Up-Hill Analysis

Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay

Form and Meter

Alright Shmoopsters, it's time dust off those thinking caps because you are going to be in serious need of them if you plan on taking on this section. The metrics of "Up-Hill" are so tricky that—...

Speaker

If you've been keeping up with the latest batch of Batman movies, you're probably familiar with Two-Face, the good-guy-turned-villain from The Dark Knight who decides the fate of his victims by fli...

Setting

Rossetti isn't much on descriptive imagery in this poem, but as far as the setting for "Up-Hill" goes, we know a few things:1. There's a road. It goes uphill for a long way, and it takes a fairly t...

Sound Check

Time to brush up on your two-stepping skills because this poem sounds like a dance-off. Or, more specifically, maybe it sounds like the very beginning of one, because things never get too fast-pace...

What's Up With the Title?

You know how sometimes you're walking up a really steep hill and you just kind of forget that you're going uphill because you've been walking that way for so long (said no one, ever)? Yeah, us neit...

Calling Card

Holla' back, Shmoopsters! It's time to talk about dialogic poetry. Officially, dialogic poetry is really just any poem that makes use of dialogue, or plays up the idea that a conversation between t...

Tough-o-Meter

It feels wrong not to give a poem called "Up-Hill" the highest possible rating on the Tough-O-Meter, but let's face it folks: this poem is not especially difficult, as far as poems go. Still, the p...

Trivia

When Christina Rossetti was little, she took a pair of scissors and stabbed herself in the arm just to prove a point to her mother. Eek. (Source.)Rossetti wrote her first full poem, "To my mother o...

Steaminess Rating

"Up-Hill" is great for a lot of things, but sex isn't one of them. God was the only man Rossetti ever made room for her in life and, as you can imagine, her poetry reflects that choice.