The Columbia History of British Poetry (121 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
10.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 492
to offer readers glimpses of paradise but of the earth below and sod above the grave. Her faith in what Jerome McGann calls "Soul Sleep" and others describe as a belief in an "intermediate abode,"a mediating state between death and the Last Judgment in which the soul waits, often dreaming, until the final Adventleads to reiterated descriptions of what the soul perceives in this condition. What the dead are doing underground, what they glimpse in the perpetual twilight of their intermediate abode, is one of her major concerns.
Rossetti typically employs dream visions, derived from medieval traditions, as well as the strategies of actual dreams. While in "Repining" and "A Ballad of Boding" the dream-vision form is used for overtly allegorical purposes, other dream poems are subtler. The dreamscapes of "The Dead City,'' the wasteland in "The Prince's Progress," the ghostly realm of "A Coast-Nightmare," derive their impact from the displacement, condensation, and symbolism of nightmare. Even Rossetti's ostensibly "natural" landscapes bear the heightened aura of dream; in "An Old-World Thicket," her version of Dante's
selva oscura
, intense visualization guides the poem's narrator to a new resolution and independence. The garden of earthly delights in the great dream poem "From House to Home" is like a Bosch painting in its detail; the dreamlike transformations of time, space, and image the garden undergoes are analogies to the mutability that mars the things of this world, the "house" of the poem.
But Rossetti's unique poetic traits are best revealed in poems such as "Cobwebs" (1855). This posthumously published sonnet about the terrain of an alternative world depicts "a land with neither night nor day, / Nor heat nor cold, nor any wind nor rain / Nor hills nor valleys." In a poem that uses "no," "nor," or "neither" twenty-one times in fourteen lines, readers are given a vivid description of a place by being told what it is
not
. We do not even know who proffers this riddle, for the poem is without an identifiable narrative voice. Yet a powerful nightmare image of a wasteland without life or change, without past or future, hope or fear emergesas parallel structure, alliteration, and assonance fuse with monosyllabic words and subtle rhythmic variation to create a tour de force of negative description.
Many of Christina Rossetti's famous poems are shaped by negative description. "Life and Death" centers on what the female narrator will
not
feel, hear, or see when she is dead; what she will not experience or share forms the content of "Dream Land" and "Song" ("When I am
 
Page 493
dead, my dearest"). Part of Rossetti's essential reticence, these negative descriptions are one major element in the impenetrability or silence at the core of her poetry. Her repeated use of grammatically indefinite references is another. The word "it," in the poem "May,'' for example ("I cannot tell you how it was . . . I cannot tell you what it was") remains undefined; the same is true of the "it" of "Memory," and of several other lyrics. The density, mystery, and deliberate difficulty that her brother achieves through Latinate or polysyllabic language, personified abstracts, elaborate and ambiguous syntax, she achieves by seemingly transparent surfaces that mask a refusal to tell all.
Ultimately, silence joins the veiled look and the postponed desire as a hallmark of Christina Rossetti's poetry. A place marked by the "irresponsive silence of the land," in the first brilliant sonnet of "The Thread of Life," speaks softly but distinctly of the speaker's loneliness. In "Goblin Market" Lizzie triumphs by keeping her mouth shut. The silence of death is a happy "Golden Silence," and the silence of the grave in "Rest" is "more musical than any song." Remarkably, in pared-down sonnets and terse, stripped lyrics Christina Rossetti, eyes averted and lips sealed, creates memorable poetic effects.
To move from Christina Rossetti's poetry to that of William Morris seems, at first, to enter an entirely different world and to test the limits of literary Pre-Raphaelitism. However, closer examination reveals the poets' underlying similarities. Both dwell on frustrated love, on death, on loss and confinement. The blunt utterance and tough, vigorous, often irregular metrics of Morris's early poems veil his detachment and essential reticence; like Christina Rossetti, Morris does not tell his audience all.
Morris's first volume of poems,
The Defence of Guenevere
(1858)the earliest Pre-Raphaelite volume in printcreates literally a Pre-Raphaelite world by taking its readers back to eras long before Raphael. Initially ignored or dismissed by critics who found it obscure and difficultespecially for those not immersed in Sir Thomas Malory's
Morte D'Arthur
or Jean Froissart's
Chronicle of the Hundred Years War
it was later admired by a generation of "aesthetic" undergraduates. Significantly, it was dedicated to "Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter."
If one volume can be called the quintessence of Pre-Raphaelitism, it is the
Defence
. Filled with details rendered surreally clear, crowded with specific details that serve symbolic functions but often appear irrelevant or peculiarly foregrounded, it creates alternative worlds: those of the
 
Page 494
Middle Ages, those of folklore and the supernatural, those of dream. What Dante is to Gabriel Rossetti, Malory and Froissart are to William Morris. Three of the first four and most famous poems in the volume"The Defence of Guenevere," "King Arthur's Tomb," and "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery''are attempts at interpreting the texture and spirit of the
Morte D'Arthur
. Poems derived from the
Chronicle
, including "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," "Concerning Geffray Teste Noire," and "The Haystack in the Floods" depict Froissart's Middle Ages, a fifteenth-century epoch of blood, violence, and brutality. A third group of poems, including several that comment on Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors, create medievalized fantasy worlds, grounded in folklore or dream.
Yet the poems, despite their medievalized worlds, are Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite in their concerns: the plight of fallen women, the tensions between romantic passion and the marriage of convenience, political and social injustice, and the attempt to define both heroism and failure. Even the volume's interest in history, its appropriation of the past, is essentially typical of its era. The dramatic monologues and lyrics of Robert Browning, whom Morris then idolized, influence its forms, meters, and moral attitudes.
Honoring both Browning and Gabriel Rossetti, Morris creates painterly details and memorable images. These are often almost metaphysical in their combinations of unexpected elements. Rapunzel, in the poem that bears her name, sees from her tower a knight slain in battle; the blood from his wounds seems "like a line of poppies red / In the golden twilight. . . ." Alice de la Barde, in "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," dreams of sleeping amid the flowers of Avalon: "soft mice and small / Eating and creeping all about my feet." In "Golden Wings" an idyllic castle is so fully described that readers know that green moss grows only on the scarlet brick of its walls, while "yellow lichen [grows] on the stone." Although we are given the precise appearance of the swan-house in the castle moat, we never learn the cause of the castle's destruction or the nature of its destroyers.
Morris's elaborate detail is often symbolic; the mad Norse protagonist of "The Wind" finds, in an orange "with a deep gash cut in the rind," an analogy to the mutilated body of his beloved. Yet often particularity functions as it does in dream or paintingas rich, decorative, evocative, yet essentially untranslatable imagery. The
Defence
is replete with brightly colored pictures, like the rich watercolors Gabriel Rosset-
 
Page 495
ti was producing in the 1850s. La belle Marguerite, golden from tip to toe in "The Eve of Crecy," could be a figure in a Rossetti picture, as could the three ladies characterized by the colors they wear and the objects they holdand posed like modelsin "The Sailing of the Sword." "Near Avalon'' might be an illumination in a medieval manuscript, a vignette of two small ships, one filled with gold-crowned fair ladies, the second with their sorrowing, lovesick knights. Like the good knight in prison in the poem of the same name, Morris
                              paints with knitted brow,
The flowers and all things one by one,
From the snail on the wall to the setting sun.
The
Defence
volume is dominated by fallen women, on whom Morris reports without moralizing. If they have fallen because of love, if they are prepared to act and choose, Morris tends to see them as heroic. Fair Ellayne of the ballad "Welland River" is pregnant and careworn, but she wins readers' sympathies and her lover's by her honesty and wit. Guenevere, in "The Defence," repudiates all Victorian values; she considers chastity, responsibility, religious faith, and duty to marriage, country, and social station inferior to the commands of romantic love. Bought "by Arthur's great name and his little love," she will not permit herself to be "stone-cold for ever," because of "a little word [her marriage vow] / Scarce ever meant at all." Morris does not undercut Guenevere's attack on the marriage of convenience and defense of romantic passion; the only direct authorial comment in this long dramatic monologue stresses that the queen "spoke on bravely, glorious lady fair!" Jehane, the tragic protagonist of "The Haystack in the Floods," is clearly Robert's mistress; her moral act is refusing to be Godmar's. Even the whore who spits in Sir Lambert's face, in "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," is proved right; she has simply recognized him as a turncoat and collaborator with the French. Morris's later poems continue the nonjudgmental treatment of fallen women; Helen, in the unfinished "Scenes from the Fall of Troy" is as much victim as victimizer, and the adulterous wife of "The Pilgrims of Hope" (1881) is both sympathetic and heroic.
Blessed damozels, derived from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's, march close behind their fallen sisters. Sir Galahad, a much less mild youth than Tennyson's, is granted a vision of one of them in "The Chapel in Lyonesse." It is he, champion of heavenly love, who sees the reunion of Ozana le cure Hardy, Morris's "Fisher King," and his beloved in an
 
Page 496
erotic lovers' heaven. Galahad alone witnesses the blissful reunion as Ozana's wasted fingers twine
Within the tresses of her hair
    That shineth gloriously
Thinly outspread in the clear air
    Against the jasper sea
The lady of "Summer Dawn" is also heavenly; in this sonnetlike poem praised by Walter Pater in "Aesthetic Poetry," the lady is implored to look
down
at her lover from the sky in which she appears to dwell.
The female figures in this volume are surprisingly assertive. Although there are conventional, beautiful, passive, iconic figures, imprisoned and awaiting rescue as in "Rapunzel" and "The Blue Closet," there are also portraits of active women. Female narrative voices utter a number of poems including "The Defence," ''King Arthur's Tomb," and "The Sailing of the Sword." Women are depicted as questers; Jehane du Castel beau of "Golden Wings" dies in her search for her lover, but the lady of the imprisoned knight in "Spell-Bound" may, at least in his fantasy, rescue him. Female figures command the center of Morris's stage. Guenevere, actress and enchantress, uses her "great eyes" (often filled with tears in the course of her "Defence") as a lethal weapon. Utilizing sex, charm, charisma, and threats ("my eyes, / Wept all away to grey, may bring some sword / To drown you in your blood"), she forces her judges to gaze upon her and persuades her readers, if not King Arthur's knights, that her love is more important than her adultery.
In "King Arthur's Tomb," a dramatic dialogue of the last meeting between Lancelot and the queen, Guenevere's loss of power and vitality is signified by the fact that "her eyes did lack / Half her old glory. . . ." The torture of Jehane in "The Haystack in the Floods" is not only her choice between two horrors (becoming the mistress of a man she loathes or sacrificing her own and her lover's life), but in being forced to see the results of her refusal to capitulate. Watching her lover slaughtered before her eyes drives her, at least temporarily, insane. We are left with the powerful image of her stunned gaze.
Gabriel Rossetti's sexual politics of gaze is evident in poems by Morris like "Praise of My Lady" (also clearly influenced by Woolner's "My Beautiful Lady" in the
Germ
) in which a worshipping lover kneels before a medievalized cult image of his beloved. As he verbally and

Other books

L.A. Cinderella by Amanda Berry
Reed: Bowen Boys by Kathi S. Barton
One to Hold by Tia Louise
Los cañones de Navarone by Alistair MacLean
Frozen Vengeance by Evi Asher
Hate Me by Jillian Dodd
Alpha Alien: Mated by Flora Dare
Captives by Shaun Hutson