The Columbia History of British Poetry (120 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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"Soul's Beauty" the enthroned Lady's gaze strikes awe into her subordinated male viewer, while in "Mid-Rapture" it is the Lady's "summoning eyes" that both ''shed dawn" and rule her worshipper's life: "What word can answer to thy word?" he asks,
                                                     what gaze
    To thine, which now absorbs within its sphere
    My worshipping face, till I am mirrored there
Light-circled in a heaven of deep-drawn rays?
The Lady is empowered by her gaze, if only momentarily, for while her look absorbs her lover, he sees himself mirrored in her eyes. For Rossetti, the perfect moment of love is the moment of reciprocal gaze, and it occurs only rarely. The moment of passion may be commemoratedeven monumentalizedin the sonnet, but it cannot be held.
Outside
The House of Life
the gaze of a woman can be even more potent, transcending the role of returning and confirming the glance of a male spectator. The "Blessed Damozel" has such a powerful look that her lover on earthwhose projection it may becan feel her eye on him. Confined by the golden bar and barrier of heaven, she attempts to pierce the path of time and space visually. She succeeds, for, after having "gazed and listened," her "eyes prayed, and she smil'd." The power of her look is diminished only when, covering her face, she weeps. The power of "Astarte Syriaca"the larger-than-life Syrian Venus in the sonnet that bears her namenever wanes. Endowed with "absolute eyes," she remains an "amulet, talisman, and oracle." A phallic figure before whom male worshippers can be subjected but content, she is seen, like the Virgin Mary in one of Rossetti's earliest sonnets, as a life force and a "mystery."
Significantly, Christina Rossetti is one of the best analysts of her brother's obsession with these female icons. "One face looks out from all his canvases," she reports in her posthumously published sonnet, "In an Artist's Studio." The one face is really no one's. What the male Rossetti writes about is not, in truth, a woman's face or gaze at allit is an image of a symbol, "not as she is, but as she fills his dreams."
Yet Christina Rossetti, piercingly perceptive about others, is extraordinarily reticent about herself. Never "Queen of the Pre-Raphaelites," she nonetheless contributed richly to the
Germ
and published the first widely known and well-received Pre-Raphaelite volume,
Goblin Market
, in 1862. In several senses, however, she was a sister among the
 
Page 489
brothers, although she remained somewhat aloof from them. Framed by her own siblings (one of whom, William Michael, wrote and revised her life, the other of whom, Dante Gabriel, criticized and edited her poems), she still managed to maintain her own independence. Yet her first public appearances were mediated through Gabriel; she appeared not as a poet but as a subject, as the solemn girl Mary in Rossetti's
Girlhood of Mary Virgin
(1848) and, one year later, as the reluctant Virgin of
Ecce Ancilla Domini
, shrinking from rather than welcoming her Annunciation. These two paintings suggest something of her paradoxical nature; in the first she is the artist, embroidering a lily from life, and keeping her eye firmly on its "truth to nature"; in the second she is the unwilling "chosen one," preferring quiet and obscurity to fame.
Christina Rossetti's own era considered her a Pre-Raphaelite. Swinburne, somewhat hyperbolically, called her the "Jael who led our hosts to victory"; other contemporaries saw her typological imagination, specificity, pictorialism, medievalizing, and intensity, as well as her truth to inner vision, as the essence of Pre-Raphaelitism. Even her religious or "devotional" poetry could be connected to the fervor and sacramental vision of Holman Hunt's paintings or John Ruskin's early prose. Like other Pre-Raphaelites, she is concerned with the religious, the erotic, and the poetic. The themes and subjects that engross herfrustrated love and the desire for death, the pain of loss and mutability, the fallen woman, the dead beloved, the structure of dream, the nature of artwere those shared by others in the movement.
Like her brother, she can create sharply outlined visual images or vivid pictorial effects when she so chooses. The dais of "A Birthday," hung "with vair and purple dyes" and carved in "doves and pomegranates, / And peacocks with a hundred eyes" is as opulent as any throne depicted in Gabriel Rossetti's "women and flower'' paintings. Her pictorialism is full-blown and perfectly controlled in such images as the room in "After Death":
The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
    And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
    Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay.
Her skill in decoratively rendering medieval settings is clearly visible in such poems as "A Royal Princess," with its pictures of an ivory throne and an enclosed and "waiting" highborn maiden. The three women who sing of love together in "A Triad" are female icons perfect for a
 
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frieze or tapestry. Rossetti's observations of nature, especially of its small things and creatures, like "Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike, / Encrusted live things argus-eyed" in "By the Sea," are frequent and accurate. Yet, her primary interests do not lie in this area; her fascination is with worlds within and beyond the realm of nature. Confined, restrained, and private as her life may have been, reticent and passive as she may initially appear, Christina Rossetti has the wildest imagination among the Pre-Raphaelites.
The power and authority of that imagination is revealed in her many poems dealing with preternatural and supernatural events. The best known of these is "Goblin Market," with its fantastic "goblin-men" and its fusion of the folklore motifs of the fairy fair and fairy food and the themes of temptation, sacrifice, and regeneration. Yet her particular fascination is not with goblins but with ghostsphenomena still within the realm of belief in her eraand is manifested in numerous ballads and narratives. These are of two varieties: ballads derived from Gothic and Romantic sources and those touched with religious or personal conviction. "The Hour and the Ghost,'' a demon-lover poem, "Moonshine," and "Lord Thomas and the fair Margaret," the ballad of a maiden whose pursuit of the ghost of her murdered lover leads to her own death, are of the first, more traditional order.
Other poems of the supernatural are more purposive, often showing revenants as visitors bringing messages fraught with meaning from the world of death. "The Poor Ghost," for example, rejected in death by the man who ostensibly loved her in life, recognizes the falseness of his mourning and departs content to sleep peacefully until the Second Coming. "The Ghost's Petition," a dialogue between a grieving widow and her newly departed husband, both explores the nature and realm of the dead and teaches the widow to let sleeping ghosts lie. "A Chilly Night" derives its impact not from the fact that ghosts appear to the lonely speaker, but from her failure to communicate with them. Alienated and despairing, she must sorrowfully conclude that "living had failed and dead had failed." Loss and death darken Rossetti's supernatural poems, yet the guise of the supernatural liberates her emotions and empowers her imagination.
Rossetti is not greatly concerned with external events or politics, although she writes a few political poems on events such as the Indian Mutiny and the Franco-Prussian War. Yet she is socially conscious, deeply involved with the condition of fallen women; in various guises,
 
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they populate her ballads and monologues. In "The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children," a dramatic monologue Gabriel did not wish her to publish, the lament of the illegitimate girl constitutes a challenge to social hypocrisy and Victorian convention. The cast-off women of the ballads "Cousin Kate" and ''Maude Clare," the female persona of "An Apple-Gathering," and the stained maiden who seeks "The Convent Threshold" are poignant and memorable figures. Many of them, like Jeanie in "Goblin Market," who ate the fruits of carnaland otherknowledge, and "who for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died" and the unwed mother of "Light Love," are ostensibly "sinners," but they are not morally judged. Rossetti blames "light" or fickle lovers of either sex, not those they seduce and abandon.
More sophisticated than many critics suggest, Christina Rossetti is acutely aware of the power of the gaze and of its relation to desire. Hence, in sonnet VIII of
Monna Innominata
, a sonnet sequence ostensibly composed by one of the unknown beloveds of a
stil nuovisti
male sonneteer, she informs readers that Queen Esther used her beauty to "snare" her royal husband's gaze, and thus to save her threatened people. In "Babylon the Great" she repeatedly cautions the faithful against looking upon the Whore of Babylon. "Gaze not upon her till thou dream her fair," she warns; "Gaze not upon her, lest thou be as she." In Rossetti's poetry it is primarily the evil or the flawed who stare. Even in the playful "Queen of Hearts" the female speaker who has "scanned" Flora with "a scrutinizing gaze" and kept a "lynx-eyed watch" on her rival is revealed as a jealous cheat. Yet, in "Goblin Market," Lizzie must learn to "listen and look," renouncing her blank and cloistered virtue, while Laura's gaze at goblin men is the beginning of her woe.
Moreover, Christina Rossetti dislikes being the object of the gaze and much prefers to see, herself invisible. Nonetheless, although she may wish to be like the woman in "A Portrait," who has "covered up her eyes / Lest they should gaze / On vanity," she is seriously addicted to peeping. In such poems as "At Home" and "After Death" she casts herself in the role of the revenant so that she may return unseen to view the earthly world she has left behind. Only the soul may gaze unblamed, and part of the appeal of death is that beyond its sleep, Rossetti believes, she will finally see "face to face."
With her own gaze turned heavenwardor her eyes avertedChristina Rossetti produces powerful poetry filled with visionary places and imaginary landscapes. Her religious convictions not only lead her

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