Summary A* analysis of Christina Rossetti's The Queen of Hearts

Poem Analysis for Christina Rossetti’s The Queen of Hearts

Themes:

Earthly love
Failure
Incompleteness
Unfulfillment
Women

Summary:

In Rossetti’s ‘The Queen of Hearts’ the poem explores what it is like to be the loser
in this game of love, through the extended metaphor of cards.

Structure:

Traditional 7 stanza poem of quatrains- AABB- somewhat an ironic use of rhyming
couplets as these suggest harmony yet there is a lack of unity in the speaker. The
rhyme adds to the light hearted nature of the poem, yet with a serious undertone
despite the colloquial language.




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Imagery:

Throughout the poem, the speaker uses the metaphor of a card game to show
luckiness and a lack of luck in love- the queen of hearts is a metaphor for love itself.
The first stanza explores the speaker’s theory “How comes it, Flora, whenever we/
play cards, you invariably... still hold the Queen of Hearts?” From the start the
speaker and Flora are separated through the use of caesura and this is further
extended through Rossetti’s deployment of apostrophe (when the person cannot
speak back). The “cards” may be a metaphor for life that women play- with the