Cristina Rossetti's Religious Life Journey

It has always been said that life is a winding road. Some also say that when things get rough it becomes an up-hill climb. If you put it together you have "Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end" (1-2). It is important to understand that this poem is written in a way that one of the lines is as if someone asked a question and the line afterwards is the answer. What is not know is if the answer is given by someone else or if it is the conscious of the person that asked. In lines one and two we see that one of the speakers is asking if the road will be difficult until the very end. It is the same way that we asks ourselves, when life puts obstacles in our way, if it is going to be the same throughout the rest of our lives.

When the speaker asks, "Will the day's journey take the whole long day?" (3) is another way of asking is the journey through the winding road will take up a long time. The day in this line means life, "From morn to night, my friend" (4) supports this idea. Also, morn is the same as dawn, the birth of day. Night is when the day dies and its darkness is also an analogy to the connection between darkness and death. This means that morn equals birth, when the journey begins, while night equal death when the journey ends. Afterwards Rossetti goes on to portray the question that everyone asks themselves about when our journey is done.

"But is there for the night a resting-place?" (5) This is the question about death. Here the speaker wants to know what will happen after death had claimed him or her. Once again we see how Rossetti uses night to portray death, and lets the reader know that the speaker is refering to death because the poem speaks of a resting-place instead of a room for rest. Here in this verse we see that Rosseti is very concerned about what will happen to her after death.