As many of his critics have demonstrated, most recently Antony H. Harrison, 3 forms of intertextuality constitute a central feature of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry.¹ For Harrison, many of Rossetti's poems, such as "A Portrait" (whose chief pre-text is in his view Browning's "My Last Duchess"), are "deliberate intertexts, works which manipulate palimpsests parodically in order both to resist the social actuality which obsessed his contemporaries and to open up new 'tracks' for future writers." For Harrison, what is distinct about Rossetti's use of intertextuality is its "tentative and oblique repudiation, subversion, and devaluation of conventional ideological statement" and its "reconstitution of ideology in purely aesthetic terms."²

One poem that demonstrates some of the intertextual patterns described by Harrison, but which he ignores, is Rossetti's sonnet "On the Field of Waterloo." Unpublished in Rossetti's lifetime, the sonnet is part of a sequence of verse and prose epistolary travel Notes, written for his brother William Michael, in late September and October of 1849 during his trip to France and Belgium with Holman Hunt, "the longest and most extensive continental wandering" of his life.³

So then, the name which travels side by side
With English life from childhood—Waterloo—
Means this. The sun is setting. "Their strife grew
Till the sunset, and ended," says our guide.
It lacked the "chord" by stage-use sanctified,
Yet I believe one should have thrilled. For me,
I grinned not, and 'twas something;—certainly
These held their point, and did not turn but died:

So much is very well. "Under each span
Of these ploughed fields" ('tis the guide still) "there rot
Three nations' slain, a thousand-thousandfold."
Am I to weep? Good sirs, the earth is old:
Of the whole earth there is no single spot
But hath among its dust the dust of man.⁴

The most salient pre-text for this sonnet is Wordsworth's sonnet "After Visiting the Field of Waterloo," which appears, as does Rossetti's later poem, in a sequence of travel-inspired verse—in Wordsworth's case Memorials of A Tour on the Continent 1820 (1822). Rossetti's sonnet does not, however, merely reconstitute the ideology of Wordsworth's earlier sonnet "in purely aesthetic terms," but actively questions its universalized humanitarianism.

Significantly, Wordsworth's sonnet is a reflection on feelings after the event, whereas Rossetti's dramatizes in the present tense the feelings of the speaker as he visits the storied field. In the octet of Wordsworth's sonnet the speaker imagines the conventional iconographic personification Victory, "a winged Goddess—clothed in vesture wrought / Of rainbow colours"⁵ hovering, diaphanously, over the battlefield and, suddenly, vanishing:

She vanished; leaving prospect blank and cold
Of wind-swept corn that wide around us rolled
In dreary billows, wood, and meagre cot,
And monuments that soon must disappear.
(11. 6-9)

The ephemerality and evanescence of the English victory, symbolized by the vanished personification and the "monuments that soon must disappear," are counterposed against images of enduring, but drearily monotonous and repetitive, natural processes that survive the symbols of human ambition, glory, and power. These are the images, not the imagined personification of Victory, that the Wordsworthian speaker encounters directly at Waterloo.

With the coordinate conjunction "Yet," the Italian sonnet turns, belatedly, in meaning in line 10:

Yet a dread local recompense we found;
While glory seemed betrayed, while patriot-zeal
Sank in our hearts, we felt as men should feel
With such vast hoards of hidden carnage near,
And horror breathing from the silent ground!
(11. 10-14)

Although the English speaker does not perceive the "glory" or "patriot-zeal" he anticipated, he feels something more ethical and universally human, "as men should feel." The concluding lines move from the distancing visual imagery of the extended octet to more immediate auditory and kinesthetic imagery. The silence of the field and the buried dead becomes an audible murmur of wasted human life. Instead of the glory of English victory, the speaker feels and hears the horror of human carnage.

For Rossetti's speaker as for Wordsworth's, Waterloo is storied ground; for the later Victorian, a name resonant with associations from childhood. Rossetti's speaker observes his response to both the battlefield and his theatrical guide, who seeks to elicit from the speaker a response of Wordsworthian sublimity. As the sun sets the guide refers to the strife which "grew till sunset." Yet the speaker who "should have thrilled" does not, though he recognizes—with considerable understatement—"'twas something" that the English "held their point, and did not turn but died." In the octet, the speaker fails to respond to the Wordsworthian imperative of sublime, universal human feeling.⁶ If Wordsworth's speaker and companion "felt as men should feel," Rossetti's speaker fails to thrill as "one should have thrilled"; if Wordsworth italicizes and thereby foregrounds his auxiliary of obligation, Rossetti, in his failure to oblige, does not.

In the sestet of Rossetti's narrative sonnet, the guide continues his attempt to elicit from the Rossettian speaker the appropriate universal, sublime "should" feelings by remarking that the dead of three nations, "a thousand-thousand fold," rot at Waterloo. Once again the speaker does not respond appropriately nor does he know how to respond: "Am I to weep?" He appears to lack the normative human feeling that the Wordsworthian speaker refers to as "what men should feel." The empirical, skeptical Rossettian speaker knows too much to feel as the Wordsworthian speaker, who himself had felt too deeply to respond merely as a conventional and insularly patriotic English visitor. Rossetti's speaker dismisses the Wordsworthian sublime by observing the scientific fact that Waterloo, despite its storied associations, is not unique; the whole earth, not merely Waterloo, is a burial ground: "of the whole earth there is no single spot / But hath among its dust the dust of man."

Rossetti's self-regarding speaker rejects the humanitarian sublimity of Wordsworth's earlier sonnet, which itself had rejected a parochial patriotism, for the sake of a skeptical, anti-ideological empiricism. The fact that the entire earth is a burial ground, and that the visitor who knows this cannot respond to Waterloo as he should—as a dramatic special case—subverts and devalues the ambitious, universalized humanitarianism of Wordsworth's "After Visiting the Field of Waterloo," substituting for it a dogged empiricism of observation and feeling. Rossetti's reevaluation here is not overtly "aesthetic" as Harrison argues are many of Rossetti's post-texts, but empirical to the point of extreme skepticism. "On the Field of Waterloo" "creates the illusion of altogether eliding and superseding ideology," not for the sake of textual "self-reflexivity and circularity" (Harrison, pp. 746, 759), but for the sake of fidelity to both emotional and scientific fact. For Rossetti, Wordsworth was "good, but unbearable" (Letters, 1:361), and it is against this "unbearable" and overbearing universalizing of humanitarian feeling, Wordsworth's emphasis on what man "should feel," that Rossetti's sonnet reacts.⁷

In the prose section of his letter to his brother (October 18, 1849) that includes this sonnet, Rossetti confesses "Between you and me, William, Waterloo is simply a bore" (Letters, 1:81). This confidence, this "se cret," Rossetti dramatizes and extrapolates, through intertextuality, into an accomplished sonnet utterance. Although sympathetic to the progressive movements of 1848, both to Chartism in England and republicanism in France (Doughty, pp. 71-72), Rossetti's insistence on fidelity to his own inner emotional life rendered him skeptical of political abstractions and the universalizing moral-political discourses of a previous generation, the generation not only of Wordsworth but of his father, a liberal political exile from the post-Napoleonic Naples of Ferdinand IV.⁸ This skepticism is enacted pointedly in "On the Field of Waterloo."

Notes

¹ The most complete discussion of sources and influences on Rossetti's poetry is to be found in Florence S. Boos, The Poetry of Dante G. Rossetti: A Critical Reading and Source Study (The Hague, 1976), pp. 259-286.

² Antony H. Harrison, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Parody and Ideology," SEL 29 (1989): 746, 760. See also his Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems (Charlottesville, 1989).

³ Oswald Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A Victorian Romantic, 2nd ed. (London, 1960), p. 86.

⁴The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl (Oxford, 1965), 1:80-81. The sonnet was not published in either the 1870 or 1881 editions of Rossetti's poems, nor included in William Michael's 1886 edition of The Collected Works. It first appears in William Michael's edition of The Family Letters (London, 1895), 2:78-79, and has since been reprinted in Doughty's edition of The Letters and as part of the entire verse sequence entitled "A Trip to Paris and Belgium," in The Essential Rossetti, ed. John Hollander (New York, 1990), pp. 112-133.

⁵William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven, 1981), 2:411.

⁶ David G. Riede has noted "a necessary diminishment from the bardic Wordsworthian stance" in Rossetti's poetry (Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Vic torian Vision [Ithaca, 1983], p. 117).

⁷ A similar rejection of seer-like generalization can be seen in "The Woodspurge," which David Riede designates a "poetry of nonstatement" (p. 57), "a kind of minimalist poetry" in which "meaning cannot be focused beyond the reach of the senses" (p.58). Riede in his chapter "Diminished Romanticism," from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, argues that in Rossetti's poetry "the more manageable province" of male-female love comes to replace the ambitious Wordsworthian themes of the '"vast empire' of nature and the universal" (p. 121).

⁸ For an account of Gabriele Rossetti's somewhat operatic political career in Naples, see Doughty, pp. 20-21, pp. 28-29.