for as long as she's lived. Perhaps there wasn't much love lost between these sisters even before Maude proved herself a rat.
This dramatic monologue (that is, a poem presented in the voice of a particular character) will be a tale of passion, treachery, and bitter sibling rivalry. In both its tone and its shape, it will fall somewhere between an old murder ballad—like "The Twa Sisters," which might be a model for this poem—and a tale ripped from the pages of a penny dreadful:
- Like a ballad, the poem will use quatrains (mostly) and an ABCB rhyme scheme. It will also use a ballad-like mixture of iambic tetrameter (lines with four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Oh who | but Maude, | my sis- | ter Maude") and iambic trimeter (lines with three stresses, as in "Who lurked | to spy | and peer").
- Unlike a ballad, this poem will break from all these conventions unpredictably, adding extra lines and refusing to stay within the bounds of its meter. The poem's raggedy form will make the speaker sound not just furious and vengeful, but crazed.
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Lines 5-8
Cold he lies, as cold as stone,
With his clotted curls about his face:
The comeliest corpse in all the world
And worthy of a queen's embrace.
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Lines 9-12
You might have spared his soul, sister,
Have spared my soul, your own soul too:
Though I had not been born at all,
He'd never have looked at you. -
Lines 13-16
My father may sleep in Paradise,
My mother at Heaven-gate:
But sister Maude shall get no sleep
Either early or late. -
Lines 17-22
My father may wear a golden crown,
My mother a crown may win;
If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate
Perhaps they'd let us in:
But sister Maude, oh sister Maude,
Bide
you
with death and sin.
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“Sister Maude” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Repetition
Repetitions help to give the poem its sinister air, evoking both the circling language of old ballads and the speaker's obsessive hatred.
One of the creepier repetitions in the poem appears in the first stanza:
Who told my mother of my shame,
Who told my father of my dear?
Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,The speaker's diacope as she spits Maude's name drips with hatred: she knows exactly who betrayed her, and she's not going to forget in a hurry.
That gets even clearer when she repeats this repetition! Take a look at these lines from the last stanza:
But sister Maude, oh sister Maude,
Bide you with death and sin.This echo brings the poem back to where it began; the speaker, it seems, is unlikely to move far from her ferocious hatred of Maude so long as Maude lives (which, if the speaker got what she wanted, might not be all that long).
Other repetitions connect this poem to the ballad tradition; ballads often use repetition for structure and emphasis. When the speaker describes her dead lover by declaring, "Cold he lies, cold as a stone," she both doubles down on his deathly chilliness and gives her line a swinging rhythm.
In the last two stanzas, meanwhile, the speaker uses the same turn of phrase twice as she develops a vengeful dream of the afterlife:
My father may sleep in Paradise,
My mother at Heaven-gate:[...]
My father may wear a golden crown,
My mother a crown may win;
If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate
Perhaps they'd let us in:This repetition stresses the speaker's idea that just about everyone might get into Heaven—except for the treacherous Maude, that is. It also creates a sing-song, nursery-rhyme sound that strikes an eerie contrast with the speaker's wish that her sister might be eternally damned for her betrayal.
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Anaphora
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Imagery
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Alliteration
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“Sister Maude” 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.
- Lurked
- Clotted
- Comeliest
- Bide
Lurked-
Skulked around, waited in secrecy.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sister Maude”
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Form
"Sister Maude" is built from four quatrains (that is, four-line stanzas) and a grim closing sestet (a six-line stanza) that drives home the speaker's eternal hatred for her treacherous sister. Both in form and in content, the poem responds to folksong: it draws on an old murder ballad about rivalrous sisters, and it adopts some traditional ballad features (quatrains, an ABCB rhyme scheme) while reconfiguring others (adding that closing sestet, playing unsettling games with the meter).
Rossetti also innovates on the ballad form by presenting this poem as a dramatic monologue: a poem spoken in the voice of a character, like a speech in a play. This choice makes readers feel uncomfortably intimate with the crazed speaker's pain and fury.
By leaping off from the traditional ballad form (and a traditional story of deadly sisterly rivalry), the poem reshapes an old tale into something eerily contemporary and personal.
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Meter
"Sister Maude" uses an unsettling, herky-jerky meter that wrongfoots readers at every turn. For the most part, the poem is written in a mixture of tetrameter and trimeter: that is, lines with four strong stresses apiece and lines with three strong stresses. But exactly how and where those lines and their stresses fall isn't easy to predict.
Listen to the rhythm of the third stanza, for instance:
You might | have spared | his soul, | sister,
Have spared | my soul, | your own | soul too:
Though I | had not | been born | at all,
He'd nev- | er have looked | at you.While the lines here are mostly iambic—that is, they're built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm—they're far from consistent. In line 9, two stresses collide uneasily in "soul, sister"; in line 12, an extra skittery little unstressed syllable makes its way into "He'd never have looked." Here as in the rest of the poem, the meter never quite settles into an even pulse.
Notice, too, that line 12 uses trimeter while the rest of the stanza uses tetrameter. Shorter lines like this intrude throughout the poem, sometimes at the end of a stanza, sometimes in the middle.
All these uneasy irregularities keep readers from getting too comfortable—a fitting effect for a poem in which a vengefully raging speaker curses her treacherous sister to eternal damnation. Crazed with grief and hatred, she rants and raves, and the meter raves with her.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Sister Maude" uses this singsong rhyme scheme:
ABCB
Or at least, it does so in the poem's first four quatrains. For the final stanza, in which the speaker relishes the thought of Maude languishing in Hell forever, the speaker adds another couple of rhymes to really rub the hatred in:
ABCBDB
The alternating rhymes reflect the poem's origins. Rossetti was retelling an old murder ballad, "The Twa Sisters," when she wrote this poem, and ballads often use an ABCB or ABAB rhyme scheme. The rhyme's simplicity and steadiness forms a creepy contrast with the poem's wavering meter, making the speaker sound both monomaniacal and crazed.
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“Sister Maude” Speaker
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The poem's nameless speaker is a woman consumed with vengeful hatred after her sister Maude rats her and her secret lover out to their parents. In this speaker's opinion, Maude only did it because she was envious and wanted the man for herself; spitefully, she tells Maude that she wouldn't have had a chance with her lover even if she herself had never been born, suggesting that Maude has always been the less attractive of the two sisters. Perhaps the sibling rivalry on display here has been a lifetime in the making.
Now that her lover is dead—how exactly the poem doesn't say, but the implication is that Maude's betrayal had something to do with it—the speaker seems mad with grief, about to throw herself on her lover's corpse like Romeo in the Capulet tomb. She's crazed enough to curse Maude, damning her own sister to Hell. The reader suspects she's preparing to get her vengeance here on earth, too.
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“Sister Maude” Setting
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This poem could be set in any time and place when sisters envy each other and women's sexual freedom is restricted—that is, just about anywhere and anywhen. Readers might be inclined to picture the poem taking place in Christina Rossetti's own Victorian world, in which a young woman taking a lover might easily have been treated as a matter for stern parental intervention.
The implication that someone has murdered the young man over this affair also gives the poem a darkly medieval twist, perhaps reflecting Rossetti's deep education in the Italian classics.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Sister Maude”
Literary Context
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was one of the most important poets of the Victorian era. A popular writer of strange and fantastical verse, Rossetti contributed to a growing 19th-century vogue for fairy tales and old romances. This poem first appeared in her 1862 collection Goblin Market and Other Poems, the title poem of which tells the tale of two sisters' sinister adventures in fairyland.
Rossetti was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artistic movement dedicated to recapturing the beauty of a (much-mythologized and romanticized) Middle Ages. Her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founder of the group, was also an accomplished painter, poet, and wombat enthusiast. The Rossettis' Italian father gave his children a good education in his country's literature; this poem reflects the influence of the Dante for whom Rossetti's brother was named.
Many of Rossetti's contemporaries saw her as a successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wildly popular and famous poet of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Like Browning, Rossetti wrote movingly about her inner life (and had a fondness for Italy—Browning because she moved there, Rossetti because she was half-Italian). But Rossetti's poetry often followed a wilder and weirder path than Browning's, exploring visions both dreamy and nightmarish. Perhaps Rossetti's contemporaries mostly associated her with Browning because the two were those rarest of Victorian birds: celebrated, successful, widely-read poets who also happened to be women.
Today, Rossetti is often remembered as a proto-feminist figure for her poetry's explorations of women's hopes, sufferings, and longings—and the ways in which male shortsightedness and cruelty can smash women's lives. This poem, with its tale of sisterly envy and frustrated desire, is one of many Rossetti poems that reflects on the dark consequences of sexual repression.
Historical Context
Alongside writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot, Rossetti was part of a 19th-century upswelling of women's voices. Many women writers of the Victorian era struggled to find a place for themselves in a rigidly sexist society that saw women more as men's possessions than as independent people. "George Eliot," for instance, was the masculine pen name of one Mary Ann Evans, a mask that helped open the difficult door to publication in a world that mostly wanted women to keep quiet.
Respectable Victorian women were not expected to become writers; they weren't expected to do much at all, besides get married and have children. As this poem's plot suggests, 19th-century Englishwomen were expected to be modest, virtuous, and chaste. Premarital sex was considered a major sin and might easily ruin a woman's life. Victorian men, on the other hand, could mostly do what they pleased.
Poems like this one—in which young women's frustrated sexual desire generates a whirlpool of envy and murder—reflect Rossetti's sense that bottled-up female energy could breed monstrous consequences. Some scholars even see the two sisters in this poem (and in lots of Rossetti's other poetry—she wrote some very famous sisters) as embodiments of a struggle between two aspects of Rossetti's own personality: her sensuous side and her pious, disciplined side.
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More “Sister Maude” Resources
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External Resources
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Rossetti's Portraits — See images of Rossetti throughout her life, from young poetic wunderkind to established literary giant.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to actor Harriet Walter performing the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Christina Rossetti through the Poetry Foundation.
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More Rossetti Resources — Find a wealth of information on Rossetti at the Victorian Web.
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Goblin Market — Take a look at an early edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems, the collection in which "Sister Maude" first appeared.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Christina Rossetti
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