SOURCE: "Political Themes in the Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn, 1979, pp. 159-79.

[In the following essay, Bentley studies the theme of modern indifference to God in Rossetti's political poetry.]

Max Beerbohm's well-known caricature of the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti "precociously manifesting … that queer indifference to politics which marked him in his prime and in his decline"¹ embodies a basic untruth. For despite Beerbohm's and, indeed, Rossetti's own assertions to the contrary,² Rossetti was far from indifferent to politics, either in his youth, in his "prime," or in his "decline." From almost the beginning to almost the end of his poetic and artistic career he manifested a sporadic but nevertheless keen and satirical interest in contemporary English and European affairs. In the following pages I will examine a number of poems by Rossetti which either deal directly with political subjects or contain references and overtones of a political and, as is often the case, of a socio- or religio-political nature. A brief examination of Rossetti's early essays into political satire and of his shorter political poems of the late forties will establish the background against which to view "The Burden of Nineveh," the longest and most important of the poet-painter's meditations on contemporary political, social, and, ultimately, religious problems.

The earliest artistic manifestation of Rossetti's satirical bent came in the early forties when he designed (c. 1840-41) and had lithographed (c.1845)³ a set of comic or punning "Playing-Cards" which, for the most part, are devoted to political satire. Since these cards were produced when Rossetti had barely entered his teens it would clearly be a mistake to place too great an emphasis on them. Yet they do provide evidence of a precocious interest in politics and related matters. The various satirical references to Prince Albert (the Knave of Diamonds) and to Sir Robert Peel (the Knave of Spades) in the pack suggest that the young Rossetti—perhaps reflecting the opinions of his politically radical father—viewed with dismay the conservative tendencies which were ushered in with the Queen's accession in 1837 and with Peel's second Ministry (1841-46). This would certainly accord with W. M. Rossetti's estimate of his brother as a liberal in ideals, though something of a conservative in practice.⁴ However, the depiction of the Prince Consort as a very Germanic Knave with a female personification of British Art impaled on his bayonet suggests a more specific target for Rossetti's early satire. In 1841 Peel appointed the Prince Consort as Chairman of the Royal Commission which was set up in that year with the general aim of promoting the arts in England.⁵ The Commission's most immediate task was to select the artists to decorate the new Houses of Parliament, which were then approaching completion. Although Rossetti enthusiastically approved most of the designs submitted for this purpose when they went on exhibit at Westminster in July, 1843—feeling that they gave "the lie to the vile snarling assertion that British Art is slowly but surely falling, never more to rise"⁶—his earlier cartoon suggests that in 1841 he had distinct misgivings about the possible effects of Prince Albert's Germanic influence on British art.⁷ Even in his early teens, then, at the time when he was enjoying a reputation among his fellow art students as a "sketcher of chivalric and satiric subjects,"⁸ Rossetti was sensitive to political issues, especially insofar as they affected the arts in England.

Something of the same use of cards as a vehicle for political satire is carried over from the "Playing-Cards" into "The English Revolution of 1848" (No connection with over the way). In this, his first directly satirical poem, Rossetti pokes fun at the last flickers of Chartism, which, as his brother recalls, "formed a transitory alarm to Londoners in the early months of 1848."⁹ Two stanzas of "The English Revolution of 1848" convey the overall tone of the piece (notice the use of cards in the first to denote the levelling tendencies of the Chartists):

Ho cock your eyes, my gallant pals, and swing your heavy staves:
Remember—Kings and Queens being out, the great cards will be Knaves.
And when the pack is ours—oh then at what a slapping pace
Shall the tens be trodden down to five, and the fives kicked down to ace!
It was but yesterday the Times and Post and Telegraph
Told how from France King Louy-Phil was shaken out like chaff;
To-morrow, boys, the National, the Siècle, and the Débats,
Shall have to tell the self-same tale of "La Reine Victoria."

(Works, pp. 261-262)

The imaginary Chartist from whose incendiary speech this is taken is finally "nailed by a policeman" when he incites his followers to burn down the "Exchange, or Parliament" or one of the fashionable "Squares" or Royal "Palaces" near "Trafalgar Square." The poem closes as he is led away pleading "Oh please sir, don't! It isn't me. It's him. Oh don't, sir, please!" "The English Revolution of 1848" is full of a certain cockney vitality and humor. Despite its conspicuous lack of political and poetic gravitas it nevertheless reveals that Rossetti was conversant with the personalities (he mentions several Chartist leaders by name) and the issues which were at stake in 1848, the year of widespread revolution in Europe. Since Rossetti himself clearly did not take "The English Revolution" at all seriously we may speculate that his poem was written, at least in part, to badger his new friends Millais and Hunt, who are known to have been sympathetic spectators at the great Chartist demonstration in April, 1848. Indeed, some of Rossetti's information on the Chartists may have been gleaned from these two artists, and more from the poet Ebenezer Jones, who, when Rossetti met him in 1848, "would hardly talk on any subject but Chartism" (Works, p. 614).

Rossetti's attitude toward the political events of 1848 was by no means as flippant or detached as "The English Revolution of 1848" might suggest. As amused as he was by the efforts of the Chartists in England, he took a more serious view of the revolutions "over the way." The European events of 1848-49 must have held much the same significance for Rossetti as did those which began in France in June and July of 1789 for young poets such as Coleridge and Blake. Certainly, in the three sonnets which will now be considered, Rossetti is, generally speaking, within the conventions of liberal Romanticism both in his optimistic attitude toward revolution and in his pessimistic interpretation of the post-revolutionary tendency towards restoration, retribution, and repression. But even in "At the Sun-Rise in 1848," a sonnet which shows that he to some extent "shared the aspirations and exultations of the year of vast European upheavals,"¹⁰ Rossetti is cautious in his endorsement of liberty at the expense of authority. In marked contrast to his brother William Michael's "unqualified support of revolutionary and democratic, national liberation movements,"¹¹ there is something of the Mill of the essay on Alfred de Vigny in Rossetti's clear-sighted ability to see both sides of the revolutionary coin, to appreciate that what is gain to the peasant is loss to the king. Towards the end of the sonnet he cautions "Man, in [his] just pride" against the destructive aspect of revolution, urging him to remember that he was not made by God merely to destroy the authority of Churches ("priests") and monarchs (a "king … and yet another king") and to ensure that his "sons' sons shall ask / What the word king may mean in their day's task" (Works, p. 171). To stress the positive aspect of revolution implied by the metaphorical dawn of his title, Rossetti both begins and ends his sonnet with an allusion to the birth of light in Genesis 1.3. For Rossetti the revolutionary "Sun-Rise in 1848" is creative only insofar as it partakes of God's initial impulse to create a better order out of chaos: "if light [there] is," the sonnet concludes, "It is because God said, Let there be light." Rossetti's use of the Biblical account of the Creation in this context implies an acceptance, not just of God's primacy over man, but of an order—albeit an order of opposites ("If it is day with us, with them 'tis night")—through which the "round world keeps its balancing." It is indicative of Rossetti's fundamentally Christian consciousness of history that he places and judges contemporary revolutions in what may literally be termed the light of God. In Rossetti's early political poems, then—and this applies as much to "The Burden of Nineveh" as to "At the Sun-Rise in 1848"—light must be regarded (the imperative is Rossetti's own) as the symbol of God's continuing presence in the world.

The year 1849, which saw the collapse of the revolutions of 1848 and the re-establishment of the status quo in Europe, furnished the setting for two sonnets which are pessimistic and prophetic in character. Although the first of these, "Vox Ecclesiae, Vox Christi," deals generally with the brutal suppression of the revolutions of 1848, its primary target is "Christ's Church" (Works, p. 175), which used its altars to bless the weapons and to absolve the soldiers of the counter-revolutionary armies. In order to satirize the "Christian habit of using the 'not peace, but a sword' text to sanctify militarism"¹² Rossetti draws a somewhat Blakean contrast in the sonnet between the teaching of the Church ("Vox Ecclesiae") and that of Christ ("Vox Christi"). The epigraph of the sonnet, from Revelation 6.9-10, a plea to the Lord to "judge and avenge" those who "were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony that they held," serves, once again, to refer contemporary events to a religious and, in this case, apocalyptic framework. According to Rossetti's analysis, the support given by the (Catholic) Church to the counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in Hungary,¹³ was a grotesque perversion of "Christ's law," a perversion made all the more reprehensible for being motivated by a "hate of truth" and for being perpetrated on "fierce youth" by "evil age." By making the seeds of good bear "fruit in wrong" the elders of the Church have so perverted Christ's teaching as to enact a Black Mass of bloodshed in which the "wine-cup at the altar is / As Christ's own blood indeed." (Of course there is a reference here to the Catholic belief in the Real Presence.) For Rossetti the blood of those who died "'neath the altar" (this phrase echoes Revelation 6.9 in the epigraph) is "as the blood of Christ's elect, at divers seasons spilt / On the altar-stone." Moreover, this blood has so tainted the Church as to make the altar itself a "stone of stumbling" (here the reference is to Isaiah 8.14) that must be "rent up ere the true Church be built." The implication is that the revolutionaries who were killed by "weapons blessed for carnage" by the established Church are, in fact, the martyrs of the "true Church." The quotation from Revelation which heads the sonnet thus becomes a direct appeal to the Christian God to recognize these martyrs of the "true Church" and to avenge their "blood on them that dwell on the earth."

"Vox Ecclesiae, Vox Christi" is a richer and more subtle sonnet than W. M. Rossetti's "The Evil under the Sun"¹⁴ (earlier called "How long Lord" and later entitled "Democracy Downtrodden"), which was also inspired by the Austrian suppression of Hungary in 1849. Indeed, in its very richness and subtlety, as well as in its subject matter and form, Rossetti's poem recalls and invites comparison with Milton's sonnet "On the Late Massacre in Piemont" which opens with the cry "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd Saints."¹⁵ "Vox Ecclesiae, Vox Christi" is finally remarkable, not just as a powerful indictment of the Church's role in the political events of 1848-49, but as the first example of Rossetti's tendency to draw upon the language and imagery of the Old and New Testament Prophets to give resonance to his condemnation of contemporary injustices.

The second of Rossetti's political sonnets of 1849, "On Refusal of Aid between Nations," was also occasioned by Austria's brutalization of Hungary and Italy in that year. As a statement about international apathy and non-intervention this sonnet has almost universal application. In 1869 Rossetti considered re-titling it "On the Refusal of Aid to Hungary 1849, to Poland 1861, to Crete 1867" (Letters, II, 721); and on March 21, 1940, it was reprinted in the Times¹⁶ as a comment on Russia's entry into Finland in that year.

"On Refusal of Aid between Nations" is particularly interesting within the corpus of Rossetti's political poems because, in its pessimistic and apocalyptic view of civilization on the brink of disaster, it bridges the gap between the guarded optimism of "At the Sun-Rise in 1848" and the unmitigated pessimism of "The Burden of Nineveh" (1850). The octave of the sonnet explores the perception that the "earth is changing," that the "seasons totter in their walk," and that the God who presides over both "nations" and "kings" is a Judge of the Last Day who, with just wrath, weighs "the rod / … in [His] hand to smite [the] world" (Works, p. 175). For Rossetti the realization that "Man is parcelled out in men," that mankind is no longer a unified body but a collection of individuals who excuse their lack of concern for the plight of others by pleading "'He is he, I am I'," is a sure and telling sign that the "earth falls asunder, being old." Rossetti's sonnet "On the Field of Waterloo" (1849) also closes on the perception that "the earth is old" (Works, p. 186). Moreover, several other poems that were either wholly or partly written in 1849 partake of this pessimistic sense of living in the last days. In "A Last Confession," for instance, the protagonist, who, it should be remembered, is an Italian maqui with a bitter hatred for "old Metternich" (Works, p. 47), also experiences a feeling of impending apocalypse. "In my dream," he tells the priest, "I thought our world was setting, and the sun / Flared, a spent taper" (Works, p. 46). An equivalent sense of an ending occurs at the conclusion of "The Bride's Prelude" where the priest assures the heroine that "The world's soul, for its sins, was sped / And the sun's courses numberèd" (Works, p. 34). In all these poems Rossetti equates the disintegration of moral values, whether at the political or personal level, with the irreversible running down of the sun; and in none of them does he give us any cause to think that the course of history offers any other, more optimistic possibility. If account is also taken of the fact that the lines from "The Bride's Prelude" just quoted were not written until 1869 and that "A Last Confession" is set in an Italy struggling against Metternich's reference to itself as a "geographical expression," it does not seem unfair to deduce that Rossetti's sense of an imminent, apocalyptic ending for the world arose directly from the awareness of political and social disintegration expressed so powerfully and concisely in "On Refusal of Aid between Nations."

It is worth taking a moment to view the political sonnets of 1848-49, the sonnets which comprise what might be called Rossetti's "revolutionary series," as a unit. This slight shift in perspective makes it clear that Rossetti sees political events as occurring within the Biblical scale of time that begins with the Creation in Genesis and ends with the Last Judgment in Revelation. The central symbol of this continuum is the sun, which, by Rossetti's analysis of contemporary socio-political events, is in 1849 well past its peak of energy. In none of the three sonnets in the "revolutionary series" does Rossetti question either the Christian conception of time or the moral and spiritual values that it implies. Rather, his criticism and, ultimately, his pessimism stem from a recognition of man's failure to take full account of the teleology and eschatology of Christianity. Although Rossetti's guardedly optimistic endorsement of revolution in 1848 probably owes a debt to his early reading of Shelley and Blake, both of whom proclaim the birth of a new world and the death of the old, his pessimism in face of the events of 1849 draws more on the Prophetic Books of the Old and New Testaments. Moreover, with "On Refusal of Aid between Nations" there emerges a concern for mankind as a whole that runs counter to the Romantic emphasis on individual liberty which, it has been suggested, contributed to Rossetti's earlier championship of revolution against the established political and religious orders. Without wholly endorsing H. N. Fairchild's somewhat simplistic analysis of nineteenth-century Catholic poetry, with its de-emphasis of individuality, as a "force opposed to Romanticism" (IV, 243), it is nevertheless true to say that Rossetti's lament over the breakup of mankind as a unified body suggests a vision that might well be classified as less Romantic than Catholic. Needless to say, this need not imply that Rossetti approved of the Catholic Church's role in the struggles of the late forties. "Vox Ecclesiae, Vox Christi" proves that he emphatically did not. However, if Pope Pius IX had condemned the principle of non-intervention soon after he acceded to the Papacy in 1846, and not waited until the Syllabus of 1864 to do so, he would unquestionably have had the support of the author of "On Refusal of Aid between Nations."¹⁷

Even with Rossetti's political poems of 1848 and 1849 firmly in mind, it is still astonishing to remember that he wrote "The Burden of Nineveh," his series of "reflexions humoristiques sur la chute des civilisations et des empires,"¹⁸ within only a few months of completing Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849-50). When we move from the painting to the poem, we move from a world inspired by the gilt aureoles and white robes of early Christian art to a world dominated by the colossal form of an Assyrian "Bull-god" seen in the grey, contemporary setting of the British Museum:

Now, thou poor god, within this hall
Where the blank windows blind the wall
From pedestal to pedestal,
The kind of light shall on thee fall
Which London takes the day to be:
While school-foundations in the act
Of holiday, three files compact,
Shall learn to view thee as a fact.

(Works, p. 56)

Although "The Burden of Nineveh" was originally written and published (in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine for August, 1856) in a humorously satirical vein that recalls "The English Revolution of 1848," the version of the poem that appeared in Poems (1870)—from which the above is quoted—is more serious and, hence, more reminiscent of the political sonnets of 1848 and 1849. Oswald Doughty goes some way towards explaining the transition from Ecce Ancilla Domini! to "The Burden of Nineveh" when he remarks that the poem was written in the "anticlimax of recent humiliations," by which he means "the failure of The Germ and the [Pre-Raphaelite] Brotherhood, [and] the perpetual embarrassment of poverty."¹⁹ Doughty's explanation of Rossetti's state of mind at the time of writing "The Burden of Nineveh" would be more inclusive and accurate if it took into account both the disastrous exhibition of Ecce Ancilla Domini! in 1850 and—since the poem is at base about "la chute des civilisations"—Rossetti's general pessimism in regard to the state of European civilization in 1849.

It was propitious both psychologically and imaginatively for Rossetti that, at the time when he was acutely disillusioned by a combination of political, professional, and personal circumstances, he was confronted with an image, part man and part beast, which exactly suited his feeling of having been brutalized by a brutal society:

I have no taste for polyglot:
At the Museum 'twas my lot,
Just once, to jot and blot and rot
In Babel for I know not what.
I went at two, I left at three.
Round those still floors I tramp'd, to win
By the great porch the dirt and din;
And as I made the last door spin
And issued, they were hoisting in
A wingèd beast from Nineveh.

²⁰

Rossetti's direct inspiration for "The Burden of Nineveh" could have been any one of the seven colossal figures which arrived at the British Museum between the end of 1850 and the beginning of 1852 "fresh from 'Layard's Nineveh'."²¹ However, Rossetti's description of the figure as a "Bull-god" with a "human face" later in the poem, coupled with his brother's recollection that the poem had its genesis in the "autumn of 1850" ("Notes," p. 649), provides good reason for associating its inspiration with one particular figure. Of the seven Assyrian colossi held by the British Museum only three are human-headed winged bulls (the remaining four have the bodies of lions), and of these three, two did not arrive at the Museum until towards the end of 1851.²² The remaining colossal winged bull arrived in London "at the end of September, 1850" (Gadd, pp. 58, 126) and, moreover, it was the only one which arrived at the Museum in one piece (the later ones were cut into segments to facilitate transportation).²³ It thus seems certain that the "wingèd beast from Nineveh" which "they are hoisting in" through the entrance of the British Museum in the "autumn of 1850" was the human-headed winged bull (No. 118872) which to the present day is exhibited in the Nimrud Central Saloon on the ground floor of the Museum.

Rossetti's detailed description of the "wingèd beast" in the second stanza of "The Burden of Nineveh" agrees very well with the first of the human-headed winged bulls to arrive at the British Museum:

A human face the creature wore,
And hoofs behind and hoofs before,
And flanks with dark runes fretted o'er
'Twas bull, 'twas mitred Minotaur,
A dead disbowelled mystery:
The mummy of a buried faith
Stark from the charnel without scathe,
Its wings stood for the light to bathe,—
Such fossil cerements as might swathe
The very corpse of Nineveh.

(Works, p. 55)

There is, however, more to this stanza than meets the eye: we should not be deceived into thinking that it is merely a description of the "Bull-god." The fact that Rossetti uses some poetic license in comparing the human-headed winged bull with the Greek Minotaur—a creature which is usually represented with a bull's head and human body—was possibly intended to alert us to the symbolic overtones of the description. Not only does Rossetti compare the "Bull-god" with a "Minotaur" but he goes on to liken it to an Egyptian "mummy" and, perhaps more importantly, he (aptly enough) describes its head-gear as a "mitre." Taken together, these metaphorical aspects of the description suggest that Rossetti is using the Assyrian figure as a summary image for the extravagances of faiths, both buried and unburied. It is surely not fortuitous that the "mitred" head of the "Bull-god" has reminded several critics of a Roman Catholic prelate.²⁴ Later in the poem, in stanza 8, Rossetti connects the "Bull-god" with "that zealous tract: / 'ROME'" (Works, p. 56). This is perhaps an allusion, by way of two puns—"Tract" / Tractarianism and "bull" / Papal Bull—to the religio-political controversies surrounding Tractarianism and Roman Catholicism which reached a peak in 1850 with the Gorham Case (Baptismal Regeneration) and the so-called "papal aggression" (the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales). Significantly, "ROME" is the only upper-case word that appears in the poem, and it is perhaps capitalized in stanza 8 to differentiate it from the lower-case "Rome" that is linked with "Greece" and "Egypt" in the succeeding stanza. In view of Rossetti's attitude toward the Catholic Church as expressed in "Vox Ecclesiae, Vox Christi" it is neither inconsistent nor surprising that he should implicate "ROME" in his condemnation of the pride and vanity of earthly empires in "The Burden of Nineveh." Indeed, it would be more surprising if he did not. Rossetti, it appears, shared with many Victorians, including the Ruskin of Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851) and the Hunt of Our English Coasts, 1852,²⁵ a distrust, which was partly political, of the spiritual imperialism of the Catholic Church.

Although "The Burden of Nineveh" was directly inspired by the arrival of the "Bull-god" "fresh from 'Layard's Nineveh'," and many details in the poem seem to have been drawn from Layard's account of his excavations in Nineveh and Its Remains (1849),²⁶ it was to the Prophetic Books of the Old Testament, particularly the books of Nahum and Jonah, that Rossetti went to vitalize his satirical portrait of a contemporary world whoring after false gods. That Rossetti intended "The Burden of Nineveh" to be an ominous comment on the state of England, filled with vague but familiar parallels with religions and empires past and present, is, it has been suggested, evident even in his metaphorical description of the "Bull-god" in the second stanza of the poem. The very title of the poem is in fact a direct transcription of the opening words of Nahum, the book that deals specifically with the fall of Nineveh. In the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine Rossetti appended a note to the title quoting a "Dictionary" definition of "Burden [as a] 'Heavy calamity; the chorus of a song'" (p. 514). This note serves not only to suggest the implicit gravitas of the poem but to direct the reader to its varying refrain (the last line of each stanza) where the parallel between Nineveh and London is developed with a weighty inevitability that, as R. L. Megroz suggests, makes each of the stanzas sound like "separate footsteps of that gigantic bull."²⁷

For Rossetti, the chief cause of Nineveh's (and London's) fall is her proud and sinful indifference to the Christian God. To vitalize this perception he alludes several times to the attempts of Nahum and Jonah to warn the city of impending destruction. The description of Nineveh as a "Delicate harlot" in stanza 15, for instance, recalls the "whoredoms of [Nineveh] the well-favoured harlot" of Nahum 3.4. Like Blake before him, Rossetti connects social with sexual corruption; and he prepares the way for the condemnation of Nineveh as a "harlot" by alluding first to "Sardanapalus," whose epitaph "eat, drink and lust; the rest is nothing" is quoted by Layard, and then to "pale Semiramis," the queen who, again according to Layard, introduced the worship of Venus-Astarte to Nineveh.²⁸ In stanzas 6, 12, and 15 the allusions to Jonah's futile attempt to bear "abroad / To Nineveh the voice of God" (Works, p. 57)—the "brackish lake [that] lay in his road" and the "gourd" which God sent to shelter him from the sun by the walls of Nineveh—are all drawn from the Prophet's own account in the four chapters of Jonah. Towards the end of his meditation on the destruction of Nineveh, Rossetti invokes Christ's temptation by Satan ("Pride's lord and Man's"), not only to suggest that it was pride that led to Nineveh's downfall, but to prepare the way for the suggestion, toward the end of the poem, that London in her pride and idolatry will be destroyed by a wrathful God as surely as was Nineveh.

In "The Burden of Nineveh" the eroding element of the wind, often in Rossetti's work a symbol for the passage of time, is the destructive agent of the omnipresent and omnipotent Christian God. The very same "callous wind" that whipped up "burial clouds of sand" around the "Bull-god" until "another land" covered "his eyes" and "blinded him with destiny" blows through the "dirt and din" of London and seems to sweep up the "shadow from the ground." The "Bull-god" in its mound of sand seemed immune to "Time [which] passed, of like import / With the wild Arab boys at sport." But its supposed immunity is merely relative, for all the while "older grew / By ages the old earth and sea" (Works, pp. 55-56). In the final analysis it is only the Christian God "before whose countenance / The years recede, the years advance" (Works, p. 57) who is immune to the ravages of time. Thus, although Rossetti is unquestionably pessimistic in his analysis of civilizations past and passing, he does not, as Harold L. Weatherby asserts, question "the very rudiments of religious thought"²⁹ in "The Burden of Nineveh." Nor is there a "thoroughly sceptical sort of idea" (Weatherby, p. 17) at the heart of the poem. As in his political sonnets of 1848 and 1849, Rossetti's aim in "The Burden of Nineveh" is to point out, with the pessimism of a Spengler rather than the skepticism of a Hardy, the apocalyptic consequences of the contemporary failure to regard the message of Christianity. That is why, in the penultimate stanza of the poem, Rossetti describes the cuneiform inscription on the "Bull-god's" side, not as "runes," but as "those scriptured flanks it cannot see" ( Works, p. 58). It is the set, forward-looking visage of the colossus which prevents it from seeing either the message behind it or the sky above it. And it is this horizontal gaze, indifferent to scripture and light alike, that makes the "Bull-god" of Nineveh with its wings "which do not fly" and its feet "planted … [on] the sod," an appropriate symbol for the false gods of a progressive and materialistic³⁰ London.

The central irony of "The Burden of Nineveh," then, is that the "Bull-god" with its horizontal gaze and flightless wings is enjoying a second coming as the god of London. This irony, which perhaps brings with it the suggestion that the discovery of the "winged beast" in some measure fulfills the reign of the Anti-Christ prophesied by the coming of the beast in Revelation 13, is given a final, knife-like twist in the last three stanzas of the poem. First Rossetti looks ahead to the day when "ships of unknown sail and prow," the ships perhaps of "some tribe of the Australian plough," will carry the "Bull-god" from the "desert place" where England's capital once stood as a "relic … / Of London, not of Nineveh" ( Works, p. 58). On finding the "Bull-god" in the ruins of London, he conjectures, these possibly antepodean people of the distant future "when / Man's age is hoary among men" might justifiably assume that the English "race / … walked not in Christ's lowly ways, / But bowed its pride and vowed its praise / Unto the God of Nineveh." The last stanza of the poem makes it clear that what initially arose as a fanciful comparison between Nineveh and London ("the smile rose first,—anon drew nigh / The thought") has now become so frighteningly real that the "Bull-god" seems all the time to have been the god of London rather than of Nineveh. The final twist of the knife occurs in the last two lines of the poem where Rossetti asks: "O Nineveh, was this thy God,—/ Thine also, mighty Nineveh?" By the conclusion of the poem the "burden of Nineveh" has indeed, in Oliver Elton's words, become "the burden of London."³¹

Only once more in his life did Rossetti use the arrival of an ancient monument in London as the occasion for a satirical poem. In 1878 Cleopatra's Needle was erected on the Thames embankment³² and three years later Rossetti used the historical associations both of Cleopatra and of the word "needle" itself to inveigh against what he saw as England's indifference to the "sweet speech" ( Works, p. 233) of its finest poets. In "Tiber, Nile, and Thames" (1881) he makes an extraordinary connection between the Egyptian "obelisk" and the "chill stone" of London's streets that "with poison froze the god-fired breath" of Keats, Coleridge, and Chatterton. The basic link in this connection is forged in the octave of the sonnet where Rossetti builds up the associations of Cleopatra's Needle by recounting the legend that "Fulvia, Mark Anthony's shameless wife" used "her sharp needle" to pierce the "god-like tongue" of the "murdered Cicero." Perhaps because the restrictions of the sonnet form allowed Rossetti to present only the bare essentials of the connection between Fulvia's needle and Cleopatra's, between the grisly fate of Cicero and the Romantic poets whom he mentions, "Tiber, Nile, and Thames" does not rise much above the level of the "grim anecdote" (Letters, IV, 1838) embodied in its octave. It is impos sible to say, and hence futile to ask, what the poem would have been like if Rossetti had developed its central metaphor—as he doubtless could have—with the ominous and pessimistic intensity of "The Burden of Nineveh."

Late in 1852, Rossetti took time off from his Marian and Dantean paintings then in progress to write what, in a burlesque, cockney spirit, he called "summat on the Dook" ( Letters, I, 116). The funeral of the Duke of Wellington took place on November 18, 1852, and the "public frenzy" surrounding it, he told Thomas Woolner a few months later, was sufficient to wring "something de rigeur" from even the "most apathetic" ( Letters, I, 133) of its spectators—Rossetti himself. In view of Rossetti's inability, laconically expressed in "On the Field of Waterloo" (1849), to respond either positively ("I believe one should have thrilled") or negatively ("Am I to weep?" [ Works, p. 186]) to the great victory and massive carnage of the Duke's most famous battle, it is indeed surprising that he should have written a poem thirteen stanzas long on "Wellington's Funeral." Of course Rossetti was writing as a contemporary of Tennyson, who was made poet laureate less than two years earlier; and it is of the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" that we will be immediately reminded by "Wellington's Funeral." But it was not an "ode" that Rossetti intended to write. Characteristically, he uses the "duteous mourning" and "reverent mood" ( Works, p. 196) surrounding the state funeral as the occasion for a meditation, not on Wellington's military victories, but on the "solemn mirth" that accompanies a soul's "new birth" into Heaven. "If our eyes were opened," he asks—perhaps echoing Blake's "If the doors of perception were cleansed"—would the "escort [that] floats / Here" not appear as "Fiery horses, chariots / Fire-footed?" For Rossetti this particular "soul's labour shall be scann'd / And found good" by God because of the "peace which this man wrought / Passing well" in Europe. In the central stanzas of the poem Rossetti supplies the corrective to the Church's abuse of the "not peace, but a sword" text which he had so bitterly condemned in "Vox Ecclesiae, Vox Christi." The only valid reason for resorting to "bloodshed Christ abhorr'd," he maintains in "Wellington's Funeral," is to bring about peace:

"'Twas thus in His decrees
Who Himself, the Prince of Peace,
For His harvest's high increase
Sent a sword."

(Works, p. 196)

Rossetti brings "Wellington's Funeral" to a close—after saluting the "Veterans" of the Napoleonic Wars and using the French Coup d'Etat of December 2, 1851, to suggest the vanity of Napoleon's imperialistic hopes—by returning, once more, to Wellington, the man, whose "long tale of conquering strife / Shows no triumph like his life / Lost and won" ( works, p. 197).

Despite such memorable touches as the oxymoron "solemn mirth," there are several unsatisfactory images and metaphors in "Wellington's Funeral." The "banshee-strain" with which the dead at Waterloo are credited is only marginally less inappropriate than the comparison between Wellington's achievements and the "All Hail!'" with which Gabriel greeted the Blessed Virgin at the Annunciation. The impression left by the poem is that, as a poet, Rossetti is trying to participate in and comment on the pompous solemnity of Wellington's funeral but that his mind cannot entirely escape from the preoccupations of the Marian work with which he was engaged as a painter. However, although certain touches in the poem are regrettable it is difficult to deny the sincerity of Rossetti's hope that, with Wellington's "great work" in establishing the basis for European peace, "Michael's sword" ( works, p. 196), "once lent for human lack," will at last be "rendered back" to God.

History, of course, has not confirmed Rossetti's hope for a lasting peace in Europe. Two of his later sonnets, "After the French Liberation of Italy" (1859) and "After the German Subjugation of France, 1871," were occasioned by breaches of the peace which occurred in his own lifetime. The connection between a corrupt society and a whore, which occurs not only in "The Burden of Nineveh" but also in "Dante at Verona" (1848-50)—where Rossetti puns on the word Republic ("RESPUBLICA—a public thing: / A shameful shameless prostitute") to describe Florence who "takes by turn … / A night with each" ( works, p. 13) of her rulers—forms the central metaphor of both these later political sonnets. Although, as his brother records, Rossetti approved of the "French Liberation of Italy" in 1859, or, more strictly speaking, Napoleon III's expulsion of Austria from Lombardy in that year, "he objected to … other features of [Napoleon III's] Italian policy" ("'Notes," p. 667). Having observed Rossetti's pessimism develop out of the "revolutionary series" of sonnets into "The Burden of Nineveh" it is not surprising to learn that he wrote "After the French Liberation of Italy" "to commemorate his forecast of bad times for Europe generally" ("Notes," p. 667). In the octave of the sonnet the encounter between Europe, the "loveless whore," and Napoleon III's France is described with explicit and memorable pungency:

with a single kiss
At length, and with one laugh of satiate bliss,
The wearied man a minute rests above
The wearied woman, no more urged to move
In those long throes of longing.

(Works, p. 205)

The "forecast of bad times" comes in the sestet of the sonnet in the form of the "harlot's child," conceived in Europe's "bought body … to scourge her for her sin."

This "harlot's child" finally makes its presence felt in "After the German Subjugation of France, 1871," which is a subtler and more complex sonnet than "After the French Liberation of Italy." Here, after a gestation period of "years for months," the whore's "babe new-born; / Out of the womb's rank furnace" is present at her "wedding feast" ( works, p. 217). Parodying the "gospel-tongues of flame" (works, p. 179) which he had sensed in the "Place de la Bastille"—that symbol of liberation from repression—in 1849, Rossetti says that it is the "fiery tongues [of] … / Hell's Pentecost," coupled with a chorus of "scoffs" from such Biblical traitors as Absalom and Shimei, which provide the "tumultuous sound" to "hail this birth" of the "harlot's child." The poem closes on the terrible and apocalyptic image of the "closing teeth of Hell" ripping the flesh of the whore's "Lord of yesterday" (Napoleon III's France) to the accompaniment of the "vanished world's last yell." In the description of the whore's womb as a "rank furnace" there is perhaps something of Milton's Hell, which is also described as a "Furnace " in Paradise Lost I.62. But it is finally Blake's "London," where the "Harlot's curse … blights with plagues the Marriage hearse," that is most insistently recalled by "After the German Subjugation of France, 1871." Indeed there is something of the fiercely satirical connection between social and sexual evil in Blake's poem translated to the sphere of international politics in Rossetti's two sonnets of 1859 and 1871.

With only one exception, a sonnet on the assassination of "Czar Alexander the Second (13th of March 1881)," Rossetti wrote no poems on contemporary political events in the last decade of his life. This does not mean, however, that he abandoned completely the themes of his political poems of the late forties and early fifties. Rather, he transferred the central, overriding theme of all his political poems—the paramount importance of God over Man—to the realm of his two historical ballads—"The White Ship" (1878-80) and "The King's Tragedy" (1881). It is permissible to speculate that it was Rossetti's profound and increasing pessimism over political events in Europe between the late forties and the early seventies that led him, towards the end of his life, to express his religio-political ideas in an historical rather than a contemporary context. A brief examination of "Czar Alexander the Second" will show, not only that Rossetti maintained a consistent political position from 1848 to 1881, but also that his political thinking is central to the two historical ballads of 1878-81.

Rossetti's conviction that the assassination of Czar Alexander the Second "bears witness of his people's woe" ( Works, p. 233) to God is reminiscent of the warnings against regicide, delivered from the same religious platform, in "At the Sun-Rise in 1848." Rossetti makes it clear that his sympathy for the murdered Czar arose from the fact that "Alexander the Liberator,"³³ as Swinburne sarcastically called him, had granted the Russian serfs "rich freedom, lifelong land, whereon to sheave / Their country's harvest." Rossetti clearly did not share Swinburne's estimation of Czar Alexander II as an "hypocritical oppressor" who, above all, was "guilty of monarchy" (Swinburne Letters, IV, 260, 203). To Rossetti the Czar's murderers are "the first / Of Russia's traitors." They are guilty, not only of regicide, but of using, and provoking the serfs to use on them, the very "torment"—the "knout's red-ravening fangs"—that the Czar's "edicts disallow'd." Here can be seen emerging clearly for the first time Rossetti's championship of a liberal monarch. It is surely no coincidence that in the same year that he wrote "Czar Alexander the Second" he chose as the subject of "The King's Tragedy" a monarch whom he also conceived to have been a liberal—King James I of Scotland. W. M. Rossetti, who in 1881 was encouraged by his brother to write his sequence of overtly political Democratic Sonnets (and then, for mainly practical reasons, discouraged by his brother from publishing them until 1907³⁴ ), tells us that it was not merely James I's "interesting combination of poetry and kingship" which attracted Rossetti but, perhaps more important, his "virtues … in vindicating the common people against oppression" ("Notes," p. 660). By Rossetti's conception of him. James I is the "King whom poor men bless for their King" ( Works, p. 149) because:

he … tamed the nobles' lust
And curbed their power and pride,
And reached out an arm to right the poor
Through Scotland far and wide.

(Works, p. 147)

Clearly Rossetti, as a liberal Royalist, saw King James I and Czar Alexander II in a similar light. To him both were just, humanitarian rulers whose liberal reforms in favor of the common people resulted in their murders by men who were traitors, not just to their respective countries and people, but to God. Moreover, Rossetti's James I is a Christ-like figure who calmly resigns himself to the "will" of the God "Who has one same death for a hind / And one same death for a King" ( Works, p. 149) and, at the end of the poem, goes to his death neither as a "King" nor as a "Knight" but as a "Man" (Works, p. 158). In the last analysis, it is the perception that all men, be they humanist rulers or humble peasants, are, in death, subordinate to the will of God that lies at the core of all Rossetti's political poems, be they contemporary or historical. Rossetti's most explicit statement of this fundamentally Christian view of existence is to be found in "The White Ship." Here "poor Berold" the "butcher of Rouen" (Works, p. 138) uses the drowning of King Henry I's son to exemplify the perception, expressed chorically at the beginning, middle, and end of the poem, that though "Lands are swayed by a King on a throne…. The sea hath no King but God alone" (Works, pp. 138, 141, and 144). It is this assertion of the omnipotence of a Christian God in the face of the evil, corruption, and death of the world that rescues Rossetti's political poems and historical ballads, pessimistic as they unquestionably are, from skepticism.

As a pessimist Rossetti may perhaps underestimate man's ability to choose right over wrong, to avoid the dreadful consequences of his own mistakes, but this does not preclude him from deferring final judgment to the just, wrathful, and omnipresent God who watches and waits to judge the world in the background of all Rossetti's serious religio-political poems. It is possible to ignore the many-sided sympathy and the compassionate sense of justice, that made Rossetti, in youth, cautious of the destructive aspect of revolution and, in maturity, the champion of liberal monarchs. It is possible to deplore the absurdities of his imagination when they occur in the wrong place, such as when Gabriel is brought in to give an "All Hail!" to the Duke of Wellington or when sex is used, perhaps a little too graphically, as a political metaphor in the sonnets of 1859 and 1871. But it is difficult either to ignore or to deplore the judiciousness and sincerity with which he examines and inveighs against what he saw as a contemporary failure to regard the teachings of Christ. In contrast to Tennyson and to Kipling—whose "Recessional" would furnish an interesting comparison with "The Burden of Nineveh"—Rossetti was chiefly a poet-painter rather than a poet-prophet. Perhaps because of the hostile reception of Ecce Ancilla Domini! in 1850 he could not feel any deep sense of identity with the reading public to which his warnings were directed. But like many politically and socially conscious men of his time Rossetti felt a sense of impending doom as Austria, France, and Germany spread their tentacles across Europe and as the brutal materialism and colossal bestiality of his own society took it away from the teachings of true Christianity. Living in a proud; pompous, and militaristic time Rossetti envisioned the world on the brink of the Apocalypse: he could find the solutions to contemporary problems only in the eschatology of Christianity. It was in the context of the ultimate and terrible consequences of man's indifferences to God that Rossetti viewed the battle between authority and liberty, between monarchy and democracy, between the institutional Church and the "true Church," between mankind and man, a debate which is as old as what, to him, was an aging world.

Notes

¹Rossetti and His Circle (London, 1922), caption to frontispiece.

² See, for instance, Rossetti's letter of 1880, quoted in T. Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Boston, 1883), pp. 200-201, in which he writes, not without irony: "My friends … consider me exceptionally averse to politics; and I suppose I must be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life! At the same time I will add that, among those whose opinions I most value, some think me not altogether wrong when I venture to speak of the momentary momentousness and eternal futility of many noisiest questions. However, you must simply view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to such matters." The present essay bears out Caine's own comment, Recollections, pp. 270-271, that "it would, nevertheless, be wrong to say that [Rossetti] was wholly indifferent to important political issues, of which he took often a very judicial view."

³ See Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), I, No. 4. Although none of the cards is illustrated by Surtees, two are reproduced in H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of His Life and Art (London, 1899), pp. 214-215 and several in The Bookman (London), 40 (June, 1911), 130-131….

⁴ See Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London, 1889), pp. 135-136. It is notable that Rossetti's Knave of Spades (Peel) contains references to Free Trade, Catholic Emancipation, and the Irish Problem.

⁵ The Commission's statement of purpose is quoted in John Steegman, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830-1870 (London, 1970), p. 130.

⁶Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl (Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), I, 16. Hereafter cited as Letters.

⁷ Rossetti's Knave of Diamonds is inscribed "OVER-BECK PINXIT" in probable reference to the fact (see John Nicoll, The Pre-Raphaelites [London, 1970], p. 19) that "it was initially proposed" (doubtless with the approval of Prince Albert) that "Overbeck … should be asked" to decorate the new Houses with frescoes.

⁸ F. G. Stephens, cited by William M. Rossetti, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir (London, 1895), I, 96-97.

⁹ William M. Rossetti, "Notes," in The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1911), p. 673. Hereafter cited as Works.

¹⁰ William M. Rossetti, "Notes," in Works, p. 663.

¹¹ Leonid M. Arinshtein with William E. Fredeman, "William Michael Rossetti's Democratic Sonnets," VS, 14 (1971), 266.

¹² H. N. Fairchild, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," in Christianity and Romanticism in the Victorian Era, Vol. IV of Religious Trends in English Poetry (Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), 391.

¹³ See William M. Rossetti, "Notes," in Works, p. 664.

¹⁴ The sonnet on which the last issue of The Germ closes. See Arinshtein and Fredeman, p. 242n.

¹⁵ See John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), pp. 167-168.

¹⁶ Kerrison Preston points this out in Blake and Rossetti (London, 1944), p. 67.

¹⁷ [J. C. Earle], "Rossetti's Poems," Catholic World, 19 (May, 1874), 271, sees "On Refusal of Aid between Nations" as an "exquisite vindication of one of the least popular of the condemnations in the Syllabus—that of non-intervention." It is worth noting that in August, 1847 (i.e. within a year of the accession of Pius IX) Rossetti expressed delight over the new Pope's attempts to take the lead in the struggle to achieve Italian unity and independence. Writing to his mother about the Austrians' forced retreat from Ferrara in Northern Italy at that time, he says gleefully: "The papers … affirm … that the Pope has said that, if the unjustifiable interference is continued, he shall first make a protest to all the Sovereigns of Europe against Austria; that, in case this should fail, he will excommunicate both Emperor and people; and that, when driven to the last extremity, he will himself ride in the van of his own army with the sword and the Cross" (Letters, I, 32). Of course, when Pius IX refused to make war on the Austrians in 1848, the liberal hopes which had been pinned on him were dashed, and not long after this the Pope himself largely abandoned his politically liberal ideas.

¹⁸ Gabriel Sarrazin, Poetes modernes de L'Angleterre (Paris, 1884), p. 238.

¹⁹A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1949), p. 104.

²⁰ This is the first stanza of "The Burden of Nineveh" as it appears in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, August, 1856, p. 512. The justification for quoting it here, in preference to the first stanza of the Poems (1870) version of the poem, is that it perhaps conveys more truly Rossetti's mood when he first confronted the "Bull-god" in 1850. The narrator of the later version of "The Burden of Nineveh" is a more serious student of ancient art who has spent several hours "rejoicing" over the art of "Dead Greece" (works, p. 55)—perhaps the Elgin Marbles.

²¹ This phrase occurs only in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, August, 1856, p. 514.

²² The details of the transportation and the dates of arrival of these colossi are given in J. Gadd, The Stones of Assyria (London, 1936), pp. 124-127 and 159-160.

²³ See Gadd, p. 160; and see also the Illustrated London News, February 28, 1852, p. 184 for a picture of one of the human-headed winged lions being hauled up the front steps of the British Museum ….

²⁴ See for example Victorian and Later English Poets, ed. James Stephens, Edwin L. Beck, and Royall H. Snow (New York, 1949), p. 1239.

²⁵ See Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain, 1750-1850 (London, 1973), pp. 127-128 for a discussion of the relationship between Ruskin's Notes and Hunt's painting. It is worth noting that Rossetti was not the only one amongst his family and artistic associates who was interested in Nineveh. In a letter from Brighton dated August 14, 1850—only weeks before the composition of "The Burden of Nineveh"—Christina Rossetti tells William Michael that she has borrowed "the first volume of Layard's Nineveh" (The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with Some Supplementary Letters and Appendices, ed. William Michael Rossetti [London, 1908], p. 14). And Hunt tells us that sometime earlier than this he had applied unsuccessfully for the post of draftsman on Layard's second expedition to Nineveh (see Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood [London, 1905-06], 1. 346). Moreover, in a letter to his brother of August 30, 1851 Rossetti compares the rusticated complexions of Hunt and Millais with the "'sun-dried bricks' of Nineveh" (Letters, I. 103)—a phrase that occurs continually throughout Layard's Nineveh—thus raising the possibility that a majority of the Pre-Raphaelite brothers were conversant with the book. Nor is it fortuitous that, in the version of "The Burden of Nineveh" that appeared and fascinated Ruskin (see "Notes," Works, p. 649) in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Rossetti pointedly alludes to the controversy over "Whether the great R. A.'s a bunch / Of gods or dogs, and whether Punch / Is right about the P.R.B."

²⁶ It is likely that the illustrations of the disinterment and transportation of the colossal winged bull which serve as frontispieces to both volumes of Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and its Remains (London and New York, 1849) were a secondary source of inspiration for Rossetti's poem. Moreover, Rossetti's source for the image of the London crowds going past "as marshalled to the strut / Of ranks of gypsum quaintly cut" (works, p. 58), an image which forms a striking visual parallel between the people of London and Nineveh, is almost certainly the numerous illustrations of tablets depicting processions of one sort or another in Layard's Nineveh. Similarly the description, towards the beginning of the poem, of the "carven warriors" with their bows, "cymbals," and "chariots" (works, p. 55) which, Rossetti imagines, must have seemed to come alive when the "sculptured" courts of Nineveh were unearthed, is strongly reminiscent of tablets depicting war and hunting parties that are illustrated in Layard, II, 66. The suggestion in stanza 3 of the 1870 version of "The Burden of Nineveh" that the "Bull-god" was moulded ("rush-wrapping, / Wound'ere it dried, still ribbed the thing") is less accurate than the original lines: "some colour'd Arab straw matting. / Half ripp'd, was still upon the thing." For Layard's description of the matting woven by Arab women (Rossetti's "brown maidens [who] sing / From purple mouths" while moving "languidly") for the transportation of the colossus, see Layard, II, 67. Layard frequently describes his excitement at unearthing various Assyrian artifacts, alluded to by Rossetti in stanzas 4, 11, and 12: see Layard, I, 73 (the bull): I, 299, II, 14-16 and 206 (the "ivory tablets" of stanza 12): and II, 71-72. Many other details in the poem are taken from Layard's spirited account of the life of the expeditionary party. For the Christians kneeling in the shadow of the "Bull-god" (st. 8), see Layard, II, 293-294 and also I, 234 and 243; and for Layard's comments on Nineveh as Egypt's "antiquity" (st. 11), see II, 21-23. The "winged teraphim" of stanza 12 are probably the images of Baal described in Layard, II, 341. Many of the Biblical accounts of Nineveh's destruction used by Rossetti are also quoted in Nineveh and Its Remains; see, for instance, II, 192 and 338.

²⁷Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter-Poet of Heaven in Earth (London, 1928), p. 304.

²⁸ See Layard, II, 360-36 1 and II, 34 5 and 362n.

²⁹ "Problems of Form and Content in the Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," VP. 2 (1964), 17.

³⁰ Rossetti's Queen of Hearts in his "Playing-Cards" is a gold sovereign engraved with the head of Queen Victoria to show the "real reigning … sovereign" of Victorian England; see The Bookman (London), 40 (June, 1911), 130-131.

³¹A Survey of English Literature, 1830-1880 (London, 1920), II, 5.

³² For an account of the shipment and installation of the Needle, by the man who financed it, see Erasmus Wilson, Our Egyptian Obelisk: Cleopatra's Needle (London, 1877).

³³The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Yale Univ. Press, 1961), IV, 119 and 128.

³⁴ See Arinshtein and Fredeman, pp. 242-246.