In ‘To What Purpose is This Waste’, Rossetti dramatizes the arrogance
and folly of supposed human superiority to plants and animals.
The honey produced by the bees for themselves can only be imagined as waste
if we think that human consumption is the natural goal of all production.
Rossetti outlines how we often look down on small and seemingly insignificant creatures,
like birds and insects. But in a vision offered by religious experience,
the poet learns to silence her ‘proud tongue’ and instead listen
to the sounds and murmurs of hedges and rivers,
which ‘swell’ to ‘one loud hymn’.
In order to change, she moves deeper into the countryside
and re-orients her senses to ‘behold/ All hidden things’
and to hear ‘all secret whisperings’.
‘Honey of wild bees in their ordered cells
Stored, not for human mouths to taste: –
I said, smiling superior down: What waste
Of good, where no man dwells’
A windy shell singing upon the shore:
A lily budding in a desert place;
Blooming alone
With no companion
To praise its perfect perfume and its grace:
And other eyes than our's
Were made to look on flowers,
Eyes of small birds and insects small:
The deep sun-blushing rose
Round which the prickles close
Opens her bosom to them all.
The tiniest living thing
That soars on feathered wing,
Or crawls among the long grass out of sight,
Has just as good a right
To its appointed portion of delight
As any King.
~ Christina Rossetti
from To What Purpose is this Waste?
