A Birthday

Christina Rossetti

Teacher card

Published: 1866, in Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
Length: 16 lines, 107 words, 1 word in 36 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: birthday, love, wedding
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

My heart is like a singing birdWhose nest is in a watered shoot;My heart is like an apple-treeWhose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;My heart is like a rainbow shellThat paddles in a halcyon sea;My heart is gladder than all theseBecause my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;Hang it with vair and purple dyes;Carve it in doves, and pomegranates,And peacocks with a hundred eyes;Work it in gold and silver grapes,In leaves, and silver fleurs-de-lys;Because the birthday of my lifeIs come, my love is come to me.

Christina Rossetti (died 1894), Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems (1866), lines 1301–1317 of Project Gutenberg ebook #16950. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.

What to do with it

One link and one task line for each activity. Send a student the one you want them to do, or print this page and hand it round; each link has a QR code.

Its lines are dealt for names in posy cardsin posy · 16 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See how posy takes lines from this poem, then make a card for someone using them.
See how posy takes lines from this poem, then make a card for someone using them.
posy.popplepoetry.com/sources#ro-birthday
Its lines are dealt for the sky in the weather poemsin weatherline · 16 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
weatherline.popplepoetry.com/sources#ro-birthday

Send the whole hand-out

This page’s link. Students open it, read the text and pick what to do; nothing asks them to sign in.

Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/rossetti-birthday · popplepoetry.com