In her Christian poem 'A Better Resurrection' (1857) Rossetti writes: 'My life is in the falling leaf'; and in his study of aesthetics, Modern Painters, Ruskin writes that life is 'partly as the falling leaf'.
To model emotion on a falling leaf holds many parallels with current theories of emotion, particularly those forwarded by Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect.
Here are the first two stanzas: I have no wit, no words, no tears; My heart within me like a stone Is numbed too much for hopes or fears; Look right, look left, I dwell alone; I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief No everlasting hills I see; My life is in the falling leaf: O Jesus, quicken me.
Rossetti's frustration with the leaf, or the tree, as embodying emotion from which either she stands at a constant remove, cannot hear, or feels herself shackled within ('My life is in the falling leaf'), is invoked again in 'An Old-World Thicket', the narrator 'mazed within a wood' where 'all green lofty things' live (ll.
The helix shape also leaves behind a trace of the movement from which it moves forward: as the leaf emerges from the child-bud and then looks after it, so the falling leaf turns round and round in a movement that imitates the spiroid growth from which it fell.
I am not arguing that either Ruskin or Rossetti takes the image of the falling leaf from one or the other: Rossetti wrote 'A Better Resurrection' in 1857 and published it in Goblin Market and other Poems in 1862; Ruskin published Volume v of Modern Painters in 1860 but had been working on the manuscript from the 1850s.
The work of Field and his colleagues follows up on a number of recent theoretical studies modeling the tumbling and drifting motion of a
falling leaf, sheet of paper, or stiff card (SN: 9/17/94, p.