1I took my heart in my hand
2(O my love, O my love),
3I said: Let me fall or stand,
4Let me live or die,
5But this once hear me speak—
6(O my love, O my love)—
7Yet a woman's words are weak;
8You should speak, not I.
9You took my heart in your hand
10With a friendly smile,
11With a critical eye you scanned,
12Then set it down,
13And said: It is still unripe,
14Better wait awhile;
15Wait while the skylarks pipe,
16Till the corn grows brown.
17As you set it down it broke—
18Broke, but I did not wince;
19I smiled at the speech you spoke,
20At your judgement I heard:
21But I have not often smiled
22Since then, nor questioned since,
23Nor cared for cornflowers wild,
24Nor sung with the singing bird.
25I take my heart in my hand,
26O my God, O my God,
27My broken heart in my hand:
28Thou hast seen, judge Thou.
29My hope was written on sand,
30O my God, O my God:
31Now let thy judgement stand—
32Yea, judge me now.
33This contemned of a man,
34This marred one heedless day,
35This heart take thou to scan
36Both within and without:
37Refine with fire its gold,
38Purge Thou its dross away—
39Yea, hold it in Thy hold,
40Whence none can pluck it out.
41I take my heart in my hand—
42I shall not die, but live—
43Before Thy face I stand;
44I, for Thou callest such:
45All that I have I bring,
46All that I am I give,
47Smile Thou and I shall sing,
48But shall not question much.
"Twice" tells the story of a heartbroken woman who, after being rejected by her beloved, turns to God for solace. Written by the English poet Christina Rossetti in 1864, the poem presents religious faith as a more reliable and transformative love than any earthly romance. With its intricate rhyme scheme, devotional nature, and attention to the gender dynamics of Victorian England, "Twice" is representative of the rest of Rossetti's influential body of work.
I offered my heart to you, my love, and told you to decide whether I stand or fall, live or die, but this one time just listen to what I have to say. (Oh, how I love you.) Actually, I'm just a woman, so my words don't carry much weight; you shouldn't listen to me. I should listen to you.
You held my heart in your hand, and you had a smile on your face even as you coldly judged and then rejected me. You said that I wasn't ready and told me to wait as the birds sang and until the corn ripened and browned.
Your rejection broke my heart, but I didn't show you how much it hurt. Instead, I smiled even as you judged me. But I haven't felt any joy since then, nor do I ask people for anything anymore. The delights of the natural world, like blooming flowers or singing birds, don't interest me.
Now, I've decided to offer up my love again. Oh God, I'm holding out my broken heart to you; you know everything that's happened and can judge me. Last time, I put my faith in an unreliable person. So, God, now I am ready to accept your judgment.
I was damaged and dirtied by this man one careless day. Now, God, I need you to judge me through and through. Cleanse my heart, burn away its impurities, and make it gold again. Then protect this new heart so that nobody can take it from me.
Now, I hold my mended heart in my hand and I will live. I stand before you, God, who created me, and I will give you everything I have and everything I am to show you my devotion. I will happily do whatever you request without hesitation.
Christina Rossetti's "Twice" tells the story of a woman who, disappointed in romantic love, turns to God for solace. The poem begins with a description of a past lover breaking the speaker's heart. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, the speaker presents her broken heart to God, whom she trusts to give her the constant love that a human being could not. The speaker's relief and joy in her new relationship with God suggests that faith is a more reliable source of fulfillment than a romantic relationship with another person.
The speaker's description of her past romance makes it clear that she was passionately in love and terribly disappointed upon being rejected. She remembers feeling as if she were "tak[ing her] heart in her hand" and presenting it to her beloved—in other words, feeling that she was offering this man a tender, intimate part of herself. To her, it was as if she were putting her very life in her lover's hands; she stood ready to "live or die" depending on whether he accepted her or not.
Her beloved's condescending rejection thus hit her very hard indeed. When he merely "scanned" her heart "with a critical eye" and handed it back to her, calling it "unripe," she was devastated; though she covered her pain with a false "smile[]," she felt her heart shatter. Romantic love, in this instance, proved both dangerous and unreliable. The speaker's experience suggests there's simply no trusting that the person you hand your heart to will be gentle with it!
In search of a less painful lover, the speaker "now" turns to God—a figure, she believes, who will be more constant, forgiving, and trustworthy than her human lover ever was. She again feels as if she is "tak[ing her] heart in her hand," but this time, her heart is already "broken"; she's thus even more vulnerable than she was before as she now offers herself to God. Even so, the speaker has total faith that her heart be protected in God's hands—nobody will be able to "pluck it out." This reliability directly contrasts the danger and instability of her past relationship.
Having put her trust in God, the speaker feels healed, cleansed, and fulfilled. She determines that she "shall not die, but live" and feels safe to continue sharing everything she has with God without fear of rejection. The poem thus suggests that the love of God is secure, deep, and life-giving, while the love of human beings is fickle and shallow.
The speaker of Christina Rossetti's "Twice" opens the poem with an account of how a man broke her heart and closes it with a description of how God then healed her. While human love hurt and sullied her, she says, God's love and acceptance allow her tarnished heart to become "gold" again—that is, to become pure, enduring, and precious. In this poem, religious faith has the power to transform and restore—even when one feels broken beyond repair.
After a romantic disappointment, the speaker feels that the man who rejected her has "marred" her, or left her badly damaged. Her heart utterly broken, she desperately turns to God—whom she feels has the power not only to heal her heart but also to purge it of all its "dross" (that is, its lesser, weaker parts and impurities). The speaker is thus eager for God to "judge" her: having "seen" everything, God has the power to determine her worth and offer the grace she longs for. She trusts that God will cleanse her heart and "refine [...] its gold." In other words, the speaker feels that loving God will purify her and undo the damage caused by the man.
The poem thus suggests that God does not just offer solace, but transformation. Through God, the speaker can move past heartbreak by receiving a new, stronger heart of gold. Along with this new heart, the speaker gets a new life force, too. When she was putting her faith in her mortal lover, the speaker felt as if her life depended on his opinion of her. Now, with her newfound trust in God, she affirms that she "shall not die, but live." This evokes her newfound lease on life on earth the idea that she will enjoy an eternal afterlife with God in Heaven.
"Twice" hints that the speaker (a woman disappointed in love) did not just give the man she loved her heart: she also gave him her physical body. In the poem's Victorian world—where women were expected to remain virgins until marriage, while men could do essentially what they liked—the lover's rejection thus makes the speaker feel that she is a damaged woman in need of forgiveness from God. The poem's sympathy for the speaker and sour portrait of her lover suggests that these Victorian sexual mores were inherently unjust and hypocritical.
The speaker's description of her past relationship suggests that she was sexually involved with the man she loved. When the speaker writes that her lover could tell her to "fall or stand" and then "took [her] heart in [his] hand," the subtle implication is that the two shared more than just emotional intimacy. That is, they also perhaps had a sexual relationship. The imagery of the man physically examining the speaker's "heart" also suggests that their relationship was sexual in nature. Indeed, the speaker's description creates the sense that her body is being evaluated in addition to her love: the man scans her heart "with a critical eye" only to "set it down" after deeming it "unripe"—language that might suggest he didn't find her sexually mature or appealing enough.
The speaker's role in this sexual relationship leaves her feeling "marred," or sullied, perhaps like a "fallen" woman. She feels that she can only purify herself by asking for God's forgiveness. The man, on the other hand, doesn't assume any guilt. The speaker asks for God's purification, wanting God to clear away the "dross" from her past love affair—"dross” that the man in the relationship never had to deal with. He, by contrast, hardly seems affected by the experience: "critical" and condescending, he rejects the speaker "with a friendly smile," an image that suggests he's hardly bothered by the whole affair (or by her pain, shame, and suffering).
By sympathetically telling this story in the heartbroken speaker's voice, the poem thus sympathizes with the female speaker and portrays her male lover as a condescending cad, suggesting the hypocrisy in the Victorian era’s gendered sexual expectations.
I took my heart in my hand
(O my love, O my love),
I said: Let me fall or stand,
Let me live or die,
The first stanza of "Twice" makes it clear that this will be a poem about love and devotion. The speaker begins by declaring that she took her "heart" in her "hand," a metaphorical image that conveys the vulnerability and courage entailed in offering her love to someone else for the taking.
Line 2 uses apostrophe to introduce the first recipient of the speaker's love: a romantic partner. The epizeuxis of line 2 (the immediate repetition of the phrase "O my love") underscores the intensity with which she loves this person. Placing these phrases in parentheses, however, also makes it seem as though the speaker is talking to herself or unable to openly express her passion, however. Readers will also quickly learn that this lover is no longer around to hear the speaker's words, and her use of apostrophe thus emphasizes her loneliness.
Lines 3-4 highlight the intensity of the speaker's feelings for this person further still. The parallel phrasing of "Let me fall or stand, / Let me live or die" creates an emphatic rhythm that emphasizes just how much she's offering here. She's not just giving this man her heart: she's granting him control over her fate and saying that she'll do whatever he asks, even if it hurts her.
The word "fall" here also hints that this relationship is physical: a "fallen woman," in the Victorian era, was one who had engaged in sexual intimacy outside of marriage and lost her innocence, "falling" from God's grace. The use of this word foreshadows the speaker's "stand[ing]" back up before God in the final stanza.
But this once hear me speak—
(O my love, O my love)—
Yet a woman's words are weak;
You should speak, not I.
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Get LitCharts A+You took my heart in your hand
With a friendly smile,
With a critical eye you scanned,
Then set it down,
And said: It is still unripe,
Better wait awhile;
Wait while the skylarks pipe,
Till the corn grows brown.
As you set it down it broke—
Broke, but I did not wince;
I smiled at the speech you spoke,
At your judgement I heard:
But I have not often smiled
Since then, nor questioned since,
Nor cared for cornflowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing bird.
I take my heart in my hand,
O my God, O my God,
My broken heart in my hand:
Thou hast seen, judge Thou.
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God:
Now let thy judgement stand—
Yea, judge me now.
This contemned of a man,
This marred one heedless day,
This heart take thou to scan
Both within and without:
Refine with fire its gold,
Purge Thou its dross away—
Yea, hold it in Thy hold,
Whence none can pluck it out.
I take my heart in my hand—
I shall not die, but live—
Before Thy face I stand;
I, for Thou callest such:
All that I have I bring,
All that I am I give,
Smile Thou and I shall sing,
But shall not question much.
Skylarks are common symbols of joy, freedom, and divinity, and "Twice" builds on this symbolism throughout.
In the first half of the poem, the speaker's beloved tells her that her heart is "unripe" and that she must "Wait while the skylarks pipe, / Till the corn grows brown." In other words, she needs to wait quite a while: the skylark's song is famously long, and the image of corn turning "brown" (ripening, or, maybe, rotting on the stalk) represents the onset of the harvest season and/or winter. Together, these images imply that the speaker's heart won't ever be "ripe" enough for this man. Waiting "while the skylarks" sing might also subtly hint that the speaker is missing out on potential joy and freedom by hanging her hopes on this fickle man; the birds go on delighting in the beauty of existence without her.
When the speaker later says that she had no interest in "cornflowers" or "the singing bird," this suggests that the man never followed up: time passed, winter came and went, and the man never loved the speaker back. The speaker's rejection of nature here conveys her deep sorrow: so hurt is she that she can't bring herself to "s[i]ng with the singing bird." She is crushed, weighed down, unable to feel joy or to recognize the splendor of the world around her.
While the speaker doesn't specifically reference the skylark in the final stanza, she does again talk about music. "Smile Thou and I shall sing," she says to God. Her own song being restored reflects the return of her happiness. She's no longer waiting around "while" the skylark sings; she's now singing for and with God.
Apostrophe appears throughout "Twice." In lines 1-24—that is, in the first half of the poem—the speaker addresses a past romantic interest. This man is not present; he has already rejected the speaker's love and will not respond to her story. As such, the speaker's use of second-person pronouns and the emotional phrase "O my love" emphasize her loneliness and desperation.
She always phrases her declaration of love in parentheses, however, as though she is really just talking to herself:
(O my love, O my love),
Indeed, in Victorian England, it would have been considered improper for a woman to openly express her desire.
This is in part what makes the speaker's apostrophe to God throughout the second half of the poem so striking. Starting in line 25, the speaker begins talking to God, and her words feel active and urgent. While she demurred in the poem's first stanza, denying her own request that her beloved listen to her and adding that "a woman's words are weak," her apostrophe to God is forceful and passionate. She outright demands that God "judge" her, "Refine" and purify her heart, and keep her heart safe "Whence none can pluck it out." Her calls to God—"O my God"—break free of parentheses, as though she can finally, openly, even brazenly declare her love. Her uninhibited devotion to God is clear.
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Small birds famous for their sustained song during flight. Males sing to attract a mate—their songs can last several minutes as they hover in the air.
"Twice" is broken into six octets (or eight-line stanzas) with a bouncy, accentual meter and intricate rhyme scheme. It doesn't follow a set form (such as the sonnet or ballad, for example) but essentially creates its own through frequent repetition and parallelism: four of its six stanzas begin with a variation on the phrase "I took my heart in my hand." This keeps the speaker's heart—her love, her very essence—front and center throughout the poem and helps to center the speaker's two contrasting experiences of love. The poem can also be broken into two chunks based on its content:
These two sections reflect the poem's title: the speaker gives her heart away "twice," with two very different outcomes.
"Twice" uses accentual meter: its lines generally contain the same number of stressed beats, but the arrangements of theses beats, and the overall syllable count, varies somewhat from line to line. For example, here's the scansion of the first stanza:
I took my heart in my hand
(O my love, O my love),
I said: Let me fall or stand,
Let me live or die,
But this once hear me speak
(O my love, O my love),
Yet a woman's words are weak;
You should speak, not I.
Meter is not an exact science, and some readers might scan these lines a little differently. Broadly, though, lines contain three or four stressed beats. Many lines are iambic (their syllables fall into an unstressed-stressed pattern), but the meter is generally flexible. The accentual meter keeps the poem's language feeling dynamic, adding drama and intensity to the speaker's tale.
Each stanza in "Twice" uses the following rhyme scheme:
ABACDBDC
This is an intricate, somewhat surprising pattern. At first, those initial A rhymes (in stanza 1, "hand" and "stand") might lead readers to believe that the poem will follow a standard alternating rhyme pattern (i.e., ABAB). Yet the speaker quickly shakes things up by inserting new rhyme sounds in the poem. That C rhyme seems to hang in the air, not finding resolution until the final line of each stanza (here, "die"/"I"). This mixture of quick and distant rhyme sounds creates a sense of tension and relief. It sounds, perhaps, as though the speaker is unraveling a thought, getting a bit tangled up or carried away, before coming back down to earth.
The poem's speaker is a lovelorn woman who, after being rejected by her beloved, decides to devote herself to God.
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker tells the story of her heartbreak: she offered her heart to a man who took it, coldly deemed it unworthy, and broke it. The speaker comes across as devastated and somewhat meek as she tells this story. She grants this man power over her life itself ("Let me live or die," she tells him) and immediately undermines her humble request that, just once, he listen to her. She deems her own words "weak" and is shattered by her beloved's callous rejection. She keeps her pain to herself, refusing to let him see her sorrow, though she admits to the reader that she hasn't felt any joy "since."
Her sense of being "marred" by this encounter and assertion that, coming from a man, her beloved's words matter more than her own reflect the beliefs of the world in which Rossetti was writing: women in Victorian England were expected to be demure, obedient, and chaste. (It's also possible that the speaker in fact represents Christina Rossetti herself, who wrote much about heartbreak and finding salvation through God.)
In the second half of the poem, however, the speaker comes across as stronger more confident as she offers her heart for the second time: now, to God. The speaker boldly calls on God to "judge" her, firmly rejects her "heedless" dalliance with that contemptible man, and embraces God's appraisal of her heart. Instead of hiding her emotions or expressing her passion in a parenthetical to herself, she proclaims, "O my God, O my God"—proudly declaring her devotion. In the poem's final moments, she invokes traditional English wedding liturgy in offering "All that I have" and "All that I am" to God. And, in stark juxtaposition to her humble request to her mortal lover at the top of the poem, she affirms her fate herself: she "stand[s]" before God and "shall not die." Her faith is healing, life-affirming, and emboldening.
The poem gives little information about where it takes place. All readers know is that time has passed since the speaker first gave her heart to the man who broke it: the poem begins in the past but ends in the present, with the speaker firmly committing herself to God. The poem nods to the gender norms of Victorian England in the speaker's assertion that "a woman's words are weak" and in its hints that this relationship "marred" the speaker (but not her male lover) because it was sexual in nature. That said, the poem's lack of a defined setting keeps its focus on the speaker's relationship to God.
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was one of the most important poets of the Victorian era. A popular writer of strange and fantastical poems, Rossetti contributed to a growing 19th-century vogue for fairy tales and old romances. This poem first appeared in her 1866 collection The Prince's Progress and Other Poems.
Rossetti was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, 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 known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was also an accomplished painter and poet.
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 desires—and the ways in which male shortsightedness and cruelty can smash women's lives.
The Victorian society in which Rossetti lived was deeply conservative and marked by sharp gender divides. Women were expected to adhere to a strict code of sexual morals, and any deviation could mean social exile. Men, while, were not held to nearly as rigid standards. With its nods to "unripe" fruit, soiled purity, and the careless decision of one "heedless day," "Twice" subtly hints that the relationship between the speaker and her beloved was sexual in nature. The speaker's desperate desire for God's judgment, then, might be a desire to cleanse her of her sin and impurity.
Women of the Victorian era were also expected to be utterly submissive to the men in their lives. This idea is reflected by the speaker's (perhaps bitter) assertion that, as a woman, her words are "weak" and less important than those of her male beloved. By contrast, the speaker openly exclaims her devotion to God and even brazenly demands that God "judge" her. She also commits herself to God using language drawn from traditional wedding liturgy. The speaker's passionate, emotional call to God is somewhat radical in light of the Victorians' demands that women be quiet and demure.
Rossetti and Gender — Learn more about Rossetti's beliefs about the gender dynamics of the Victorian era.
The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of "Twice."
Rossetti and Religion — Check out an article that presents close readings of two of Rossetti's religious poems to learn more about her quest for spiritual fulfillment.
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Rossetti's life and work at the British Library's website.