SOURCE: "Rossetti's A Last Confession: A Dramatic Monologue," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring, 1967, pp. 21-9.

Critics have often suggested that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetic failures are connected with (or dependent on) his metaphysical problems, that there is no intellectual or emotional conviction behind his religious and supernatural symbols, which are then mere ornamentation, or behind his expressions of mystic union, which are then mere wishful thinking. Most recently and persuasively Harold L. Weatherby has analyzed Rossetti's failure as an inability to establish the proper relationship between form and content, as the poetic use of a spiritual and supernatural reality in which he did not believe.¹ Weatherby finds Rossetti intellectually conditioned by the scientific scepticism of his age but emotionally compelled to follow out his strong predilections for both the supernatural and the flesh.

In at least one poem, however, Rossetti resolves his intellectual-emotional dichotomy, and is enabled to do so precisely because he chooses an objective, critical form which allows him his supernatural trappings without his having to be committed to them. "A Last Confession" is usually felt to be uncharacteristic of Rossetti, a pallid imitation of the Browningesque character study. But the main reason it has not been treated with more respect, I think, is that it has not been given the kind of painstaking attention paid to (and required by) a Browning monologue. A careful examination of the poem proves that Rossetti understood not only the external features of the dramatic monologue but also its essential nature, that he used it without giving up his characteristic sensuous detail or his predilection for the religious and supernatural, that in fact he made his personal predilections functional within the whole, objectifying and thus transcending them. Although Rossetti's failures have long been of greater critical interest than his successes, an estimate of his poetry must finally include both. If there are many poems in which his mysticism fails to convince, in which his religious symbolism seems to belie a basic scepticism, there are others in which he sees his materials steadily and sees them whole. The prevalent critical misunderstanding of "A Last Confession" is perhaps indicative of a general tendency to ignore in Rossetti's poetry most of what is detached and ironic.

The dramatic monologue, as described by Robert Langbaum, is identifiable by more than its external characteristics—a speaker other than the poet, a listener, a specific occasion, and an interplay between the speaker and the listener. More importantly the form involves a tension on the part of the reader between sympathy and moral judgment, disequilibrium between what the speaker reveals and what we understand, a strategic significance of the monologue in the present tense of the poem's occasion. That is, the speaker is a pole for the reader's sympathy precisely because he is the poem (there is no vision of the facts except his; there are no facts presented outside of his vision) and because, as Langbaum says, he is "so much particularized, because his characterization through contradictory qualities renders inapplicable the publicly recognized categories of character … since it is between the categories that we find the counterpart of our own life."² Nevertheless, his contradictory qualities—villain and aesthete, criminal because he loves, etc.—also give rise to our moral judgment, a judgment conditioned by the discrepancy between what the speaker reveals and our perception of the limitations and distortions of his vision, and by our awareness of his strategy, his concern with the particular effect of his speech at the moment rather than with its truth. It is because it has these intrinsic qualities that "A Last Confession" is a true dramatic monologue.

The poem, Rossetti's longest work in blank verse, is a deathbed confession to a Catholic priest by an Italian wounded in the Italian resistance to Austria, 1848. The narrator tells of his adopting a little girl abandoned by her parents during the Austrian occupation, of his raising her and falling passionately in love with her when she was fourteen, of her gradually changing, growing away from him, and of his killing her at Iglio when she spurned his love. The framework of the poem is one of war and violence (both his original meeting with the girl and his approaching death are a result of the Austrian invasion), and the interrupted narrative flow reflects the disruption of Italian life during the occupation and the narrator's sense of guilt, his fear, his fever and hallucinations. Externally the narrative, loosely chronological but filled with apparently irrelevant flashbacks and digressions, is held together by the time sequence, climaxed by the account of the murder, and by leitmotifs signifying his sense of guilt—the knife, the sands of Iglio, the woman's scornful laugh. Internally the movement of the poem is determined by the narrator's strategy, his desire in the face of death to lessen the magnitude of his crime, to secure relief from the torments of his conscience, to obtain pardon, or at least sympathy, from the priest.

The dramatic monologue typically involves enough suspension of the reader's judgment that he can read himself temporarily into the narrator's point of view. Certainly the narrator of "A Last Confession" gains our sympathy, not only because he is a dying man with the torments of hell (as he believes) ahead of him, but also because the intensity of his nature draws us in. Even on his deathbed he can curse the enemy (ll. 184-185, 407-411) and be proud of having spent his adult life defending Italy, the "weeping desolate mother" (l. 254). His devotion to the girl, as it emerges in the poem, has been equal to his commitment to his country, and, paradoxically, he has murdered her out of love. The passionateness of his nature is oddly juxtaposed with the poetic, even ethereal, propensity of his imagination, as evidenced by his giving the little girl a glass figurine of Cupid and by his bright dream of heaven and a pleasant doomsday. He is thus particularized by intensity and contradictoriness. And, of course, there is no vision except his by which to test the sincerity of his confession, no other side of the story from the point of view of the dead girl, no judgment on the part of the priest to prompt us to judgment. Critics have long been sympathetically involved enough to arrest their judgments so completely as to lose the peculiar effect of the dramatic monologue, the tension between sympathy and judgment.

The monologue itself, however, prompts us to judgment from within. With no word from the priest we feel his presence: he is part of the immediate occasion for the monologue, the source of the irony of situation encompassing the poem, the reason for the particular strategy the narrator adopts. For the monologue is the confession of a murder of passion to a celibate, and the strategy involves gaining sympathy for a physical love resulting in murder from a man sworn to chastity in a spiritual cause. This is not to say that the narrator is himself fully aware of his strategy, his distortions, or even his original motivations. Rather, it seems as though the monologue is an attempt to justify the murder as much to himself as to the priest before he can finally confess it. The first verse paragraph introduces one leitmotif (the knife), the narrator's sense of guilt, and the first key to the tenor of the whole poem. About the ominous gift he explains matter-of-factly that Lombard girls carry daggers, "for they know / That they might hate another girl to death / Or meet a German lover" (ll. 2-4). But since he knew when he bought the knife that it might be a "parting gift" (l. 25), the instrument represents a desire, perhaps subconscious, to kill her. And the motive of jealousy (which becomes clearer later in the poem) is hinted in his suggestion that a Lombard girl might "meet a German lover." Thus part of his strategy involves from the beginning the concealment (or, at the very best, ignorance) of the true nature of his motivation.

Paragraph two represents a second facet of his strategy, the attempt to draw the priest sympathetically into his narrative—"O Father, if you knew all this / You cannot know, then you would know too, Father, / And only then, if God can pardon me" (ll. 17-19)—while at the same time he is aware that there is little common to both their experiences which would provide a basis for understanding. Too, there is the slightest implication in this first direct address to the priest that to know, to understand, would be to forgive.

His strategy in the next three paragraphs picks up the hint from the second of the great change in the girl (ll. 10-13) and directs attention, not to the murder, but to her attitude at Iglio, her proud posture—"Her neck unbent not, neither did her eyes / Move, nor her foot left beating of the sand"—and her scorn—"Only she put it by from her and laughed" (ll. 43-45). The laugh has become symbolic to him of the scene of parting, of her change toward him, of her scorn, and, as he finally tells it, of her degradation. It haunts him throughout the poem and is one means by which he seeks to justify the murder: "Father, you hear my speech and not her laugh; / But God heard that. Will God remember all?" (ll. 46-47)—implying that the provocation would serve to justify the crime, in part at least, to God.

The narrator stresses his point about the change in the girl by switching from his memory of her scornful laugh to his memory of her childish one and the story of how he first adopted her. There is no reason to doubt that his taking her in was motivated by the highest humanitarian sympathy, but his insistence here on his courage, patriotism, and piety seems strained, designed to put himself in the best possible light and to demonstrate to the priest his spirituality: "With that, God took my mother's voice and spoke … / And so I took her with me" (ll. 91, 94). Keeping her, he says, "doubled my own danger: but I knew / That God would help me" (ll. 99-102).

Though he excuses himself for the apparent irrelevancy of some parts of his narrative (ll. 103-105), he goes on with another digression about his last night's dream, a lovely wish-fulfillment dream in which the laughter that haunts him is transformed into the happy laughter of heavenly maidens. There are, however, no real irrelevancies in his narrative, which compulsively follows out its own logic, directed on the one hand by his strategy and on the other by his irrepressible fear and sense of guilt. The description of the dream ends with the first mention of his hallucinations (both dream and hallucination are expressions of his fear of hell fire), and by implication the contrast of the blessed maidens and the girl casts the girl with the demonic (part of his strategy).

The incidents from his past life with the girl which he now relates are those most significant to him and those which would best serve to justify him. From them we learn incidentally the overpowering strength of his physical passion for her and the motive for his crime. The story of the "earliest gift" he gave her, a glass image of Love (ironically the last is an instrument of death), is intended to show the priest the depth of their early mutual attachment. It suggests much more. How much his memory and his subconscious desire have distorted the actual incident we have no way of knowing, but as he tells it the story has strong overtones of sexual initiation and emphasizes the sensuality of his love. He makes it explicit that the image represented Cupid (Eros) and recalls how he told her about Cupid's ruling the loves of human beings, initiated her, in other words, into the knowledge of the strength of passion in human life. His words to her on discovering that Love's dart had pierced her hand—"'That I should be the first to make you bleed, / Who love and love and love you!'" (ll. 174-175)—suggest sexual initiation even more explicitly. And his recollection of her response is of a love speech: she sobs "'not for the pain at all, / … but for the Love, the poor good Love / You gave me'" (ll. 177-179). The significance for him of her words is underscored when he repeats them later (ll. 487-489) with "Love" in lower case.

As the narrative progresses and the dying man describes the growth of his love for the girl, the not yet extinguished sensuality of his nature becomes more and more apparent, and his passion for his country becomes intertwined with his passion for the girl. Thus paragraph fourteen (ll. 180-200) contains both his cursing of Metternich and his account of how the girl first aroused him physically: "She was still / A child; and yet that kiss was on my lips / So hot all day where the smoke shut us in" (ll. 198-200). But although in this and the next paragraph he seems to be talking to himself more than to the priest, dwelling on his memory of her womanly attractiveness, he is at least fitfully aware of his listener, enough to return to his strategy and to play down the underlying sensuality of his love, and subtly equate it with the spirit:

For now, being always with her, the first love
I had—the father's, brother's love—was changed,
I think, in somewise; like a holy thought
Which is a prayer before one knows of it.

(ll. 201-204)

His preface rings strangely false in juxtaposition with the following description of her "breasts half globed / Like folded lilies deepset in the stream" (ll. 225-226), her mouth "Made to bring death to life,—the under-lip / Sucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself" (ll. 230-231), and her "great eyes, / That sometimes turned half dizzily beneath / The passionate lids" (ll. 244-246). When the strategy begins to break down, as here, we begin to perceive the truth. Even as the narrator describes his love for his country (ll. 253-264) his remarks suggest sublimated sexual energy, for he speaks of his fight for Italy as "a love to clasp, … / All things together that a man / Needs for his blood to ripen" (ll. 261-263).

Thus, because he does indeed have a strategy, because he is perhaps himself confused about his motives and his nature, the reliability of the narrator is called into doubt. Significantly, the girl's actions as he relates them are sufficiently ambiguous to allow more than one interpretation. We have, of course, only his to go on. When he describes how once he almost chided her for leaping about and laughing, her song in answer is ambiguous in its intent; both it and her actions, as he relates them (ll. 337-341), suggest flirtatiousness. Yet her ostensible point is stated clearly in her question to him: "'Weeping or laughing, which was best?'" At any rate, we see in the narrator's complete memory of the song and in his tears (ll. 272-278) that he has interpreted it as a love song.

In the next incident we again have only his interpretation of her ambiguous action. She is now a woman, as he emphasized more than once, and he feels "some impenetrable restlessness / Growing in her to make her changed and cold" (ll. 370-371). When in the Duomo she prays before "Some new Madonna gaily decked, / Tinselled and gewgawed, a slight German toy" (ll. 385-386) rather than the one "wrought / In marble by some great Italian hand" (ll. 354-355), he is shaken, and "sharply" questions her of "her transferred devotion" (ll. 388-389). His interpretation is at odds with the fact that in Roman Catholicism one's devotion is not to the statue but to Mary, of whom the image serves as the visual reminder, but it is characteristic of him that his vision of the incident involves a confusion of patriotism, religion, and love. What he fears, what he sees symbolically in her praying before the "slight German toy" (echo of the "German lover") is the transference of her affection for him to someone else. He makes the fear of loss explicit when he describes their going out again into the square:

… and the face
Which long had made a day in my life's night
Was night in day to me; as all men's eyes
Turned on her beauty, and she seemed to tread
Beyond my heart to the world made for her.

(ll. 399-403)

At this point, with renewed fear of damnation and perhaps a sense of confessing too much, of drawing too dangerously close to the real motive for the murder, he bursts out that if the priest mistakes his words and so absolves him, the blessing will burn his soul. He repeats:

If you mistake my words
And so absolve me, Father, the great sin
Is yours, not mine: mark this: your soul shall burn
With mine for it.

(ll. 418-421)

Though he asks not to be absolved, the strategy is apparent. He has of course tacitly asked for absolution throughout his confession; he wants the priest to take over part of the responsibility for his soul. At the least he desires understanding, a human forgiveness:

Father, Father,
How shall I make you know? You have not known
The dreadful soul of woman, who one day
Forgets the old and takes the new to heart.

(ll. 448-451)

To be understood and forgiven he becomes almost Machiavellian; to make the priest know the "dreadful soul of woman" he impassionedly and at length equates his loss with an imaginary situation in which the priest loses heaven after one year in it (ll. 460-474):

Even so I stood the day her empty heart
Left her place empty in our home, while yet
I knew not where she went nor why she went
Nor how to reach her: so I stood the day
When to my prayers at last one sight of her
Was granted, and I looked on heaven made pale
With scorn, and heard heaven mock me in that laugh.

(ll. 475-481)

—spiritual metaphor to describe earthly (even earthy) loss. His passion for her (even now that she has been some time dead)—more sensual, more powerful, more jealous than he admits—at last betrays him into blasphemy as he momentarily forgets both strategy and confession in addressing her: "Ah! be it even in flame, / We may have sweetness yet" (ll. 485-486). His confusion is apparent when he asks her to say, "As once in childish sorrow" (l. 487), what amounts to a declaration of love. What he seems to want is the child's devotion to a father—but from an adult, fully ripened woman. There is no evidence in his narrative (in fact it is noticeably absent) that she ever considered him as a lover or as anything but a father, which is perhaps why he, having nothing else, so emphasizes her child's love for him.

Nor are the ambiguities surrounding the girl resolved by the murder scene. In the village as he hides from the spies he hears the harlot's laugh, and three hours later the girl's laugh reminds him of it:

She had not left me long;
But all she might have changed to, or might change to,
(I know nought since—she never speaks a word—)
Seemed in that laugh.

(ll. 523-526)

To take this motive for the killing at face value—as critics have long done³—is to judge the speaker as he wishes to be judged, to ignore his strategy, to lose, in other words, the effect of tension between sympathy and judgment. In actuality we must judge him precisely because the motive as he gives it is false. The facts do not force us to conclude that the girl is either depraved or in danger of depravity; we have only his judgment to go on, and the soundness of that judgment is questionable. Because of the ambiguity of her actions, her guilt or innocence remains problematic. His very language as he confesses the motive—what she might have changed to, or might change to, seemed in her laugh—suggests his own uncertainty about her guilt, his unwillingness to commit himself unequivocally to a judgment distorted by his intense passion for her, his fear that she may take a lover, his frenzy at being rejected. It is not to save her soul that he kills her; it is to prevent her from taking "a German lover," from going "Beyond [his] heart to the world made for her." It is the strategy which demands that he spiritualize his motive.

Besides being incapable, finally, of confessing frankly to a crime of passion, he describes the murder as though it were an act devoid of volition, talking of fire and blood and of knowing that he had stabbed her when he found her "laid against [his] feet" (l. 538). At the very last, however, the strategy again breaks down, and the poem ends in hallucination and fear, a plea for the priest to tell him what hope there is, and the premonition—"but I shall hear her laugh / Soon, when she shows the crimson steel to God" (ll. 558-559). The final irony is that for all of the fearful and desperate manipulation of fact and emotion in his confession, the magnitude of his crime stands bare in the sight of God. And he knows it.

The poem is not only a skillful and subtle dramatic monologue; it is also characteristic of Rossetti in its details: Rossetti's penchant for the abstraction upper case "Love" becomes a means of objectively exploring the relationship between the narrator and the girl; his characteristic sensuous detail becomes in context an indication of the narrator's intense physicality; his predilection for the religious, transformed into the narrator's beliefs, provides the occasion for the poem, the reason and direction for the monologue's present tense strategy, the rationalization for the murder; his fascination with the supernatural and the demonic creates the hallucinatory apparition of the girl, symbol of guilt and fear. The success of the poem is perhaps a result of the fact that because of the dramatic monologue form, the poet is committed to none of these materials, but stays outside of his poem directing our judgment by demonstrating the distortions of the narrator's vision through the workings of his strategy. A form based on disequilibrium seems peculiarly appropriate for a poet of whom it has so often been protested that he does not believe in the symbols and trappings of his poems. It is a way out of the problem of belief and value while still allowing him the materials which appeal to his aesthetic sense, a legitimate artistic means of feeling one way and thinking another.

Notes

¹ "Problems of Form and Content in the Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," VP, II (Winter, 1964), 11-19.

²The Poetry of Experience (New York, 1957), p. 204.

³ For example, Lafcadio Hearn in Pre-Raphaelite and Other Poets, ed. John Erskine (New York, 1922), p. 75, says that the narrator "has reason to suspect unchastity" of his beloved and kills her on the instant; Arthur C. Benson, Rossetti (London, 1916), p. 123, asserts that he kills her half in mad passion and half to save her from degradation; and—further off than all—Garnet Smith writes in "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Contemporary Review, CXXXIII (1928), 629: "That he might save her soul, the penitent has slain his love."