Dante gabriel rossetti the house of life, sonnet sequence a variorum edition with introduction and notes

In my Frequently Cited/Consulted Sources I have relied heavily on the records of William Rossetti, William Bell Scott, Ford Madox Brown, Jane Morris, Hall Caine, Thomas Hake, Theodore Wa

THE HOUSE OF LIFE

A Sonnet-Sequence

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti’s pen-and-ink design for his Sonnet on the Sonnet S 258 Private Collection See p 38 note 9

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THE HOUSE OF LIFE

A Sonnet-Sequence

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Variorum Edition

with an Introduction and Notes

by

Roger C Lewis

Boydell & Brewer

2007

The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions

Disclaimer:

Some images in the original version of this book are not

available for inclusion in the eBook.

ANNAE UXORI For my wife Nancy

Table of Contents

Sonnet XXIX The Moonstar 90

Sonnet XXXVIII The Morrow’s Message 103

Sonnets XLIX, L, LI, LII Willowwood 119

Sonnets LVI., LVII., LVIII True Woman 133

Sonnet LXVI The Heart of the Night 155

Sonnets LXXI., LXXII., LXXIII The Choice 167

Sonnets LXXIV., LXXV., LXXVI Old and New Art 172

Sonnet LXXXIV Farewell to the Glen 193

Sonnet LXXXIX The Trees of the Garden 202

Sonnets XCII., XCIII The Sun’s Shame 209

Appendix One Dating and Ordonnance 227

Appendix Three Poems: Chronology 1868–71 250

Appendix Four Poems: Bibliographical Summaries 254

Appendix Five Ballads and Sonnets: Chronology 1879–82 261

Appendix Six Ballads and Sonnets: Bibliographical Summaries 274

Appendix Seven Locations of Sources 278

Appendix Eight Unpublished and Excluded Sonnets 288

Bibliography of Works Cited or Consulted 298

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece: Rossetti’s pen-and-ink design for his

Sonnet on the Sonnet

Plate I: Annotated proofsheet of 25 Apr 81

Plate II: Self-portrait by Elizabeth Siddal opp 131

Table: Locations of proofsheets for Ballads and Sonnets 23

Acknowledgements

This book began as a proposal for a Ph.D dissertation more than forty years ago I cannot now remember the names of everyone who helped me with the research necessary to complete this variorum edition Many of them, some of those most vividly and fondly remembered, are now beyond thanking, but I must thank them anyway

I shall start by naming my predecessors in undertaking a separate

edition of the House: Frederick Page, Paull Baum, Janet Troxell,

Kathryn Gordon and Thomas Delsey, whose work I have built on

No one has done more to unearth Rossetti’s manuscripts, letters and scarce printed materials than William E Fredeman, the godfather of

Pre-Raphaelite studies and Editor of The Correspondence of Dante

Gabriel Rossetti (D S Brewer, 10 vols): my book is the first to make

exten-sive use of that monumental edition Neither has anyone done more

to help me personally and professionally with this edition than Dick Fredeman From July 1975, when my research assistant Gavin Murdock and I descended on his Allison Road home and library, to a few days before his death in July 1999, Dick shared his collection, his letters edition-in-progress, his wisdom, expertise and vast network of contacts

to aid my editorial efforts The generosity and hospitality he offered

to fellow-scholars during the Allison Road days were matched by his wife Jane Cowan Fredeman, who continued to extend them both towards me after Dick was gone by acting as my editor on this book

I was assisted in the early stages of this edition by my able and supportive mentors F E L Priestley and Malcolm M Ross Other Rossettians who have aided and encouraged my research include Robert N Keane, Robert S Fraser, Joseph P Gardner, Rosalie Glynn Grylls (Lady Mander), Roger W Peattie, Allan and Page Life, Mark Samuels Lasner and Jerome J McGann The co-operation of collectors and family custodians of rare material is essential in work of this kind: it is too late now to thank two of William Rossetti’s grand- daughters, Imogen Dennis and Lucy O’Conor, and collectors Simon Nowell-Smith, Sir Paul Getty and Halsted B Vanderpoel, but without their help this edition would have been badly compromised Booksellers are vitally important to scholarly editing as well: I must thank Maggs Bros., Ian Hodgkins and Co., Antony Rota, Bernard Quaritch and John Fleming

The list of Librarians and Curators who enabled my research both

in person and by other means would fill pages, so I am forced to be

both selective and collective The staff of every repository mentioned

in Appendix Seven (Location of Sources) is here formally thanked, but

my greatest demands were made on personnel at the Firestone Library at Princeton, the Fitzwilliam Museum Library at Cambridge, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale and the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington: I was particularly obliged to Rob Fraser at Princeton, Phyllis Giles and P Woudhuysen at the Fitzwilliam, Marjorie Wynne at Yale and Phyllis Nixon and Rowland Elzea at Delaware Art Museum Donald Sinclair advised me on using the Symington Collection at Rutgers George Brandak showed me around the Rossetti family archive at the University of British Columbia Tim Burnett helped solve my problems in the British Library Department of Manuscripts Finally, I am grateful to the staff

in the Bodleian Library Bibliographic Centre, the Folger Shakespeare Library and Dan Tierney in the New York Public Library for teaching

me the mysteries of collating machines

I acknowledge with gratitude and humility the enormous role that my editors played in the creation of this book Jane Cowan is mentioned above I thank the editorial staff at Boydell & Brewer, particularly Caroline Palmer I owe a special debt of gratitude to my tireless and unflappable technical editor, my indispensable wizard of word-processing, Barbara Lange

Chasing Rossetti manuscripts is expensive My initial searching in England was facilitated by a Queen Elizabeth II Ontario Scholarship and two Canada Council Pre-Doctoral Fellowships Later research was generously funded through two Research Grants awarded by the Canada Council and its successor the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC); many smaller SSHRCC Grants were made through Acadia University, which also gave me several Reid Summer Study Awards and a generous amount of supported leave Indeed, Acadia, my academic home, supported my research in countless ways, not least through assigning several student research assistants to me over thirty years Other support received came from the University of Toronto Research Travel Fund, the British Council, the Nuffield Foundation and the Royal Academy

I had many research assistants but the best of them were Gavin Murdock, Keith Anderson, Joe Kanary and my wife Nancy: this book

is dedicated to her

Note on the Edited Text

House of Life sonnet is considered to have authority unless the copy-text

derives directly from the poet or he is known to have seen proofs of the items It is not the sort of variorum edition that includes a history

of scholarship on the poem with representative excerpts or a large and various selection of notes and comments on the text by previous editors and critics Both my bibliographies, the following list of frequently cited sources and the terminal list (pp 298–301) of occasionally cited sources, do not therefore aim at completeness or inclusiveness I have not attempted an exegesis or paraphrase of the poem

Rather, I have striven to present the essential materials needed for such a critical task and to indicate where supporting materials may

be found I have read many critical studies of the sequence and individual sonnets in it, some of which I have cited below because I found them relevant and insightful or helpful in establishing context

in the way that Rossetti’s exchanges by post with Swinburne or Caine provide context for some of the sonnets Not every brilliant article on

The House of Life is mentioned in this book, but neither is it crammed

with all the dull and superfluous criticism of this poem that has been pouring forth since Robert Buchanan started the tradition in 1871 The reader is left to construct an interpretation of the poem and to choose between good and bad criticism of it

My primary purpose has been to print exactly the text that Rossetti intended the reader to have, in its final form To that end, I

chose as copy-text the first edition of Ballads and Sonnets (1881), the

last form of the sequence seen through the press by the poet Some emendations were adopted from the resetting in 1882 of this text, called the fourth edition, because the poet had identified to his publisher mistakes he wanted corrected in the next edition or because there were obvious mistakes, wrong indents or dropped-out characters, that he would have corrected had he lived to see proofs of the fourth edition I also accepted William Rossetti’s restoration to

the sequence of Nuptial Sleep as VIa, although the poet had

suppressed it in 1881

Original or early editions of all sources cited or quoted are fully identified Where an accessible and reliable reprint of a rare original exists, I have noted the fact The abundant quotes from the Fredeman

Correspondence edition follow the Editorial Procedures outlined there

on pp xxxv–xli, Vol I Rossetti’s quoted letters follow the MSS exactly and respect his erratic usage When the letter quoted is in one of the later volumes not yet published, other printed sources follow the WEF identification e.g the Doughty-Wahl or Bryson collections of letters

In this edition, protocols for abbreviations, dates, insertion of marginal content and documentation in annotations and footnotes are consistent where practicable with the WEF edition so that the two may be used together with a minimum of confusion For the WEF, Doughty-Wahl, Bryson and Lang (Swinburne) editions of letters, I identify the quote by a letter number However, in editions like Roger Peattie’s of William Rossetti’s correspondence and William’s own editions of his brother’s and sister’s letters, where there is so much commentary and annotation, I use ‘No.’ for a letter citation: otherwise

my numbers refer to pages Some page references to Doughty-Wahl occur when their notes are being cited because their note numbering

is not consecutive (i.e., the same letter could have more than one n1) Conjectural dates for letters are enclosed in square brackets; a prefatory

? before a date in square brackets indicates that it is a guess

Date and place references for composition and publication of each sonnet are followed by source abbreviations In my Frequently Cited/Consulted Sources I have relied heavily on the records of William Rossetti, William Bell Scott, Ford Madox Brown, Jane Morris, Hall Caine, Thomas Hake, Theodore Watts-Dunton and other contemporaries, not because they were profound scholars or eminent literary authorities, but because they were close friends and eye- witnesses to the poet’s life

Recording revisions and variants is discussed below under

‘Stylistic Conventions and Sigla’ As befits a variorum edition, I have tried to compile complete rather than selective lists of variants, but even with magnifying glasses and infrared photography it is not always possible to decipher a palimpsest, reconstruct a cancelled or erased passage or read an illegible scrawl

While I have aimed at an exact reproduction of the texts of the sonnets, I have not followed the first edition precisely in the matter of accidentals Line numbers were inserted to help the reader follow often-complex lists of variants There are no broken-up or spilled-

over lines Rossetti’s dashes are all en-dashes with spaces around them I have not capitalized the first word of each sonnet

The ‘curly’ quotation marks of Ballads and Sonnets are not present

because the book is set in Palatino While following the first edition

in using Roman numerals above each sonnet title, in my notes, commentary and tables I have sought to avoid confusion with the

Poems (1870) version of the sequence by identifying all 1881 sonnets

by their Arabic number and all 1870 sonnets by their Roman number

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

Frequently-recurring names and frequently-cited sources are usually abbreviated in the notes and apparatus; these protocols and others follow as closely as possible those used in W E Fredeman’s

The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (WEF) Abbreviations for

MS and other rare or unique sources appear in Appendix Seven A bibliography of works cited or consulted occasionally is on pp 298– 301; throughout the text citations of these works consist of the author’s last name, the year of publication and page or chapter numbers

CGR Christina Georgiana Rossetti

EES Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (DGR’s wife)

FLR Frances Lavinia Rossetti (DGR’s mother)

PR/B Pre-Raphaelite/Brotherhood PRISM Pre-Raphaelitism

Rossetti’s Printed Works

B&S Ballads and Sonnets (Ellis and White, 1881)

EIP The Early Italian Poets (Smith, Elder, 1861)

HL The House of Life (Poems pp 187–255; B&S pp

161–263)

Poems Poems (Ellis, 1870–72 eds 1–6)

Poems: New Poems: A New Edition (Ellis and White, 1881)

Tauchnitz Poems (7th ed Tauchnitz, 1873)

Works; CW WMR, ed The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

London: Ellis, 1911 Enlarged from WMR’s

Collected Works (CW) 2 vols London: Ellis and

Date/month/year 15 Oct 81 or 5 Jul: but, months without year or

day are spelled out or given in full, as are single and non-nineteenth-century years, e.g

15 Oct 1781 Ampersands Used only in abbreviated bibliographical

references: ‘WEF 69.258 & nn’ or ‘PML MSS

6081 & 6083’

MSS, Revisions and Variants

I have as far as possible listed the MSS in chronological order and given the variants the same order When an early version of a sonnet differs greatly from the final text I give it in full When two sources are compared, the earlier one comes first: the readings of the later one are in bold face, the two separated by a virgule (/) Proofsheets and printed texts revised in Rossetti’s hand are treated as MSS:

<revision> angle brackets enclose a word, phrase, line or passage deleted from a MS The new reading substituted follows If further deletions and substitutions occur, they too will be enclosed in

angle brackets following in the order of substitution until the final reading in that MS

<<revision>> double, or triple, angle brackets are used to indicate revisions within revisions; deletions and substitutions within double brackets are thus enclosed within single brackets

[MS breaks off here] square brackets contain editorial insertions: they are also used to identify conjectural dates, speculative readings or references (sometimes preceded by a question mark if the editor

is guessing) or to separate editorial comment from the text of revisions and variants

Frequently Cited or Consulted Sources

ALC The Ashley Library: A Catalogue of Printed Books,

Manuscripts, and Autograph Letters Collected by Thomas J Wise 11 vols London: Printed for

Private Circulation, 1922–36 Reissued with a new preface by Simon Nowell-Smith Folkestone: Dawson’s, 1971

AN William Minto, ed Autobiographical Notes of the

Life of William Bell Scott and Notices of His Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends 1830–82 2 vols

London: Osgood, 1892

Bibliography WMR Bibliography of the Works of Dante Gabriel

Rossetti London: Ellis, 1905; repr New York:

AMS, 1971

Bryson John Bryson, ed., with Janet Camp Troxell

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence Oxford: Clarendon, 1976

Buchanan Robert Buchanan The Fleshly School of Poetry

and Other Phenomena of the Day London: Strahan,

1872 Expanded from Buchanan’s

pseudo-nymous attack on DGR in the Contemporary

Review (Oct 71): 334–50 Repr New York: AMS,

1975 For more bibliography and other details

of this controversy that precipitated DGR’s breakdown in the summer of 1872 see Appendices 8 & 9 in WEF Vol V

Caine Hall Caine Recollections of Rossetti London:

Stock, 1882; contains many excerpts from DGR’s letters to HC, some misquoted and conflated

ClassLists WMR Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Classified Lists of

His Writings with the Dates London: privately

printed in 100 copies, 1906

DGRDW WMR Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and

Writer London: Cassell, 1889 Repr New York:

AMS, 1970 Includes sonnet-by-sonnet prose

paraphrase of HL pp 179–262

Doughty Oswald Doughty A Victorian Romantic: Dante

Gabriel Rossetti London: Frederick Muller,

1949 Rev ed 1960

DW Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, eds

Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 4 vols Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1965–67 Vol I 1835–60 Letters 1–353 pp 1–385; Vol II 1861–70 Letters 354–1094

pp 387–921; Vol III 1871–76 Letters 1095–1744

pp 923–1468; Vol IV 1877–82 Letters 1745–2615

pp 1469–1953

FL/FLM WMR Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters

with a Memoir 2 vols London: Ellis, 1895 Vol 1:

Memoir (FLM) Vol 2: Letters (FL); repr New

York: AMS, 1970

FLCGR The Family Letters of Christina Georgiana Rossetti,

ed WMR London: Brown, Langham, 1908

FR ‘Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets’,

Fortnightly Review (March 1869): 266–73

Grylls Rosalie Glynn Grylls [see also Rosalie, Lady

Mander] Portrait of Rossetti London:

Macdonald, 1964

Harrison The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed Antony H

Harrison 3 vols Charlottesville: U Virginia P,

1997

HRA Helen Rossetti Angeli Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His

Friends and Enemies London: Hamilton, 1949

Kelvin Norman Kelvin, ed The Collected Letters of

William Morris 5 vols Princeton NJ: Princeton

UP, 1984–96

Lang Cecil Y Lang, ed The Swinburne Letters 6 vols

New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1959–62

Lewis Roger C Lewis Thomas J Wise and the Trial

Book Fallacy Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995

Marillier Henry Currie Marillier Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life

London: Bell, 1899

MS Diary MS Diary of WMR in the Angeli-Dennis Papers

at UBC, an almost continuous record of literary and artistic events and family activities from early PRB days to the close of WMR’s life in 1919 Masefield John Masefield Thanks Before Going: Notes on

Some of the Original Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

London: Heinemann, 1946

Peattie Roger W Peattie, ed Selected Letters of William

Michael Rossetti University Park, PA:

Pennsylvania UP, 1990

PFB 1) 2) 3) Paull Franklin Baum, ed 1) Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

An Analytical List of Manuscripts in the Duke University Library with Hitherto Unpublished Verse and Prose Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1931;

2) The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928; 3) ‘The Bancroft Manuscripts of Dante

Gabriel Rossetti’, Modern Philology (Aug 1941):

47–68

PRISM William E Fredeman Pre-Raphaelitism: A

Biblio-critical Study Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1965

RP WMR, ed Rossetti Papers, 1862–70 London:

Sands, 1903

S/Surtees Virginia Surtees Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A

Cata-logue Raisonné 2 vols Oxford: Clarendon, 1971

S followed by a number identifies an entry in the catalogue

SR WMR Some Reminiscences 2 vols London:

Brown Langham, 1906

Wahl John Robert Wahl The Kelmscott Love Sonnets of

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Cape Town: A.H

Balkema, 1954

WA/GBH George Birkbeck Hill, ed Letters of Dante Gabriel

Rossetti to William Allingham 1854–70 London:

Unwin, 1897

WEF William E Fredeman, ed The Correspondence

of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 10 vols Completing

Editors: Roger C Lewis, Jane Cowan, Roger Peattie, Allan Life, Page Life Cambridge: D.S Brewer, 2002–; Vol I 1835–54; Vol II 1855–62; Vol III 1863–67; Vol IV 1868–70; Vol V 1871– 72; Vol VI 1873–74; Vol VII to be issued in 2007

WMRD Odette Bornand The Diary of William Michael

Rossetti 1870–1873 Oxford: Clarendon, 1977

Annotated proofsheet for Ballads and Sonnets of 25 Apr 81 with Prefatory Note to The House of Life Princeton See p 34 note 5

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available for inclusion in the eBook.

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Introduction

The Building of The House of Life

In 1909, Wilfred S Blunt, author of the sonnet sequence Esther,

asserted to Sir Sydney Cockerell that he considered Dante Gabriel

Rossetti’s 103-sonnet poem The House of Life ‘the greatest of all the

great Victorian poems’ This image of its loftiness has been popular among the poem’s would-be interpreters, who regard it as an unscaled, perhaps unscalable, pinnacle among Victorian peaks Certainly, its textual complexities are formidable, and it is impossible to attempt an

authoritative interpretation of the House without the benefit of a proper critical edition The final version, which appeared in Ballads

and Sonnets (1881), contained sonnets written as early as 1847, before

the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and as late as 1880

The individual ‘sonnet-stanzas’ of the House were thus composed over a

period of thirty-four years, twice the time it took Alfred Tennyson to

compose all the individual lyrics of In Memoriam

The sequence itself appeared in three different states: 16 sonnets

in 1869, published in the Fortnightly Review with the title ‘Of Life, Love, and Death’; 50 sonnets and 11 lyrics published in Poems (1870) with the title ‘Sonnets and Songs, towards a Work to Be Called The

House of Life’; 102 sonnets (including an unnumbered proem-sonnet

but no songs) published in Ballads and Sonnets (1881) as The House of

Life in a two-part sequence with the subtitles ‘Youth and Change’ (59

sonnets) and ‘Change and Fate’ (42 sonnets) Jerome McGann identifies

a fourth state (McGann 2003: 386), the Bodleian Library MSS of 30

sonnets and songs that J R Wahl published as The Kelmscott Love

Sonnets of D G Rossetti, but McGann’s claim that these documents

form ‘a relatively coherent’ version of the sequence is difficult to support They form no entity and have no unity beyond being a collection of fair copies that Rossetti included in letters to Jane Morris

Some of these poems were never part of any version of the House

Nevertheless, McGann’s emphasis on the instability of this long poem is critically sound: it is a house built upon ever-shifting sands

Some poems added to the final House in 1881 originally appeared

in the ‘Sonnets for Pictures and Other Sonnets’ section of Poems

(1870) To the despair of his printer, Rossetti experimented with a half-dozen different sonnets in the initial position and shifted large

groups of sonnets within the sequence in the course of his manic composing and revising from 1868 to 1870 He constantly revised individual octaves, sestets and lines as well, introducing these changes at all stages, even on press-proofs Some of his proofsheets used as printer’s copy contain so much revision and additional material that an editor may be justified in regarding them as MSS As John Carter remarked in 1972, no publisher today would tolerate this amount of revision at the proof stage from a best-selling novelist, never mind a poet

What does all this textual instability signify, and how should an editor deal with it? Answers to the first question abound among Rossetti critics Perhaps the most common is that Rossetti was a relentless per- fectionist, a ferocious competitor in the struggle to determine the poetic survival of the fittest His goal was hyperdense, multifaceted signifi- cance, to be achieved by what he described to Hall Caine as ‘funda- mental brainwork’ (WEF 81.104) and summed up in a phrase from his sonnet on the Sonnet as ‘arduous fulness’, a phrase once parodied

by the unsympathetic critic John Addington Symonds as ‘plethoric verbiage’ Rossetti contrasted his compositional methods with those

of his more fluent and prolific friends Swinburne and Morris, depicting himself as agonizing upon his couch, the racked and tortured medium through whom the Muse vouchsafed only a few lines at a time Too

much emphasis on biographical explanations of The House of Life,

however, obscures Rossetti’s ambition to be regarded as a fine sonneteer As C S Lewis observed, the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamoured of a woman but also to be enamoured of the sonnet

Like that other inveterate reviser, Tennyson, Rossetti was diffident about his poetic gift, determined to publish only work adjudged to be his finest by family and friends and paranoid about criticism from all others In this matter his painting parallels his poetry to some extent: he was as reluctant to exhibit as he was to publish, and he painted out heads as often as he cancelled stanzas But there is a very important difference He thought of his poetry as untainted by commercialism, affirming an integrity and evincing a dedication in his literary art that he felt he had surrendered by painting so many potboilers He began and ended his career as an artist by writing poetry; it is striking that in the 1880s he was revising poems that he had written in the 1840s What Johnson said of Pope is true of Rossetti: ‘to make verses was his first labour, and to mend them was his last’

I

My own belief is that I am a poet primarily and that it is

my poetic tendencies that chiefly give value to my pictures;

only painting being – what poetry is not – a livelihood – I

have put my poetry chiefly in that form On the other

hand, the bread-and-cheese question has led to a good deal

of my painting being pot-boiling and no more – whereas

my verse, being unprofitable has remained …

unprosti-tuted … As with recreated forms in painting, so I should

wish to deal in poetry chiefly with personified emotions;

and in carrying out my scheme of the House of Life (if ever I

do so) shall try to put in action a complete dramatis personae

of the soul D G Rossetti to Dr T G Hake (WEF 70.110)

Written to an enthusiastic admirer upon the publication of Poems

(1870), the passage above conveys the sense of inspired poetic vocation

that possessed Rossetti for only three short periods of his life: 1849–53,

the years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; 1868–71, a time of nearly

continuous literary production beginning at Penkill Castle, Ayrshire,

and ending at Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire; and 1879–81, an Indian

summer of literary creativity that culminated in Poems (1881) and

Ballads and Sonnets On 13 April 1880, Rossetti told Hall Caine, one of

his first biographers, that he gave up poetry in favour of painting in

1853 when he was twenty-five, writing ‘extremely little I might

almost say nothing except the renovated Jenny in 1858 or 1859’ until

he began work on his 1870 Poems (WEF 80.125) He also revealed to

Caine that he wrote on a sort of orgiastic principle, working himself

into states of manic intensity followed by exhaustion and depression:

I wrote the tale [Hand and Soul] all in one night in

December 1849 In such a case a landscape and sky all

unsurmised open gradually in the mind – a sort of spiritual

‘Turner’ among whose hills one ranges and in whose waters

one strikes out at unknown liberty But I have found this

only in nightly work which I have seldom attempted, for

it leaves one entirely broken, and this state was mine

when I described it at the close of the story (WEF 80.116)

But the fact is that Rossetti’s best writing was done this way, when

his painting activities dwindled to make way for bursts of

imagina-tive composition sustained often for months at a time The second

period of literary creativity began tentatively in 1868 when he

thought his career as a painter threatened by failing eyesight, but in

1870 it had reached a multiple climax of acclaim among the literati and success with the reading public, satisfying the author’s own demanding criteria for poetic excellence However, the euphoria waned when the writing stopped, giving way in late 1871 to obsession and in 1872 to despair and madness For eight years Rossetti wrote almost nothing Then the pattern asserted itself one last time Slowly

at first but eventually attaining all the old mastery, Rossetti enjoyed

in 1880–81 a final poetic blossoming, even improving on his triumph

of eleven years earlier by bringing out not one but two successful volumes in October-November of 1881 But scarcely more than a

month after the publication of Poems (1881) on November 10, he was

raving again: from that breakdown, he never recovered

II

Much has been written on the first two creative periods: Rossetti’s

‘Pre-Raphaelite’ youth, and the fascinating circumstances under

which Poems (1870) was produced dominated in the popular mind by

the Gothic episode of the exhumation in Highgate Cemetery in which his friends recovered the MS poems from his wife’s grave.1 The

textual story of the building of Poems (1870) in general and the House

in particular is recounted in detail in Appendices One to Six

That Rossetti intended The House of Life to be read as a unified

whole is clear from the excerpt quoted above from his letter of 21 April 1870 to Dr Hake His use of terminology from drama suggests that he was aiming at more than self-expression and prepares us for his eventual omission of the lyrics It is true that this drama takes

place within ‘the soul’, but in The Stealthy School of Criticism, the poet

insisted that ‘the motive powers of art reverse the requirement of

science, and demand first of all an inner standing point’ (Works 619)

From that point, the ‘personified emotions’ may be seen as characters

in a drama that is more Jungian than Dantesque

Rossetti’s letters show that the idea of a sonnet sequence evolved gradually and intermittently in his mind Many sonnets written before 1870 were not composed consciously as part of a larger

1 On Rossetti’s ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ youth see WEF Vols I & II and Gordon H

Fleming, 1967 & 1971 On the context and publication history of Poems

(1870), see WEF Vols IV & V, especially Appendices 1–5 & 8–9 See also Lewis Chapter 3 and articles by Robert S Fraser, Robert N Keane and Janet Camp Troxell in Fraser 1972, a publication commemorating Princeton’s acquisition of the Troxell Rossetti Collection

scheme, although some, such as 69 and 70, were revised in varying

degree, both before and after the appearance of Poems (1870), to take

their place within the sequence His experimentation with grouping

and positioning can be partially followed in some collections of House

MSS: the Fitzwilliam Library sonnets are numbered in pencil on the

upper left of each leaf, some having as many as four cancelled

numbers while other numbers were never altered This process is

also evident in proofsheets

Much has been made of Rossetti’s declaration to William Bell

Scott that his sonnets were ‘occasional’ and his apparent contradiction of

that statement in his cancelled preface to the 1881 sequence: ‘These

poems are in no sense occasional.’ In August 1871, during the period

of the ‘Kelmscott Love Sonnets’, Rossetti wrote to Scott:

I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of

special momentary emotion; but I think there is another

class admissible also – and that is the only other I

practise, viz the class depending on a line or two clearly

given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence

of ideas This also is a just raison d’être for a sonnet, and

such are all mine when they do not in some sense belong

to the ‘occasional’ class (WEF 71.129)

Naive Freudians read Rossetti’s poetry as disguised and distorted

autobiography But there is much evidence that he regarded all

intense human experience, including his own, as symbolic of deeper

realities While he never formulated, as Carlyle did, a distinction

between extrinsic and intrinsic symbols, such a distinction is clear

from both his creative and his critical writing He believed that only

trivial poetry could be made from incidents not amounting to events:

one way to ensure that an occasion, or incident, amounts to an event,

or symbolic experience, is continuous revision In 1854, including his

new sonnet Lost on Both Sides (91) in a letter to William Allingham, he

remarked, ‘my sonnets are not generally finished till I see them again

after forgetting them, and this is only two days old’ (WEF 54.55) This

is an understatement Sonnet 91 in particular and House sonnets in

general underwent so much revision before their final appearance in

1881 that the poet’s use of the word ‘tattoo’ to describe this process

aptly characterizes many of his MSS and proofsheets The

deperson-alizing, symbolizing tendency of much of this revision cannot be

dismissed as mere self-censorship; Rossetti was following that

impulse towards an impersonal art that he celebrated in the proem

Sonnet and Transfigured Life (60)

The 1854 letters to Allingham contain the first references covered to those very important MSS, Rossetti’s vest-pocket note- books, four of which were acquired by Thomas J Wise for the Ashley Library These tiny documents contain poems in process, in nearly every stage of composition from single words or scribbled phrases to final drafts After agreeing with Allingham that the last lines of Sonnet 91 are ‘certainly foggy’, Rossetti amends them from his vest- pocket notebook containing ‘various sonnets and beginnings of sonnets written at crisises (?!) of happy inspiration’ Then he copies for his friend a sonnet ‘which I remember writing in great glory on the top of a hill which I reached one after-sunset in Warwickshire last year’ (WEF 54.57) A study of the development of this poem from its

dis-appearance here to its inclusion in the final House as The Hill Summit

(70) reveals to what purpose Rossetti could shape what began as the record of an intense moment In September 1869, he sent his brother a revised version of the sestet with the following question:

The symbolism being thus more distinct than before, do

you not think this sonnet should properly be transferred

to the House of Life section? (WEF 69.156)

The only earlier references to the House come in a letter of 30 August to Jane Morris (WEF 69.143) and Proof State 2 of Poems (1870)

dated 18 August (see Appendix Two) By the summer of 1869, some overall plan for a sonnet sequence had formed itself in the poet’s

mind; he revised The Hill Summit to fit into the pattern he was working out for The House of Life

Many sonnets of the other, non-occasional, sort developed from

or drew upon single lines or couplets that he had evidently written in

these little notebooks as they were ‘given’ to him Silent Noon (19), an

apparently ‘occasional’ poem and a sonnet often read as an entry in Rossetti’s erotic diary, combined four separate notebook entries made over so long a period of time that all four could not possibly refer to a single experience Even some of the ‘Kelmscott Love Sonnets’ contain

imagery not inspired by that locale: the final two lines of The Lovers’

Walk (12) came out of a notebook, although the first twelve are clearly

set at Kelmscott The point of carrying these books in the vest-pocket was to facilitate easy transcription of passing impressions which might be of use later in the ‘fundamental brainwork’ of composition and revision Rossetti described to Caine In the following letter of

1876 he explains this matter to his fellow-poet Hake upon presenting him with a notebook:

Let me beg your acceptance of a waistcoat pocket book,

such as I always carry I enclose it with the MS The

waist-coat pocket is the only one of all pockets into which the

hand slips willingly whatever be the body’s position

whether walking, standing, sitting, lying or squatting

Kneeling you see I exclude A dive into the trousers pocket

is often laborious and coat pockets inaccessible Thus the

best thoughts of the lazy minstrel may doze past his brain

unjotted but for the waistcoat pocket book (WEF 76.44)

The concept of a group of sonnets with related themes and images

in sequential order appears in letters to several correspondents

between December 1868 and August 1871 Rossetti first mentions it to

Allingham 23 December 1868, in a letter which also gives eye trouble

as the cause of ‘inaction’ in painting and ‘the looking up of ravelled

rags of verse’:

I have been looking up a few old Sonnets, and writing a

few more new ones, to make a little bunch in a coming

number of the Fortnightly (WEF 68.173)

These sonnets, the embryonic phase of The House of Life, appeared

three months later with the title Of Life, Love and Death: Sixteen

Sonnets Appendix One includes a comparison of this selection with

the 1870 and 1881 phases of the sequence: it is apparent from this

comparison that the poet intended from the start to end the series

with the richly suggestive and paradoxical image of death as a

newborn child (Newborn Death, 99 and 100)

Rossetti’s letters to his brother William at this time indicate how

carefully he was selecting and revising Despite the fact that in both

1870 and 1881 he worried about the slightness of his volumes, he

excluded many sonnets from the House, either discarding them from

various proof states or including them in ‘other sonnets’ sections;

some sexually explicit ones were suppressed or left unfinished (see

Appendix Eight) Early sonnets such as 71–73 and 90 were finally

included after heavy revision discussed with William (e.g., WEF

69.130, 137, 139, 144, 146, 154, 156 and 168) What strikes one most about

these letters is the precision and thoroughness with which the poet

prepared his printer’s copy and revised his proofs Always he strives

for more exact expression, more coherent structure to render the inner

logic of an imaginary set of circumstances Nuptial Sleep (6A) exemplifies

this procedure He thought it one of his best sonnets, having no wish

to suppress it in 1870 as he did in 1881 (except en famille) The fact

that in 1869 he did remove the sonnet After the French Liberation of

Italy in the name of decorum indicates that he did not regard Nuptial Sleep as obscene or vulgar (Lewis 137–40) Neither did he regard it

sentimentally as the record of some private sexual encounter – his correspondence about it with William and Swinburne shows that he was searching for what Coleridge had defined as the essence of poetry, the best words in the best order In changing the title from

Placatâ Venere to Nuptial Sleep and adding ‘married’ in line 6 to ‘help

it stand fire’, he presumably thought that Patmorish marital imagery would be less likely than Swinburnian pagan symbolism to draw on him the abuse that was heaped upon Swinburne after he published

his Poems and Ballads (WEF 69.146 and 154) His fears proved only too justified when Buchanan selected Nuptial Sleep as the prime example

of Rossetti’s ‘fleshliness’, yet the poet had feared the charge of idolatry more than adultery, for he deleted paganism, not eroticism, from the sonnet There is no evidence that Jane Morris opposed the

publication of Nuptial Sleep in 1870 That she seems to have advised

Rossetti against including erotic poetry in his 1881 volume shows her concern for his health – another literary war might have caused madness or death – rather than her fear of personal embarrassment The exchange of letters with Swinburne during this period was especially stimulating for Rossetti, more often at his best with one who was his literary equal as well as an enthusiastic admirer Swinburne seems to have grasped at once what Rossetti was attempting in his sonnet sequence which so many, including William, thought obscure On 26 February 1870, while Swinburne was

working on his review of Poems from proofsheets, Rossetti wrote to

him as follows:

I am delighted to hear that you are battling with the British

dragon on the subject of my ‘obscurity’ in the Sonnets I

opine that I am likely when I read your elucidation to see

how much better they might have been made by your

light, just as I did with the pictures of mine you described

I trust no inconvenience will result to your labours by the

fact that I am now slightly transposing that section – but

only in masses – putting the love sonnets first – (beginning

at Bridal Birth [2] and ending at Stillborn Love [55]) and the

other sonnets following these (Inclusiveness [63] to

Super-scription [97] with a new one for a close [The One Hope, 101])

Two other new ones occur in the love-sonnets The section

then winds up with the songs This is better I think, as the

love-sonnets are the preponderant portion (WEF 70.35)

Swinburne wrote back two days later:

Thanks for your new sonnet, which is lovely It will make no

difference to my critical work that you have – very rightly I

think – re-arranged the cycles of sonnets (Lang 2: 105)

The comments of both poets draw attention to the element of

structure Both ‘masses’ and ‘cycles’ suggest relatedness, as does the

inclusion of The One Hope ‘for a close’ Here also appears the concept

of a two-part work beginning with ‘love-sonnets’ and ending, after a

second group of sonnets, with the songs, for the sake of evidently,

balance As the design worked itself out in the poet’s mind after 1870,

the songs, never an integral part of the sequence, got dropped In

fact, a week after receiving Swinburne’s letter, Rossetti removed the

lyrics A New Year’s Burden and Even So because ‘they seemed to jar

with the other love songs and to make a false climax’ (WEF 70.45) He

kept adding and deleting sonnets until he had an even fifty just

before press-time; again in 1881, he finally reached an even hundred,

numbering The One Hope 101 as if to balance the unnumbered proem

Sonnet and thus provide a frame for his ‘century’ of sonnets

Swinburne’s review appeared in the Fortnightly Review for May

1870 (Swinburne 1875) The fulsome praise of his friend embarrassed

Rossetti but the critical insight of the essay pleased him After refuting

‘charges of darkness and difficulty’ in the sonnets, Swinburne

proceeds with characteristic exuberance to argue that The House of Life

is a unified organic whole which eludes mechanical dissection:

But such work as this can be neither unwoven nor recast

by any process of analysis The infinite depth and wealth

of life which breathes and plays among these songs and

sonnets cannot be parcelled and portioned out for praise

or comment This House of Life has in it so many mansions,

so many halls of state and bowers of music, chapels for

worship and chambers for festival, that no guest can

declare on a first entrance the secret of its scheme Spirit

and sense together, eyesight and hearing and thought, are

absorbed in splendour of sounds and glory of colours

distinguishable only by delight But the scheme is solid

and harmonious; there is no waste in this luxury of

genius: the whole is lovelier than its loveliest part Again

and again one may turn the leaves in search of some one

poem or some two which may be chosen for sample and

thanksgiving; but there is no choice to be made (7)

Swinburne recognizes that the unity of the sequence does not depend on any narrative progression:

There seems no story in this sequence of sonnets, yet they

hold in them all the action and passion of a spiritual history with tragic stages and elegiac pauses and lyric motions of the living soul (8)

He hails as successful Rossetti’s striving for ‘inclusiveness’ (as

sonnet 63 is called), his attempt ‘to put in action a complete dramatis

personae of the soul’:

Resignation and fruition, forethought and afterthought, have one voice to sing with in many keys of spirit And

of all splendid and profound love-poetry, what is there more luminous or more deep in sense and spirit than the

marvellous opening cycle of twenty-eight sonnets, which

embrace and express all sorrow and all joy of passion in

union, of outer love and inner, triumphant or dejected or

piteous or at peace? (9)

After a detailed paraphrase of this ‘opening cycle’ which remains

unsurpassed by the subsequent efforts of William Rossetti (DGRDW),

Paull Baum {PFB 2)}, John Masefield and Kathryn Gordon (1968), Swinburne concludes by emphasizing what he sees as the central theme of the sequence: the metaphorical identity of the Lover and the Artist made possible through the worship of his Mistress/Muse:

In all the glorious poem built up of all these poems there

is no great quality more notable than the sweet and sovereign unity of perfect spirit and sense, of fleshly form

and intellectual fire This Muse is as the woman praised

in the divine words of the poet himself:

‘Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought

Nor Love her body from her soul.’ (13)2

One of Rossetti’s first critics remains one of his most perceptive Yet Swinburne’s word ‘fleshly’ was soon to explode in both their faces

2 Swinburne is quoting the final lines of ‘Love-Lily’, Song 1 in the 1870 House of Life

III

The story of the two 1881 volumes and the final version of The

House of Life begins where the second period of creativity ends, in the

summer and fall of 1871 On 12 August, speculation appeared in the

literary gossip section of the Athenæum that Rossetti intended to issue

a new collection of poems as early as winter 1872 Writing to his

friend William Bell Scott on the following day, Rossetti joked about

but did not deny the rumour (WEF 71.123) Besides thirty new

sonnets for the House, Rossetti had the lyrics ‘Sunset Wings’, ‘The

Cloud Confines’ and ‘Down Stream’ ready to print In September, he

finished his long ballad Rose Mary (though not yet the ‘Beryl-songs’

that he later added to it), starting at once on another long poem, The

Orchard Pit, all of which, augmented ‘with smaller things, might

perhaps make a fair volume again’ (WEF 71.152) However, with the

return in October of William Morris from Iceland, he had to vacate

Kelmscott for Chelsea He lamented to Scott: ‘Of course I’m leaving

here just as I was getting into the poetic groove, and I know were I to

stay I should have a volume ready by the end of another three

months But it may not be’ (WEF 71.159) In the same letter, he

remarks that he is evidently ‘the first victim’ of an attack on ‘the

Fleshly School of Poetry’ This development, casually dismissed here,

was to prove more destructive of Rossetti’s scheme for a new book of

poems than his being deprived of the beauties of Kelmscott Manor

and its graceful mistress Jane Morris

The pamphlet war known as the Fleshly School Controversy is well

documented, as is its cumulative effect on the poet from October 1871

to September 1872 Beginning with Robert Buchanan’s pseudonymous

attack on Rossetti and Swinburne, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, in the

Contemporary Review for October, it reached a crisis when Buchanan

published a signed, expanded and more vengeful assault in

pamphlet form on the poet’s birthday, 12 May, precipitating his total

breakdown on 2 June (WEF 72.83 & Appendix 8, Vol V) W E

Fredeman’s careful, detailed, analysis of Rossetti’s collapse, suicide

attempt, near-incarceration in an insane asylum and partial recovery

appears in his Prelude to the Last Decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the

Summer of 1872 (Fredeman 1971: an abridged version of these two

articles from BJRL is printed at the end of WEF Vol V as Appendix 9)

Yet we cannot assign all the blame for Rossetti’s desperate condition

at this time to Robert Buchanan, Jane Morris and chloral hydrate For

instance, the poetic efflorescence of 1868–71 was not simply ‘snuffed

out by an article’ but undermined, partly indeed by the poet’s

obsession with confounding enemies both real and imaginary, but

partly also by the erosion of his many literary friendships, so

nourishing to him during the preparation of Poems (1870) and the

fruitful summer of 1871 The communal aspect of artistic creation had always been a source of joy to Rossetti His astounding offer in his

last years to publish jointly with his solicitor Watts (a very minor

poet) a ‘Miscellany’ of their poems was made in what Rossetti called the ‘Tuscan’ spirit (WEF 78.232 [DW 1975]) This word denotes the standard literary Italian of the Middle Ages: Tuscans such as Dante and Cavalcanti commented on each other’s work and urged one another on to poetic achievement Rossetti’s exchanges of verse with various friends were attempts to introduce that spirit into his own circle, even though some members of it, such as Scott, Philip Marston and the egregious Theo Marzials, may deserve Tom Stoppard’s

epithet, ‘the belles-litter that surrounded Rossetti’.3

Rossetti was forty-four at the height of the Fleshly School Controversy, no longer surrounded by the intense young men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or the ardent aesthetes of the Jovial Campaign who helped him decorate the Oxford Union in the late 1850s It was the very idea of such brotherhoods that was being

attacked: the Saturday Review for 24 February 1872 ran an article,

‘Coterie Glory’, alleging that personal friends of the Fleshly poets

wrote all reviews of their work, a practice sneeringly designated as

Italian.4 How all this affected Rossetti is eloquently expressed in one

of his letters to the painter Frederick Shields:

Things go on the same as ever in London Everyone works,

and hardly anyone sees the other’s work more than if

many counties lay between them – every man having his

own daily groove, and the cross roads being somehow of

rare occurrence Goodbye, my dear Shields I hope our

really seeing each other again before we are much older is

not quite out of the question (WEF 71.185)

Rossetti’s biographers have recognized that his muse flourished only under certain conditions, but they tend to underestimate the part played by literary friendships in the creation of those conditions Indeed, Oswald Doughty underestimated the degree to which the

3 The British Consul so characterizes the Irish poet William Allingham in

Stoppard’s Travesties (London, 1975)

4 Robert Buchanan, The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day (London, 1872; rpt New York, 1975), Notes, pp 94–95

poet’s friendship with Jane Morris could be described as literary

When he left Kelmscott in 1871, Rossetti had already composed 88 of

the 102 sonnets that would form the complete House in Ballads and

Sonnets; he did not take it up again until a renewal of warm relations

with Jane Morris and his brother William and new literary

friendships with Watts and Hall Caine stimulated him near the close

of his life When his publisher F S Ellis proposed a new volume of

original poetry at the beginning of 1873, Rossetti dithered, fearing

that his present material would print up to a mere 150 pages, but

resolved to ‘set to work writing new [poems] as soon as possible’

(WEF 73.2 & 3) He didn’t, offering Ellis instead a translation of

Michelangelo’s poems that soon grew to an edition with critical

introduction, thence into a comparative study of ‘other

painter-poets’, coming finally to nothing (WEF 73.20–22) By then, evidently

recovered from his breakdown and far behind with his commissions,

Rossetti was neither a writer nor a scholar, but once again a painter

IV

The decision to prepare a trade edition of his poetry was

precipitated for Rossetti in both 1869 and 1879 by the appearance in

print of articles praising his achievement as a poet in terms that

pleased him Contrary to Oswald Doughty and other sources dating

back to T J Wise, the exhumation of his MS poetry from his wife’s

grave in October 1869 was not the occasion of his dropping an earlier

plan to print privately That had already been cancelled by 30 August,

when he told Jane Morris that he would ‘rush into publication’ as

soon as he had written enough to make up a volume of 300–350

pages (WEF 69.143) In the same letter he makes clear that his

confidence was boosted by the appearance in Tinsley’s Magazine for

September of the first critique ever published on him as a poet, a

laudatory piece by Harry Buxton Forman Thinking back to his first,

‘Pre-Raphaelite’, poetic flowering, he remarked to his mother that

Forman’s article ‘is so far satisfactory that, after twenty years, one

stranger has discovered one’s existence’ (WEF 69.138) Ten years

later, he wrote again to Jane:

I enclose an article just received from some enthusiast

of whom I had already heard as lecturing in my honour I

only hope Caine may manage to spell Able as regards

enforcing my poetic claims The object of the lecture is

very good – being evidently to insist on the high tone of

feeling in the poems (WEF 79.114 [Bryson 68&n1])

Hall Caine, an architect’s clerk with literary ambitions, could not have taken a tack more pleasing to Rossetti than to argue as he did

that Poems (1870) contained nothing immoral Jane Morris was the

first among many friends of the poet to be unimpressed by Caine, but Rossetti protested peevishly, ‘I grow more and more into the weak- ness of being thankful to anyone who will give me a little praise’ (WEF 79.122 [Bryson 71]) He struck this defensive tone about Caine

in another letter to Mrs Morris, describing the Liverpudlian’s warm sympathy with his poetry as ‘a thing worth meeting with when one’s old friends care little or nothing whether one lives or dies’ (WEF 80.70 [Bryson 108])

From the summer of 1879, Rossetti’s commitment to poetry grew, displacing and ultimately replacing painting, fed as it had been twice previously by a group of admirer-collaborators, smaller than in 1868–

71 but no less fervent The old group of Swinburne, Scott and Hake

no longer received copies of Gabriel’s latest poems They had been replaced by Jane Morris, who was now nearly always the first to see any new writing by Rossetti, and Caine, with whom he exchanged a massive literary correspondence (sending 124 letters over the next three years) There were also his brother William and his solicitor Watts Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton first met Rossetti around 27 December

1872 (WEF 73.7), although he had earlier represented him in the Rovedino (WEF 72.70n2) affair: the two exchanged letters from 24 September 1872 In time, he became factotum and crony to the para- noiac artist, shielding him against the malevolent outside world with a professional expertise never at the command of William Rossetti, who more or less resigned as his brother’s keeper in 1874 to take up his new role as husband and father Like William and Dr Hake, who introduced him to Rossetti, Watts was an amateur man of letters whose boundless admiration for Gabriel’s genius brought out the best in the moody poet Others in the new circle included William Sharp, whom Rossetti introduced to Watts in September 1880, and Caine’s Liverpool friend James Ashcroft Noble, whose article in the September (1880)

Contemporary Review, ‘The Sonnet in England’, described Rossetti as the

leading sonneteer of the age The delighted poet wrote to Caine:

Mr Noble’s article on the Sonnet like your lecture, greets

me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition It is all

the more pleasant to me as finding a place in the very Review

which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous attack

on my poems and on myself [Buchanan’s ‘Fleshly School’

diatribe] I am very proud to think that after my small and

solitary book has been a good many years published and

several years out of print, it yet meets with such ardent

upholding by young and sincere men (WEF 80.303)

After the American publisher, Roberts Bros, had imported the

few remaining British copies of Poems (1870), it was in fact out of

print by early 1879 Responding at last to the demand for a new issue,

Rossetti began in October 1879 to overhaul Sister Helen, developing ‘a

fresh incident’ of three stanzas which he sent with interpretive

commentary to Jane Morris (WEF 80.81 & 94 [Bryson 82 & 83]) As

before, his return to poetry proved to be halting, but many

circum-stances drew him away from painting at this time, particularly hard

times among patrons whose wealth depended upon industry and

manufacture, and changing fashions in art Explaining the

fluctu-ations of the economy to his mother, he noted that coal, copper and

textiles are ‘vitally wound up with the picture-market’ (WEF 79.194

[DW 2143]) Patrons and agents grew more impatient for delivery of

prepaid pictures and less eager to provide further commissions for

the somewhat dilatory artist Some old customers, such as William

Graham, could no longer afford to purchase Rossetti’s work Tastes

were changing Impressionism, which Rossetti hated, gained ground

in England: Whistler’s insolence to Ruskin was prophetic The

Daydream, completed by the summer of 1880, seems to have been the

last painting that Rossetti worked on with enthusiasm, although he

continued to daub away at the semi-travesty La Pia, the

forever-unfinished Found, replicas of The Blessed Damozel, which he privately

referred to as ‘The Blasted Damdozel’ (WEF 81.21 [DW 2401]), and

commissions a decade overdue His reputation as a painter was on

the wane, as William confided to his Diary on 30 September 1880

Whereas Rossetti’s fellow Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt had

recently received £10,000 for his new painting The Shadow of Death,

Rossetti’s prices were in three digits and falling Watts told William

that buyers objected to ‘the outré points of G’s style in painting –

especially the peculiar & almost mulatto form of his mouths, & the

tumid elongation of his throats, almost goitred in form’ (MS Diary)

On the other hand, times seemed right for Rossetti’s poetry

Ballads were enjoying a vogue, and William Rossetti spoke of ‘a

veritable sonnet-mania’ breaking out with the publication of David

Main’s Treasury of English Sonnets, which included two specimens

from the House, ‘Broken Music’ (47) and ‘Lost Days’ (86), in early

1880 (DGRDW 169) In his notes, Main emphasized Rossetti’s

greatness as a master of the sonnet In 1882, Caine brought out his

Sonnets of Three Centuries, a project on which Rossetti had been a

virtual collaborator; in the same year Samuel Waddington’s English

Sonnets by Poets of the Past, dedicated, by permission, to Rossetti

appeared Waddington followed in 1884 with English Sonnets by

Living Writers and in 1886 with The Sonnets of Europe During this

decade, William Sharp produced American Sonnets and Sonnets of this

Century, the latter containing eleven sonnets from the House All these

compilers had been in touch with Rossetti during his lifetime and owed much to his theory, practice and preferences This was the most purely literary period of his life Besides the whole range of sonnet literature from the early Italian to the contemporary, he was reading his beloved Romantic poets again, helping Anne Gilchrist with a new edition of her husband Herbert’s Blake biography, assisting Watts with his research into the life and work of Chatterton and writing new poems To William Davies in Italy he described his state of mind

at this time: ‘It is true that my own life is a very uncheered one Yet I shall not sink, I trust, so long as the poetic life wells up in me at intervals (and with me it was always and by preference intermittent)’ (WEF 81.121 [DW 2435])

At Christmas 1879 Rossetti wrote the first new House sonnet in five years, ‘Ardour and Memory’ (64) In his A Victorian Romantic,

Doughty makes much of the poignant sestet, depicting Rossetti as brooding alone in gloomy old Tudor House during the festive season, stupefied with chloral-and-whisky to escape tormenting memories of Jane Morris who no longer cared for him (609–610) The composition of the sonnet at that time is used as an illustration of Doughty’s theory that Rossetti’s poetic faculties were ‘vitalized solely

by physical passion’ (60) The facts of the matter make this melodramatic interpretation almost comical

Unknown to the biographer, ‘Ardour and Memory’ had been sent to Jane by the poet soon after he composed it; seeking her opinion of its poetic merit, he noted that ‘it is in a different mood from those of old, yet I have tried to sustain some beauty by natural images’ (WEF 79.217 [Bryson 88]) A week later, receiving no reply, Rossetti inquired anxiously whether Jane had been upset by the sonnet, perhaps thinking

it ‘extra dismal’ (WEF 80.5 [Bryson 89]) After further accusations that

she had, as once earlier, ‘put some inconceivable construction on that

Sonnet I sent you,’ and a refusal to send her any more new sonnets as ‘it might not be safe’ (WEF 80.29 [Bryson 97]), she confessed that she had indeed been depressed by the ‘extremely woeful character’ of the poem:

It seemed to me that you must have written it when very

ill, so sad was its tone, that I resolved to say nothing

about it, there is the truth of the matter Do send me the

Songs you speak of for the Rose Mary poem and anything

else you are doing, you must feel sure how welcome your

work always is to me – and there is little pleasure left one

in this world (Bryson 98)

Rossetti has the last word:

Pardon my reverting one last time to that blessed sonnet

I never dreamed you wd not perceive that the tone

adopted was only a contrasting framework for a set of

natural images such as one does not put into relishing

form if one is very ill! At least I am not at such times a

sonneteer (WEF 80.31 [Bryson 99)

At the end of February, evidently satisfied that she could now avoid

morbid interpretations, he sent her the Rose Mary ‘Beryl-songs’, his

new sonnet on Keats and thereafter all his new poetry as he wrote it

While Rossetti’s correspondence with Jane Morris does not often

display the turbulent passions imagined by Doughty and others, it

does show that she inspired the artist as much as the man On 6

November 1880, after Jane has been touched by his latest House

sonnet, ‘True Woman: Herself’ (56), for which she was ‘the model’

(WEF 80.352 [Bryson 121]), he sends her an explicit declaration of his

love, or rather what that love would have been:

I felt deeply the regard so deeply expressed in your last

letter The deep-seated basis of feeling as expressed in

that sonnet, is as fresh and unchanged in me towards you

as ever, though all else is withered and gone This you wd

never believe, but if life and fate had willed to link us

together you wd have found true what you cannot think

to be truth when – alas! – untried (WEF 80.361 [Bryson 122])

Immediately after this passage comes the following important

news concerning Rossetti’s 1881 poems: ‘Ellis looked me up yesterday

to talk of publishing He thinks the best plan is to put the old and

new together, and this is what I think.’ It is no distortion to refer to

the autumn of their friendship as decidedly literary The actual affair

between them had been terminated by Jane at Christmas 1875 (WEF

vol 6, Appendix 1, ‘Rossetti’s Relations with the Morrises 1868–75’)

Each correspondent, rather inclined to solitude, relies upon the other

for discussion of books and pictures, the weather, gossip of mutual

friends and detailed reports of the latest malady experienced or

remedy discovered Rather than Cathy and Heathcliff or Tristan and

Isolde, these late letters suggest Cyrano and Roxane – he bringing his