The Sublimity of Nature
The sublime is a philosophical concept originally delineated by philosopher Edmund Burke in 1757. Burke defines the sublime as a feeling of awe, terror, and beauty inspired by an overwhelming experience. This concept deeply influenced much of the poetry, often grouped under the heading Romanticism, that was written in the late 18th and early 19th century. Like Burke, the Romantics saw nature as the ultimate source of the sublime. Christina Rossetti wrote towards the end of Romanticism, and we can see in her poetry the legacy of the notion of the sublime in nature
In “Who has seen the wind,” the speaker experiences the sublimity of the wind, and projects this perception onto the leaves, which “hang trembling” as “the wind is passing through.” Here the wind can be seen as sublime because of its force, invisibility, and inevitably. To the speaker in the poem, the beauty of the wind comes by looking out and seeing the wind move through the trees; however, here there also lies terror. The speaker projects her own anxiety about the wind onto the leaves of the trees which tremble and bow from the sheer unstoppable force. Together, this mixture of beauty and terror works to render the wind as sublime in Rossetti’s poem.
Faith
Although on the surface the poem is a nursery rhyme that explains an unseen natural phenomenon to a child, one might also read it, on a more subtle level, as a formative lesson in faith. Rossetti, a deeply religious person, might pose the following argument: although one cannot see the wind as it moves in the world, one can indirectly surmise its existence by the effect it has on the trees. Likewise, although one cannot see God, his existence might be evinced via his effects in the world.
Although this interpretation requires some supposition, it’s plausible, since religion and faith were key elements in Rossetti's life. Likewise, the Victorian era was often characterized by an interest in using logic and reason to prove an argument. In this way, Rossetti's poem might be a pushback against the sort of Kantian agnosticism that says that the existence of a divine power can be neither proved nor disproved. For someone as devout as Rossetti, such indeterminacy would stand as an egregious lack of faith. Thus, in this poem, Rossetti pushes back against agnosticism, using the basic logic that a child might learn when he or she proves the existence of the wind by looking at its effect on the trees as a spiritual analogy. God, like the wind, can be proved through indirect means; it simply requires a bit of faith to make the connection.
The wind as Divine Afflatus
Many religions throughout history have explained natural phenomena by attributing them to divine origins. The wind in particular, because of its invisibility an force, has been conflated with the presence of the divine. Roman, Norse, Celtic, pre-Islamic, and Semitic religions all had wind gods; the ancient Greeks even had 5 different gods associated with the wind, called the “Anemoi.” It should be no surprise then that the wind still plays a spiritual role in modern religions, especially Christianity.
Since its inception, Christianity has conflated the wind with the spirit of God, or “the Holy Spirit” as the Catholics refer to it. (You can see the connection in the English language: respiration, the process of breathing, contains the same Latin root as spirit: "spir," meaning breath, as does "inspire.") For Rossetti then, one might read her nursery rhyme “Who has seen the wind?” as explicitly religious. At this level, the wind operates not merely as a metaphor for faith or the divine, but quite literally acts as the Holy Spirit moving in the world. During the Christian holiday of the Pentecost (Easter), people of the faith celebrate the Biblical story of the Holy Spirit, who comes down as a great wind and moves among Jesus’s disciples. Rossetti certainly heard this story many times, and as a woman of great faith, took the wind to be a divine afflatus, something that brings about inspiration in its sublime mix of beauty and terror.
