Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence

Sexuality, Belief and the Self

John Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351946339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published the first version of his sonnet sequence The House of Life. The next thirty years saw the greatest flourishing of the sonnet sequence since the 1590s. John Holmes's carefully researched and eloquent study illuminates how leading sonneteers, including the Rossettis, John Addington Symonds, Wilfrid Blunt and Augusta Webster, and their early twentieth-century successors Rosa Newmarch and Rupert Brooke, addressed the urgent questions of selfhood, religious belief and doubt, and sexual and national identity which troubled late Victorian England. Drawing on the heritage of the sonnet sequence, the poetic self-portraits they created are unsurpassed in their subtlety, complexity, courage, and honesty.

Chapter 1

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Inclusiveness: Method and Meaning in The House of Life

‘Inclusiveness’ and the Inclusive Method

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s most virulent critic, Robert Buchanan, sparked off the most persistent critical debate on Rossetti when he declared, in his witty, scurrilous and almost instantly infamous article ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’:

In petticoats or pantaloons, in modem times or in the middle ages, he is just Mr. Rossetti, a fleshly person, with nothing particular to tell us or teach us, with extreme self-control, a strong sense of colour, and a careful choice of diction (1871, p.339).

In an age when overt didacticism is out of fashion, the claim that Rossetti has nothing to teach holds out the refreshing promise of a poetry which allows us to make up our own minds. Yet there remains the implication that his work is barren and literally insignificant, a position which has been reiterated by generations of Rossetti’s critics. Buchanan’s remarks, published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, were echoed the following year by William Courthope, who denounced Rossetti’s ‘mysteries’ as ‘nothing but word puzzles or literary conceits’ in the Quarterly Review (1872, p.69). Reviewing Rossetti’s next volume of verse, Ballads and Sonnets, John Addington Symonds could not but agree that Rossetti’s sonnets betrayed no more ‘thought’ than could be expected from ‘ordinary men of feeling and intelligence’ (1882b, p.324). With the modernist reaction against the eminent Victorians, the dominant thrust of twentieth-century criticism on Rossetti followed these same unsympathetic lines. Under the leadership of Graham Hough (1949) and Harold Weatherby, post-war critics repeatedly reproached Rossetti for concealing vagueness or emptiness beneath a veneer of symbolism, and by the 1960s it had become the critical orthodoxy that Rossetti had been unable to avoid what Weatherby called a ‘failure of meaning’ (1964, p.13). Jerome McGann (1969) sought to turn this assumption on its head by arguing that the failure perceived by earlier critics was in fact Rossetti’s success. McGann’s case was that Rossetti deliberately excluded transcendental ‘meaning’ from his symbols, elevating in their place exact perception and sensation. Ideas were thus purposefully sacrificed to experience. McGann paved the way for a nihilist reading of this alleged erasure of meaning, developed by Clyde Ryals (1970), Stephen Spector (1971) and McGann himself (1989), in which Rossetti’s poetry is held up as a bold confrontation with the absence of meaning itself. Rossetti emerges as both a victim of and a spokesman for the nineteenth century’s loss of faith. The meaninglessness of his verse is rendered, paradoxically, meaningful, embodying and thus disseminating a perception of the world at large as similarly meaningless.

Is Rossetti’s poetry necessarily so meaningless? Is emptiness, self-conscious or otherwise, all it can offer? And is a reader’s relationship with the text really as predictable as this model suggests? Rossetti himself saw the writer’s identification with the reader as ‘a part of the very act of production’ (W.M. Rossetti, 1895, vol.1, p.417). Florence Boos has argued that the obliqueness and uncertainty of Rossetti’s poetic language ‘directly dictate a subjective response to the reader’ which is only effective if ‘one’s inner correlatives’ are the same as the poet’s own (1976, pp.72, 75). Yet Rossetti himself pinpoints the fact that such ‘correlatives’ vary hugely from person to person in his sonnet Tnclusiveness’:

The changing guests, each in a different mood,

Sit at the roadside table and arise:

And every life among them in likewise

Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood

How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—

Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,

Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell

In separate living souls for joy or pain?

Nay, all its comers may be painted plain

Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;

And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,

Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell. (The House of Life (1870 text), XXIX)

This sonnet stands at the very centre of Rossetti’s 1870 collection Poems, with fifty-one named units of poetry before it and another fifty-one after it. It stands too at the centre of the original text of Rossetti’s most complex and commanding poem, the sonnet sequence The House of Life, as the first of the sonnets after those which ‘treat of love’ (1870, p.188).

Ostensibly, the significance of this sonnet is that similar experiences can have radically different meanings for different individuals, or for the same individual at different times of life. One face watching another, a woman’s kiss, a room – each carries with it a range of associations that depend upon the person considering it. As Pauli Baum remarks, the idea is ‘a familiar one and not at all difficult to grasp’ (1928, p.162). But Rossetti compels the reader to face it with a directness that the familiar is often denied, not only through the vivid horror of the last two lines, but also through the questioning that forms the second half of the octet. Baum, paraphrasing this sonnet, rephrases these questions as statements, declaring T have changed the questions of the original without, I think, altering the sense’. Yet for Baum to substitute ‘A man will wonder’ for Rossetti’s ‘What man has…?’ is indeed to alter the sense, and substantially. The implication of Rossetti’s rhetorical questions is not that men do commonly ask these questions but rather that they do not. The questions themselves are disturbing, Baum himself admitting that the first is ‘morbid and almost pathological’ and the second ‘(heaven forgive the word) downright Freudian’. Rossetti confronts his readers with a fact that they may know but will tend to repress – that the perceptions of others are dramatically, even frighteningly, at odds with their own.

Philosophically, ‘Inclusiveness’ suggests a vision of the world in which no one vision of the world can claim primacy. As McGann argues in his recent book Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost, ‘Every vantage point is provisional, relativity is the permanent rule of order’ (2000, p.43). This appears to confirm Weatherby’s view that Rossetti’s poetry has ‘no commitment to any single conception of values’ (1964, p.15). But it does not therefore follow that it has no positive commitments or values at all. Rossetti’s brother William suggests in a note to ‘Inclusiveness’ that its title is misleading:

I question whether the word ‘Inclusiveness’ quite indicates to the reader what the author meant to convey in this sonnet. The uncouth word ‘many-sidedness,’ or ‘divergent identity,’ might be more apt (D.G. Rossetti, 1911, p.655).

These suggested titles are merely descriptive, each giving a name to the psychological phenomenon recorded in the sonnet. The original title goes further. It guides the reader towards a reaction to this phenomenon, one of acceptance rather than rejection. In translating a sonnet by the thirteenth-century Italian poet Guido Guinizzelli, Rossetti writes ‘He is a fool who deems that none has sought/The truth, save he alone, or knows it true’ (1911, p.435). In Rossetti’s version, the sonnet is aptly entitled ‘Of Moderation and Tolerance’, and in it the ethical and intellectual implications of ‘Inclusiveness’ become apparent. To acknowledge and address differing perspectives, to accommodate and seek to comprehend possibilities and identities which seem at first alien or disturbing, is both Rossetti’s ethic and his method.

In the sonnet ‘Inclusiveness’, specific images – the sleeping face, the kiss and the room – generate a range of responses according to the experiences of the individual. By extrapolation, any image can be seen as capable of evoking a range of significances depending on the ‘inner correlatives’, as Boos puts it, which have arisen from that individual’s life to date. This applies not only to direct perceptions and experiences in life, but also to reading, both as an experience in itself and in the perceptions of others which it conveys. Rossetti’s sonnet is reflexive, making a statement about poetry as well as experience. Rossetti acknowledges that the words he writes, the images he chooses to employ, will have different resonances for different readers. In so doing he alerts the readers themselves to this fact, encouraging them both to indulge in and to reflect on their own perceptions and interpretations, whilst asking them to accept that alternative and equally valid meanings may present themselves to other readers. In effect, he is positing a model of poetry which is open to and expressly anticipates a number of seemingly contradictory but ultimately complementary readings.

‘Inclusiveness’ is one of the sixty-one units of poetry which together comprise the first, unfinished version of The House of Life. This poem in this text embodies the values and strategies that the sonnet sets out. In Sonnets and Songs towards a Work to be called ‘The House of Life’ to give it its full title, Rossetti uses four poetic devices in particular to create his inclusive approach to meaning. The first is his much-vaunted symbolism. By holding in tension different traditions and expectations, Rossetti is able to formulate symbols which carry a number of meanings at once. The most influential of these inclusive symbols, and a good illustration of the poet’s technique, is the child Love, born in ‘Bridal Birth’, the opening sonnet of the 1870 text:

As when desire, long darkling, dawns, and first

The mother looks upon the newborn child,

Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled

When her soul knew at length the Love it nursed.

Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst

And exquisite hunger, at her heart Love lay

Quickening in darkness, till a voice that day

Cried on him, and the bonds of birth were burst.

Now, shielded in his wings, our faces yearn

Together, as his fullgrown feet now range

The grove, and his warm hands our couch prepare:

Till to his song our bodiless souls in turn

Be born his children, when Death’s nuptial change

Leaves us for light the halo of his hair. (I)

Ostensibly the personification of Love is constructed within the Classical tradition of Ovid and subsequently Dante. That this Love is an emblem of intense appetite and the potential for transcendence imagined in palpably bodily terms suggests too the Romanticism of Shelley and Keats. There is also, in the figure of the child, an allusion to Christ. Like Mary, the bride who is the mother of Love has yet to lose her virginity in the ‘married flowers to either side outspread/From the knit stem’ of ‘Nuptial Sleep’ (V, 6f). Love’s hair is identified as a halo, and his birth is brought about by a calling voice not far removed from an annunciation. His role as both the bride’s son and her father recalls the coexistence of the different persons of the Trinity within God, while the centrality of love to Christ’s teaching is further grounds for associating the infant Love with the infant Jesus, in parallel with the identification of love with God in the First Epistle of John:

Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. […] If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us (I John, 4. 7–12).

Rossetti’s Love, like the love that is the God of St John, exists in the speaker’s beloved and is made manifest in his love for her and in hers for him. It is pure, so its expression in sexual love within marriage is also pure. Finally, the association of love with Christianity is implicit in the idea, central not only to this sonnet but to the sequence as a whole, of a revelation taking place through the rebirth that is death. The figure of Love in The House of Life is not Christ, nor is it the Romantic lover writ large, nor indeed is it simply a motif borrowed from Dante. It is instead a new symbol which combines elements of each and alludes to all three. How one reacts to these different elements, and to Rossetti’s handling off them, will depend on one’s own perspective. While a given combination can appear blasphemous or parodie, as Lothar Hönnighausen (1988, p.232) and George Landow (1980, p.201) respectively suggest, the appeal for Inclusiveness made by Rossetti in the middle of his sequence steers us towards more open and accepting readings.

The second tactic within Rossetti’s strategy of Inclusiveness operates not through imagery but through voice. The biographical thrust of so much criticism of Rossetti – which has always read his sonnets as personal poems and was quick to latch on to his romance with Jane Morris as their immediate source – has obscured the fact that there is a plethora of voices within The House of Life. The nineteenth-century sonnet had taken a line from the Romantic self-expression of Wordsworth and Keats, which had gone on to colour the sonnet sequence both through Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s deeply personal Sonnets from the Portuguese and through the growing number of biographical interpretations and editions of Elizabethan sonneteers (Holmes, 1999, pp.41–45). Rossetti, on the other hand, hoped in The House of Life ‘to put in action a complete dramatis personae of the soul’ (1965–67, vol.2, p.850). The immediate association is with the dramatic monologue, which he himself mastered in ‘Jenny’ and ‘A Last Confession’, and which was the chosen form, to differing degrees, of the two older contemporaries whose poetry he most consistently admired, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. By employing dramatic voices, and borrowing from his friend George Meredith’s Modern Love the technique of switching from first to third person between sonnets, Rossetti allows for a range of signification depending on the reader’s perception of the speakers’ identities.

The third sonnet of the 1870 sequence, ‘Lovesighf, is a love-sonnet open to a biographical reading but not demanding or expressly authorising one:

When do I see thee most, beloved one?

When in the light the spirits of mine eyes

Before thy face, their altar, solemnize

The worship of that Love through thee made known?

Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,)

Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies

Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,

And my soul only sees thy soul its own?

O love, my love! if I no more should see

Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,

Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—

How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope

The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,

The wind of Death’s imperishable wing? (III)

As well as its openness to dramatic readings, this sonnet is open-ended, consisting of nothing but questions. This is the syntactic manifestation of Rossetti’s third inclusive technique. Through asking questions rather than making statements, he allows the reader the freedom to concur or not with such answers as may be implied within the text. As the form of a question pre-supposes an answer beyond itself, so a number of Rossetti’s sonnets close with a gesture towards a moment after that of the sonnet itself. In many, including ‘Lovesight’, the c...