Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  for an original sonnet, you might mention my name, and

  address him at Carlisle with Please forward. Of course he

  is a Rev.

  You will be sorry to hear that Davies has abandoned the hope

  of producing a new sonnet to his own satisfaction. I have

  again, however, urged him to the onslaught, and told him how

  deserving you are of his efforts.

  Swinburne, who is a vast admirer of my sister’s, thinks the

  Advent perhaps the noblest of all her poems, and also

  specially loves the Passing Away. I do not know that I

  quite agree with your decided preference for the two sonnets

  of hers you signalise, — the World is very fine, but the

  other, Dead before Death, a little sensational for her. I

  think After Death one of her noblest, and the one After

  Communion. In my own view, the greatest of all her poems is

  that on France after the siege — To-Day for Me. A very

  splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion is The Convent

  Threshold.

  I have run the sonnet you like, St. Luke the Painter, into

  a sequence with two more not yet printed, and given the

  three a general title of Old and New Art, as well as

  special titles to each. I shall annex them to The House of

  Life.

  Have you ever read Vaughan? He resembles Donne a good deal

  as to quaintness, but with a more emotional personality.

  I have altered the last line of octave in Lost Days. It

  now runs —

  “The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway.”

  I always had it in my mind to make a change here, as the

  in standing in the line in its former reading clashed with

  in occurring in the previous line. I have done what I

  think is a prime sonnet on the murdered Czar, which I

  enclose, but don’t show it to a soul.

  Theodore Watts is going to print a very fine sonnet of his

  own in The Athenæum. It is the first verse he ever put in

  print, though he wrote much (when a very young man). Tell me

  how you like it. I think he is destined to shine in that

  class of poetry.

  I knew you must like Watts’s sonnets. They are splendid

  affairs. I am not sure that I agree with you in liking the

  first the better of the two: the second (Natura Maligna)

  is perhaps the deeper and finer. I have asked Watts to give

  you a new sonnet, and I think perhaps he will do so, or at

  all events give you permission to use those he has printed.

  He has just come into the room, and says he would like to

  hear from you on the subject.

  From one rather jocular sentence in your note I judge you

  may include some sonnets of your own. I see no possible

  reason why you should not. You are really now, at your

  highest, among our best sonnet-writers, and have written two

  or three sonnets that yield to few or none whatever. I am

  forced, however, to request that you will not put in the one

  referring to myself, from my constant bugbear of any

  appearance of collusion. That sonnet is a very fine one — my

  brother was showing it me again the other day. It is not my

  personal gratification alone, though that is deep, because I

  know you are sincere, which leads me to the conclusion that

  it is your best, and very fine indeed. I think your

  Cumberland sonnet admirable. The sonnet on Byron is

  extremely musical in flow and the symbolic scenery of

  exceptional excellence. The view taken is the question with

  me. Byron’s vehement directness, at its best, is a lasting

  lesson: and, dubious monument as Don Juan may be, it

  towers over the century. Of course there is truth in what

  you say; but ought it to be the case? and is it the case

  in any absolute sense? You deal frankly with your sonnets,

  and do not shrink from radical change. I think that on

  Oliver much better than when I saw it before. The opening

  phrases of both octave and sestette are very fine; but the

  second quatrain and the second terzina, though with a

  quality of beauty, both seem somewhat to lack distinctness.

  The word rivers cannot be used with elision — the v is a

  hard pebble in the flow, and so are the closing consonants.

  You must put up with streams if you keep the line.

  You should have Bailey’s dedicatory sonnet in Festus.

  I am enclosing a fine sonnet by William Bell Scott, which I

  wished him to let me send you for your book. It has not yet

  been printed. I think I heard of some little chaffy matter

  between him and you, but, doubtless, you have virtually

  forgotten all about it. I must say frankly that I think the

  day when you made the speech he told me of must have been

  rather a wool-gathering one with you.... I suppose you know

  that Scott has written a number of fine sonnets contained in

  his vol of Poems published about 1875, I think.

  I directed the attention of Mr. Waddington (whom, however, I

  don’t know personally) to a most noble sonnet by Fanny

  Kemble, beginning, “Art thou already weary of the way?” He

  has put it in, and several others of hers, but she is very

  unequal, and I don’t know if the others should be there, but

  you should take the one in question. It sadly wants new

  punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it

  when a boy in some twopenny edition.

  In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the

  Life of Blake, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps

  interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for

  it; but I don’t advise you, if you don’t think it worth.

  I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz.

  Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems

  containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must

  send it you.

  This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with

  much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it

  vastly.

  This closes Rossetti’s interesting letters on sonnet literature. In reprinting his first volume of Poems he had determined to remove the sonnets of The House of Life to the new volume of Ballads and Sonnets, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in youth, and now called The Bride’s Prelude. He sent me a proof. The reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less remarkable for striking incident (though never failing of interest and picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song (using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light and shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings through five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one’s senses awake to the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing literary forms. The story is a striking one, with a great wealth of highly effective incident, — notably the episode of the card-playing, and of the father striking down the sword which Raoul turns against the breast of the bride. Almost equally memorable are the scenes in which the lover appears, and the occasional interludes of incident in which, between the pauses of the narrative, the bridegroom’s retinue are heard sporting in the courtyard without.

&n
bsp; The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but preserved in the minutest most matter-of-fact details, such as the bowl of water that stood amidst flowers, and in which the sister Amelotte “slid a cup” and offered it to Aloyse to drink. But the one great charm of the poem lies in its subtle and most powerful psychical analysis, seen foreshadowed in the first mention of the bride sitting in the shade, but first felt strongly when she begs her sister to pray, and again when she tells how, at God’s hint, she had whispered something of the whole tale to her sister who slept

  The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although less remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following condition, with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly done, and delicate as is the theme, and demanding a touch of unerring strength, yet lightness, the part of the poem concerned with it contains certain of the most beautiful and stirring things. The madness (for it is not less than such) in which at the sea-side, believing Urscelyn to be lost, the bride tells the whole tale, whilst her curse laughed within her to see the amazement and anger of her brothers and of her father, is doubtless true enough to the frenzied state of her mind; but my sympathies go out less to that part of the poem than to the subsequent part, in which the bride-mother is described as leaning along in thought after her child, till tears, not like a wedded girl’s, fall among her curls. Highly dramatic, too, is the passage in which she fears to curse the evil men whose evil hands have taken her child, lest from evil lips the curse should be a blessing.

  The characterisation seemed to be highly powerful, and, so far as it went, finely contrasted. I could almost have wished that the love for which the bride suffers so much had been more dwelt upon, and Urscelyn had been made somehow more worthy of such love and sacrifice. The only point in which the poem struck me, after mature reflection, as less admirable than certain others of the author’s, lay in the circumstance that the narrative moves slowly, but, of course, it should be remembered that the poem is one of emotion, not incident. There are most magical flashes of imagery in the poem, notably in the passage beginning

  Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech,

  Gave her a sick recoil;

  As, dip thy fingers through the green

  That masks a pool, where they have been,

  The naked depth is black between.

  Rossetti wrote a valuable letter on his scheme for the completion of The Bride’s Prelude:

  I was much pleased with your verdict on The Bride’s

  Prelude. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness,

  but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too

  purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind,

  and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse’s first love

  would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered

  calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful

  soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the

  horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the

  bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse

  would confess her fault to her second lover whose love

  would, nevertheless, endure. The poem would gain so greatly

  by this sequel that I suppose I must set to and finish it

  one day, old as it is. I suppose it would be doubled, but

  hardly more. I hate long poems.

  I quite think the card-playing passage the best thing — as a

  unit — in the poem: but your opinion encourages my own, that

  it fails nowhere of good material. It certainly moves slowly

  as you say, and this is quite against the rule I follow. But

  here was no life condensed in an episode; but a story which

  had necessarily to be told step by step, and a situation

  which had unavoidably to be anatomised. If it is not

  unworthy to appear with my best things, that is all I hope

  for it. You have pitched curiously upon some of my favourite

  touches, and very coincidently with Watts’s views.

  Early in 1881, he wrote:

  I am writing a ballad on the death of James I. of Scots. It

  is already twice the length of The White Ship, and has a

  good slice still to come. It is called The King’s Tragedy,

  and is a ripper I can tell you!

  The other day I got from Italy a paper containing a really

  excellent and exceptional notice of my poems, written by the

  author of a volume also sent me containing, among other

  translations from the English, Jenny, Last Confession,

  etc.

  I have been re-reading, after many years, Keats’s Otho the

  Great, and find it a much better thing than I remembered,

  though only a draft.

  I am much exercised as to what you mention as to a Michael

  Scott scheme of Coleridge’s. Where does he speak of it, and

  what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I

  have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called

  Michael Scott’s Wooing, not the one I proposed beginning

  now — and also have long designed a picture under the same

  title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote

  a romance called Sir Michael Scott, but I never saw it.

  I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription

  proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of

  Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on

  Severn. I hear it is in The Athenæum, but have not seen

  it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you.

  Nothing would be so good as Severn’s own words.

  I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the

  Supernatural. The closing chapter should, I think, be on

  the weird element in its perfection, as shown by recent

  poets in the mess — i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson

  has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no

  great success in the part it plays through his Idylls. The

  Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this

  feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of

  The Palace of Art:

  And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame;

  And with dim-fretted foreheads all

  On corpses three months old at morn she came

  That stood against the wall.

  I won’t answer for the precise age of the corpses — perhaps I

  have staled them somewhat.

  CHAPTER IX.

  It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal, and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of my selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume an interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is now, and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command of Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number of critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those passages in his letters where the writer has got closest to his correspondent in revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now about to write I must perforce set aside all limitations of reserve if I am to convey such an idea of Rossetti’s last days as fills my mind; I must be content to speak almost exclusively of my personal relations to him, to the enforced neglect of the more intimate relations of others.

  About six months after my first vi
sit, Rossetti invited me to spend a week with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I found him in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion was brighter than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have been understood to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact it rather denoted in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being indicative chiefly of some recent excess in the use of his pernicious drug. He was distinctly less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less bright, and had more frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing upon vacancy, and when he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was his habit to do at intervals of about an hour, he did so with a more laboured sidelong motion than I had previously noticed, as though the body unconsciously lost and then regained some necessary control and command at almost every step. Half sensible, no doubt, of a reduced condition, or guessing perhaps the nature of my reflections from a certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to conceal, he paused for an instant one evening in the midst of these melancholy perambulations and asked me how he struck me as to health. More frankly than judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It was a luckless remark, for Rossetti’s prevailing wish at that moment was to conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit, he had completed his King’s Tragedy, and I had heard from his own lips how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the poem had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out of him. “It was as though my life ebbed out with it,” he said, and in saying so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question he did not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes. Time after time while the ballad was in course of production, he had made effort to read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry was always submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the physical impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage welled up out of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed perhaps who, while at work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation. And the weight of that work was still upon him when we met again. His voice seemed to have lost much in quality, and in compass too to have diminished: or if the volume of sound remained the same, it appeared to have retired (so to express it) inwards, and to convey, when he spoke, the idea of a man speaking as much to himself as to others. More than ever now the scene of his life lacked for me some necessary vitality: it breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it was like the dream of a distempered imagination out of which there came no welcome awakening, to say it was not true. On the side of his intellectual life Rossetti was obviously under less constraint with me than ever before. Previously he had seemed to make a conscious effort to speak generously of all contemporaries, and cordially of every friend with whom he was brought into active relations; and if, by force of some stray impulse, he was ever led to say a disparaging word of any one, he forthwith made a palpable, and sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate the injurious impression as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear that he had not said anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown aside.