In this and in others of his early poems, as, for instance, World's Worth, there is a purity of diction and a slow distinctness of enunciation that bespeak deep passion. There is no 'flow of language;' it is the ebbing of the life-blood, drop by drop. Rossetti is most widely and generally known as the author of The House of Life. These famous sonnets, which range through a great diversity of moods, have but one subject-the passion, and the mystery, and the sacrament of love between man and woman. The passion is so intense that it bears the seal of a tragic fate on its forehead even from its birth, like the love of Romeo and Juliet or of Tristan and Iseult. As we are carried along these rapids we hear the distant roar of the doom ahead. It is perhaps over-curious to speculate on the different completion that Rossetti might have given to The House of Life had fate dealt more gently with him, and carried him out safely among the pastures where the river is deep and silent and the voices of children are heard. Perhaps his gain would have been our loss, for where the shadow falls deepest and the doom impends, his thought tightens its grasp, and his expression becomes almost Shakespearian in its tortuous and complex strength. His poetry fulfils the requirements of his own famous saying, which makes 'fundamental brain-work,' an essential of all poetry. The glamour of his passion and the intoxication of his admirers with the strange beauty that he celebrates interfered for a time with the due recognition of his speculative genius. But it is on the strength of this foundation-on the range and power of his vision-that his best claim to a place among the English poets must be based. The attention of the public is at all times easily lured from substance to accident; and the early Italian angels and archaic musical instruments have obscured the calm sweep of the horizon that surrounds them. In The Blessed Damozel, written by a boy of eighteen, these lines might well startle a critic looking only for costume and conceits: From the fixed place of Heaven she saw Rossetti has that great ‘negative capability' which Keats found lacking in Coleridge, the power of resting content in the contemplation of mystery, without any irritable striving after certainty and system. Some of his profoundest reflections have thus been mistaken, even by favourable critics, for commonplaces. Commonplaces are great truths which from the dullness and flimsiness of man's mind have lost their power to move. They regain that power in the mind of a poet. A tree outlives the generations of man; and there comes a man whom the thought excites : Ye, who have passed Death's haggard hills; and ye The Burden of Nineveh is a splendid piece of historical imagining. The great winged stone bulls of Nineveh, newly dug up, are seen by the poet as they are carried into the British Museum, and they beget in him a passion of reverie. Their shadow, under which Sennacherib has perhaps knelt, is now thrown on the London flags : Lo thou! could all thy priests have shown Even as of yore in Nineveh. When Satan showed all the kingdoms of the world to Christ, did the desolation of Nineveh, already ruined, not rebuke him? The poem is compacted of thought, down to the last line, in which there comes a sense of misgiving with regard to our own civilisation, when it shall be looked back upon by coming generations : Those heavy wings spread high, So sure of flight; which do not fly; Those scriptured flanks it cannot see ; Thine also, mighty Nineveh? Since the whole bulk of Rossetti's poetic work is comparatively small, its variety deserves notice. A Last Confession is a dramatic monologue, not unlike some of Browning's, but built round a single impression-the sense of horror awakened in the soul by the sound of a coarse, empty laugh, which reveals, as no sight can reveal it, the abode of lost souls. The whole tragedy, it is easy to divine, was built up from this single experience. In The King's Tragedy and The White Ship two memorable historical tragedies are recited with concentrated power. Sister Helen and Eden Bower tell weird stories of supernatural terror in a revived ballad metre, with varied refrains. Perhaps those critics are right who insist on the insuperable difficulties of modern attempts to revive the ballad. The refrain, well suited for the broad and simple effects of the old ballads, is teased and varied in Sister Helen for the purposes of a more restless and critical poetry, and the old effect is lost. Lastly, in The Stream's Secret, Love's Nocturne, and many shorter poems Rossetti proves himself unsurpassed in the power of evoking emotions of wonder and pathos and mystery from the subtle music of words. It is customary to conclude the critical consideration of a poet by noticing his limitations, and by enlarging on what he did not accomplish, which is like saying the Lord's Prayer backwards by way of thank-offering for his achievements. Rossetti, it is truly said, 'deals with man little as a social being, and not much as an ethical being; he knows (save here and there) of no care for the many, of no conflict between duty and desire, the interest of the many and the passion of one.' But he expressed the passion of one-the passion of man, hungry at heart and islanded between two eternities-with a stress of thought, a lyrical fervour, and a high command of the manifold chords of language which have not often been matched in the annals of English poetry. Sonnet VII.-Supreme Surrender. Rests there attained. Methinks proud Love must weep Lies the queen-heart in sovereign overthrow. Sonnet LV.-Still-born Love. The hour which might have been yet might not be, It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before The house of Love, hears through the echoing door His hours elect in choral consonancy. But lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand With eyes where burning memory lights love home? Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die. Outstretched in the sun's warmth upon the shore, Thou say'st: Man's measured path is all gone o'er : Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh, Man clomb until he touched the truth; and I, Even I, am he whom it was destined for.' How should this be? Art thou then so much more Than they who sowed, that thou shouldst reap thereby? Nay, come up hither. From this wave-washed mound Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me ; Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd. Miles and miles distant though the last line be, And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea. Sonnet LXXVII.-Soul's Beauty. Under the arch of Life, where love and death, Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe, I drew it in as simply as my breath. Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath, The sky and sea bend on thee,-which can draw, This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise Thy voice and hand shake still,-long known to thee In what fond flight, how many ways and days! Sonnet XCI.-Lost on Both Sides. As when two men have loved a woman well, Each hating each, through Love's and Death's deceit ; And the long pauses of this wedding-bell; At last their feud forlorn, with cold and heat; So separate hopes, which in a soul had wooed She fell asleep on Christmas Eve: At length the long-ungranted shade Our mother, who had leaned all day Over the bed from chime to chime, With work to finish. For the glare Without, there was a cold moon up, Through the small room with subtle sound I had been sitting up some nights, And my tired mind felt weak and blank; Like a sharp strengthening wine it drank The stillness and the broken lights. Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years Like water that a pebble stirs. Our mother rose from where she sat : 'Glory unto the Newly Born!' So, as said angels, she did say; Because we were in Christmas Day, Though it would still be long till morn. Just then in the room over us There was a pushing back of chairs, Our mother went where Margaret lay, And held my breath, and spoke no word: There was none spoken; but I heard The silence for a little space. Our mother bowed herself and wept : And both my arms fell, and I said, 'God knows I knew that she was dead.' And there, all white, my sister slept. Then kneeling, upon Christmas morn A little after twelve o'clock, We said, ere the first quarter struck, 'Christ's blessing on the newly born!' The Sea-Limits. . Consider the sea's listless chime : Time's self it is, made audible,— The murmur of the earth's own shell. Secret continuance sublime Is the sea's end: our sight may pass As the world's heart of rest and wrath, Listen alone beside the sea, Listen alone among the woods; Shall have one sound alike to thee: Hark where the murmurs of thronged men Surge and sink back and surge again,— Still the one voice of wave and tree. The day is dark and the night To him that would search their heart; To him wild shadows are shown, And height above unknown height. Still we say as we go, 'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.' The Past is over and fled; Or whether as bond or free, Or whether they too were we, Or by what spell they have sped. Still we say as we go, 'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.' What of the heart of hate That beats in thy breast, O Time?— And anguish of fierce debate, And peace that grinds them as grain, On the pitiless eyes of Fate. 'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.' What of the heart of love That bleeds in thy breast, O Man?— Still we say as we go,— That shall we know one day.' The sky leans dumb on the sea, Is dark everlastingly. Our past is clean forgot, Our present is and is not, Our future's a sealed seed-plot, And what betwixt them are we?We who say as we go, 'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.' The Family Letters and Memoir by his brother, William Michael (2 vols. 1895), should be referred to; that brother's Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1889); the Rossetti Papers (1903) compiled by the same hand; Rossetti's Letters to W. Allingham (1897); Theodore Watts-Dunton in Encyclopædia Britannica and Nineteenth Century for March 1883; works by William Sharp (1882), Hall Caine (1882), Joseph Knight (1887), and F. G. Stephens (Portfolio, 1894); and Walter Pater's Essay on Rossetti. See also articles on 'The Rossettis' by William Sharp in the Fortnightly for 1886; on The Poetical Writings of Mr Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Miss Alice Law in the Westminster Review for 1895; and on 'The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood' by W. Holman Hunt in the Contemporary Review for 1886 (three articles). WALTER RALEIGH. Christina Rossetti * (1830-94), the youngest child of Gabriele Rossetti, and sister to Dante Rossetti, spent the greater part of her life in London, where she was born and died. She lived in great privacy, devoting herself to the care of her mother (who died in 1886), to her religious duties, and to poetry. She was an attached member of the Church of England, and, for reasons of religion, rejected two proposals of marriage, one from a Roman Catholic, the other from a suitor of 'undefined and heterodox views.' The series of sonnets entitled Monna Innominata, and some others of her best-known poems, are probably as directly autobiographical in import as Mrs Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Her earliest printed verses appeared when she was eleven years old, and from that time till her death she wrote, not voluminously, but incessantly. A volume called Verses was privately issued by her grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, in 1847; she contributed several numbers to The Germ (1850) over the signature of effort in all her work. She made no attempt in the larger poetic kinds of drama or romance, and was never betrayed by literary admiration into imitating the works of others at the sacrifice of sincerity and spontaneity. Imitation has been the besetting sin of not a few English poetesses. Mrs Aphra Behn, a clever and excellent woman, has been called vicious because she wrote fashionable comedies from the stand-point of the courtly rakes of the Restoration; Mrs Hemans is almost inconceivable without Byron; and Mrs Browning often forgoes her genuine gifts, even in her lyrics, to CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI (with her Mother, FRANCES MARY LAVINIA ROSSETTI). 'Ellen Alleyn;' and thereafter wrote many poems, masquerade as a kind of conventional man, or, straining after power, strikes that note of 'falsetto muscularity' which, in works like Aurora Leigh, offended Dante Rossetti. It is therefore not a little to say in praise of Miss Rossetti that she knew herself and held fast by her own experience; that she looked in her heart and wrote. Nor would she have resented praise bestowed on her work as 'woman's work.' Women know and feel many things that men do not know or feel, and it is only by expressing these things that they can match men in literature. It was by simple loyalty to their own experience and their own vision that Jane Austen and Christina Rossetti achieved their unique positions among English writers. Her genius is almost purely lyrical, and her poems are full of that beautiful redundance and that varied reiteration which are natural to all strong feeling and all spontaneous melody. Her lyrics have very much the air of improvisations; she chooses for theme some simple, elemental feeling, and pours it into song, the expression rising unsought, with incessant recurrence to the words or phrases given at first, and with a delicate sense of pattern which prescribes the changes in the cadence. Her ideas are so essentially poetical that they can hardly be expressed in prose. Her art is so subtly simple that critical analysis may well despair of explaining it. The whole bulk of her poems would yield but few quotations and perhaps not one generalised statement of moral truth. Though, like many other poets famous for * Copyright 1903 by J. B. Lippincott Company to the poem entitled "Shall I forget?" page 647. Though by the accidents of association Christina Rossetti was brought near to the group of poets and painters who started the Pre-Raphaelite movement, she belongs to no school, and holds a place by herself in English poetry. She is the least ambitious, and some would add the greatest, of English poetesses. She has that rarest of gifts, the gift of expressing deep feeling in quiet speech and perfect musical cadence. Her best sonnets, though they have not the splendour of the greatest of Shakespeare's, or Milton's, or Wordsworth's, or Rossetti's, yet come nearer than any of these to the purity and simplicity and perfection of form that mark the finest Italian sonnets. Her thoughts run naturally into a lyrical mould, and there is no sense verbal melody, she had no strong taste for music, her poetical gift is musical rather than pictorial. Her most characteristic imagery, such as is found in A Birthday or Death Watches, is passionate, not contemplative; it is the outcome of moments of feeling arrested, and yields little or nothing to thought, yet everywhere and always the soul of poetry is in her work. The poems of many earlier religious poets are easily and sharply divisible into secular and sacred. It would be vain to attempt any such bisection of Miss Rossetti's work. Some of her poems deal with religious themes, and some do not, but all alike are permeated with religious ideas. This is especially noticeable in the very few of them that have any sort of claim to be called 'long poems.' Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress are fairy stories, the one telling of certain goblin sellers of magic fruit who haunt a mossy valley, the other describing the temptations and adventures that befall a prince of fable on his way to claim his bride. The stories are told without the smallest didactic intention; they are dream fantasies; but no one who reads them can fail to perceive that the ideas shadowed in them are all religious. Goblin Market is an idyl of temptation and of vicarious sacrifice; The Prince's Progress is a history of the pilgrimage of the soul, unmindful of its destiny, blinded and hindered by the love of ease and pleasure, by the search for wealth or knowledge, and aroused from time to time by the chiding, wailing voices that are carried on the air. A deep melancholy underlies all her most heart-felt poems, and if she resembles Shelley in lyrical elevation and the natural glow of lyrical utterance, there is more of the sadness of humanity in her poems than in his. Her verses beginning, 'Passing away, saith the World, passing away,' have been given the fame that they deserve by the praise of Mr Swinburne, who alludes to them as 'the great New-Year hymn of Miss Rossetti, so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language that there is none which comes near it enough to stand second; a hymn touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.' Shall I forget? Shall I forget on this side of the grave? I promise nothing: you must wait and see Patient and brave. (O my soul, watch with him and he with me. e.) Shall I forget in peace of Paradise? I promise nothing: follow, friend, and see Faithful and wise. (O my soul, lead the way he walks with me. e.) A Birthday. My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell Raise me a dais of silk and down; And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. Echo. Come to me in the silence of the night; Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years. O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet; Where thirsting longing eyes Watch the slow door That opening, letting in, lets out no more. Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live My very life again though cold in death: Come back to me in dreams that I may give Pulse for pulse, breath for breath : Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago. Rest. O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes; Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth; Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. She hath no questions, she hath no replies, Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be; |