SOURCE: Bristow, Joseph. “He and I’: Dante Rossetti's Other Man.” Victorian Poetry 39, no. 2 (fall 2001): 365-88.

Toward the largely despondent close of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “The House of Life” stands “He and I”: a “representation,” as David G. Riede observes, “of some sort of self-division and self-alienation” that appears rather “enigmatic.”¹ Composed in 1870, this intriguing sonnet—which results in a distressing physical encounter between the male poetic voice and his masculine other—may well look puzzling in a long two-part series whose reflections on heterosexual manhood have in any case seemed obscure to many scholars. “Biographers and critics alike,” writes William E. Fredeman, “have been tantalized by Rossetti's poem; it challenges their imaginations and taxes their ingenuities.”² Try as they might, most readers cannot make these one hundred and one sonnets—several of which express feverish eroticism—fit neatly within a framework that either allegorizes Rossetti's turbulent love affairs with Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal or expounds a systematic philosophy of love.³ Even the subtitle, “A Sonnet-Sequence,” sits oddly in a work that offers comparatively little narrative cohesion. Instead, Algernon Charles Swinburne's comment that “The House of Life” aims to “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”⁴ remains one of the most accurate—because open-ended—descriptions of the work. The only (seemingly obvious) qualification to be made to Swinburne's statement is that the expression of such joy and sorrow belongs to a man who remains, according to C. M. Bowra, “a ready victim to the beauty of women.”⁵ Here femininity allures the frequently tormented poetic voice in a variety of ethereal and fiendish guises. On the one hand, the poet-speaker remains in awe of female “Beauty enthroned.”⁶ On the other hand, he bears terrified witness to how a figure such as Lilith (with her “enchanted hair”) “left … / One strangling golden hair” around the “heart” of a young man exhausted with passion (“Body's Beauty,” p. 314). What, then, might “He and I”—where “some sort of self-division” involves one man's body momentarily touching that of another male figure—disclose about the enduring struggle of this sequence, in its desperate closing moments, to celebrate how “Life” is truly “the lady of all bliss” (“Newborn Death,” p. 325)? Might this haunting sonnet elucidate why the insistent heteroeroticism of “The House of Life” grows more and more bleak in “Change and Fate”: the apt subtitle for the sequence's disconsolate second part?

These inquiries arise because Rossetti's writings, whose adoration of femininity makes passion burn almost to the point of fatigue, often concentrate on masculine apparitions—an assemblage of elusive phantasms, together with figures that adopt more palpable human forms—whose disturbing immediacy besieges the poetic voice. Despite the fact that these manly types recur with striking regularity in Rossetti's oeuvre, they have remained largely ignored whenever critics have sought to understand his ardent—though frequently impeded—other-sex desires. The present discussion attempts to adjust current critical perspectives on Rossetti's avowedly heteroerotic wish-fulfillments by examining first how his poet-speaker scrutinizes both himself and other male figures—rather than female objects—in selected sonnets from “The House of Life.” Thereafter, I show how Rossetti's scrupulous use of the sonnet form throws into sharp relief a structure of thwarted yearning that becomes even more agonized in longer poems that follow an explicit narrative pattern. In these longer writings, Rossetti's passionate “I”—notorious for fetishizing femininity⁷—finds itself among initially seductive kinds of masculinity that tend to solicit, only to betray, the poet-speaker's trust. The poetic “I”'s discovery of eerie icons of maleness in dreams, mirrors, myths, and even mid-Victorian London indicates not only patterns of profound self-alienation but also confusions about the reasons why his beleaguered longings often depend on intimate encounters with the same sex.

This pattern of male-male desire—a pattern that resonates with incredible emotional depth throughout Rossetti's canon—questions the adequacy of the much-used term homosocial to characterize one man's intense involvement with another man in scenarios where other-sex intimacy remains paramount. The powerful concept of male homosocial desire originates in the influential work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who ingeniously rethinks René Girard's account of the intricate ways in which western narratives often feature modes of bonding that consolidate patriarchal authority when males engage in sexual rivalry over a female object. Sedgwick maintains that the “male homosocial continuum” that sustains a man's heterosexual privilege nonetheless has the capacity to generate closeness between men that may become eroticized in a manner that threatens the seeming primacy of other-sex desire within a male-dominated cultural system. In other words, male homosociality is always already in danger of becoming the very form of homoeroticism that must be banished in the name of the subordination of women. She pays particular attention to the cultural processes through which homophobia regulates the disruptive nature of homoeroticism within male homosocial ties. (Sedgwick carefully observes that “genital male homosexual desire” does not stand “‘at the root of’ other forms of male homosociality.” The homosocial instead articulates “a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men's relations with other men.”⁸)

There is no doubt that Rossetti's poetry seeks to position his speakers' heterosexual masculinity within a framework where the poetic “I” must engage with the considerable force of another male presence. His poetry, however, seldom suggests that the two male figures assume the equality—or at least the common ground—upon which homosocial competition implicitly relies. Nor do his writings manifest the homophobic anxiety that one man might come within familiar reach of another male body. By contrast, Rossetti's “I” explores situations in which its voice can express a frequently elegiac dependency upon other male figures. “He,” as far as the “I” can tell, often has the disturbing prerogative to make or break the “I”'s urgent wish for sexual intercourse with “she.” In fact, many of Rossetti's poems suggest that the close involvement of “he” and “I” maintains a constitutive—but none the less thwarting—role in the yearned-for union with “she.” By focusing on the fraught but never tabooed intimacy between Rossetti's male speaker and his masculine other, “He and I” provides an appropriate starting-point for exploring why his poetry keeps turning to shadowy male emanations whose familiarities continue to distract—even to the extent of maddening—his poetic “I.”

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“Whence came his feet into my field, and why?” says “I.” “How is it that he sees it all so drear?” he asks (p. 324). Contemplating this male intruder, the poet-speaker declares that he wants to know “How” he “see[s]” the other man's “seeing” (p. 324). Throughout the octave, his persistent questions speculate on what exactly informs his deep absorption in the bodily movements and contemplative gaze of someone named as “he.” How or why should “I,” at this noticeably late stage in a sequence that longs for heterosexual “bliss,” be left interrogating another man's vision that proves unalterably “drear”?

My questioning of the poetic voice's insistent inquiries may at first seem unnecessary because the sestet supplies at least one lucid answer. “He,” the “I” reveals, embodies a “new Self” who becomes the “sighing wind's auxiliary” as he makes his dispiriting way through the speaker's “field,” moaning dirge-like “plaints for every flower” (p. 324). Yet it is not the case that “he” destroys the poetic “I”'s pastoral. The poet-speaker, after all, reveals that in his domain there was only “a little fold of sky” amid the “pasturing clouds” that admitted “living light” into the “soul's atmosphere” (p. 324). Instead, “he”—“this new Self” that renders this once barely “living” world “lifeless”—exerts a negative force that drains what little energy already existed in these pastures. “He” gradually exhausts the speaking “I” by occupying the poet-speaker's place in this already dimly lighted “field.” Where the octave closes with the “I” wondering if both “he” and his own self might be doubles of each other, the sestet ends on a more decisive, if startled, note: “Even in my place he weeps. Even I, not he” (p. 324). “He” has become suggestively “even” with “I,” at once leveling, superseding, and yet joining with a poetic voice abandoned in a bewildered state.

This final line shows how the “new Self” inhabits—to the point of usurping—the implicitly old one that articulates what amounts to an invasion of identity. Jerome J. McGann remarks that “He and I” serves as “the definitive representation of identity-loss in the sequence”; the poem, he contends, results in a “schizoid form of a disintegrated identity which has lost itself in a house of mirrors.”⁹ But the disintegration of each pronominal position into its other is not only the structural “obverse and reverse of a single self-conflicted figure,” as McGann suggests (Towards a Literature of Knowledge, p. 88). The decomposition of the “I” also involves, perhaps surprisingly, a less readily explainable—because physical—contact. For the “I” discloses that in the here and now—a time when both selves continue to “weep”—“the sweet waters” of his “life … yield / Unto his [i.e. the new Self's] lips no draught but tears unseal'd” (p. 324). “He,” therefore, draws intimately on the weeping “I,” an act that enables them to exchange “place[s],” as one man's lips touch another man's teardrops. To be sure, this intimate moment marks the terrible undoing of the poet-speaker's fragile ego. Yet the undermining of the “I” nonetheless rests on an intimate conjunction with another male entity. “He and I” may record the painful splitting of the self but the sonnet does so by accomplishing—both in its title and its conclusion—what the poem implies is an inevitable connection through a “draught” of “tears” between the “old” and “new” male subjectivities.

“He and I” deepens the troubling internal rift that has already confounded the poet-speaker's sense of self in “A Superscription,” the disturbing sonnet composed in 1868 that Rossetti—in a telltale moment of self-appreciation—called “a favourite of my own.”¹⁰ “A Superscription” discloses that a certain pleasure exists in the “I”'s inconsolable reflection. Here the poetic “I” takes special pains to dissect his image in a “glass”—an arduous process that results in despair. As he ponders his features any hope that he may have of projecting an ideal individuality undergoes immediate dissolution. “Look in my face,” he says, “my name is Might-have-been; / I am also called No-more, Too-Late, Farewell” (p. 323). Belated, untimely, and ready to depart to another world, this “shaken shadow” soon proves “intolerable” (p. 323). By the end of the rueful octave, he asserts that the “frail screen” that captures his withering reflection remains insufferable because it represents “ultimate things unuttered” (p. 323). While gloomily inspecting his likeness, however, the poetic voice admits that the reflected “Might-have-been” is in fact of his own making. Under his “spell,” he proclaims, he has become the dismal specter confronted in the mirror: a face that once “had Life's form and Love's” (p. 323).

The poet-speaker's sorrow for the loss of both Life and Love remains significant because it evokes two of the three personifications that preoccupy many of the preceding sonnets belonging to an evolving sequence that in 1869 first appeared under the heading “Life, Love, and Death.” Life, “the lady of all bliss,” seems on occasion to “house” the poet's passions; in “Soul's Beauty,” for example, he stands beneath “the arch of Life” where “love and death, / Terror and mystery, guard her shrine” (p. 314). (Critics have traditionally used different frameworks to interpret the domestic metaphor that came to title the sequence from 1870 onward. The “House of Life” has often been interpreted in architectural terms that relate to Rossetti's engrossment with the sonnet as a “moment's monument,”¹¹ the memorable phrase that appears in the poem that introduces the 1881 published version of the sequence [p. 275]. As Jan Marsh observes, this poetic house comprises stanzas: the Italian word for rooms.¹²) Life's house—if one accepts that this is a female domain—remains haunted by Love, always presented as male. These personifications derive in part from the tradition of early Italian poets such as Dante, who comments on why he “speak[s] of Love as of a man” (Rossetti, Collected Writings, p. 109). In Rossetti's fine English translation of The New Life, Dante remarks that throughout Ovid's Remedies for Love “Love speaketh as a human creature” (p. 111). Here Dante reminds those among his skeptical contemporaries who might “be moved to jeering” at his vernacular poetry that this personification remains perfectly legitimate because it possesses noble classical origins (p. 111). In one sense at least, when the “I” of “A Superscription” stares at his likeness he imagines the loss of both female Life and male Love, which he believes were at one time united by his gaze. How, then, might we understand the “spell” that has destroyed the unity of these two figures? Does this “unuttered” thought perhaps disclose that his “spell” was a deluded form of narcissism?

On the basis of insights gathered from influential criticism of Rossetti's poetry, readers may be inclined to suggest that the “spell” displays a morbid type of self-absorption. Since it concentrates on the “I”'s reflection, “A Superscription” certainly solicits interpretations that correspond with the well-known view that Rossetti's poems and paintings depicting feminine forms remain the product of his enduring but far from consoling self-love. Martin A. Danahay, for example, sees “The Mirror” (a short poem dating from 1850) as the epitome of Rossetti's “narcissistic enterprise.”¹³ In this intriguing work, the poet-speaker declares that his female beloved could not comprehend the depths that he plumbed while witnessing “forms that crowd unknown / Within a distant mirror's shade” (p. 462). As he peers into the otherworldly glass, the poet-speaker “Deems” one of these forms to be “himself” (p. 462). Danahay, however, claims that “The Mirror”—if self-loving—fails to extend the myth of Echo and Narcissus. He contends that “The Mirror” participates instead in a century-long revision of the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, a rewriting evident in William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris: or, the New Pygmalion (1823) and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913). From this viewpoint, Rossetti's works reveal a man who creates the lavish female object of his desire only to learn that she fails to return his love. “The Mirror” opens by stating that “She knew it not:—Most perfect pain / To learn” (p. 462). The “it” is ultimately the lesson that the poet-speaker “must seek elsewhere for his own” (where the unqualified pronoun “own” suggests both self-image and self-possession). Such perspectives on “The Mirror” could well imply that in “A Superscription” the poet-speaker expresses an overdue recognition that his earlier desire to unite Life (her beauty) and Love (his desire) was in truth the “spell” of egotism.

Yet the problem with developing a reading of the apparent “narcissistic enterprise” in “A Superscription” lies in how the “I”'s moment of reflection involves a destructive element that emerges from a rather different kind of “spell.” Throughout the sestet the poetic voice certainly yearns for physical closeness between self and image in this mirror of masculine desire. But such proximity can only come about through a surprise attack. “Mark me, how still I am,” the poet-speaker initially demands of his reflection (p. 323). The sentence that follows ruffles his composure when he reproaches the face in the mirror, however. “[S]hould there dart,” he quickly adds, “One moment through thy soul the soft surprise / Of that winged Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,— / Then shalt thou see me smile” (pp. 323-324). The very idea that his reflection might maintain a calm and restful demeanor, one that stands truly “still,” humors him. Should the reflection, he says, ever feel the penetrating “dart” of “winged Peace,” then the mirror-image will “turn apart” its “visage” (p. 324). The unusual verb form “turn apart” suggests that either the poetic voice will not allow the “visage” to slumber or that the “visage” will disfigure itself. Either way such discomfiture will follow his “ambush” of the “shaken shadow”'s “heart.” He asserts, in the final line, that the disturbed “visage” will remain “Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes” (p. 324), ones that must stay forever open because they will memorialize his abiding disillusionment. Then again, the poet-speaker's hypothetical “ambush” of his “visage” implies more than his willingness to castigate himself eternally. This calculated assault expresses another aim: to preserve the reflection of a “cold” gaze that, even though it may lack erotic passion, sustains at least the permanence of an ineffaceable superscription. He should never, on this account, feel possessed by his “visage” because he can cast a “spell”—by way of an “ambush”—that guarantees, no matter how painfully, that those eyes will stare back at him.

The troubled intimacy that occurs between men in both “He and I” and “A Superscription” may at first appear understandable in “The House of Life,” given that its trajectory of desire would seem to gravitate toward the other sex. Yet it is worth remembering that these doubled male selves and returned male gazes accomplish physical closeness that sometimes proves impossible when the poet-speaker seeks his reflection in the feminine forms that arouse his passion. Rossetti's poetic voice often discovers that his hankering for the reciprocity of intimate looks, gestures, and caresses with his lady results in failure, even when the songs of male Love inspire him to kiss her passionate image. Somehow, Love tends to obstruct the desire that the poetic “I” believes must lie within Love's unassailable power. Sometimes Love's intermediary role between the “I” and “she” absorbs so much the poet-speaker's attention that we may well wonder whether the desire that supposedly stands at the heart of “The House of Life” remains exclusively heterosexual.

This quandary becomes perhaps most acute in the four sonnets comprising “Willowwood,” the mini-sequence that—as Douglas J. Robillard observes¹⁴—encapsulates the erotic pains and pleasures of “The House of Life” as a whole. First published in 1869, the opening sonnet locates the poet-speaker recalling how he once sat next to “Love upon a woodside well” (p. 300). But where in both “He and I” and “A Superscription” the two male figures “see” each other's “seeing,” here we discover that “I and he” (p. 300)—if seated side by side—cannot so easily stare into each other's eyes. The personified Love that inhabits these four sonnets appears far less benign than the male figure whose “overpowering sweetness” affirms Dante's passion for Beatrice throughout The New Life (Rossetti, Collected Writings, p. 87).¹⁵ “Nor ever did he speak nor looked at me” (p. 300), Rossetti's poetic voice declares, as if bemoaning Love's indifference. He recounts how the two male companions peered down instead upon a “low wave”: a shimmering surface where their “eyes met silently” (p. 300). As they stared below into the waters, Love touched the strings of his lute to play a song that revealed “a secret thing” (p. 300). The “secret,” however, is soon disclosed at the end of the octave where the “I” remembers that he recognized a “passionate voice” in the song (p. 300). He says that the voice—which of course belongs to the female beloved—moved him to tears. The sestet, we might imagine, will once and for all relieve his suffering by bringing him within reach of her body.

But the intricate ideation of Rossetti's sonnets refuses to supply such neat resolution. Here he exploits the suddenness of the volta in order to produce an unanticipated scene that confounds the speaker's wish to unite with his lady. Strikingly, the final six lines shift to a vision that appears even more mysterious in its sexual intimacy than the emotive male-male union depicted in “He and I.” At the moment when the poet-speaker's tears fell upon the reflecting waters both his and Love's “mirrored eyes” underwent an astonishing transformation: Love's “eyes beneath,” in an unexpected turn of phrase, “grew hers” (p. 300). In other words, the female object of the male lover's adoration emerged out of Love's watchful look. Soon “the dark ripples spread to waving hair” (p. 300). And then, as the poet-speaker stooped down toward this female emanation, “her own lips rising there / Bubbled with brimming kisses” on his “mouth” (p. 300). Why should such a powerful heteroerotic vision, enriched by its allusion to Keats's luxuriant “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), emanate where one man looks indirectly into another man's eyes? Is this transformation yet another aspect of Rossetti's much-criticized self-love in which the fetishized eyes, hair, and lips of his adored femininity reflect his own male-centered projections? Once again, the charge of self-absorption—whether viewed in terms of either the Narcissus or Pygmalion myths—fails to account for the intricate manner in which “Willowwood” represents Love as a figure who transforms into the object of the poet-speaker's desires. Love, it might be said, is Rossetti's other man, one whose body—as the mini-sequence develops—feels ultimately more substantial than the feminine form that glimmers briefly in the well.

The three subsequent sonnets of the “Willowwood” sequence record how the permutation of male Love into female eyes, hair, and lips gradually falls “back drowned” (p. 301) into the “low wave”—a heartrending action that remains definitely in Love's power. In “Willowwood (II)” Love's “passionate voice” continues but in ways that convert the poet-speaker's joy into sorrow. Since it “was such a song / So meshed with half-remembrance hard to free,” the music orchestrates a vision of initially silent “mournful forms”: “each,” he tells us, “was I or she” (pp. 300-301). These “shades,” which represent the “days” that the poet once spent with his female beloved, “looked on” the pair like witnesses recording their intimate relationship. The sestet depicts how these “shades” pored over “the soul-wrung implacable close kiss” held “fast together” between the poet and his beloved upon the waters (p. 301). Each “mournful form” finally broke its silence in an obsessive lamentation: “For once, for once, for once alone!” (p. 301). In this “moan”—as the poet-speaker calls it—the saddened “forms” recognized that the “close kiss” once shared by “I and she” was a perfect unity: they were “alone” (p. 301). To be “alone”—that is, as one being—evokes the shades' “pity,” since the unity of “he” and “she” exists no longer.

The prospect of remaining “alone” strikes an extraordinary note in a poem where it is already clear that the lovers remain surrounded by phantasms of themselves, all of which have been conjured by the male figure of Love. Even though Love has supposedly provided the “eyes” that have enabled the poet-speaker to recapture his beloved's image, in the third sonnet Love reasserts his autonomy by elaborating a heavyhearted moral upon the lovers' agonized predicament. Commenting on how the lovers' shades “walk with hollow faces burning white” through this quasi-purgatorial domain of weeping “Willowwood,” Love assures them that even though they may feel that they “have wooed” their “last hope lost,” there will be a future time when they “again shall see the light” (p. 301). But where the octave of “Willowwood (III)” ends by offering such solace, the sestet characteristically modifies the mood, on this occasion changing to a lament: “Better all life forget her,” cries Love, “than this thing”—the dehumanized state in which her spirit is kept “wandering” through Willowwood (p. 301).

Love's command to “forget her” is partly fulfilled in the fourth sonnet. The poet-speaker recalls that after Love's song came to an end “her face fell back drowned.” He asserts that he still does not understand “if it”—her faded image—“ever may / Meet” his eyes again (p. 301). Further, he fails to comprehend “if Love knows” whether he and his beloved will ever reunite. Stephen J. Spector assumes that here the “lover experiences a momentary triumph because the haunting image is finally exorcized.”¹⁶ Yet surely the sestet offers some consolation after her “grey eyes” fade beneath the water (p. 301). The poetic voice declares that when he “leaned low and drank / A long draught from the water where she sank,” he touched her “breath,” “tears,” and “soul” (p. 301). Even more physical and satisfying, however, is the reentry of Love into this intimate moment: “as I leaned, I know I felt Love's face / Pressed on my neck with moan of pity and grace” (pp. 301-302). Although we must assume that “Love's face”—in a sense—is also hers (not visualized but sensuously touched), it remains the case that the pressure exerted on the poet-speaker's neck is to some degree masculine. “Willowwood (IV)” ends with the lovers' “heads” encompassed by Love's “aureole” (p. 302). Such imagery obviously makes their union a highly spiritual one. But the presence of Love—the third party on whom this moment depends—wields such power that it is possible to glimpse the poet-speaker feeling both a man's and a woman's touch upon his neck when their heads combine intimately within the halo. Such instances may encourage readers to speculate if Rossetti's male speaker is making love either to a man or a woman—or both. One point, however, is undeniable: Heteroeroticism is enabled by the poet-speaker's other man, a “he” whose intrusive but necessary presence remains at once distant and proximate to the “I.”

Since “The House of Life” contains many sonnets that return to mirrors which permit the kind of erotic redoubling that we find in “Willowwood,” it is important to ask why the sequence is sometimes troubled by Love's almost fickle ascendancy over the poetic “I.” Part of the reason for this obsession resides in the contradictory condition of the poet-speaker's type of desire. Such sonnets show that the presiding power of Love both implements and confounds the poet-speaker's longings. And it appears that Rossetti's man cannot help but return to this vexatious problem in the hope that there might be some means—through, appropriately enough, the dialectical structure of the sonnet—of finding permanent congruity between “he,” “she,” and “I.” But “The House of Life,” which fixates upon these disparate positions, remains unable to reconcile them. The problem becomes even more acute in several narrative poems where Rossetti's “I” grows ever more demanding toward the Love that promises to mediate the otherwise unreachable passions of the perfect lady.

3

At this juncture it is apposite to turn to “Love's Nocturn,” a poem dating from 1854 that—like so many of Rossetti's inclusions in Poems (1870)—underwent substantial revisions with the aim of making its narrative design more coherent than before. This important work reveals that the young Rossetti had already determined that the contours of a man's desire for a woman at times remain problematically in the hands of another male figure. The unusual prosody accentuates the awkwardness of the erotic coordinates that Rossetti maps in this mysterious dream-vision. In her helpful source study of Rossetti's writings, Florence S. Boos sees the poem as “atypical” in Rossetti's canon. Characterizing “Love's Nocturn” as “something of an artificial set piece,” she observes that its twenty-two stanzas (rhymed ababbab) seem reminiscent of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even Edgar Allan Poe, though not attributable to any of them.¹⁷ The stanzas, it is true, have no direct source in English poetic tradition. But the meter—trochaic tetrameter catalectic in all but the penultimate dimetric line—bears remote echoes of Caesar's marching songs.¹⁸ Perhaps we are to presuppose that in this seemingly “atypical” poem the meter assumes a certain masculine posture, as it implicitly does for Alfred Tennyson later in the century.¹⁹ Any pretence to male power, however, dwindles when the poet-speaker realizes that he remains at the mercy of his master to evoke a scene in which “I” through “he” may connect with “she.” Moreover, the jolting trochaic rhythm—with its partly military origins—clashes with the term “nocturn”: a word that relates both to nighttime prayers, on the one hand, and dreamy music, on the other. This oddly structured poem, therefore, creates memorable antagonisms not only within its sexual triangle but also between its meter, theme, and title.

“Master of the murmuring courts,” the poet-speaker declares to the figure that he eventually identifies as “Love.” “[M]y spirit here exhorts,” he continues, “All the powers of thy demesne / For their aid to woo my queen” (p. 227). After this summons it becomes immediately apparent that the poetic voice inhabits a “Dreamland”—a word that eventually replaced “Dreamworld” while Rossetti was struggling to render intelligible the setting of the poem in 1869. (“Dreamland,” he told his brother, remained “rather hackneyed” but nonetheless “valuable for clearing up” the scene where indefinite “shapes of sleep convene” [Letters, 2:739].) From these vague “shapes,” the poet-speaker wishes to choose “one dream,” urging his “master” to “guide its flight” (p. 227). His preferred dreamvision “lies / In one gracious form's control” (p. 228). This “gracious form,” he says, is “Fair with honourable eyes,” eyes in which Love—the “Master”—“descries his goal.” But in order to realize this visionary dream the poet-speaker longs to see the “face” of his own “body's phantom” make “its presence” known to “her brow” (p. 228). Urgently demanding that this “phantom” possess even greater presence in this scene, he bids the “Master of the murmuring courts” to make his spirit “sing and moan” (p. 229). He promptly specifies the song that the phantom should sing, insisting that it should articulate neither the “prayers” that “the world's fluent woes prefer” nor “the praise the world doth give” (p. 229). It must “yield” instead his “love to her,” in the hope of “achiev[ing] / Strength that shall not grieve or err” (p. 229).

But while summoning Love to lead his phantom toward the sleeping lady, the poet-speaker imagines his spirit reaching “her face” only to be beset by fears that “another phantom” might “lean / Murmuring o'er the fragrant bed” (p. 230). Since the word “murmuring” repeats at this point, one is left speculating on the identity of this other ghost—perhaps Love, the Lord of the “murmuring courts,” or some unnamed rival. More pressing, however, is the poet-speaker's persistent imperative to control the power that Love already exerts over this situation. If his beloved “a wedded heart should show,” then the time will come for him to return—as J. Hillis Miller puts it—“to the dream-fosse, having enjoyed one kiss not of the lady's lips but of their reflection in her mirror” (Miller, p. 340): the “One dull breath against her glass” (p. 230). Miller contends that the repeated elusiveness of the lady's body—the very fact that she remains untouchable—ensures that Rossetti's structure of desire may “never be fixed in a definitive version” (Miller, p. 340). Perpetually unable to embrace his lady, the poetic “I” urges Love to “let all” of his “vain hopes” “Rise up” at Love's “summoning sign,” for they are indeed—as he remarks once more—part of Love's “dreamland” (p. 230). The poet-speaker finally concedes that the sole figure to retain agency in this erotically anguished scene is Love himself: “through thee,” he tells his Master, “Adam woke beside his wife” (p. 230). Without Love, Rossetti's “I” contends, the union of man and woman remains impossible. Little wonder, then, that the poet-speaker should conclude by pouring his “frail song of hope and fear” to “Love himself” (p. 231). This “frail song” remains his petition to “bring her near” (like Adam waking from his dream) but his song addresses not the sleeping beloved but another male figure.

Clearly “Love's Nocturn” expresses the poet-speaker's turmoil in remaining dependent on another male authority. Striving to manipulate Love's omnipotence over him, the poetic “I” enters into a situation where he glimpses an imaginary rival lover winning his lady. Even if the poetic voice can send forth his phantom toward her, it may be the case that an unspecified competitor has already “married” her heart. Needing another man (the powerful “Master”) but also fearing another man's presence (a spectral rival), the poetic voice therefore moves in two opposing directions—whereby the “I” calls on male power only to dread that some other “he” might have won her favor.

This ambivalence toward other men forms part of Rossetti's admitted indecisiveness about the relations that he wished to chart between “I,” “he,” and “she.” In 1869 when he was circulating the “Trial Books” of his planned edition of Poems (1870), Rossetti told his brother about his resolve to revise certain stanzas. “The first conception of this poem,” he writes, “was of a man not yet in love who dreams vaguely of a woman who he thinks must exist for him. This is not very plainly expressed and not very valuable, and it might be better to refer the love to a known woman whom he wishes to approach” (Letters, 2:239). The motivation for such changes—made in the 1870 text—may well stem from Rossetti's wish to maintain a certain level of sexual propriety at a time when he sought to forestall hostile criticism in the press. (Although Rossetti ensured that his associates like Swinburne provided very favorable notices, it was left to the unscrupulous Robert Buchanan to denounce how the “Mutual Admiration School” of Rossetti's circle rhapsodized about despicably “fleshly” pieces of work.²⁰) Still, the fact that Rossetti considered the status of the female beloved “vaguely” from the start underscores the idea that she occupies a secondary position within a poem that was already disturbed by a much more urgent struggle between “he” and “I.”

The secondariness of femininity in Rossetti's ostensibly heteroerotic “Dreamland” becomes even more apparent in “The Stream's Secret”—a longer poem, dating from 1859, that Riede understandably finds “somewhat obscure and tortuous” (Rossetti Revisited, p. 112). Written in sextains (rhyming abbaab), the poem inserts into its iambic lines a number of trochaic inversions that unsettle the poetic voice. The alternating line lengths of three, four, and five feet likewise emphasize the uneasy energies of a male “I” that remains radically displaced from the female beloved. The “I” yearns to know if Love—once again in a state of “Murmuring”—has confided to the reflective waters a “secret thing”: the hope that “Time” might “endow / One hour with life, and I and she / Slake in one kiss the thirst of memory” (p. 265). As these lines show, the anguished “I” contemplates not only the “Master of the murmuring courts” but also another presence: the flowing stream to which sensuous Love (this time like Cupid, all “curls” and “lips” [p. 265]) has communicated a clandestine message. The poet-speaker urges the “wandering water” to whisper the elusive “secret” in his ear. What he craves, therefore, is doubly mediated, first by Love, then by the stream. And the fact that the “I” remains dependent on a “wandering” medium that feels uncontrollable—at one moment a “silver thread,” the next “a torrent brown” (p. 266)—thereby makes Love inaccessible in much the same manner as the lady appears in “Love's Nocturn.” Even though the poet-speaker's attentions stay focused on quenching his heterosexual “thirst,” in “The Stream's Secret” he can only accomplish this end by imploring the mutable stream to disclose the conversation that occurred with another male figure: the “he” that holds the “secret” of the “I.” In this poem, therefore, the erotic triangle of “The House of Life” and “Love's Nocturn” expands into a four-sided affair whose intricacy makes the currents of male heterosexual desire decidedly obscure and tortuous.

The stream, noticeably, has no sex. Ungendered, its fluid movement produces unpredictable reflections and revelations. While presuming that the stream can indeed divulge the “secret thing,” the poet-speaker also realizes that its “eddy's rippling race / Would blur the perfect image” of Love's “face” (p. 266). Not surprisingly, then, his petition is shot through with fears and threats: “I will have none thereof,” he says, frightened that the eddy will ruin Love's countenance. Reliant on these capricious waters, the “I” urges the stream to “learn and understand” that Love—recognizing the “wrongs that himself did wreak” against the speaker—went to the aid of the lady whose “eyes beseeching gave command” that she was true in her passion (p. 266). That is to say, if the stream will articulate Love's voice, then the lover will receive confirmation that his beloved exercised some power over Love, in a complex relay of conversations. But since the stream continues to withhold the secret, the speaker proceeds to refine his thoughts on the longed-for “Hour of Love” that transcends time. “[S]he and I shall meet,” he enthuses, “With bodiless form and unapparent feet” (p. 269), as if they will be spirited away from the earth. The central stanzas of the poem dwell exhaustively on the poetic voice's delight in imagining the “proud growth” that shall effloresce when “that hour's thirsting race be run” (p. 269). The resulting “passion of peace”—in which he bathes in the fetishistic glow of her “Sweet hands, sweet hair, sweet cheeks, sweet eyes, sweet mouth”—shall culminate in “One love in unity” (p. 269). In this idealized state, he will abide both selflessly and silently.

This indulgent vision, however, emerges as a vain supplication. Unable to move the stream to “pity,” the poet-speaker is promptly plunged into darkness where “the night-wind shake[s] the shade like fear,” making “every covert quail” (p. 270). Her “soul-sequestered face” remains consequently “Far off.” Baffled by her inaccessibility, he contemplates the “deathlier airs” in which—at the one moment when he addresses his “love” directly—her “heart” will “call” him “home,” a “home” which he styles a “low cave” (p. 270). “Love's self,” the male lover declares, “doth stand” in this erotic crypt “Gather[ing] the water in his hand” (p. 270). At this point, he reaches a conclusion that sounds uncannily like the ending of “He and I”:

                                        O water whispering
                              Still through the dark into mine ears,—
As with mine eyes, is it not now with hers?—
                              Mine eyes that add to thy cold spring,
Wan water, wandering water weltering,
                              This hidden tide of tears.

(pp. 270-271)

This final stanza struggles to synthesize the lover's, the beloved's, and Love's desires within the “cold spring,” as the “I” imagines both himself and herself adding their tears to the pale water, which both echoes and reflects their weeping. But the poem ends noticeably with the poetic voice waxing lachrymose in a “weltering” current from which he has imagined Love taking refreshment. One man drinks, therefore, as the other man cries. In this scene, “he” and “I” touch—if only indirectly—through this source whose “wandering” movement now appears not so much enigmatic in Rossetti's canon as almost standard in its deviations.

What, then, should we make of this recurrent pattern where men commune in overwhelming sadness with each other? It suggests that physical closeness between men, where eyes and lips may indeed touch, remains distressing because it comprises a non-erotic familiarity that refuses to substitute for heterosexual union. In “Willowwood,” “Love's Nocturn,” and “The Stream's Secret,” male Love always demands attention first and foremost—prior to any desire for the female beloved. And Love offers physical contact that remains far more tangible than the highly spiritualized heteroerotic vision that fills out the central stanzas of “The Stream's Secret.” Rossetti's other men drink “tears unseal'd” and stare back “with cold commemorative eyes” because they remind his male poetic voices that they cannot—no matter how close they get—ever love each other. All of these poems show that this same-sex intimacy must disappoint the “I” erotically, over and over again. This, I think, is one of the main sites of loss—one might call it a type of melancholia—which enfeebles the sexual energy of much of Rossetti's poetry. In melancholia, as Sigmund Freud elaborated, the “patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable.”²¹ Moreover, this impoverished psychic state supports forms of suffering to which the subject (for inscrutable reasons) remains espoused. Melancholia, Freud remarks, comprises an “unknown loss” (p. 254) that leads to the subject's delusional belief in his inferiority. In this regard, Rossetti's poetic “I” love willingly endures the grief of its own disempowerment, continually demanding but forever denied the amatory authority that is supposed to lie in the hands of the other man.

4

It is not only in the tormented world of dreams, mirrors, and shadows that we find Rossetti's plaintive poet-speaker confronting this troubling male other. The poetic “I” also discovers “he,” with even greater discomfort, in the heart of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Located in the turbulent late 1840s, the “I” fixes its gaze upon the imposing—palpably material—masculinities whose historical weight will ultimately crush the poetic voice to death. The burden of history emerges most visibly in “The Burden of Nineveh,” a suggestively titled poem begun in 1850 and revised over the course of twenty years. Unlike the other poems I have discussed, here “he” and “I” do not commune intimately. Nor does this particular work engage directly with a female object of desire. But this structurally repetitious poem remains fixated on the intrusive power of another male-identified figure, in ways that complicate Rossetti's tenacious attraction to masculine authority—especially when it manifests godlike fascination of a highly sensual kind. Written in vigorous iambic tetrameter, this interior monologue of twenty ten-line stanzas (each of which concludes with the burden “Nineveh”) scrutinizes an antique icon. This ancient revenant is an Assyrian “Bull-god” that endured the long reign of what the speaker quips is a “Delicate harlot” (p. 36): the proverbial whore of Babylon. Austen Henry Layard excavated the ruins of Nineveh along the banks of the Tigris from 1845 onward. (By mid century Layard transported his loot to the British Museum, where they rivaled the Elgin Marbles in prestige. His Nineveh and Its Remains [1849] passed into many widely reviewed editions.) The large number of monuments and statues put on display—if not wholly interpretable to the nineteenth-century historians' eye—represented what was at the time believed to be the most ancient civilization on earth.

Rossetti's speaker, like the hundreds of visitors who eagerly sought out the prize exhibits, fixes his gaze upon this “mitred Minotaur” (p. 33) at the moment when the museum porters trundle it into a hallway. This ancient figure adorned the grand entrance of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh. No sooner has this “dead disbowelled mystery” (p. 33) comes before him than he quickly responds to its historical and sexual allure. Stopped in his tracks, the poet-speaker muses on the darkness thrown by the disinterred “beast's recovered shadow” (p. 34). He observes how the sunlight that “Sheltered” the Lord's “Jonah” in the Bible “has been shed the same” for thousands of years. “Within thy shadow,” he remarks, addressing the bull-god directly, “Sennacherib has knelt,” as well as “pale Semiramis,” who brought “incense” to the altar (p. 34). Such thoughts, however, strike him as risible when he compares the “three files compact” of schoolchildren who “learn to view” the bull-god as pure “fact” (pp. 34-35). The very idea that such a sacred image should be the object of ignominious rote-learning in 1850s London makes the narrator ask rhetorically whether the bull-god's original “worshippers” anticipated that this “mummy” would cohabit space with Greek, Egyptian, and Roman gods, in the name of modern education. Yet as the poem progresses, the Assyrian bull—for all its debasement amid the Museum's educational mission—becomes (as Boos points out) “a powerfully negative object, not an appealing or sensuous one, despite its sensual accompaniment in past times” (Boos, pp. 214-215). In “The Burden of Nineveh,” not even the recollection of Semiramis—the voluptuous founder of Babylon—can make this godhead an eternal source of inspiration. No matter how much the bull-god's presence connects the Victorian present with ancient history, the “I” grows suspicious of its “pomp” (p. 36). This bestial “creature”—with its initially captivating “hoofs behind and hoofs before” (p. 33)—becomes the focus of disillusionment.

The narrator's frustration with the bull-god lies in the contingency of a world where religious faiths transmogrify out of all recognition over time. He acknowledges how historical memory may undergo such radical change in years to come that the Assyrian bull will no longer be understood for the religious authority that it once commanded. In the future, he suggests, “Some tribe of the Australian plough” may “Bear him afar,” assuming—in their implicitly primitive antipodean home—that this “relic” is “Of London, not of Nineveh” (p. 37). Further, after some seventy centuries, the Victorians' distant descendants may mistake them “for some race / That walked not in Christ's lowly ways, / But bowed its pride and vowed its praise / Unto the God of Nineveh” (p. 37). Such reflections on the vicissitudes of history ensure that a wry “smile” breaks over the narrator's lips, as he looks up at the bull-god's “heavy wings spread high, / So sure of flight, which do not fly” (p. 37). Disaffected, he robs the Assyrian bull of its timeless glory, not by treating it as empty fact but by declaring that each and every god has its own transitory day.

Moreover, in making this point the poet-speaker, as Rossetti's critics have observed, implicitly alludes to famous poems by two influential Romantics. Rossetti's indirect references to both the “colossal Wreck” in Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ozymandias” (1819) and the “Cold Pastoral” of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) serve, in Antony H. Harrison's view, to communicate—even in such a metrically jaunty poem—a sense of artistic debilitation. Harrison sees Rossetti's monologue repeating in a somewhat self-defeating mode Keats's and Shelley's Romantic preoccupation with “the transcontextualization of an artifact from an ancient civilization and the hermeneutical problems that result.”²² Since Rossetti's monologue mines these well-known sources to embellish rather commonplace thoughts about the displacement of an artifact from its historical locale, Harrison characterizes “The Burden of Nineveh” as “parodic.” He maintains that “The Burden of Nineveh” is “parodic”—more specifically, a fatigued parody—because it “not only [tells us] of the burdens of the past as they are appropriated by the present but of the fact that all parodies as artistic reenactments are burdensome” (Harrison, p. 104). The poem's burden (both its insistent refrain and its cumbersome reenactments) ensures that its wearied conclusion is just as incapable of ascending to higher realms as the flightless Assyrian bull. Regardless of how much energy it seeks to impress upon its tetrameters, the monologue remains weighed down by the knowledge that not even inspirational precursors like Shelley and Keats can raise the art of poetry to transcendent spheres. Ultimately, the speaker's mockery of the bull-god bears an intimate relation to the emasculation of the poetic means that deride all pretensions to spiritual authority.

This agnostic insight—the knowledge that the male speaker cannot claim the power of any poetic or religious gods whatsoever—assuredly encourages a reconsideration of the faith that Rossetti pledges to his alternative deity, Love, throughout “The House of Life” and elsewhere. It is perhaps no coincidence that when Rossetti situates Love in an immediate historical context—the Risorgimento—the idol's fluttering wings crash to the earth with devastating consequences. Set in a time of revolution whose violence destroyed traditional social and sexual relations, “A Last Confession” was first drafted in 1847, even though the later subtitle (“Regno Lombardo-Veneto, 1848”) pinpoints the action in what would become the tumultuous year of the pan-European struggles for liberty. Like “The Burden of Nineveh,” this monologue does not involve any physical familiarity between “I” and “he.” But in this poetic confession—in which a murderer bears his anguished soul to a priest—the speaker puts his trust in a male authority after his female beloved has engaged in a painful act of emotional and political betrayal.

“A Last Confession” recounts the story of an Italian nationalist of unknown origin who, some eleven years before, found an orphaned girl “Alone upon the hill-side” (p. 192). “She might,” he says, “have served a painter to pourtray / That heavenly child which in the latter days / Shall walk between the lion and the lamb” (p. 192). Treating this picture of innocence as if she were a religious icon, the speaker—himself barely an adult with no parents of whom to speak—raised this “merry loving child” (p. 194), at first bestowing affections upon her. Such affections, he says, were “the father's, brother's love” (p. 195), not the love of a youthful paramour. But as the monologue unravels, these sentiments—in the very process of claiming their innocence—appear charged with paternal, fraternal, and adolescent eroticism, all of which suggest his incestuous desire for the young girl. Noting that “both protagonists lack a family,” J. B. Bullen contends that the poem keeps evoking family relations as its “site of desire”—a desire that, in the context of 1848, is acutely politicized and extremely perilous.²³ In other words, the revolutionary setting of “A Last Confession”—in which various masculine desires have to be reinvented—creates the volatile conditions in which the speaker confuses his violent activist mission with his conflicted desires for the child he has raised to womanhood. Shaped by political insurgency, the speaker's longings become increasingly disturbed, injurious, and deathly, not least because he assumes the unbounded agency of Love: the treacherous figure on which he models his every erotic action.

Rossetti, however, remained at first unclear about the perfidious condition of Love. In the earliest draft of the poem, the speaker recounts how he “brought her from the city, one such day, / The earliest gift I mind my giving her.” The gift, in this text, was not Love but “A little image of Jesus Christ, / Whom yet she knew but dimly.”²⁴ By 1870, when the monologue was first published, this “little image” transmuted into a glorious picture of “flying Love / Made of our coloured glass-ware”; “in his hands,” the speaker adds, there were “A dart of gilded metal and a torch” (p. 194). In this later version, the adored girl asked the speaker to explain why Love's “poor eyes” were “blindfold,” and “why” Love had “wings” and an “arrow” (p. 194). Riede, contemplating this revision, remarks: “Sexual love replaces religious faith, the somewhat empty rhetoric about ‘God and truth’ is eliminated, and a previously absent level of psychological penetration is added to the poem” (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, p. 99). By removing all traces of Christianity from this “little image,” Rossetti's textual changes disclose that the speaker has converted his seemingly innocent affection for the young woman into profound erotic attraction.

There is, however, a further aspect of Rossetti's decision to shift the focus from Christ to Love. By relocating his poetic interests in this amatory deity at quite an early phase in his career, Rossetti affiliated himself with an idol whose presence would constantly betray him, whether in distorted reflections, rushing waters, or subterranean depths. In “A Last Confession,” Love literally shatters into pieces. As the girl strove eagerly to nail the “image of a flying Love” on a wall, the speaker “held” her in his “arms”; “still she laughed and laughed,” he says, “And kissed and kissed me” (p. 194). “But amid her mirth,” we learn, “It slipped and all its fragments strewed the ground: / And as it fell she screamed, for in her hand / The dart had entered deeply and drawn blood” (p. 194). Instead of bringing pleasure, this fallen idol's arrow could only inflict pain. After the speaker “bandaged her small hand” (p. 194), he recognized that his fatherly and brotherly affection for her “changed … / … somewise” (p. 195). He now understood that the “orphan-girl” had grown into a woman—no longer a “heavenly child” but a figure whose “breasts half globed” were “Like folded lilies deepset in the stream” (p. 196). As she became more sexual in the speaker's eyes, the young woman appeared at times untouchable, since her “rounded finger-tips” that “clung a little where they touched” were “gone o' the instant” (p. 196). The increasing remoteness of her femininity emerges in imagery that embellishes her at once as fatal (“a mouth / Made to bring death to life”), ghostly (“Her face was pearly pale”), and narcissistic (“the underlip / Sucked in, as it strove to kiss itself” [p. 196]). Anatomized in this manner, her image breaks up—much like the icon of Love—into fragments, suggesting that male heteroeroticism can only undo what it desires.

Yet, as it unfolds, the monologue shows that the process of disassembling a highly eroticized femininity grew so frenzied that the speaker finally wounded her far more deeply than Love's dart. He eventually took her life with another of his ill-fated gifts: “a knife / … with a hilt of horn and pearl” (p. 204) that “Lombard country-girls” (p. 190) wore in their garters to threaten their female rivals in love or German-speaking men who tried to seduce them. In a sense, then, the monologue records a tale in which the speaker degenerates into a parodic distortion of his already traitorous idol, Love.

After the image of Love broke into pieces, the lover adopted by turns various chastening and humiliating personae. Erotically excited by her, he quickly mutated into her “moody comrade” (p. 196). He recalls how at one time she sang a song to pacify him after he “Did almost chide her” (p. 197). Confiding in the priest, he sings this mournful song—“a rude thing, ill rhymed, / Such as a blind man chaunts” (p. 197)—in entirety. Rather like the manner in which the beloved's eyes “grew beneath” Love's gaze in “Willowwood,” here the male speaker enables her voice to sound through his own. The young woman's song features a “sweet lady” who weeps because her love is unrequited: “Oh! What one favour,” the lovelorn lady cries, “Remains to woo him?” (p. 199). Having uttered this “rude” lyric, he declares: “That I should sing upon this bed!—with you / To listen” (p. 199). His expostulation points to his astonishment at the remarkable displacements that have occurred in this scene. In a moment of delirium, he claims to be unsure whether it was he or she who sang the song in the priest's company (“The voice seemed hers,” he declares [p. 199]). At this moment, therefore, the lover adopts simultaneously at least three different positions: he reenacts her song to himself; he sings as a woman to a man (the priest); and he sings as a man to another man. His ability to move between male and female, lover and beloved—itself a skill that Rossetti frequently attributes to Love—splinters the self, whose conflicting impulses soon lead to homicide.

Several further episodes contribute to the speaker's exposure as an absurd parody of Love. To begin with, he discovered that the young woman, who once “told her heart” to “image of Our Lady” at Monza, deserted her long-loved shrine in favor of a “new Madonna gaily decked, / Tinselled and gewgawed” (p. 200). “The old Madonna?” she quipped, “She had my old thoughts,—this one has my new” (p. 201). Not comprehending her change of affections (since she presumably took a German-speaking lover), he finally watched “her empty heart” leaving “her place empty” in their home (p. 203). Later, he sought to meet her for a nighttime tryst upon the dramatic “black and red sand” of the beach near Iglio (p. 202). His journey, however, involved another change that unsettled his identity. Stopping at a “village fair” (p. 203) to buy her the dagger—the “parting gift” that she soon “scorned” (p. 193)—he caught sight of “cursed rats” belonging to the political enemy. To save his life from these “spies,” he petitioned a “painted mountebank” for refuge, and once “hustled … / Into” the entertainer's “booth” the speaker daubed clown's make-up and donned a “zany's gown” (p. 203). This ludicrous disguise, in all its ingenuity, could not preserve him entirely from danger. As he fooled around, he noticed a “brown-shouldered harlot lean[ing] / Half through a tavern window thick with vine” (p. 204). The courtesan let out a “coarse empty laugh” (p. 204) whose scornful mockery echoed the already reverberating laughter of his beloved's “empty heart.” Although safe from the spies, he none the less played the most abject kind of fool. This embarrassing performance clearly implies that his heteroeroticism remains an object of derision. Ridiculed to the last, he pushed this debasing charade to its logical extreme by transforming Cupid's arrow into a lethal weapon. In the closing lines, he states that when he offered his “parting gift,” “she took the knife / Deep in her heart” (p. 204). As he speaks, she still bleeds to death. He, too, is dying from wounds inflicted by an Austrian soldier who may be his sexual rival (the precise circumstances of the speaker's injury prove cryptic to the end). Why, then, should Love have been parodied horrifically as a murderer?

The gory ending of “A Last Confession” takes the dangers inherent in one man's misguided wish to occupy the role of another—more powerful—male figure to the most derisory, brutal conclusion. Here, after all, the confessional “I” recalls a senseless crime in which he made a woefully inadequate imitation of Love. Instead of petitioning Love to win the lady, the speaker—his sharp-edged gift in hand—mistakenly assumed Love's supremacy. The result of this massive overidentification, of course, was fatal. At the same time, however, what survives from this disclosure is a speech addressed to a male authority: the priest who audits every secret word, including the heartfelt song of forlorn love once uttered by the young woman. Forever betrayed yet constantly heard by other men, Rossetti's “I” remains both their deficient impersonator and their subservient intimate. Torn between these various competitors and confessors, the poetic voice repeatedly suffers two related forms of loss. On the one hand, the “I” learns that his trust lies in men whose might remains greater than his own. On the other hand, Rossetti's poet-speaker discovers that other men supplant him where he has failed erotically. Although the speaker's homicidal passion in “A Last Confession” may appear idiosyncratic, it accentuates a recurrent idea in many of the poems that I have analyzed here: namely, that male heterosexuality depends upon a “he” whose power to save or destroy demands a familiar connection with an almost annihilated “I.”

“Whence came his feet into my field, and why?” At the close of this discussion, the “I”'s fraught inquiry now looks not so much enigmatic as a recurring enigma whose bewildering strength caught the poet-speaker unawares—in dreams, mirrors, streams, and even the British Museum. By the time Rossetti was working on “The House of Life,” this puzzle burdened his poetic vision as never before. In many respects, this unanswerable question marks the culmination of pervasive forms of melancholia that intensify the idea that Rossetti's poetry—fashioned after such luminaries as Dante, Keats, and Shelley—suffers an emasculated belatedness: the belief that his art, like love, is the work of an inferior “Might-have-been.” The desolate manhood that occupies these saddening writings is left asking why its yearning “I” must forever remain in the thrall of a “he” who may embody love but perpetually withdraws it from him. Any account of masculine desire in Rossetti's writing, therefore, remains just as inadequate as are his loveless speakers unless it looks—as they do closely—at the haunting visage of the other man.

Notes

1. David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1992), p. 136.

2. William E. Fredeman, “Rossetti's ‘In Memoriam’: An Elegiac Reading of ‘The House of Life’,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 47 (1965): 299.

3. Jerome McGann maintains that “the sequence is structured in terms of an implicit narrative.” “The story,” he explains, “involves a young man, an artist, and two (at least two) idealized women. The young man's love for one of the women succeeds to his love of the second. The first woman dies—it is not entirely clear whether her death occurs before or after his second love—and the events radically intensify the man's erotic yearnings for perfect love. This new desire is haunted by feelings of guilt and remorse, and dominated by ambiguous images of death and otherworlds” (Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000], p. 39). McGann's explanation points to the rather indefinite direction of the “implicit narrative” that Rossetti, after several reorderings of the sonnets, put in place.

4. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Fortnightly Review, NS 7 (1870): 554-555.

5. C. M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 210. Bowra's study first appeared in 1949.

6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Soul's Beauty,” in Rossetti, Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh (London: Dent, 1999), p. 314; further page references to this edition appear in parentheses.

7. The persistent structures of fetishism that recur in Rossetti's poetry and painting are explored in a groundbreaking feminist analysis by Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 120-154. Pollock observes that one of his late paintings, Astarte Syriaca (1877), “raises to a visible level the pressures that motivated and shaped the project of ‘Rossetti’—the negotiation of masculine sexuality in an order in which woman is the sign, not of woman, but of that Other in whose mirror masculinity must define itself” (p. 153). By comparison, my analysis explores a parallel struggle with male heteroeroticism in a number of poems where the reflection—or projection—in Rossetti's universe of mirrors is a person of his own sex.

8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 2. Part of Sedgwick's argument about the male homosocial continuum involves a careful rethinking of René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965). Girard's study first appeared as Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961).

9. Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 88.

10. Rossetti, “To Miss Losh,” October 19, 1869, in Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-67), 2:760.

11. “The architectural interpretation of ‘house’ in the title,” according to William E. Fredeman, “suggests an external structure of ‘frame’ for the sonnet-sequence. It should be noted that the image, unlike tree or plant or leaf (as Whitman uses it) is non-organic, in both the physical and critical sense, and that it comprehends a unity appropriate to a long poem comprising more than one hundred smaller units” (p. 320). Fredeman's contention differs from Paull Franklin Baum's claim that “Rossetti apparently used the term ‘House’ vaguely in its astrological sense,” in which the heavens are divided into twelve parts, the first of which is “the house of life”: Rossetti, The House of Life: A Sonnet-Sequence, ed Paull Franklin Baum (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1928), p. 34. Such comments obviously reveal that the meaning of Rossetti's chosen title remains as obscure as the “enigmatic” qualities of some of the sonnets included in the sequence.

12. Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), p. 401.

13. Martin A. Danahay, “Mirrors of Masculine Desire: Narcissus and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation,” VP 32 (1994): 37. Danahay defines his interpretation of “The Mirror” against J. Hillis Miller's powerful reading of the poem in “The Mirror's Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art,” VP 29 (1991): 338.

14. Douglas J. Robillard puts forward this view in “Rossetti's ‘Willowwood’ Sonnets and the Structure of ‘The House of Life’,” VN 22 (1962): 5-9.

15. Further examples would include the moment when Dante declares: “Love … gathers to such power in me / That my sighs speak, each one a grievous thing, / Always soliciting / My lady's salutation piteously” (Rossetti, Collected Writings, p. 113). Likewise, the confiding and inspiring power of Love—which can both elevate Dante's spirits and share his sorrows—comes to Dante “fair and fain” in a state of “joyful cheer,” speaking to (as well as on behalf of) the poet (Rossetti, Collected Writings, p. 108). Rossetti's Love is not, by any account, such a supportive and trustworthy companion.

16. Stephen J. Spector, “Love, Unity, and Desire in the Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” ELH 38 (1971): 457.

17. Florence Saunders Boos, The Poetry of Dante G. Rossetti: A Critical Reading and a Source Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), p. 96. Timothy Steele, in his exploration of catalexis, discusses the tetrameters of Barrett Browning's “The Best Thing in the World” (1862) in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 224-225.

18. William Beare says that this is “one of the oldest of all metres—the fifteen-syllabled trochaic line, with a break after the eighth syllable. The falling trochaic rhythm has always been a favourite for marching songs” (Latin Verse and European Song [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957], p. 15). I am grateful to Yopie Prins for advice on this metrical matter.

19. See the rousing, patriotic poem that Tennyson produced for the “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen” (1886), which begins by stressing the male imperial prowess of empire: “Welcome, welcome with one voice! / In your welfare we rejoice, / Sons and brothers that have sent, / From isle and cape and continent, / Produce of your field and flood” (The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 3:147.

20. [Robert Buchanan,] “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti,” Contemporary Review 18 (1871): 335; this essay was first published under the pseudonym “Thomas Maitland,” sparking a notorious literary controversy that rumbled on until the mid 1870s.

21. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915; 1917), in Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, 15 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 11:254.

22. Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1990), p. 103. Boos remarks that “Rossetti's bull seems a form of compromise between Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’ image and Keats's urn, simultaneously a sign of the transience of corrupt glory and an artifact inspiring meditation on past life” (p. 213).

23. J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 112-113.

24. The quotation from the early draft of “A Last Confession” appears in David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 99.