Promises like Pie-crust Explanation

 

Promises like Pie-Crust

CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI

The Peom

Promise me no promises,

So will I not promise you:

Keep we both our liberties,

Never false and never true:

Let us hold the die uncast,

Free to come as free to go:

For I cannot know your past,

And of mine what can you know?

You, so warm, may once have been

Warmer towards another one:

I, so cold, may once have seen

Sunlight, once have felt the sun:

Who shall show us if it was

Thus indeed in time of old?

Fades the image from the glass,

And the fortune is not told.

If you promised, you might grieve

For lost liberty again:

If I promised, I believe

I should fret to break the chain.

Let us be the friends we were,

Nothing more but nothing less:

Many thrive on frugal fare

Who would perish of excess.

Annotation

Paraphrasing 

Analysis

 In “Promises like Pie-crust” the poet Christina Rossetti directly and fact fully speaks about the weak promises, boundedness, and captivity in serious relations. She in the poem has emphasized upon the promises that are made in relation and later those in relation break the promises. From the title of the poem “Promises like Pie-crust” it is evident that promises do not work in serious relations. Rhetorical questions, illusions and distrust in the poem explains the long run of relations by comparing friendship with serious dependent relation.

The poem looks like a conversation between two individuals and the beginning lines of the poem “Promise me no promises/So I will not promise you” is like a plea towards the speaker which the speaker immediately reject. And as the stanza goes the speaker says that committing with someone is like to lose the very liberty we have without any commitment. Christina in the poem want to tell us not be in complicated relation where you would have no liberty and she direct us to be as we were “Never false and Never true/Let us hold the die uncast”. Then the speaker in the last lines of first stanza asks some rhetorical question about the detail of each other, she says whether we know each other? And in fact, knowing one another is important for a relation.

The second stanza portrays the point in the last couplet of first stanza which is the past. The speaker argues “You, so warm, / I, so cold,” means that might you have some kind of relation in the past and you might have broken the promises you made in the previous relation. And then the speaker turns to herself I might have been so in the past. Definitely they are not here to remind their past and as the stanza goes “Who shall us if it was/Thus indeed in the time of old?” off course no one would remind them of their past and it will fade as the images from the glass. Again, in the second stanza the speaker is emphasising on not to involve in any relation. And like the images their promises will also fade, no one will come to regret.

In the third stanza the poet has used again the word promise and she says that if you make promises you might grieve in the future as she is of the opinions that life is not that much simple, the second line in the third stanza “For the lost liberty again”. The grieving is for the lost of liberty and to herself she says, “I should fret to break the chain”. Through this stanza she again says “Let us be the friends we were” means we should not indulge in any serious relation where we must depend upon one another. The last lines of the last stanza “Many thrive on frugal fare/Who would perish of excess” means that very few people keep the promises that they made before establishing relation but what about the large number of people who fail to do so.