SOURCE: "Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Betrayal of Truth," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 339-61.

Rossetti has a notebook entry dating from the early 1870s in which he speaks of certain "Days when the characters of men came out as strongly as secret writing exposed to fire."¹ What is illuminating and complex in this figure centers in the pun on the word "characters," where both people and writing are imagined as encrypted forms—indeed, as encrypted transforms of each other. Their respective truths appear only when the false innocence of the surface is removed.

As with Blake, when he spoke of a similar process in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the agent of revelation here is fire, and a fire associated, as in Blake, with hell. But in Blake there is nothing sinister in such fire, which is seen as a "divine" agency (that is to say, as part of the human process of engraving). In Rossetti, however, the fire threatens because the "characters" are sinister and threatening. Lurking below Rossetti's metaphor are suggestions of torture and even damnation, of a world in which "the characters of men" practice concealment and deceit.

This is not an image which Rossetti would have produced when he began to test his imaginative resources in the 1840s. But it has arrived at the heart of his work, and it can help to guide us should we choose to approach him from more customary angles—for example, down the avenues of his early prose works like "Hand and Soul" or the fragmentary "St. Agnes of Intercession." These tales seem typically Rossettian in their treatment of the relation between love and art; but their extreme deceptiveness, their preoccupation with false appearances, is equally central to what they are doing, and equally a Rossettian trademark.

Like its companion tale "Hand and Soul," "St. Agnes of Intercession" anatomizes the character and situation of a young painter whose "impulse towards art" was "a vital passion" (1:400).² When he falls in love with a young woman of comfortable means—as he puts it, "of more ease than my own" (1:402)—he is driven to seek "such a position as would secure me from reproaching myself with any sacrifice made for her sake." That is the young man's painfully delicate way of saying that he set about trying to become a commercially successful painter, which meant, in practical terms, submitting his work for exhibition. To this end he "laboured constantly and unweariedly" for many days and nights on a work whose "principal female figure" was his betrothed, Miss Mary Arden.

In these initial details we glimpse the characteristic tension which will dominate Rossetti's story: between an exalted ideal of art, on one hand, and certain quotidian practical exigencies on the other. The young man's reflections on the opening day of the exhibition make these contradictions very explicit:

My picture, I knew, had been accepted, but I was ignorant of a matter perhaps still more important,—its situation on the walls. On that now depended its success…. That is not the least curious feature of life as evolved in society,—… when a man, having endured labour, gives its fruits into the hands of other men, that they may do their work between him and mankind: confiding it to them, unknown, without seeking knowledge of them … without appeal to the sympathy of kindred experience: submitting to them his naked soul, himself, blind and unseen. (1:403)

Centrally at issue here is the public and commercial "success" of the work, as opposed to its "artistic achievement" or "intrinsic value." Or rather, the passage shows how the sensibility of a man who is committed to the "intrinsic values" of art suffers a crucifixion of the imagination when he feels compelled to operate in and through the mediations "evolved in society." His initial anxiety about whether his picture will even be accepted for exhibition succeeds to a whole train of others which crystallize in one immediate concern: whether the painting will be prominently displayed—in the jargon of the day, whether it will be "on the line"—or whether it will be relegated to some less prestigious, or even less visible, position.

These misgivings surface as soon as he begins to make a tour of the exhibition with another man, also unnamed in the story, whom the painter accidentally encounters. This man, a poet and an art critic, gives a further turn of the screw to the young painter's anxieties. Rossetti's painter fears and respects his companion's power in the culture-industry of their world, but he has only contempt for the man's artistic taste and poetic skills. He is able to conceal his actual views and feelings until the poet-critic pauses in their tour of the exhibition, pulls out a sheaf of his poems, and asks the painter for his opinion. After reading them hurriedly the young man manages an answer. It is a nice moment:

"I think," I coolly replied, "that when a poet strikes out for himself a new path in style, he should first be quite convinced that it possesses sufficient advantages to counterbalance the contempt which the swarm of his imitators will bring upon poetry."

My ambiguity was successful. I could see him take the compliment to himself, and inhale it like a scent, while a slow broad smile covered his face. It was much as if, at some meeting, on a speech being made complimentary to the chairman, one of the waiters should elbow that personage aside, plant his knuckles on the table, and proceed to return thanks. (1:407)

This passage dramatizes the deep connections joining the painter's artistic fastidiousness and "idealism" to his tortured duplicity and servile cowardice. "Successful" is just the right word, in this context, to describe his wary but contemptuous reply to the other man's fatuous request for praise. If he wants to be "successful" as an artist, he cannot afford to offend this man. Indeed, he even has to cultivate him to some extent. So the young painter stays with him throughout the exhibition, suffering his absurd displays of self-importance. Through it all, however, the young painter keeps his distance from the man—inwardly, spiritually, in secret. He practices a fraud on his companion when he equivocates about the man's bad verse. That false representation is his way of preserving his sense of integrity and his commitment to true art. The moment is troubled and troubling, however, because it sets those key Rossettian values quite literally on a false ground.

The entire scene from "St. Agnes of Intercession," written in 1848-50 (but revised in 1870),³ is thus an emblem of Rossetti's career as an artist and poet. Later I will return to deal with the matter of Miss Mary Arden—that is to say, with Rossetti's habit of linking his artistic ideals and imaginative practices to the women whose images dominated his life. For now I wish to concentrate on the problem of the material conditions of artistic production as Rossetti experienced them in his age. Unlike Blake's and Byron's, Rossetti's work does not foreground the artistic opportunities which are offered when an artist seeks to utilize the physical and institutional structures within which all such work is necessarily carried out. Rossetti is as self-conscious as they are about those media, but to him the structures more often rose up as obstacles to be overcome rather than adventures to be risked. "St. Agnes of Intercession," in the scene I have been recapitulating, pays greatest attention to the difficulties raised by the institutions of imagination: most particularly, those means of production which establish the possibility, or the terms, on which a painter or a poet is able to encounter an audience.

If Rossetti's feeling for those difficulties makes him a less innocent poet than either Blake or Byron, it also set him in a position where he could explore, far more profoundly than any English poet had previously done, the significance of imaginative work in an age of mechanical reproduction, in an age where "the best that has been known and thought in the world" is seen to be quite literally a product, the output of what we now call the "culture" or the "consciousness industries." Like Baudelaire in France, Rossetti was the first poet in England to see this very clearly; and, again like Baudelaire, he recoiled from it, and tried to imagine ways for evading those institutional powers, and for recovering an ideal of artistic and poetic transcendence. But like Baudelaire once again, what he accomplished was far otherwise and far more important. What he accomplished was a critical definition of the symbolistic imagination when its work has been forced by circumstance to be carried out within a marketing and commercial frame of reference.

II

In that context, Rossetti is constantly driven to work by indirection. This happens because he operates in the belief—the ideology—that life is one thing, art another. Art for Rossetti appeared to him—as in Chiaro's vision in "Hand and Soul"—as life in its finer tone, the one certain means by which human beings can soar beyond the confusions of a mortal and veiled existence. His ideology of the sacred character of the poetic life made him an acute observer of the illusions of the quotidian world—in this he is like his sister Christina. But whereas, for her, sacramentalism—the ritually practiced religious life—was the one fundamental necessity, for Dante Gabriel that necessity was located in the practice of art.

This point of view established the basic contradiction within which Rossetti's work was to develop. The practical dimension of the contradiction can be expressed as follows: how does one paint or write poetry when the world of getting and spending constantly impinges, transforming the fair illusion of a pure pursuit of Beauty into other, darker forms—at worst unworthy, at best distracting, but in any case equally illusionistic? This is the great contradiction raised by poetry in the age of Victorian commercial imperialism, and first given profound expression in Tennyson's 1832 Poems. Rossetti would not find a solution to that problem, any more than anyone else would. In fact the problem has no solution, because its importance as a problem lies not in any realities it consciously questions but in the illusions it unwittingly exposes. It is a problem without a solution because it is a problem framed within its own rooted misunderstanding about the nature of art and imagination: that these are transcendental forms standing free of the sublunary orders of human things.

One face of the illusion appears as the idea that "effort and expectation and desire," or striving, seeking and finding, will eventually produce a solution. Rossetti is the first Victorian poet to show clearly the falseness of such convictions. The important secondary illusion is that the sublunary world and the world of art differ from each other in every important respect—as the material world is thought to differ in all important respects from the world of spirit. This illusion Rossetti will also discredit, at first with excitement and confidence, in his explorations of erotic experience, but finally in fear and trembling, as the full import of his erotic explorations slowly dawns upon him. In the end Rossetti's poetry (and his art as well, though I shall not be concentrating on that aspect of his work)⁴ will repeat Dante's journey in the opposite direction, descending from various illusory heavens through a purgatory of unveilings to the nightmares and hells of his greatest work, the unwilled revelations arrived at in The House of Life.

It is important to realize that Rossetti did not set out to discredit that ideology. "Hand and Soul," for example, tells a story of the triumph of art and the artistic life over base circumstances. The problem is that the story doubts the truth of its own apparent theme. It is a hoaxing tale in more ways than one. It is a hoax, formally speaking, in that it consciously imitates the hoaxes of Edgar Allan Poe—those tales like "Von Kempelen and his Discovery" which present themselves to the reader as nonfictions. Rossetti's work is written to secure a real belief in its fictional representations. Written in the form of a personal essay, it deceived "more than one admirer … who made enquiry in Florence and Dresden after the pictures of Chiaro" (2:524).

Like Poe and Baudelaire, Rossetti catches the reader out by feeding him the illusions he wants to believe. The ultimate effect of such a story is to expose the structure of those illusions. But, unlike Poe and Baudelaire, Rossetti himself more than half believed in the illusions he was calling out. For Rossetti, then, the story is not initially conceived as a hoax at all but as a serious conjuring trick. R. L. Megroz was acute to see that "in his imaginative adventures, Rossetti was always casting the horoscope of his life."⁵ "Hand and Soul" is in this respect, at least initially, a serious act of magic, an effort to put into writing a story that might prove to be the actual plot of Rossetti's own life. If the story could be imagined to be true, in the second half of the nineteenth century in England (either as a piece of "past" history or as the sketch of the true "future"), then art could be said to transcend circumstance. And Rossetti was not the only one who sought to turn the fictions of that story into truths.

The greatness, as well as the horror, of Rossetti's career can be traced to his insistence upon interrogating that cherished belief in the mission of art to unveil, or achieve, transcendence. To discover the truth of that belief Rossetti made an experiment of his life and his life's work, where his deepest convictions were put to a series of empirical tests. Rossetti's work is an effort to confirm empirically those narrative imaginings he had initially set forth in "St. Agnes of Intercession" and "Hand and Soul."

The experiment led Rossetti to complete the curve of the demonic imagination outlined half a century before by Blake when he showed that "he who will not defend Truth may be compelled to / Defend a Lie, that he may be snared & caught & taken" (Milton 8:47). For the truths Rossetti discovered did not confirm the story he was committed to. In the first place, the artist's life Rossetti came to know in those years had none of the mythic purity of Chiaro's tale. Rossetti had to scramble for success, seek out commissions, constantly resupply himself with the money he loved to call "tin" (thereby dismissing it from the serious concerns he kept imagining for himself). The more he made his way as an artist, the more difficult he found the demands that such a life placed upon him. These were not the grandiose spiritual difficulties laid upon the high-minded Chiaro; they were crass and quotidian demands, nightmarishly worse even than those glimpsed in "St. Agnes of Intercession."

Rossetti had various tricks by which he held off the enormity of this experimental life that he was pursuing. He paraded his refusals to exhibit in the ordinary professional ways, and nurtured the myth, both for himself and for others, of bohemian genius. But while Millais, Brown, and Edward Jones were making their way by more conventional means, Rossetti was nonetheless making his way—in certain respects, not least of all monetary, even more successfully. But it was a way that left only ashes in his mouth.

Nothing shows his situation so well as his relations with the people whose commissions he was seeking. It began with the earliest of them, Francis McCracken for instance, in the early fifties. Perceiving McCracken as "an absolute Guy—worse than Patmore" (L 1:185),⁶ Rossetti manipulated him into buying things at grossly inflated prices, and then ridiculed him to his friends—for example in his contemptuous parody of Tennyson's "The Kraken" which Rossetti called "MacCraken."⁷ Throughout the fifties and sixties Rossetti cosseted and condescended to his buyers. They seemed, most of them, altogether too easy marks: eager, relatively ignorant, contemptible in the end. To Ford Madox Ford, for example, he remarked, "I'll forebear from springing at the unaccustomed throat of Trist, if possible; but really a man shouldn't buy pictures without nerving himself beforehand against commercial garotte" (L 2:520). This sort of thing is a refrain in his letters. Yet his own idealization of the practice of art turned his behavior into a kind of self-immolation. If Trist and the other buyers were suffering executions in their pocketbooks, Rossetti's "commercial garotte" was strangling his own soul.

By 1865-66 Rossetti had become a very successful painter indeed, measured both in terms of his celebrity and his income. At the same time it had become apparent to himself, in any case, that his experiment with his life and his ideals had not gone well. The course of his commercial career had its parallel in the course of his devotional life—by which I mean his love life. Elizabeth's suicide in 1862 was no more than the exponent and capstone of his disastrous quests for the Beatrice which his experiment required. Their life together had not been an "ideal" in any sense, either before or after the marriage, though his initial imagination of her meaning for him was—just that, that she was to be deeply meaningful. Then too there were his infidelities, we do not know exactly how many. In a sense they were not infidelities to Elizabeth at all, since his attachment to her was never personal. What he worshiped was her image, and that he had himself created, first in his imagination, and then later, in the series of incredible drawings and paintings which he devoted to that image. His were infidelities, therefore, to his own soul, to his idea of himself, to the vision which had come to Chiaro in the late 1840s.

The extent of those infidelities were defined for him in the death of his wife and unborn child. The most celebrated act of his life—burying his volume of largely unpublished poems in the coffin with Elizabeth—was a form of expiation, of course, but its full significance has to be understood in the context of his artistic and poetic careers. His steady success as a painter became for Rossetti an index of how he was betraying his mission as an artist. The greater his success in securing commissions, the more erratic his output as a painter became. His cynical attitude toward his various patrons was matched only by his scandalous failure to meet obligations even after he had been paid. Through it all, however, he began to imagine that what he was betraying as a painter he was preserving as a poet. His paintings were hopelessly entangled with commercial affairs, but his poetry, it seemed to him, had been nurtured apart from worldly concerns. When in the fall of 1860 he sent a manuscript book of his original poetry to William Allingham for comments and criticism, his accompanying remarks are revealing:

When I think how old most of these things are, it seems like a sort of mania to keep thinking of them still, but I suppose one's leaning still to them depends mainly on their having no trade associations, and being still a sort of thing of one's own. I have no definite ideas as to doing anything with them, but should like, even if they lie at rest, to make them as good as I can. (L 1:37.7)

After he published, successfully, his 1861 The Early Italian Poets, a volume of his original work, Dante at Verona and Other Poems, was advertised. But Elizabeth's death intervened, along with the accompanying sense that his unfaithfulness was not simply, or even fundamentally, marital. The gift of his book of poems to Elizabeth's corpse was a gesture asserting that his artistic soul was still alive, and that he still had the integrity to preserve its life. He sent his poems out of the world.

But this left him more painfully in the world than ever, and the years 1862-68 are a record of what Oswald Doughty once labelled "Disillusion" and "Success."⁸ For Rossetti these were two faces of the same reality. Doughty's terms apply to Rossetti's artistic career, but they carry ironical overtones because, so far as Rossetti was concerned, his very success as a painter only multiplied his sense of moral disillusion. In this connection, though we must be very clear about the commercialism of the paintings, we are precisely not to judge the significance of those paintings through Rossetti's contradicted Victorian ideology. He despised the commercial face he saw in his work, but we must read and judge that work in another light.

If the paintings were commercial to a degree—and they were—they triumph in and through that commercialism. Like the poems, they are deceptions, sometimes even self-deceptions. Formally considered, they often appear to us as genre paintings; but the appearance is fraudulent. Rossetti's paintings come forth showing different kinds of representational faces. In every case the representational surface is distorted or disfigured, however, and those disruptions signal the truth about his work which Rossetti was concealing, partly from himself, and wholly from his contemporary audience. For his oils are not at all representational, they are abstract experiments in the use of color and (most importantly) the conventions of painterly space. Critics have never seriously faulted Rossetti's composition and his use of color, of course, but many have complained about his draughtsmanship. It is the drawing, however, which most graphically reveals the experimental character of his work, for it is the drawing which tilts his pictures out of their conventional structures. These paintings seduce and then abandon the corrupted eye of the conventional viewer, and in the process they contrive to deliver a secret meaning through the surface of betrayed appearances.

In this way Rossetti experienced an overthrow of certain traditional ideas about success and failure in art, illusion and disillusion in life. His success and disillusion are both real. But in his work we observe success being measured by disillusion, and disillusion being founded on success.

This pattern is recurrent and graphically displayed in the case of his poetical work as well. In 1868-69, finding it impossible to paint at all, he began writing poetry again. After much urging by relatives and friends, he published sixteen of these new sonnets in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), and in the succeeding months he continued to write. Eventually he began to articulate the possibility of exhuming the book he had buried with Elizabeth, as part of a project to print "some old and new poems … for private circulation" (L, 2:716). Rossetti's tentative moves toward returning his poetry to the world were given a crucial impetus when he read an anonymous article on his verse in Tinsley 's Magazine in August 1869, at the very time he was working on the proofs for his "Trial Book" of poems. Once again he clearly describes the dialectic which is driving his new writing:

So after twenty years one stranger does seem to have discovered one's existence. However I have no cause to complain, since I have all I need of an essential kind, and have taken little trouble about it,—except always in the nature of my work,—the poetry especially in which I have done no pot-boiling at any rate. So I am grateful to that art, and nourish against the other that base grudge which we bear those whom we have treated shabbily. (L 2:729)

It is an astonishing passage for a man who, in 1869, had the kind of celebrity and success which Rossetti enjoyed. That H. Buxton Forman—the young author of the Tinsley's piece—would write an essay on Rossetti's poetry, when so little had appeared in print, and most of that in relatively inaccessible places, testifies to the kind of attention which his name commanded. Yet to Rossetti it seemed that his very existence had only just then been discovered, after twenty years of—what, invisibility? Yes, this was the way he saw it: the blankness which his commercial work as a painter had left where the image of his soul had once appeared.

III

Late in 1869, therefore, Rossetti began putting together a book of poetry which was to recoup those losses and betrayals he had been accumulating since the early fifties. He was full of anxiety about every detail of this project. Between mid-August 1869 and March 1, 1870, he received for correction and revision at least three sets of initial proofs (August 20-September 21), two so-called Trial Books (October 3-November 25), and a final complete proof of the first edition. The changes made in these proofs and Trial Books were massive: many poems were added and some were removed; large additions were written into the proof materials at all six major stages; titles were changed, and numerous local corrections and alterations were made; and finally, not least significant, the ordering of the poems underwent important and radical transformations. In the next two months, April and May, Rossetti continued to harass his publishers with extensive revisions and large-scale alterations of every kind. Nor was the physical appearance of the book a matter of small moment: the paper, the binding, the cloth, the color, the kind of dies to be struck for the embossed cover designs, and so forth—all these matters engrossed his attention. Rossetti's Poems of 1870 were bringing the whole soul of the man into activity.⁹

To Rossetti's imagination, that soul was the one he had almost lost through his life of betrayal—through his worldliness. But in objective truth it was another, more demonic soul to which his life's work had been devoted, and entirely faithful. Rossetti's concern that his book make a good appearance, in every sense, reflects his desire that it be a perfect image of beauty, of finishedness, of his commitment to perfection. His notorious efforts to control as completely as possible the immediate critical reception of the book must be understood as part of this obsession with the appearance of his work, the impression it would create. By 1870 he had a large network of friends and friendly acquaintances who were well-connected in the periodical press. All were enlisted to launch the book into the world—in pre-publication reviews wherever possible—not simply to a chorus of praise, but in terms that were to represent Rossetti's Poems as a work of the greatest artistic moment—indeed, as the very exponent and symbol of what "a work of art" means.¹⁰

In this sense, Rossetti's Poems (1870)—even more than Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866), which had created such a sensation four years earlier—is a manifesto for what Pater would call "Aesthetic Poetry." Comprised in that event, however, as Walter Benjamin so acutely observed in his great work on Baudelaire, is the understanding that the "work of art" has now identified itself with, and as, the commodity.¹¹ The work was to be so carefully prepared, so thoroughly worked and polished, so packaged and promoted that it would ravish its audience and establish Rossetti's fame. The book was meant to "succeed" in the same way, only far more absolutely, that the painter, in "St. Agnes of Intercession," set out to succeed. Consumed for months with his corrections and revisions, Rossetti was perhaps able to blink the commercial forms and "trade associations" that were concealed in this attention to his craft, but the commodity-status of his work emerges very clearly in those other investments: his obsession with the physical appearance of his book, on one hand, and—crucially—his campaign to manage the reviews, on the other.

But if Rossetti's Poems (1870) return and re-establish the contradictions he had begun to explore in the late forties and early fifties, the intervening years had made an enormous difference in his work. In those years a happy liberal view might look for, and might even discover, signs of a "growing artistic maturity," of a "development" toward some "greater self-consciousness" in his work which could suggest that he had "transcended" in some measure the network of initial contradictions.¹² But in fact Rossetti's "development," if one can call it that, is in the opposite direction—toward a more complete immersion within the contradictions, indeed, toward an enslavement to them. In twenty years Rossetti had moved from the margin to the very heart of his culture: as Blake would have said, "he became what he beheld." In tracing that movement, Poems (1870) achieved its greatness. The analogy to Les Fleurs du Mal is quite exact, so that what Benjamin said of the latter can be applied, pari passu, to Rossetti: "Baudelaire was a secret agent—an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule."¹³ In Rossetti's case as well, therefore, "the point of departure is the object riddled with error" (Benjamin, p. 103). And in the nineteenth century there are few English books of poetry more secretly discontented, more riddled with error, than this book of Rossetti's.

We may begin to unriddle that error by a critical retracing of the history of the book. In his reply to Buchanan's "The Fleshly School of Poetry," Rossetti defended his dramatic monologue "Jenny" by a general argument about the nature of art. When he first wrote the poem "some thirteen years ago," he says, he understood that the subject-matter—a young man's visit to a prostitute—might have called for "a treatment from without." Such an objective treatment would have set a critical distance between the poem and its problematic subject. Rossetti rejected the option because "the motive powers of art reverse the requirement of science, and demand first of all an inner standing-point such as the speaker put forward in the poem,—that is, of a young and thoughtful man of the world" (2:484-485). This is more than the classic defense, that poems are not to be read as "personal expressions." Rossetti is rather speaking as a student of Browning, whose work with the dramatic monologue Rossetti so much admired. In that form an effort is made to confine subjectivity to the core of what Coleridge once called the "dramatic truth of such … situations, supposing them real."¹⁴ The dramatic monologue moves to take the "lyrical" out of the "ballad." Rossetti's "inner standing-point" is thus a Victorian explanation of what Keats called "negative capability," or the process by which the author's conscious separation from his subject—the typical structure of a poem by, say, Rochester or Pope—is canceled in a process of deep sympathetic engagement. In Rossetti's case, however, as in Browning's, the chameleonic turn involves a transfer of sympathy from the poet to some figure or character who is concretely imagined in the poem. The so-called "poetry of experience" becomes, in Victorian hands, a form for introducing modes of subjectivity into historically removed materials, or into contemporary materials which might be, for various reasons, problematic.

In the Victorian dramatic monologue, this transfer of sympathy cancels the traditional structure on which the identity of the poet, formally speaking, depends. Browning was not especially interested in, or perhaps even aware of, the crisis (and therefore the opportunity) which was emerging for poetry in this dismantling of the conventions of sincerity. But Rossetti was. Browning's spy will succeed to the absent gods of Flaubert and later Joyce, who stand apart from their creations, paring their fingernails. This is the theory, or rather the ideology, in which Rossetti too has taken his stand.

But as with Baudelaire's flaneur, Rossetti's disengagement becomes an exponent of social alienation, as is quite clear in "Jenny" itself. The sympathy of Rossetti's "young and thoughtful man of the world" is for a sleeping figure, a prostitute who never responds and who in the poem cannot respond. Her condition merely replicates the incompetent thought and limited sympathies of the young man, however. He does not understand her, or her "case," because she exists for him in an aesthetic condition alone, that state where sympathy appears as the indifference of appreciation. In the end, both prostitute and young man are figures of the latent structures of alienation of poetry itself as these structures have descended into Rossetti's hands. In fact, he here reveals the image of that "thoughtful" young man's soul as self-contradicted, an image with the face of a prostitute superimposed on the face of his sister.

In "Jenny," the frame erected by the dramatic monologue works to reveal alienation rather than establish sympathy, and to suggest—ultimately—that the dramatic monologue is a construction of Chinese boxes. More than recording a failed quest for sympathetic engagement, the poem judges this to be the failure of poetry (or art) itself. This judgment is an extremely critical one, in the nineteenth century, because poetry and art were then generally regarded as the ultimate depositories, and even the creators, of spiritual and human values. In calling that ideology into question, Rossetti's work has contrived to imagine the experience of being distanced altogether from experience. It is to have fashioned a vehicle for conveying, quite literally, the feeling of the absence of feeling.¹⁵

Nowhere is this experience more clearly visible than in The House of Life, which must be the most alienated, and probably the most horrifying, major poem in the language. This culminant achievement is so integrated with his whole life's work, and in particular with the project that became Poems (1870), that the connections have to be sketched. Poems (1870), we may recall, is separated into three parts. The initial section is composed principally of a series of longer pieces—dramatic monologues, stories, ballads, and a few translations. Here the deployment of Rossetti's "inner standing-point" is most clearly shown—not simply in monologues like "A Last Confession" and "Jenny," but in all the literary ballads ("Troy Town," "Stratton Water," "Sister Helen," and so forth), where the use of the ballad convention historicizes the style and voicing as well the narrative materials. The point of view in "Dante at Verona," similarly antiqued, is much closer to Dante's age than to Rossetti's. Likewise, Rossetti employs translation, here and elsewhere, as yet another depersonalizing convention. The third section of Poems (1870), which follows The House of Life, is largely devoted to a variant type of Rossettian translation: "Sonnets for Pictures," so-called.

Paradoxically, Rossetti's use of these nonsubjective verse forms intensifies the aura of poetic self-consciousness. He turns away from his own age and self, but in doing so the contemporaneous relevance of his acts of historical displacement is only heightened. "Dante at Verona" is in this respect a clear allegory, but an allegory which deconstructs itself. Dante's alienation has its contemporary (Rossettian) analogy in the speaker of the poem, who celebrates Dante's critique of luxurious society. But whereas the Dante of Rossetti's poem speaks out openly and plainly against the world of Can Grande, there is no plain speaking at the contemporary level, merely gestures and vague allusions.

Yet "Dante at Verona" does not exemplify what is best and most innovative in Rossetti's poetry. To see that, in the nonpersonal and antiqued material, we have to look at some other things—for example, the excellent "An Old Song Ended," which begins by quoting the last stanza of an antique ballad and then "ends" it with four more stanzas. The story, rendered in the convention of a dialogue between a dying lady—a Mariana figure—and an unnamed interlocutor, lets us know that she will die before her lover returns. The poem finishes with the lady's last reply to the final question put to her:

"Can you say to me some word
I shall say to him?"
"Say I'm looking in his eyes
Though my eyes are dim."

This is quintessential Rossetti, an ambiguous icon constructed from a play on the phrase "looking in." Henceforth the lady will be haunting her absent lover, in the same way that Rossetti is haunted by the old song. (That connection between lady and old song, in fact, makes the absent lover an obvious figura of Rossetti and the contemporary poet.) Henceforth an "external" presence who will be looking into his eyes as he observes the external world, she becomes as well an internal ghost who, though dead, is destined to live on in the way he looks at his world.

This haunted and self-conscious figure is at the heart of all Rossetti's poems and paintings. We rightly see a poem like "The Blessed Damozel" as typical work for just that reason. Of all the verse printed in the first section of Poems (1870), "The Stream's Secret" is closest to The House of Life. But "The Blessed Damozel" is more relevant for understanding the sonnet sequence because its antiqued character highlights how the "inner standing-point" works in those sonnets. Rossetti disjoins himself from the first-person speaker in "The Blessed Damozel" by invoking the formalities of the ballad convention; but because he does not historicize his materials as clearly and resolutely as he does, for example, in "Stratton Water" or his other old tales, the scenes in the poem appear to float in a kind of abstraction, outside space and time. That ambiguous condition, where one feels unmoored and alienated even as one seems to live a determinate and eventual existence, defines what we know as The House of Life.

IV

The House of Life is more than a mere presentation, or case history, of personality dismemberment. It is that, of course, but it is also part of a project—an execution—of such dismemberment, an active agent in the destructive project it is unfolding. This complicity is what makes the work, and the whole volume which it epitomizes, so fearful and so magnificent. The sonnets record a history by which "changes" associated with a period of "Youth"—these are figured principally as the changing experiences of love—are finally transfixed in (and as) the immobilized forms of "Fate." The history unfolds through a set of losses and disintegrations which culminate as the loss of identity.¹⁶

At the outset of the sequence, the notorious "Nuptial Sleep" appears far removed from the terrible images which emerge in the concluding six sonnets:

At length their long kiss severed with sweet smart:
And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on each other where they lay apart.

Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,
And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.
Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams
Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.
(6a/5)¹⁷

Here is the supreme imagination of triumph in the work. One might not appreciate this fact because the previous sonnet, "The Kiss," represents an actual experience of erotic consummation. It is, moreover, an experience recorded for us in the first person:

I was a child beneath her touch,—a man
When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,—
A spirit when her spirit looked through me,—
A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,
Fire within fire, desire in deity.
(6/4, 11. 9-14)

After those lines, the movement to the third person in "Nuptial Sleep," a modulation from major to minor, comes as a shock, since it conveys the impression of incredible detachment on the part of the speaker, whom we associate with the lover. That shock is the rhetorical equivalent of the "wonder" recorded at the end of the sonnet, where—following an experience of ecstatic physical union—the beloved appears to the eyes of the lover as a unique identity, wholly individuated despite the previous moments of mutual absorption. The lover's (actual) "wonder" is thus reduplicated, or realized, in the rhetoric of the speaker, who is spellbound before his imagination of the separate lovers. "Nuptial Sleep" argues, in other words, that the heart of the "poignant thirst / And exquisite hunger" ("Bridal Birth," 2/1) of this work is an ecstasy which culminates not in the extinction but in the establishment of individual identities through love. This argument is clinched by the tense shift executed between the sonnets, which transfers to identity and self-consciousness the values associated, both traditionally and in the previous sonnet(s), with intense feeling: immediateness, and spontaneity.

But the achievement in the sonnet is tenuous and fragile, and finally self-conflicted. Lover observes beloved much as the young man in "Jenny" observes, lovingly, the sleeping prostitute; and the perspective is here explicitly revealed as the perspective of art and poetry. This "wonder" matches passivities to passivities, and thus contradicts the developing energetic impulses of the poem itself. Furthermore, although the watery medium of sleep and dreams does not here directly threaten the ideal of self-identity in the sonnet, those forms prefigure the conditions of loss later realized in "Willowwood."

As in "Hand and Soul," then, the apparitions here are images of the artist's "soul," or that to which he is ultimately committed. That is to say, the sonnet raises up an imagining of self-identity achieved through artistic practice. As The House of Life gradually delineates the features of that soul, however, a hollowed-out figure emerges from the expectant shadows of Beauty. For the story told by the sequence is that the images are insubstantial: literally, that the supreme moment of "Nuptial Sleep" was a supreme fiction only. In this respect The House of Life is the story of betrayed hopes; and if that were all it had to tell us, it would scarcely deserve to hold more than our minimal interest. As we shall see, however, what Rossetti's work ultimately reveals are not its betrayals but its self-betrayals.

The instabilities we glimpse in "Nuptial Sleep" initiate the sequence of illusions that forms the ground of the conclusive nightmares of the work. These will culminate in the terror of "He and I" (98/47), the definitive representation of identity-loss in the sequence. The sonnet operates through the simple contradiction of first- and third-person pronouns, both of which are "identified with" the poet. They are the residua of the first- and third-person narrators whose careers in The House of Life we initially traced in "The Kiss" and "Nuptial Sleep." Here they emerge as the obverse and reverse of a single self-conflicted figure, the schizoid form of a disintegrated identity which has lost itself in a house of mirrors.¹⁸

Pronouns, those ultimate shifters, figure largely in Rossetti's sonnet sequence. The iconographical status of "He and I," however, contrasts with the more fluid pronominal ambiguities which play themselves out in most of the earlier sonnets. This happens because Rossetti depicts first the process and then the achievement, first "Change" and then "Fate." "He and I" is the "Fate" that awaits Rossettian "Change," an entropic nightmare immortalized in one dead deathless sonnet.

"Life-in-Love" is very different, a not untypical instance of Rossettian deconstruction observed in a "changing" phase.

Not in thy body is thy life at all,
But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes;
Through these she yields thee life that vivifies
What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall.
Look on thyself without her, and recall
The waste remembrance and forlorn surmise
That lived but in a dead-drawn breath of sighs
O'er vanished hours and hours eventual.
Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair
Which, stored apart, is all love hath to show
For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;
Even so much life endures unknown, even where,
'Mid change the changeless night environeth,
Lies all that golden hair undimmed in death.
(36/16)

The second person pronoun here slides from ambiguity to ambiguity. Isolated thus, in solitary quotation, we register the simple alternative that it may be taken to refer either to "the poet" (a.k.a. D. G. Rossetti) or to the "old love" (a.k.a. Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti), with "this lady" standing as the "new love" (a.k.a. Jane Morris).¹² The "meaning" in each case is that both "poet" and "old love" are resurrected in the experience of "new love," which revivifies and redeems what would otherwise be encorpsed forever.

Were we to restore the sonnet to its larger (1881) context in the sequence, we would observe a further fall into ambiguity; for it is impossible to read "Lifein-Love" after the preceding sonnet, "The Lamp's Shrine," and not respond to the inertia of the latter's second person pronouns, which all refer to the allegorical figure "Lord Love." Finally, because Rossetti rhymes this sonnet with the soon to follow "Deathin-Love," yet another nominal presence comes to fill the shifting pronoun, and even names itself: "I am Death."

In this case, the fact that "The Lamp's Shrine" was only added to The House of Life in 1881 reduces by one the number of substantive options in the 1870 sequence, but its addition also calls attention to the unstable and shifting form of the work as a whole. In Rossetti's lifetime The House of Life appeared in no less than four relatively coherent forms: as a sequence of 16 sonnets; as a sequence of 50 sonnets and 11 songs; as a sequence of 25 sonnets and 5 songs; and as a sequence of 101 sonnets. Rossetti treated that last as the finished sequence even though it lacked the crucial sonnet "Nuptial Sleep."²⁰ Today, as for many years, most readers enter the work through the 102 sonnet version, where "Nuptial Sleep," sequenced with the appropriately unstable number 6a/5, is restored.

And indeed this ambiguous presence of "Nuptial Sleep" in The House of Life is singularly appropriate, for only in that sonnet is the ultimate ideal of the work, self-identity through love, defined. That Rossetti repeatedly unsettled the forms of the sequence emphasizes the overall lack of resolution of the work, but that he should have removed "Nuptial Sleep" from his last imagination of the work is a truly remarkable revelation of his loss of faith in the identity he set out to fashion and represent. Needless to say, this surrender of faith, this betrayal, is the ambiguous sign under which the work will triumph.

V

Poems (1870) is the first chapter in Rossetti's history of ultimate dissolution/disillusion. But the book is more than the record of a personal and psychic catastrophe, it is the portrait of an age. We glimpse this most clearly, if also most simply, when we recall that the book is full of various social and political poems with distinct, if obliquely presented, points of contemporary reference. "The Burden of Nineveh," an unusually direct work, involves an ironic meditation on England's imperial imagination. This fact is glossed in the multiple pun of the title. At the proof stage Rossetti set an explanatory headnote under that title to emphasize his word play: "BURDEN. Heavy calamity; the chorus of a song.—Dictionary"²¹ Rossetti directs us to read the poem as a "burden" in the Old Testament prophetic sense, with a relevance for England emphasized by the storied names (Thebes, Rome, Babylon, Greece, Egypt) called in the roll of the poem. Finally, that Nineveh is also "a burden to" England, an example of the self-destructive imperialism under which she currently labors, is made all but explicit at the conclusion of the poem. It is particularly apt, in Rossetti's book, that the focus in the poem on decadence should be the British Museum, the repository of the nation's cultural treasures. Rossetti's poem reflects the excitement of cultural imperialism with a special force because the British Museum, at that time, was relatively small, so that recent acquisitions of Near Eastern treasure were peculiarly visible and celebrated occurrences. "The Burden of Nineveh" draws out the implications of what Byron, sixty years earlier, had already sketched in The Curse of Minerva.

But this is a unique poem in a book which generally proceeds by careful, not to stay stealthy, indirection. "Troy Town" generates an entire network of references to that fabled history of a civilization which, according to the myth, found destruction through indulgence and illicit love. This Troy theme plays a key role in linking The House of Life poems to the less personal material, as Rossetti must have realized: through all the proof stages "Troy Town" was the opening poem. In that position it would have emphasized more strongly the social dimensions of the book. But at the last minute Rossetti replaced it with "The Blessed Damozel."

Changes of that and other kinds are the hallmark of Rossetti's discontented book. This is why, from a social point of view, the steps that Rossetti takes to marginalize his "social themes" are in the end more important, more significant, than the themes themselves. They remind us that works like "Troy Town" are in themselves even more obliquely mediated, as pieces of social commentary, than The Idylls of the King. What we should attend to, here and throughout Poems (1870), are not any of the "ideas" but what the book is doing and being made to do, how carefully its materials are managed, packaged, and polished. Unlike Swinburne in his deliberately outrageous Poems and Ballads, Rossetti does everything in his power to make sure his book will behave.

This manic sense of decorum makes the book not more "crafted" but more "crafty." It is a monument to its own shame, a kind of whited sepulchre. We can see how this comes about if we trace the structure of change in Rossetti's book. We begin by reflecting once again on those disintegrative mechanisms we observed earlier. One notes for instance that they are heavily "languaged," so to speak, and that the extreme level of the verbal artifice is a mode that holds off, brackets out, "reality." All is arranged so that what occurs seems to occur at the level of the signs alone, as a play of signifiers and signifieds. No names are given, no definite events are alluded to, no places, no times, no "referential" concretions of any kind—other than the (1870) book in which The House of Life is printed. Many of the works in that book have points of reference, as we have seen, but not The House of Life poems, which occupy the abstract space first clearly delineated in "The Blessed Damozel." Yet, paradoxically, these sonnets and songs constitute the most "personal" work in the entire volume.

The book itself, in other words, provides the key referential point which alone really clarifies what is happening in The House of Life. Critics have often observed the claustrophobia and abstraction of the sonnets, but if we consider the sequence wholly in itself, we would have to see it simply as an event in language. By printing and publishing the work when and how he did, Rossetti provided the local habitation which could give social and ethical names—rather than merely technical ones—to the sonnets.

In simplest terms—they are critical for Rossetti—the act of printing and publishing establishes the "trade associations" of his work. These associations are, however, what he wants to avoid or cancel out, in order to "prove" that art occupies a transcendental order. Rossetti wants to establish what the Romantics called "the truth of imagination," but Poems (1870) ends by showing instead how that "truth" is rather "an imagination" of imagination—and an imagining which, when carried out in the world, can have disastrous consequences. The most prominent sign of disaster in the book is psychic disintegration, but the social significances of that sign are never far to seek. Perhaps the greatest "moral" of Rossetti's book, for instance, could be expressed as follows: that active moves to escape "trade associations"—to evade or avoid them rather than to oppose, in concrete and positive ways, the compromised "world" they represent—inevitably involve a complicity with that world. It was a truth Rossetti glimpsed early in "St. Agnes," but in Poems (1870) it is fully exposed. Indeed, it is executed. In the horrors of his book Rossetti carried out the (concealed) truth of imagination for his age: that it has a truth, that it serves the world even in fleeing the world, that the truth is both a dream and a nightmare, and that it destroys the individual.

The marvel of Rossetti's work is that he chose to follow his own "inner standing-point" in declaring those contradictory truths, that he submitted to their "execution." We therefore trace the choices made by his work even in what must seem (for Rossetti) the least likely of places, the early reviews. One observes initially that they mirror the contradictions exposed in Rossetti's book. Whether written by friends or enemies, accomplices or neutral observers, two lines of understanding are repeated. Poems (1870) is a celebration of art, on one hand, or of love on the other; and to the degree that a mediation of the two is carried out, the book is said to be devoted to Beauty. But the mediating concept of Beauty merely resituates the contradictory registrations elsewhere. Thus, we can alternately see the book as a manifesto of "fleshliness" and eroticism, or of "mysticism" and spirituality. The contradictions are multiplied: what many find labored and obscure others see as crafted and sharply defined; and so the descriptive terms proliferate: abstract, ornate, pictorial, self-conscious, impersonal, and so forth.

These varied responses are the integrals of Rossetti's differential achievements. So much finish at the surface, so much apparent control—in a work that is also, plainly, nervous and highly unstable. Rossetti's perpetual acts of revision at every level, in the months immediately preceding publication, are but a dramatic instance of the consummate lack of resolution in the book. The book shifts and changes as it seeks its ideal of articulation, that monochord of which audience approval is the tonic, reciprocity the dominant. It is a mad, an inhuman ideal—what Marx ironically called "the soul of the commodity": a form crafted so as to be universally irresistible. It is the nineteenth-century's revenant of Dante's summum bonum, the encorpsed form of what was once alive.

Rossetti was more deeply complicit with his immediate institutions of reception than appears even from his attempt to manage the reviews. This became most obvious when the voices of negation began to be heard, the critical notices which culminate in Buchanan's famous review. Its date of publication—well over a year after the initial appearance of Poems (1870)—is quite important, because it tells us how far Rossetti identified himself with Buchanan. "The Stealthy School of Criticism" shouts back at the champion of late Victorian moral and poetic order, but it does not challenge that order, or argue that Rossetti's book challenged it. Furthermore, the poem particularly singled out by Buchanan for denunciation, "Nuptial Sleep," which was also the key sonnet of The House of Life, was removed from the sequence by Rossetti when he published his new and (otherwise augmented) version of the work in 1881. Like the young painter in "St. Agnes," Rossetti despised and sneered at the "poet-critic" who attacked his work, but Rossetti too, in the end, deferred.

It is an illuminating act of bad faith and betrayal, reminding us of the fear and trembling in which Rossetti worked out his damnation. We might wish that he would have done otherwise, that he would have braved it and defied his critics. But in fact he took the better part, for the shame of that betrayal is an eloquent sign of the ambiguous situation Rossetti's book has exposed. Buchanan is what Shelley would have called "The Phantasm of Rossetti" in a play where Prometheus does not appear as a character. What is Promethean in Poems (1870) is not "Rossetti" but what Rossetti has done. Assuming the inner standing point throughout, the book dramatizes Rossetti's enslavement to the commercial culture he despises. That culture thereby grows again in Rossetti's book, like some terrible virus in a laboratory dish. Poems (1870) is a coin "whose face reveals / The soul—its converse, to what Power 'tis due."

Rossetti's work set out to prove the Victorian theory of cultural touchstones which Arnold was developing elsewhere in his ideological prose: to prove that Ideal Beauty was transcendent. His achievement was to have shown that the theory was a confidence trick which Victorian society played on itself. Thus, the clear path to fulfillment sketched in "Hand and Soul" becomes, in the empirical testing of that prediction which Rossetti's work carried out, a field of endless wandering—in Rossetti's recurrent figuration, a maze.²² Similarly, the Beatricean vision which was to mediate the quest for perfection continually shifted out of focus, or turned into nightmare forms.

The characteristic experience here is to be found in various pictures which Rossetti, obsessively over-painting, turned into palimpsests and cryptic surfaces. Somewhere beneath the face of Alexa Wilding hovered the unseen head of Fanny Cornforth, or Elizabeth Siddal would float about the canvas occupied by the face of Jane Morris. Rossetti fled his haunted and haunting canvasses and sought relief in poetry, which for a brief time seemed open to pure forms, transparent expressions. But the hope turned to illusion as his poetry delivered up its secret and invisible texts to the fire of his art. In the 1870s, as he plunged deeper into that abyss of Beauty, neither poetry nor painting offered any sustaining fantasies of escape.

"An untruth was never yet the husk of a truth," Rossetti argues at the conclusion to "The Stealthy School of Criticism" (I.488) as he makes a final dismissal of the various deceits of Robert Buchanan. Perhaps that relation of truth to untruth never held before, but the observation—the metaphor—is wonderfully apt for Rossetti's work, which tells the truth of false appearances, the truth that is in the husks of beauty and truth. Rossetti's poetry crucifies itself on its own infernal machineries. These always want to appear otherwise, as benevolences, but for the sake of truth Rossetti chose an unusual and lonely path: to will a suspension of disbelief in those inherited lies of art. Thence the nightmares of paradise appear in his work in their many forms, the most critical being called, commonly, Love and Art. They are dangerous and deceitful names, like the realities they denote, and in Rossetti's work none—neither names nor realities—are ever just what they seem.

This is an art difficult to practice, the index of a world not easy to survive. Rossetti allegorized both in a dramatic figure which became familiar to us only much later. It appears in another of Rossetti's notebooks, an entry of uncertain date, though it was clearly written a few years later than the passage I quoted at the outset. This time Rossetti copies a passage from Petronius and then translates it to his own verse.

I saw the Sibyl at Cumae
(One said) with my own eye
She hung in a cage to read her runes
To all the passers-by
Said the boys "What wouldst thou Sibyl?"
She answered "I would die"!²³

That scene of cultural desperation Eliot later made famous as the epigraph to a poem about another wasted world. To find it written almost fifty years before in a Rossetti notebook will surprise us only if we read as twentieth-century literary historians, that is to say, if we continue to misunderstand what Rossetti's poetry is actually about.

Notes

¹ This is from one of the notebooks in the British Library (Ashley 1410; Notebook I, 4r), much of whose material remains unpublished, though W. M. Rossetti reproduced large portions of it in his 1911 edition of the works of his brother; see below n.2.

² My texts for Rossetti's work will be taken from The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1886), 2 vols. For texts not available in this edition I have used The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1911). Both collected editions were edited by W. M. Rossetti. Where necessary, page numbers are given in the text.

³ According to W. M. Rossetti (Works 1:525-526).

⁴ See David Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca, 1983) for an excellent handling of the parallel forms of Rossetti's imaginative work.

⁵ Rodolphe L. Megroz, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter Poet of Heaven and Earth (London, 1928), p. 185.

⁶ References to Rossetti's letters are from Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1965), cited in the text as L followed by volume and page number.

⁷ The poem is printed in L 1:164.

⁸ These are the titles of Chapters I and II in Book III in Doughty's biography Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Romantic (London, 1949).

⁹ The best account of the Trial Books and the publication history of the 1870 volume is Janet Camp Troxell's "The 'Trial Books' of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," reprinted from The Colophon, New Series III, no. 2 (1938) in The Princeton University Library Chronicle 33 (1972): 177-192; but see also Robert N. Keane, "D. G. Rossetti's Poems, 1870: A Study in Craftsmanship," Princeton University Library Chronicle 33:193-209.

¹⁰ See Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pp. 439-453 for a good account of Rossetti's campaign to control the reviews.

¹¹ See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973).

¹² In a sense, of course, Rossetti's work does make an advance from the relative unselfconscious and even innocent work of the early years. What I mean to indicate here is the inadequacy of the commonplace idea that Rossetti's poetry, as it develops, gains some kind of wisdom or imitable moral depth. Indeed, it seems to me that the climax of his career was "penultimate" in the sense that, after completing the work for the 1870 volume and the associated House of Life poetry, Rossetti's poetry experienced a sharp falling-off, a collapse that parallels the curve of his last years.

¹³ Benjamin, p. 104n. The quotation immediately following is from p. 103.

¹⁴ See Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate (Princeton, 1983) 2:6.

¹⁵ Rossetti's paintings—and Burne-Jones's, for that matter—are similarly charged.

¹⁶ Joan Rees has an excellent general comment on Rossetti's significance as a poet: "A slight shift of position, and what has been taken as an emblem of salvation becomes a mark of damnation. This is the central moral insight of Rossetti's work" (Joan Rees, The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Modes of Self-Expression [Cambridge, 1981], p. 101).

¹⁷ In identifying the sonnets I always give two numbers: the second being the number in the 1870 volume, the first the number in 1881. The one exception is for this sonnet, the so-called 6a (a number which indicates that Rossetti removed it from the sequence printed in 1881, though later editors, perceiving its centrality, have always restored it).

¹⁸ See Henry Treffry Dunn, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Circle, or Cheyne Walk Life, ed. Rosalie Mander (Westerham, 1984), p. 14: "Mirrors and looking-glasses of all shapes, sizes and design lined the walls. Whichever way I looked I saw myself gazing at myself."

¹⁹ I refer here to the traditional "biographical" level of exegesis, which plots the poem as a story of Rossetti's relations with Elizabeth Siddal (the Old Love) and Jane Morris (the New Love). The fullest treatment of this subject is in Doughty, but the best discussion of the subject in terms of the formal structure of the sonnet sequence is William E. Fredeman's "Rossetti's 'In Memoriam': An Elegiac Reading of The House of Life," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 47 (1965): 298-341.

²⁰ The twenty-five sonnet, five-song version is the MS Rossetti made of the poems he wrote in 1870-71. He made a gift of it to Jane Morris, the person who had inspired most of the work. The MS (Bodleian Library) was printed (most of it) in The Kelmscott Love Sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. John Robert Wahl (Capetown, 1954).

²¹ The following discussion depends heavily upon a study of the MS and proof material in the Ashley Library (British Museum) and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

²² The central "maze" poem by Rossetti is "Troy Town," whose title means (at one level) a labyrinth (see OED).

²³ W. M. Rossetti printed these lines in 1911; his text differs slightly from the Notebook's (II.12v).