The Columbia History of British Poetry (119 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 484
                       the sea stands spread
As one wall with the flat skies
Where the lean black craft like flies
Seem well nigh stagnated
Soon to drop off dead.
He is a master at presenting seldom-noticed small details of the natural world like "the heart-shaped seal of green / That flecks the snowdrop underneath the snow," or the moment when "the dragon-fly / Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky." Yet these details are less common in his poetry than his unique combinations of specific images and personified abstracts, or his substitutions of abstractions for images. Far more prone to create poetic paintings than to write painterly poems, Rossetti is no more a realist in poetry than in painting; in both media he uses the apparatus of realism for symbolic purposes.
The House of Life
, his sequence of 101 sonnets on love, art, change, and death, is filled with these potent yet essentially untranslatable image patterns fusing the sensory and the intangible. "Winged Hours" have "bloodied feathers scattered in the brake." A bright day is ''sun-coloured to the imperishable core." A terrifying "something" in the "Monochord" turns the speaker's face "upon the devious coverts of dismay." Critics have carped at the elaborate artifice of this poetic technique, but it is quintessentially Rossettian.
Fundamentally, Gabriel Rossetti is most concerned with the inner life and with the making of art, whether through painting or through "the fundamental brainwork" involved in poetry; he does, however, share the social and political conscience of his first set of compeers. Indeed, most of his overtly political poems date from the late 1840s. Italian politics takes center stage in such sonnets as "On the Refusal of Aid Between Nations" and in his Browningesque dramatic monologue, "A Last Confession." The revolutions of 1848 inspire "At the Sun-Rise in 1848," and memories of the French Revolution empassion. another sonnet, "At the Place de la Bastille." "The Burden of Nineveh" is a splendid commentary on England's worship of false gods, especially Mammon, and a poem as much indebted to Carlyle's and Ruskin's warnings to their society as to Layard's archaeological discoveries.
"Jenny," despite all its emphasis on the male poet-hero's self-examination, is a classic Victorian examination of the nature and plight of the fallen woman, more compassionate than most such studies. Indeed,
 
Page 485
seduced and sexually exploited or abandoned womenoften disguised in medieval trappingsare significant in Gabriel Rossetti's poetry; "The Bride's Prelude" raises the question of whether a woman need marry the seducer she no longer respects; "Rose Mary" and "Stratton Water" empower the fallen women they depict. However, Rossetti's interest is not primarily in contemporary problems. His reaction to the Industrial Revolution, for example, is to allude to the bleakness and materialism of a world made unaesthetic, and to emphasize the towns and landscapes of the mind.
Indeed, Rossetti is always more interested in the state of the mind than in the state of the nation. His fascination with mental phenomena results in such lyrics as "Sudden Light," with its recognition of the déjà vu experience, the sense that lover and beloved have met and loved before; his awareness of the traumatic impact of "perfect grief" shapes "The Woodspurge," for the seemingly random observation that "the Woodspurge has a cup of three" is true to the nature of memory during shock. Even in narratives like ''Dante in Verona," "A Last Confession," or "Jenny," Rossetti's primary interest is in the presentation and analysis of rapidly shifting emotions or states of mind. Occult speculations, mesmerism, spiritualism, phrenology, all play a role in many of his poems as do the figures, landscapes and occurrences of the preternatural and dream worlds. Folkloric and supernatural elements add power and drama to such ballads as "Sister Helen," "Eden Bower," "Rose Mary," and "The King's Tragedy."
Rossetti defined both his method and the nature of much of his literary art when he wrote: "I shut myself in with my soul / And the shapes come eddying forth." The shapes, engendered by dream and reverie, are not vague in thought or detail; instead, they are preternaturally vivid, condensed, fluid. Dream functions to create imaginary landscapes as well as iconic figures. Not identified with a specific time or place, these landscapes are nonetheless defined and memorable. Rossetti's is a world of thickets, coverts and woodsperhaps an homage to the
selva oscura
of his beloved Danteand of streams, rivulets and wells that hold or reveal secrets. (See, for example, "The Stream's Secret.") The "Willowwood" sonnets from
The House of Life
typify his approach. In these sonnets of mourning for a lost love (and Christina Rossetti's sonnet of commentary on her brother's poems, "Echoes from Willowwood," suggests that the loss is not caused by death) the speaker stands beside a "woodside well" whose woods are haunted by past memories:
 
Page 486
Alas! the bitter banks in Willowwood,
    With tear-spurge wan, with blood-wort burning red:
Alas! if ever such a pillow could
    Steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead,
the poet laments, yearning for oblivion. In this world of dream, a drama of momentary contact and endless separation occurs. The bitter banks of the place of grief grow their own nightmare flowers, dismal pillows on which the soul is to repose; ordinary woodspurges metamorphose into mythic tear-spurges; the common weeds called "worts" both burn with frustrated passion and run with blood. The lover is trapped in a limbo or purgatory of hopeless love. The emphases in sonnets such as this and in such depictions of dream and nightmare worlds as "Love's Nocturne" and "The Orchard Pit'' are on inner truths, not those of nature.
The same generalization applies to Rossetti's endless portraits of women, for they, too, are fantasies or iconsimages of the women who are the speaker's soul. Recent critical commentary has centered upon his numerous images of Beatrice, Mary, Magdalen, Lilith, Helen, Proserpine, and of the many faces of Venus. Most are described in the language of religion, displaced to explore the varieties of erotic love; many are painted enclosed or "embowered," staring out of their frames at the world, the viewer, or nothing in particular. All are marked by their enthralling hair (usually golden), their prominent lips, and by their eyes. Long before Jacques Lacan, Rossetti is aware of the power of the eye; one of his most frequently used words is "gaze." Interestingly, these iconic female figures, fraught with both desire and anxiety, appear in Rossetti's poetry even before they come to dominate his visual art.
In describing Da Vinci's Madonna in "Our Lady of the Rocks," one of the "Sonnets on Pictures" of 1847, Rossetti depicts an enclosed, inaccessible, female cult figure and describes her gazeon the Child she holds. In the "Card Dealer" of 1849, another variety of gaze, that of the femme fatale, is fully delineated. "Could you not drink her gaze like wine?" inquires the male narrative voice. But although the awestruck speaker attempts to "search" the dealer's "secret brow," it is her eyes, not his, that "unravel the coiled night / And know the stars at noon," her eyes that control and mesmerize him, threatening to drain his soul.
 
Page 487
This potent fatal woman, reminiscent of the Life-in-Death in Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," is the progenitrix of a number of others. Lilith of "Eden Bower," the Siren of ''The Orchard Pit," "Venus Verti-cordia" feed upon the faces of their male victims, just as masculine gazers, in other Rossetti poems, feed upon those of more passive, conventionally feminine subjects. More threatening to Rossetti than the overt stare of the female who does not perceive herself as object is the icon who refuses to look at the male subject at all, instead commanding him to look at her. In the sonnet "Body's Beauty' from
The House of Life
, for example, Lilith does not look out; she contemplates herself in a mirror, and, in making men stare at her, Medusa-like, she destroys them. The voice of the enigmatic sonnet "A Superscription," also from
The House of Life
, has the same potency and destructive force. Whispering like a deadly femme fatale, the voice orders the poet to "look in my Face," provoking his guilt and remorse. Yet most of Rossetti's female icons are not either the simple, potent nightmare images of anxiety discussed above or the mere objects of the male poet-painter's penetrating, dominating phallic gaze. There are, indeed, many of the latter, especially in
The House of Life
, but this might be expected. For the sonnet sequence is itself grounded in the Dantesque conventions of the power of the eye in engendering love and of the solitary, enclosed, unattainable womanidealized and worshipped by a lover who dares not approach her.
Thus, the lady of "Her Gifts" and of "Genius in Beauty' is both created and contemplated by her poet-lover; she becomes an object of veneration. In the latter sonnet, the lady's beauty may be a form of genius, but it is the product of the lover who has painted it. The lady of "The Portrait," whose "face is made her shrine," is the most extreme case. She is the landscape the poet-painter is limning, as he depicts "the very sky and sea-line of her soul" and describes the expressive eyes he has createdthat "remember and foresee." In an orgy of possession he reveals his sense of power: "They that would look on her must come to me."
The sexual politics of the gaze is shot through Rossetti's poetry (and painting), but it does not always function in binary oppositions; his male personae are not always active in contradistinction to passive females; or male voyeurs to female exhibitionists; or masculine subjects to feminine objects. And Rossetti's female icons are not always passive or masochistic. In "Bridal Birth" from the
House of Life
the Lady stands "at gaze" and smiles, becoming both the mother and creator of Love. In

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