SOURCE: "The Web of Eroticism in Rossetti's 'Troy Town,' 'Eden Bower,' and 'Rose Mary,'" in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer, 1987, pp. 333-44.

In the introductory sonnet to The House of Life Dante Gabriel Rossetti suggests that the sonnet pays "tribute" or addresses itself to a threefold theme—life, love, and death, a focus which his ballads share.¹ Several of his early ballads, written between 1848 and 1854 when he was also busy translating the Vita Nuova, offer variations on a Dantesque vision of love as the creative, dynamic force in this triune complex. Thus love, as a source of heavenly salvation in "The Staff and Scrip," triumphs over death in a setting characterized by ornate medievalism. In the more earthy "Stratton Water," love—this time physical rather than spiritual—is a natural, vital force, a prime mover in the cycle of life. And "The Bride's Prelude," a third ballad from this early period, shows that life has no force, no vivifying movement, without the saving power of love. But in mid-life, no longer content with the vision of the Vita Nuova, Rossetti added a new dimension to his old theme, focusing in the ballads from this period on the destructive potential of love in its relationship to life and death. In "Troy Town," "Eden Bower," and "Rose Mary," written between 1869 and 1871, the medievalism that Rossetti found useful in presenting the spiritual quality of creative love gives way to a new metaphor—emphatic eroticism.

Many critics have written about the erotic qualities of Rossetti's art, but his own comments prove most telling. In response to Robert Buchanan's charge of "fleshliness," Rossetti defended the sensual elements in his poetry. Admitting that the sonnet now called "Nuptial Sleep" embodies a "beauty of universal function" (482), Rossetti argued that the spirituality of the greater part of The House of Life outweighs the sensuality of this one stanza: "here all the passionate and just delights of the body are declared—somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably—to be naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times" (482). Further, he notes:

That I may nevertheless take a wider view than some poets or critics of how much, in the material conditions absolutely given to man to deal with as distinct from his spiritual aspirations, is admissible within the limits of Art,—this I say, is possible enough; nor do I wish to shrink from such responsibility. But to state that I do so to the ignoring or overshadowing of spiritual beauty, is an absolute falsehood…. [485-86]

When Rossetti speaks of "material conditions" in relation to love, he speaks of physical passion, the concrete manifestation of an always more important spiritual relationship. This particular argument presents none of the irreconcilable tension that certain scholars find between themes associated with "Body's Beauty" and "Soul's Beauty" in Rossetti's works.² It gives credence instead to Yeats's view of the morally satisfying aesthetic synthesis that Rossetti creates: "He listens to the cry of the flesh till it becomes proud and passes beyond the world where some immense desire that the intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire for a body's warmth and softness." Thus physical passion becomes rarified, but as Bowra notes, never "so rarified that it seems to have no relation to any familiar world." For, he concludes, "Rossetti knew that there is one beauty of the flesh and another beauty of the spirit," which "in the end … are united in a single harmony," so that ideally, "each fulfills and glorifies the other."³ Although Rossetti, as a painter and poet, is often accused of sensual excesses, three of his most sensuous poems, "Troy Town," "Eden Bower," and "Rose Mary," show a moral perspective which condemns sensuality that is unalloyed with a more powerful spirituality, even as Rossetti seems, finally, to question the redemptive power of spiritual love.

"Troy Town" and "Eden Bower" are each designed to illustrate an upset in the ideal balance between the worship of beauty of the spirit and beauty of the flesh, a dichotomy drawn in the sonnets written to accompany two paintings. These sonnets, "Soul's Beauty" and "Body's Beauty," clarify the stories behind the beautiful women in Sibylla Palmifera and Lilith. In Sibylla Palmifera Rossetti intended "to embody the … Principle of Beauty which draws all high-toned men to itself, whether with the aim of embodying it in art or attaining it in life."⁴ The worship of the lady in "Soul's Beauty" has an uplifting effect on her "bondsman" since following ideal beauty gives form to his life. On the other hand, the Lilith figure, in the painting for which the sonnet "Body's Beauty" was written, uses her beauty to destroy. She "draws men to watch the bright web she can weave / Till hearts and body and life are in its hold" (216). When the spiritual component in the quest for beauty is absent, the impulse toward that beauty becomes erotic rather than uplifting, and the outcome, according to Rossetti's essentially moral perspective, is destruction and death.

In "Troy Town" Rossetti presents the two faces of beauty and shows the destruction which results when beauty elicits a purely erotic response. Although the poem is a ballad, its narrative action is limited by Rossetti's focus on the moment of pause between two well-known stories. Prior to the Trojan War Helen, in the temple of Venus, offers the goddess a cup in the shape of her breast. In return for her gift, she asks for the love of Paris, to whom Venus owes a debt. Venus, with a smug awareness of future catastrophe, grants the wish, and Cupid's arrows strike the ill-fated pair. In the final stanza, Paris, caught in a web of desire, longs "to clasp" Helen's "golden head!" (307). Helen's reminder to Venus of her debt to Paris recalls the story which precedes the poem. The echoing refrain forecasts the fall of Troy, the story to come when Helen's beauty is rewarded as she wishes. The refrain—"O Troy Town! … Troy's down, / Tall Troy's on fire!"—and other repetitive devices do more than merely add to the suspense and the sense of inevitability. As Ronnalie Roper Howard comments: "The refrain has its own kind of music, a harsh clanging which suggests catastrophe … the refrain is the poem's comment on the destructiveness of eroticism and briefly sums up the whole theme of the poem in every stanza."⁵ The refrain functions as the warp of a fabric having alternating strands of eroticism and death.

The first stanza of "Troy Town," which establishes the thematic tension between "soul's beauty" and "body's beauty," is formally split by the alternating refrain lines. Helen is both "Heavenborn" and the earthly queen of Sparta. Her "two breasts" are "the sun and moon of the heart's desire," suggesting opposing forces (305).⁶ "Love's lordship" lies between the two poles of beauty and may by drawn in either direction. The refrain, which divides the stanza and focuses on the fall of Troy, serves to emphasize the destruction which results when eroticism, the attractive force of body's beauty, is out of control. The images of beauty in the stanza contrast sharply with the images of destruction in the refrain which laments the fall of Troy, "O Troy Town!, " and suggests spent passion through phallic and fire images, "O Troy's down, / Tall Troy's on fire!"

In addition to developing the idea of duality, the refrain links death with eroticism in the texture of "Troy Town." Those critical statements that have not been kind to this refrain seem based on a misunderstanding of Rossetti's intention. Friedman, who views the poem only as it relates to the ballad tradition, writes: "When Helen in the early passages is negotiating her translation to Troy, the burden … stimulates lively forebodings; in the later stanzas, it contributes nothing." But he does not see the refrain in terms of a sustained pattern of eroticism and death. Robert Cooper calls the refrain "monotonous." Waugh, who finds the poem effective when read aloud, notes that the refrain exercises "a hypnotic effect on the hearer, drawing him into the poem."⁷ This, it seems, is the effect Rossetti wished to create, in order to show, through the form of the poem, the seductive power of eroticism which ensnares "the hearts and body and life" (216) of those who are enthralled by body's beauty.

Rossetti uses repetition, another ballad device, to weave the stanzaic web more tightly. Howard names "repetition, sexual suggestion, and sexual symbolism" as the major poetic devices, noting that "repetition emphasizes physical passion, suggesting obsessive force."⁸ Further, these devices serve to enhance the already tight stanzaic structure. Each seven-line stanza has only three rhymes. Two of these are repeated in all fourteen stanzas, and, in addition to the refrain, every fourth line ends in "heart's desire." The prominent beat of the trochaic tetrameter lines alternates with the shorter, heavily stressed refrain. And the tetrameter lines often begin and end with stressed syllables in order to heighten the beat. This tight, almost metronomic, stanzaic pattern is augmented by repetitions which tend to group at points of erotic intensity. The conclusion of the poem, for example, is replete with repetition and added internal rhyme:

Paris turned upon his bed,
(O Troy Town!)
Turned upon his bed and said,
Dead at heart with heart's desire—
"Oh to clasp her golden head!"
(O Troy 's down,
Tall Troy's on fire!)
[307]

With the rhyme of "bed," "dead," and "head," Rossetti knots the strands of eroticism and death woven throughout the poem.

At another point of erotic intensity the imagery works with the repetition and internal rhyme to draw diverse elements in the narrative together. Specifically, the image of the apple unites the stories that precede and follow the incident narrated in the poem. Helen reminds Venus that "Once an apple stirred the beat / Of thy heart with heart's desire" (306). As Venus had coveted an apple to reward her beauty, Helen covets Paris, the ill-fated Trojan prince, as a reward for her own. The lines also suggest the biblical story in which, traditionally, an apple leads to sexual passion and another fall. Further, Helen relates the image of the apple to the earlier image of her breasts in a purely sensual stanza:

"Mine are apples grown to the south,
(O Troy Town!)
Grown to taste in the days of drouth,
Taste and waste to the heart's desire:
Mine are apples meet for his mouth."
(O Troy's down,
Tall Troy's on fire!)
[306]

The erotic nature of the relationship Helen seeks is clear. With the link between the apple, sexual passion, the garden of Eden, and the fall established, the web is complete. In the subsequent stanzas, with the prominent ballad rhythm suggesting inevitability, Venus and Cupid do their work, and when Paris falls victim to body's beauty, Troy falls with him.

In "Eden Bower," like "Troy Town" in its use of eroticism, Rossetti focuses directly on the Adamic myth. Lilith, a snake given woman's form for Adam's pleasure, has been cast outside the garden upon the creation of Eve, his human wife.⁹ In a long, seductive monologue culminating with her description of the Fall, Lilith tries to persuade the snake, her former mate, to exchange his shape for hers so that she can tempt Eve. Motivated by hatred and the desire for revenge, Lilith uses her sexuality as her strength, and the power of eroticism is once again the focus of the poem.

While "Troy Town" focuses on the fatal attraction of eroticism, Lilith's passion is repulsive or "grotesque."¹⁰ It is not simply body's beauty that ensnares in "Eden Bower." In its portrayal of the potentially destructive side of love, "Eden Bower" shows love's power to deceive. The central problem the poem presents is our inability to distinguish erotic attraction from love's spiritually uplifting passion. Here deceit leads man into the erotic death trap.

The element of deceit begins in the title of the poem, which plays upon the double significance of "Bower." In its relation to Eden the word suggests prelapsarian shelter, but it also evokes the connotation of a lady's bedroom, particularly to those familiar with Rossetti's "Song of the Bower." Thus, the drama of the poem takes place in a setting which combines innocence and experience. The changeable figure of Lilith introduces a further element of deception, for although "Not a drop of her blood was human, / … she was made like a soft sweet woman" (308). The form that eroticism takes, then, is problematic because passion so closely resembles love. Yet as the next stanza suggests, the consequences of mistaking the two are grave:

Lilith stood on the skirts of Eden;
(Alas the hour!))
She was the first that thence was driven;
With her was hell and with Eve was heaven.
[308]

Following Eve leads to salvation while the worship of Lilith results in damnation.¹¹

Throughout the poem the refrain relates the theme of deceit to the consequences of eroticism. The refrain line, "Sing Eden Bower!" is a final condensation of two earlier versions, "Sing the bower in flower, " and "Eden Bower's in flower. "¹² Although Rossetti came to see that the longer lines would interrupt the movement of the poem, the spirit of the original lines, which suggest that Eden is fruitful, happy, and safe, is retained. The alternate lines, "Alas the hour!" revised from "And it's the day and the hour!" emphasize the deception in the first lines by hinting at the impending fall. Thus Eden, like Lilith, seems to change its shape from stanza to stanza.

Rossetti adapts the incremental repetition techniques of the traditional ballad in order to create a pattern of duplicity and deceit. The ninth stanza, for example, which begins "O thou God, the Lord God of Eden!" echoes blasphemously in the tenth stanza, "O thou Snake, the King-snake of Eden!" as Lilith worships good and evil with the same words (309). Repetition draws a similar parallel in another pair of stanzas in which Lilith addresses the snake as "O my love, thou Love-snake of Eden!" and then "O bright Snake, the Death-worm of Adam!"(312). Much has been made of these lines as the link between eroticism and death, but they are also a part of the pattern of deception.¹³ The love that leads to hell often takes the same form as the love that leads to heaven. Further, the incremental series beginning "Lend thy shape for the love of Lilith!" and continuing, "for the hate of Adam … for the shame of Eden!" suggests a confusion of motivating emotions (310). The repetitive line "Lo God's grace, by the grace of Lilith!" (313) is far-reaching in its duplicity. The concept of grace figures prominently in several ballads that develop variations on the love theme. Death in "The Staff and Scrip," for example, becomes the lady's "gift and grace" (80) because dying for true love leads to salvation. In "Troy's Town" Venus laughs at Helen and taunts, "Thy gift hath grace" (307), suggesting that Helen will be rewarded with the love she requests, a grace that will lead, ironically, to destruction. "Eden Bower" draws upon both uses of "grace," emphasizing the duplicity in a relationship that can lead to eternal happiness or eternal damnation.

The biblical story in "Eden Bower" is, after all, a story of deceit. The serpent in the garden, whether it be the devil or Lilith, deceives Eve, who deceives Adam, who, in turn, tries to deceive God. But as Lilith points out in an imagined taunt to Eve, God will not be fooled although Adam will try to blame Eve who will accuse the snake. Both are cast out of Eden into a new life, but the pattern of duplicity continues. Eve will be both "bride" and "mother" (313); the pair will produce "two babes" who will be both "travail and treasure." Part of the tragedy of the poem's conclusion is the ambiguity regarding the nature of love that remains both a blessing and a curse.,

In "Rose Mary," written in 1871, Rossetti reworks the theme of deceit and attempts to resolve the problem left open at the end of "Eden Bower." This poem is staged once again in a medieval setting. Traditional gothic trappings—a crystal from the exotic East, a secret shrine full of symbols, a seer, and an atmosphere of mystery—adorn this poem as the elements of medieval romance decorate "The Staff and Scrip" and Bride's Prelude." Rose Mary, at her mother's urging, looks into the beryl stone to see if danger lurks on the path that her lover James will follow on his way to make shrift before their wedding day. Only a virgin, according to the tradition that Rossetti draws upon, can see into the beryl.¹⁴ Because Rose Mary is not a virgin, the vision that the beryl allows her is false. She sees an ambush in the valley where James's sworn foe, the Wardin of Holycleugh, waits. Advised to take the high road to avoid him, James is killed in an ambush on a misty hill. Evil spirits had entered the beryl stone and deceived the sinful seer. Watching over the dead knight's body, Rose Mary's mother finds a letter in his pocket wrapped in a lock of golden hair, not one of her daughter's dark tresses. The hair, she discovers, belongs to Jocelind, sister of the Wardin of Holycleugh, whom James intended to marry. Rose Mary, unaware of James's treachery, enters the shrine of the beryl. Conscious of the evil in the stone, she cleaves it with a sword, knowing that the act of destroying the stone will bring her death. Because she has remained faithful, she is transported to heaven while James is consigned to hell.

In keeping with the ballad tradition, "Rose Mary" begins with dialogue which is employed at intervals throughout. At times, particularly when the narrative advances, the language is beautifully and appropriately simple in the best ballad style:

Daughter, once more I bid you read;
But now let it be for your own need:
Because to-morrow, at break of day,
To Holy Cross he rides on his way
Your knight Sir James of Heronhaye."
[103]

The stanza, with the tetrameter rhythm of the traditional ballad, is once again Rossetti's own five-line variation. Vogel notes that the alternation of couplets and triplets and the limited enjambment produce the effect of a refrain ballad, which he describes as "a kind of inexorableness—a feeling of advancing steadily through the tale's ominous events to its final catastrophe."¹⁵ Rossetti avoids the abrupt transitions that are characteristic of the ballad only by introducing the Beryl Songs to link the sections.

Although "Rose Mary" has much in common with the traditional ballad both in form and in narrative development, like Rossetti's other ballads it is not simply a poem that tells a story. Although the unifying force of the erotic metaphor in the earlier ballads is absent in "Rose Mary," the same human passions concern Rossetti. The idea of love as a deceiver, developed in "Eden Bower," is broadened in "Rose Mary" where life itself becomes a mystery to be read and interpreted. After Rose Mary has been deceived by the beryl, her mother's words sum up the theme of the poem:

"Ah! would to God I clearly told
How strong those powers, accurst old:
Their heart is the ruined house of lies;
O girl, they can seal the sinful eyes,
Or show the truth by contraries."
[117]

It has been said that Rossetti's The House of Life might more appropriately be called The House of Love; here in keeping with the theme of deceit, the same human sphere becomes a "house of lies." Howard describes this poem as "Rossetti's largest treatment of the essential opacity of the universe and human life," an opacity which, it would seem, becomes actively malevolent at times.¹⁶

The difference between appearance and reality lies, as Howard suggests, at the center of this poem, where each section presents a central deceit.¹⁷ In the first section, the mother believes that her daughter is pure so she encourages her to read the beryl. The girl's very name testifies to her purity.¹⁸ The mother's ironic words "A bride you'll be, as a maid you are" (104) capsulize the element of deceit and forecast the tragic conclusion, for Rose Mary is not a maid, nor will she be a bride. Toward the conclusion of this section Rose Mary expresses relief: "Thank God, thank God, thank God I saw" (117). But she has not seen the truth. In the second section, where the mother knows of her daughter's sin, James's betrayal becomes the central deceit, again underscored by an ironic remark: "Be sure as he loved you, so will I!" (117). But James did not love Rose Mary, and love, like sight, cannot be trusted. In the third section the mother learns of James's betrayal, but Rose Mary never does. Her last words reveal her delusion:

"One were our hearts in joy and pain,
And our souls e'en now grow one again.
And my love, if our souls are three,
O thine and mine shall the third soul be,—
One threefold love eternally."
[132]

She cleaves the beryl and dies for the sake of a spiritualized, idealized love, but love has deceived her.

The beryl lies at the center of the theme of deceit, for as soon as the stone is introduced, the pattern of narrative simplicity breaks down. Descriptive similes, images of cloud and shadow, and an element of mystery accompany the beryl stone. The mother's words as she addresses the beryl, in sharp contrast with the earlier simplicity in her dialogue, take on the tone of incantation and share the opaque quality of the beryl:

"Ill fare" (she said) "with a fiend's faring:
But Moslem blood poured forth like wine
Can hallow Hell, 'neath the Sacred Sign:
And my lord brought this from Palestine."
[105]

The descriptive passages relating to the secret shrine of the beryl are intricate, symbolic and gothic:

To the north, a fountain glittered free;
To the south, there glowed a red fruit-tree;
To the east, a lamp flames high and fair;
To the west, a crystal casket rare
Held fast a cloud of fields of air.
[128]

Although the beryl songs have met with much adverse criticism, including, finally, Rossetti's own condemnation, they fit into the pattern of confusion that surrounds that stone.

For Rossetti, the beryl represented a microcosm of the world. To his old friend Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, Rossetti wrote: "Many thanks for your information about the Beryl. I had no idea what the stone was really like, but perceive that for my purpose the elements must be somehow mystically condensed in it as a sort of mimic world."¹⁹ In the poem itself the description of the beryl evokes the idea that the stone reflects the world:

Shaped it was to a shadowy sphere,—
World of our world, the sun's compeer,
That bears and buries the toiling year.
[104]

The world that the beryl reflects is the world of half-truths, of shadows, and of mists. Rose Mary, who hides her own sin, fears that the pastoral vision may hide a terrible reality:

"Ah! vainly I searched from side to side:—
Woe's me! and where do the foemen hide?
Woe's me! and perchance I pass them by,
And under the new dawn's blood-red sky
Even where I gaze the dead shall lie."
[107]

The fear that sin will obscure her vision is justified; the sins of the flesh prevent her from seeing the truth, which for Rossetti is spiritual love.²⁰

The problem of reading the signs in a confused opaque world is developed further through the images of sight and blindness. When Rose Mary saw the vision of death, she "shrank blindfold in her fallen hair" (108). The significance of hair in relation to the image pattern of sight is particularly evocative. In "Body's Beauty," "Eden Bower," and "Troy Town," hair has been associated with eroticism; here too James's betrayal is discovered through a telltale lock of hair. It is fitting, then, that Rose Mary's blindness, the result of her sin, is evoked with the image of hair. Ironically, the mother advises her daughter to "Fear no trap you cannot see" (110), and Rose Mary, reassured, expresses her relief: "thank God I saw!" (112). But she has been deceived by appearances.

The vision of salvation through love in "Rose Mary" lacks the conviction behind a similar salvation in "The Staff and Scrip." The lines regarding heavenly reunion, resonant with religiosity—"And our souls e'en now grow one again … One threefold love eternally" (132)—must be read ironically. The erotic vision of love's dark deceitful side developed in "Troy Town" and "Eden Bower" ultimately foils Rossetti's attempt to return to the Dantesque ideal. As a synthesis of spirituality and eroticism, "Rose Mary" fails because the happy ending is undercut by irony.

Thus these three ballads show the process through which Rossetti's early Dantesque faith in love evolves into a more complex vision. "Troy Town" suggests that the saving power of love, prominent in the early ballads, is balanced by an equally powerful destructive impulse, embodied in the metaphor of eroticism. In "Eden Bower" our inability to distinguish between spiritual love and erotic attraction defies resolution. In "Rose Mary" the power of the erotic vision and the dilemma that it presents undercut the salvation offered by love. Rossetti's exposure, in the erotic ballads, of love as a two-faced deceiver prohibits our faith in its gift of grace.

Notes

¹ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1887) 1: 176. All future references to Rossetti's poetry are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

² See Philip McM. Pittman, "The Strumpet and the Snake: Rossetti's Treatment of Sex as Original Sin," Victorian Poetry 12 (1974): 46-47; David Sonstroem, Rossetti and the Fair Lady (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1970) 16; and Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York UP, 1969) 252.

³ W. B. Yeats, "The Happiest of the Poets," Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier, 1973) 53; Cecil Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (1949; New York: Oxford UP, 1961) 211-12.

⁴ Rossetti cited by Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1949; London: Oxford UP, 1960) 347.

⁵ Ronnalie Roper Howard, The Dark Glass: Vision and Technique in the Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1972) 142.

⁶ To note just a few examples, the sonnet "Passion and Worship" in the concluding sestet associates the sun with passion and the moon with worship. The two sonnets "Silent Noon" and "Gracious Moonlight" seem to contrast physical with spiritual love.

⁷ Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influences of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961) 323; Robert Cooper, Lost on Both Sides: Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Critic and Poet (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1970) 202; Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (New York: Dodd, 1928) 157.

⁸ Howard 141.

⁹ Pittman notes the sources for the Lilith legend as Jewish folklore and Talmudic legend (47).

¹⁰ Howard 144; Pittman 52.

¹¹ Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, in "The Feminization of D. G. Rossetti," The Victorian Experience: The Poets, ed. Richard A. Levine (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1982) writes about Rossetti's "ambivalence" toward women: "The goddess of one painting turns siren or betrayer in another—or … a combination of the two" (102).

¹² Paull Franklin Baum, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Poems and Ballads and Sonnets: Selections from the Posthumous Poems and Hand and Soul (Garden City: Doubleday, 1937) 55.

¹³ Howard 148.

¹⁴ Clyde K. Hyder, "Rossetti's 'Rose Mary': A study in the Occult," Victorian Poetry 1 (1963): 205. Hyder discusses crystal-gazing and legendary sources associated with it.

¹⁵ Joseph F. Vogel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Versecraft, U of Florida Humanities Monograph 34 (Gainsville: U of Florida P, 1971) 57.

¹⁶ Howard 155.

¹⁷ Howard 153-54.

¹⁸ For comment on Rossetti's use of the name Rose Mary, see Doughty 447; Howard 153; Hyder 199; and Sonstroem 101.

¹⁹ Rossetti, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl (London: Clarendon, 1965) 3: 1010.

²⁰ For quite a different reading, which presents this poem as Rossetti's triumph over Victorian morality that would condemn Rose Mary for her sexual sin, see David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983) 171-78.