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In addition to penning the lyrics to the Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the poet Christina Rossetti (sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti) began her writing career with riddles and witty acrostic verses while she was still a teenager: Incredibly, she published one of her first puzzling poems, “Name any gentleman you spy,” in a Victorian periodical called Marshall’s Ladies Daily Remembrancer at the age of just 19.
Several of Rosetti’s riddles relied on identifying a word or an object from a set of clues that both hinted at its definition and broke the word down into its constituent letters or syllables. In the fiendish riddling poem below, the “first” and “second” clues in the opening two lines refer to the first and second syllables of the answer word (the “whole”). Can you figure out what six-letter adjective Rossetti is describing here?
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