Poem of the day: After Death by Christina Rossetti

I recently finished the Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti and this poem just reminded me of something I’d read about Lord Byron and how he treated his daughter.

When I read ‘Strange Antics: A History of Seduction’ by Clement Knox (can’t find my my beautiful hardback copy which I’m annoyed by so I can’t give you the page number) he mentioned that Lord Byron was terrible to his daughter by Claire Clairmont (the sister of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). He basically never let her mother see her and then sent her to a convent where she died of a fever at the age of 5. She died alone. This is what Byron wrote to a friend later:

While she lived, her existence never seemed necessary to my happiness; but no sooner did I lose her, than it appeared to me as if I could not live without her.

He did not love her living.