Success Quote by Christina Rossetti

Rossetti turns a love lyric into a small hostage situation: the speaker “dream[s] of you to wake,” only to wish she could keep dreaming and never surface. The pivot on “wake” is the whole engine. Dreaming is usually coded as escape, but here it’s also utility - a way to endure consciousness. Waking isn’t clarity; it’s deprivation. By yoking desire to sleep, Rossetti makes longing feel bodily, cyclical, almost chemical: you don’t just miss someone, you metabolize them at night and crash in the morning.

The subtext carries Rossetti’s signature tension between intensity and renunciation. In a Victorian context where female desire was expected to be disciplined, the dream becomes a sanctioned zone: passion without permission, closeness without consequence. That’s why the fantasy escalates from “dream” to “slumber on.” She isn’t merely asking for more of the beloved; she’s asking for a state where the beloved can’t be taken away by daylight, society, or the self’s own moral accounting. The “would that I might” performs modesty while smuggling in a radical wish: to opt out of waking life’s rules entirely.

There’s also a faint chill under the romance. “Not wake” can read as erotic surrender, but it brushes against death’s vocabulary too, the Victorian “long sleep.” Rossetti, steeped in devotional poetry and the era’s preoccupation with mortality, lets that ambiguity stand. The line works because it refuses to choose: love as refuge, love as addiction, love as annihilation - all held in the simple cruelty of morning.