Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that, around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it, sharing the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless adoration, or echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those who are beyond all height and depth more than it. Something of this passive sympathy of environing objects comes out in the poem:

  Around her, lovers, newly met

  ‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,

  Spoke evermore among themselves

  Their rapturous new names;

  And the souls mounting up to God

  Went by her like thin flames.

  And still she bowed herself and stooped

  Out of the circling charm;

  Until her bosom must have made

  The bar she leaned on warm,

  And the lilies lay as if asleep

  Along her bended arm.

  The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when the sun’s warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away, the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti’s have a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem, almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that lives only on the air, and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its accents have been caught. Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem, none is more calmly musical than this:

  When round his head the aureole clings,

  And he is clothed in white,

  I ‘ll take his hand and go with him

  To the deep wells of light;

  We will step down as to a stream,

  And bathe there in God’s sight.

  Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than this little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life he painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies lying along her arm.

  A first draft of Jenny was struck off when the poet was scarcely more than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely re-written — the only notable passage of the early poem that now remains being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest phrase, as a man’s meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met at a dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she lies at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning dawns he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among her hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the poem. But the motif of it is a much higher thing. Jenny embodies an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet’s root impulse is therein the same as in the case of The Blessed Damozel. No two creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than the dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen girl; yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same. The ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one gave birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of joy found expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the nameless misery of unwomanly dishonour: —

  Behold the lilies of the field,

  They toil not neither do they spin;

  (So doth the ancient text begin, —

  Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)

  Another rest and ease

  Along each summer-sated path

  From its new lord the garden hath,

  Than that whose spring in blessings ran

  Which praised the bounteous husbandman,

  Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,

  The lilies sickened unto death.

  It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of man’s sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets, yet young, delicate, “apparelled beyond parallel,” unblessed, with a beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci’s hand, might stand whole ages long “for preachings of what God can do,” and then to endow such a one with the sensitiveness of a poet’s own mind, make her read afresh as though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days —

  Much older than any history

  That is written in any book,

  and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which man’s transgressions will be visited — this is, indeed, to hazard all things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.

  Shall no man hold his pride forewarn’d

  Till in the end, the Day of Days,

  At Judgment, one of his own race,

  As frail and lost as you, shall rise, —

  His daughter with his mother’s eyes!

  Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his Jenny has something in common with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter — than which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical, has reached us even from the land that gave Evangeline to the English tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour, and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out, as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester Prynne. But we see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women: desecrated but akin.

  This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling for the impeachment of lust; —

  Like a toad within a stone

  Seated while Time crumbles on;

  Which sits there since the earth was cursed

  For Man’s transgression at the first;

  Which, living through all centuries,

  Not once has seen the sun arise;

  Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,

  The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;

  Which always — whitherso the stone

  Be flung — sits there, deaf, blind, alone; —

  Ay, and shall not be driven out

  Till that which shuts him round about

  Break at the very Master’s stroke,

  And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,

  And the seed of Man vanish as dust: —

  Even so within this world is Lust.

  Sister Helen was written somewhat later than The Blessed Damozel and the first draft of Jenny, and probably belonged to the poet’s twenty-fourth or tw
enty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her lover; so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she burns his waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he dies in torment In Sister Helen we touch the key-note of Rossetti’s creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural phenomena. The superstition involved in Sister Helen partakes wholly of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of demonology. The groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the ballad showing that the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven: —

  (O Mother, Mary Mother,

  Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)

  But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any animosity against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate demoniacal justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue of the superstition has something in common with that of the German secret tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however, that whereas the latter punishes in secret, even as the deity, the former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased by sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and soul of her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul’s untimely flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also: —

  “Ah! what white thing at the door has cross’d,

  Sister Helen?

  Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!”

  “A soul that’s lost as mine is lost,

  Little brother!”

  (O Mother, Mary Mother,

  Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)

  Here lies the divergence between the lines of this and other compacts with evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti’s departure from the scheme that forms the underplot of Goethe’s Faust, and of Marlowe’s Faustus, and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge’s Michael Scott. It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is the consequence of a misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon an original thirst for knowledge baffled. Faust never does from the beginning love knowledge for itself, but he loves it for the means it affords for the acquisition of power. This base purpose defeats itself; and when Faust finds that learning fails to yield him the domination he craves, he hates and contemns it. Away, henceforth, with all pretence to knowledge! Then follows the compact, the articles to which are absolute servility of the Devil on the one part, and complete possession of the soul of Faust on the other. Faust is little better than a wizard from the first, for if knowledge had given him what he: sought, he had never had recourse to witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort of the triumphant nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell itself, and not in vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she loses the originally vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the consequence of a poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to sorcery. She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It is throughout the last hour of her three-days’ conflict, merely, that we see her, but we know her then not more for the revengeful woman she is than for the trustful maiden she has been. When she becomes conscious of the treason wrought against her, we feel that she suffers change. In the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is beautiful; but hers is the beauty of fair cheeks, from which the canker frets the soft tenderness of colour, the loveliness of golden hair that has lost its radiance, the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and lustreless. Very soon the wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just revenge of a broken heart? That suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute wronged woman must go through with it. And when the last hour comes, nature itself is portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind’s wake, the moon flies through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants crave pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the three-days’ bride.

  In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had written, before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, The Staff and Scrip, The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower and The Last Confession, as well as a fragment of The Bride’s Prelude, to which it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching higher or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell upon them at length. The Last Confession covers another range of feeling, it is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is akin to that which finds expression in the pure and shattered love of Othello; but it is a range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps less indigenous and appreciable.

  In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and though he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the leisure moments of many years, of their subsequent revision alone, perhaps, could this be altogether true. The Vita Nuova, together with the many among Dante’s Lyrics and those of his contemporaries which elucidate their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a great body of the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and indirect apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet in ten minutes — rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, were rarely, if ever, adjudged worthy of publication, by the side of work to which he gave adequate deliberation. But several of the sonnets on pictures — as, for example, the fine one on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione — and the political sonnet, Miltonic in spirit, On the Refusal of Aid between Nations, were written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets in question.

  * Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate

  the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds’s

  translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence

  that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.

  As The House of Life was composed in great part at the period with which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence nearly twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this stage. Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation that it is not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical, not an architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and Dantesque. Whilst electively akin to the Vita Nuova, it is broader in range, the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What Rossetti’s idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his prefatory sonnet: —

  A Sonnet is a moment’s monument, —

  Memorial from the Soul’s eternity

  To one
dead deathless hour. Look that it be,

  Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,

  Of its own arduous fulness reverent:

  Carve it in ivory or in ebony,

  As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see

  Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

  A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals

  The soul, — its converse, to what Power ’tis due: —

  Whether for tribute to the august appeals

  Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,

  It serve; or ‘mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,

  In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.

  Rossetti’s sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who deliberatively separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who obeyed throughout a series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary structure requiring that a sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a single thought or emotion. This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least the first among English writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to render. The House of Life does not contain a sonnet which is not to some degree informed by such an intellectual and musical wave; but the following is an example more than usually emphatic:

  Even as a child, of sorrow that we give

  dead, but little in his heart can find,

  Since without need of thought to his clear mind

  Their turn it is to die and his to live: —

  Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive

  Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,

  Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind