[In the following essay, Markley investigates the function of the monologue in “The Portrait.”]

In the first line of “The Portrait” the artist/speaker remarks, “This is her picture as she was,” alluding to Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess” (1842), in which Browning's Duke of Ferrara opens with, “That's my last duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.” This relationship between viewer, auditor, and art object also immediately brings to mind Tennyson's “The Gardener's Daughter,” which Tennyson also published in 1842. In Tennyson's poem the speaker describes his first meeting with the woman who was to become his wife while unveiling a portrait of her: “Behold her there, / As I beheld her ere she knew my heart” (lines 269-70). Rather than directly addressing an auditor as Browning's and Tennyson's speakers do, Rossetti's speaker speaks to himself. By conflating the typically distinct roles of auditor and speaker in the Victorian dramatic monologue, Rossetti succeeds in accentuating the poem's exploration of self.

The egocentric nature of the speaker's monologue is greatly strengthened by his comparison of this painting of his lover to his own image reflected in a mirror, or perhaps in the glass over the portrait: “It seems a thing to wonder on / As though mine image in the glass / Should tarry when myself am gone” (2-4). Here Rossetti makes a visual allusion to the story of Narcissus, the youth who falls in love with his own image which he sees reflected in a clear, still pool. Ovid narrates this tale in his Metamorphoses, and his speaker mocks poor Narcissus, pointing out that when he turns away from his reflection, the object of his love is lost. Narcissus continually stares at his image, frustrated by the fact that although it mimics his own movements, it consistently eludes his grasp. Rossetti's speaker, on the other hand, stares beyond his own reflection at the image in the painting until the image of his beloved itself seems to stir, and until its lips seem to whisper sweet words to him. Admiring the life-like image, he marvels that its subject lies buried beneath the earth. Clearly he has transferred his attachment and devotion to his dead lover to the only surviving vestige of her—her portrait, and his own artwork.

Rossetti's speaker moves on to describe the background of his painting, the image of the woman depicted “'Mid mystic trees, where light falls in / Hardly at all; a covert place” (20-21). The description of this “deep dim wood” (28) again recalls Ovid's story, in which Narcissus's grass-encircled pool is located in a dense wood which allows in none of the sun's warm rays. Furthermore, Rossetti's details of “a live flame / Wandering” and of “many a shape whose name / Not itself knoweth” (23-25) contribute to the poem's mythological overtones by evoking the forgetful wandering shades of the Underworld and even Narcissus himself, who cannot identify his own image. The final lines in stanza 3 extend this idea of identity confusion to the artist's own situation as the speaker describes “your own footsteps meeting you, / And all things going as they came” (26-27), suggesting his meeting of a twin self in the woods. This interesting image of the doppelgänger also extends the poem's running imagery of mirrored reflection. Like meeting a twin self, or finding his own reflection in the glass over his painting, the artist's act of gazing on his own work clearly is not separable from the act of gazing at himself.

Rossetti's artist laments that his lover is now “Less than her shadow on the grass / Or than her image in the stream” (35-36), an image that extends the poem's allusion to the myth of Narcissus. The speaker describes stooping with her to drink from a stream, and says that “where the echo is, she sang,— / My soul another echo there” (44-45). In the Greek story, Echo had wasted away for love of Narcissus and was only able to repeat the words that Narcissus spoke aloud. By calling his own soul an echo of his beloved, the speaker thus makes full symbolic use of the Narcissus story's theme of aural as well as visual reflection. Rossetti continues to develop the subtle aural references to echo in describing the whispers that come back to him at night in lines 75-76.

In the conclusion to “The Portrait,” Rossetti's speaker describes a mournful occasion on which he inadvertently stumbled on the glades where he depicted his lover's image. From this return to the place where he experienced his artistic inspiration, he then looks forward to a future union with his love, when he will enter “in her soul at once” (98). Until then, “Here with her face doth memory sit / Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, / Till other eyes shall look from it / Eyes of the spirit's Palestine” (100-103). The speaker envisions a time when his lover's face will look on him with different, immortal eyes—when he is able to join her and to become “two in one” with his beloved.

In “The Portrait,” Rossetti's allusions to contemporary Victorian monologues that dramatize the relationship between viewer and objet d'art add a profound resonance to this poem in which the poet explores the relationship between love, identity, and the act of creation in the figure of the artist. Moreover, Rossetti's subtle and extended use of the myth of Narcissus and Echo provides a brilliant allusive pattern that allows him to explore the idea that the speaker's attachment to his painting represents far more than merely his attachment to his former lover. The artist's attachment to his painting, and his idealization of the moment it captures, is a self-reflexive attachment. Moreover, his attachment to the image mirrors his expectations for the afterlife. As he gazes on the portrait and observes his own reflection blended with the image of his lover, he imagines a future union with his beloved when his soul will “enter in her soul at once.” The artist's conflation of his lover, his art, and his own identity is merely a way to imitate that kind of ultimate union of souls here on earth. For Rossetti, the power of art lies in its ability to simulate the eternal.

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. “My Last Duchess.” The Oxford Authors: Robert Browning. Ed. Adam Roberts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 101-102.

Lang, Cecil Y. ed. The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle. 2nd ed. Chicago: U Of Chicago P, 1975. 20-23. All quotations from the poem are from this edition.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “The Gardener's Daughter.” The Poems of Tennyson. Vol 1. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Essex: Longman, 1987. 552-69.