12 D G Rossetti

Dr Neeta Nagaich

epgp books
11.1 Learning Objective
11.2 Pre Raphaelite Movement
11.3 Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood
11.4 Fleshly School of Poetry
11.5 Characteristics of pre Raphaelite poetry
11.6 Short biography of D.G. Rossetti
11.7 The Blessed Damozel
11.8 My Sister’s Sleep
11.9 Short Biography of Christina Rossetti
11.10 An Apple Gathering
11.11 Dead before Death
11.12 A Birthday
11.13 Notes
11.14 Revision
11.15 Further Reading
11.16 Test Your Knowledge

11.1 Learning Objective

 

To understand what the term “Pre-Raphaelite” means and why the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed

  • To understand the pre Raphaelite movement
  • To know the characteristics of pre Raphaelite poetry
  • To learn about the Pre Raphaelites’ use of literary sources for inspiration
  • To know the poets D.G Rossetti and Christina Rossetti
  • To familiarize self with the poems of Dante and Christina Rossetti

11.2     Pre Raphaelite Movement

 

Pre Raphaelite movement of the mid-nineteenth century, at the initiation period was mainly involved with painting. The artists of the movement chose the period which came before the painter Raphael because they identified with the views and sentiments prevailing in the medieval age. Its members believed that the Classical models and polished compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name “Pre-Raphaelite”. The group ventured into poetry because its leader D.G. Rossetti was both a painter and poet. The poets who came to be associated with the group were William Morris Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris and A.G Swinburne. They founded a monthly review ‘The Germ’ to propagate their ideas. The movement was a development of the romantic revival and its concern was art especially the connection with painting and plastic arts. Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood was born in 1849 and as a protest to the persisting doctrines of the academic convention of their time that made young artists copy the art of the school of Raphael. The Pre Raphaelite endeavor was to create perfect pictures, painted brightly and to be photographic representations of objects and this fascination in art was later taken to poetry. The pictures that were drawn carefully with elaboration of every detail, found their way into poetry and imagination was added with a lot of content from the medieval and romantic world. The poetry was a protest against contemporary poetry of the kind written by Tennyson which was full of tradition and involved in the immediate, everyday problems of contemporary society.Every poem written was perfected with picturesque detail, characterization, individual charm, mystery and sensuality. The poems became beautiful narratives of beautiful paintings or paintings in words. The poets followed the doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s sake.’

 

11.3      Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood

 

In 1848, the young artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited the Royal Academy exhibition and was particularly drawn to a painting of William Holman Hunt labeled ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’. It was not common at that time to make paintings from works of poets, so Rossetti’s fascination led him to find out Hunt, and both realized they could learn a lot from each other. Through Hunt Rossetti met John Everett Millais, and the three formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group that shared its dissatisfaction with the artistic concern of the mid 19th. century England. The name “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” came to be given to the group for the medieval subject matter they used in their paintings and in poetry later on. The young artists preferred the simplicity of lines and large flat surface of brilliant color found in the early Italian painters before Raphael. These were not qualities promoted by the more academic outlook taken at the Royal Academy during the mid 19th century, which stressed the strong light and dark shading of the old artists. Another influence on the young artists was the writing of art critic John Ruskin, when he said that the artists “to go to nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing.” This combination of influences contributed to the group’s extreme attention to detail, and the brilliant colors for which they are known. The artists even became some of the first to paint their canvases outdoors in an effort to capture the minute detail of everything they observed. Later they included four other members in their group, who were maybe not pure artists, but they felt that seven was the necessary number which could be taken seriously. The group grew stronger and in 1849 they made their presence known to all by sending a group of paintings to the Royal Academy, all bearing the initials “PRB”.

 

11.4    Fleshly School of Poetry

 

The term was invented by the Scottish author Robert Williams Buchanan (1841–1901) and appeared as the title of an article in the ‘Contemporary Review’ of October 1871, in which he chastised the poetry of Rossetti and others, particularly of A. Swinburne, for its “. . . morbid deviation from the healthy forms of life. . . .” Buchanan’s said that these poets exhibited “. . .

 

weary wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility. . . .” The provocative poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites was thought to be bad by the prim and proper Victorians when it came to the description of the human body. The Pre-Raphaelites did not shy away from display of their salacious leanings. But it is difficult to charge them with grossness or decadence. Swinburne and others strongly objected to the charge of Buchanan that the poetry of their school was “fleshly.” Rossetti’s ‘Troy Town’ and ‘The House of Life’ are somewhat “fleshly,” but Rossetti is not an offensive sensualist as he deals with the physical body as something inseparable from the inner beauty and the spiritual self. Grierson and Smith observe: “Never since ‘Venus and Adonis’, ‘Hero and Leander’ and the ‘Songs and Sonnets of Donne’ had the passion of the senses been presented with such daring frankness.”Readers found Swinburne to be as intense with his ability to mix shock with amazement as Byron had done before him. Nonetheless it is said that the Pre-Raphaelites had an emotional edge over other poets that led them to excessive sensuousness and giving them the smear of being dissolute.

 

11.5      Characteristics of Pre Raphaelite Poetry

 

The adjective’ Pre Raphaelite’ in literary terms suggests certain peculiarities and tricks in style that mark them different from others.

Use of numbers

 

“She had three lilies in her hand

And the stars in her hair were seven.”

(Rossetti; The Blessed Damozel)

 

Use of sensory details

 

“Without, there was a cold moon up,

Of winter radiance sheer and thin;

The hollow halo it was in

Was like an icy crystal cup.”

(Rossetti, My Sister’s Sleep)

 

Use of Sounds

 

“Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years

Heard in each hour, crept off, and then

The ruffled silence spread again, Like

water that a pebble stirs.

Our mother rose from where she sat;

Her needles, as she laid them down,

Met lightly, and her silken gown

Settled: no other noise than that.”

(Rossetti, My Sister’s Sleep)

 

Archaizing and medievalizing

 

“They hammer’d out my basnet

point Into a round salade,’ he said.

“The basnet being quite out of joint

Natheless the salade rasps my head.”

  (Morris, Old Love)

 

Taste in decoration

 

“Raise me a dias of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys;

 

(Christina Rossetti, A Birthday)

 

Recurrence of moods ( like death)

 

“…. The year grown old

A-dying mid the autumn scented haze,

That hangeth o’er the hollow in the wold,”

(Morris, The Earthly Paradise: October) “..…. The sere

Autumnal springs, from many a dying year Born dead;

                                  (Rossetti, The Stream’s Secret)

 

Metre and Music:

 

Nor shall they feel or fear,

Whose date is done,

Aught that made once more dark the living sun And

bitterer in their breathing lips the breath

Than the dark dawn and bitter dust of death.

(Tristram of Lyonesse)

11.6      Short Biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London May 12, 1828, to Gabriele and Frances Rossetti. He was their second child and eldest son. Dante attended King’s College School from 1837 to 1842, which he left to join the Royal Academy at F. S. Cary’s Academy of Art. In, 1849 and 50, Rossetti put up his first important paintings, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini, for exhibition. The picture forsakes conventional perspective and adopts a naturalistic outlook showing an adolescent Mary working at a piece of embroidery. At about the same time he met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal who modeled for many of his paintings and sketches. They were engaged in 1851 but did not marry until 1860, for many reasons- her ill health, his financial difficulties and unwillingness on his part to commit. When they married, the marriage lasted only 20 months as Elizabeth died from a self-administered overdose of morphine on February 10, 1862. After her death Rossetti moved to Chelsea, to a large house on the Thames which he shared with Swinburne, also sometimes with his brother William Michael Rossetti and George Meredith. He continued painting and writing poetry, getting help from benefactors to become relatively prosperous. Another of his models, Fanny Cornforth (who appears in Bocca Baciata, The Blue Bower, and Found), became his mistress and housekeeper, but because she was full-bodied and blond Rossetti never idealized her. Modeling for him was first done by Lizzie Siddal; sometimes by models like Ruth Herbert and Annie Miller; but most of the time by Janey Morris. Rossetti’s choice of models and his idealization of them helped alter the idea of feminine beauty in the Victorian period and the tall, thin, long-necked, long-haired stunners of frail health that we see in paintings like Beata Beatrix, Pandora, Proserpine, La Pia, and La Donna della Finestra became popular. He exercised wide influence because of his role as the leader of the movement. He collaborated in the Oxford and Cambridge magazine, in 1856; he translated fragments of Medieval Italian Verse and the ‘Vita Nuova’ of Dante. In the late ’60s Rossetti had a lot of medical issues; he began to suffer from headaches, weakened eyesight and insomnia and became addicted chloral mixed with whiskey. Chloral made the depression and paranoia worse which Rossetti failed to control and the final straw was Robert Buchanan’s attack on Rossetti and Swinburne in ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (1871). In the summer of 1872 he suffered a mental breakdown, experienced hallucinations and was plagued by disturbing voices. He was taken to Scotland, where he attempted suicide, but he recovered in a few months to paint again. But his health deteriorated slowly and he died of kidney failure on April 9, 1882.

 

11.7     The Blessed Damozel

 

“The Blessed Damozel” is a dramatic lyric poem of 144 lines in 24 six-line stanza. Dante Gabriel Rossetti completed the first version of “The Blessed Damozel” in 1847 and published it in the February 1850 issue of The Germ, the journal started by the group. The theme of the poem is everlasting love and although the death of the damozel has separated her from the man she loves, the love between them is eternal and lives on. So does the hope that one day they will reunite in heaven. Rossetti wrote “The Blessed Damozel” as a tender, simple portrayal of ingenuous young love that thrived in the world of knights and nobles. The poem presents a romantic, dreamlike atmosphere in which a virginal young woman who has died recently stands at the gates of heaven thinking and longing for the young man she left behind while he likewise yearns for her on earth. Rossetti links the heavenly damozel with her earthbound lover by mixing the spiritual imagery of heaven with the physical imagery of earth. The seven stars of the heavenly constellations that adorn her hair flows down her back with the color of “ripe corn”; at the same time the young man thinks he feels her hair fall over him but discovers it is only the fall of autumn leaves. The Blessed Damozel peeps out, from a golden banister from the line separating heaven from space, with eyes that are deeper than the bottom of still waters. In one hand she holds three lilies indicating her purity and the nearness to God. The damozel’s robe hangs loosely about her and there is no embroidery on it except a single white rose fastened on it, a reward from the Blessed Virgin Mary in appreciation of the damozel’s devotion to Heaven. The damozel feels that she has stood in the heavenly realm no more than a day. To the young man to whom she promised her love, it is as if she has been gone ten years. The damozel stands on a rampart built by God around heaven which is so high that when she looks down she can hardly see the sun. Below the rampart day and night comes and goes and around the damozel stand lovers, newly united in heaven, greeting each other. Souls keep rising to heaven like “thin flames.” The damozel is not interested in what is happening in heaven but continues to look down into the vastness of space, yearning for her earthbound young man. She sees time storming inexorably and visualizes that when he does appear someday in a white robe with a halo around his head, they will go hand-in-hand into heaven and soak up the radiant light of God. They will lie in the shadow of the tree of life, where the Holy Spirit as dove will sometimes alight on it and every leaf will speak His name. She will then teach her beloved the songs that she sings, and he will stop every now and then to absorb the knowledge that the song contains. On earth the young man wonders whether God will invite him to enjoy infinite union with his beloved. The damozel, meanwhile, says that after her beloved arrives in heaven they will visit groves where Mary lives with her five handmaidens who weave golden threads into white cloth for the robes of the newly dead melting into eternal life. The damozel will speak with pride of her love for the young man, and Mary will approve and take them to the place where all souls kneel around God while angels sing and play their stringed instruments. The damozel will ask Christ to allow her and her young man to live forever together, united in love. The young man imagines he sees her smile but she actually casts her arms down on the golden banister and weeps and her beloved feels her tears.

 

11.8      My Sister’s Sleep

 

In “My Sister’s Sleep” Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes the last moments of a dying girl’s life through the voice of her brother. The descriptions and imagery both create a dark mood in the poem and impart a sensory touch to it. The poet uses ways which convey to the readerthe pain of loss that the mother and brother feel. The poem looks atdifferent emotions and reactions to the death of a loved one and emphasizes on the differences of feelings between what the brother and mother of the girl show. Rossetti expertly develops these emotions through his descriptions of the character’s body language and speech; he never explains his characters bluntly. The reactions of the characters, along with the descriptions of sight and sound, simile, and word choice, produce a dark and somber mood. Stanzas ten through fifteen show these techniques effectively. A sense of calm and stillness pervades Rossetti’s language in this poem. The ticking off of the clock and the sound of chairs moving on the floor above provide the only audible disturbance to the long held vigilance. All remains still, except for when the mother lays down her knitting needles and gets up to acknowledge the arrival of Christmas day. Few words are spoken by the pair, but the poem ends with the joint exclamation ‘Christ’s blessing on the newly born’. In my sister’s sleep, Rossetti wants to express his emotional feeling through the poem that reflect th eugliness of industrial revolution in England; that in this poem Margaret suffers a long illness and her mother doesn’t have much money to pay for the health care. The poet talks about a small family which lived in a small house, was poor, and one of the members named Margaret was sick. Her mother couldn’t afford to payfor her health care and the narrator, her brother, can only stare at her hopelessly in the Christmas night. Soon Margaret dies and her mother notices it and repeats to console herself that she wasn’t dead. She says she has left the earth and was to be born again in another world as soon as the clock goes beyond twelve and the new day of Christmas would appear. The theme is Death- death of one person which will be replaced by the birth of new life or human in other place. The tone is cold, silent, and sad as a result of Margaret’s death. But towards the end the tone is bright because Christmas day has come and the sign of the new life as well as the new day starts.

 

11.9     Short biography of Christina Rossetti

 

Rossetti wrote creatively from an early age and by the age of 17 she had composed enough poems for her grandfather to print a small volume of her work, entitled Verses, on his home press. By the age of 19, she was writing for the Pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ and beginning to establish her literary reputation. At this time, she wrote under the pseudonym, Ellen Alleyn. Created by her brother, Dante Gabriel, this pseudonym gave her the anonymity and protection she desired in the early stages of her career. Rossetti’s first volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems was published in 1862. It was divided into two sections, non-devotional and devotional poetry. This collection secured Christina Rossetti’s reputation. Rossetti published her second volume, A Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, in 1866 four years after her first. When Rossetti was 42, she published Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. A Pageant and Other Poems, published in 1881, includes the sonnet sequences Monna Innominata and Later Life. Rossetti’s final volume, Verses, (1893) published when she was 63, contains the devotional poems she had previously included in three of her books of devotional prose, Time Flies, Called to be Saints and The Face of the Deep. In Verses, these poems are grouped together under seven headings. One, entitled Some Feasts and Fasts, contains a selection of poems written to celebrate feast days in the Church calendar. The final section, New Jerusalem and its Citizens, contains poems which look forward to the splendours and comfort in heaven to which the Bible alludes. Rossetti also published two books of short stories, “Commonplace” and” Speaking Likeness” during her writing career: Between 1874 and 1893, Rossetti produced six volumes of devotional prose. Five were published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The Face of the Deep: A devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments, Called to Be Saints, The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite, and Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year.

 

11.10   An Apple Gathering

 

The poem is of seven stanzas with four lines each. The issue in the poem, like in many other poems of Rossetti, is of betrayed love or unreceptive love. The speaker in the poem is more baffled than heartbroken by her lover’s betrayal. The poet makes the setting of the poem outdoors to highlight alienation and danger the speaker experiences when left alone by her beloved. In the first stanza itself the speaker makes it clear that she has had sex before marriage – ‘plucked pink blossoms from mine apple tree’ and because she has lost her virginity before marriage she is shunned by society and not taken to be fit by the people she lives with and no man will marry her. The next stanza speaks about all the people the speaker knows and who have taken advantage of her before rejecting her. In the next stanzas the speaker directly addresses a character called ‘Willie’ with whom she may have had a love affair and who either had abandoned her or had died but nevertheless the separation from her beloved brings her into a state a of despair and isolation. The last stanza puts before the readers the question of what will happen to the speaker of the poem.

 

Christina repeatedly uses ‘I’ to emphasize the suffering and anguish of the speaker. The speaker suffers because she makes the mistake of falling in love before marriage and faces abandonment not only by her lover but by society in which she lives. She shows that ideal love is far from reality and this she does by showing the trial of love through images of uncertainty and change as occurs in nature. Imagery of garden, apples, eve and blossoms are abundantly used to imply temptation and enticement while images of plucked fruits, ripeness and harvest tell about downfall and abandonment. Biblical references are used to bring home the point that Victorian society was orthodox and was unable to accept a woman on whom the social stigma of promiscuity was attached. Because the narrator “plucked pink blossoms from mine apple tree,” she later in the year “found no apples there.” The main part of the poem is spent reflecting on the loving pairs of individuals who have been able to gather apples from other trees. She is left with only her memories, which she counts of more worth than the apples gathered by the others. The repetition of four line stanza conveys the confined way the narrator finds herself due to the strict rules of the society she lives in. The personal voice used in the poem speaks directly about her isolation and desertion she experiences by all, be it her lover or the people around her. She uses the extended metaphors of vegetative life to convey her feelings, her love which comes to her as temptation then becomes the cause of her downfall.

 

11.11    Dead before Death

 

Dead before death is a fourteen line sonnet with a rhyme scheme after every four lines. The speaker seems very depressed in the poem. She says that time brings promises, but even those don’t bring fulfillment, so to her nothing matters and might as well be dead, because at least in death nothing would be expected of her. She feels lost in her life; for the rest of eternity since after death she cannot really tell people how she feels and it is one time a person would be free to do so and because she cannot, she would remain lost in darkness for all of time. The title itself puts in plain words what the poet tries to express. The speaker feels like everything has come to an end, like death has fallen upon her but ironically she is still alive.

 

It could be that the poet is trying to tell us that women of her time had no real independence and no place in society and were not included in matters of importance, neither were they given any opportunity to develop as self sufficient individuals. Their lives were all the same, they were only recognized as somebody’s daughter, sister, wife, mother or widow and this sometimes stifled them. There was no way to achieve; no support in their efforts and so felt dead from the beginning. Rossetti brings the “we” and not “I” in the poem. She makes an assertion for a class of people and that class appears to be women.

 

In the poem the lines “All fallen the blossom that no fruitage bore,/ All lost the present and the future time” express the feeling of the senselessness of one’s being if it did not bear any fruit, the fruit being any achievement that gives an individual a sense of being alive. This senselessness of existence does not only enclose the present, but also the future. This expresses the doubt that a life that does not produce some kind of fruit has any meaning. The lyrical self is “dead before death” and the poet hopes that it can only be revived in the next life after death.

11.12   A Birthday

 

“A Birthday” is a sixteen line poem with two eight line stanzas of irregular pattern. The narrator in the poem conveys her happiness for her love’s forthcoming birthday. The narrator speaks the voice of Rossetti herself. Rossetti always tries to express her feelings through things of nature and in a similar manner the narrator in the poem shows ways her heart can find expression for its feelings through elements of nature. She uses the images of a songbird, a fruit-laden apple-tree, and a rainbow to express the depth of her love. The narrator expresses the depth of her feelings she has for her love’s birthday and she shows it by starting every second line in the first stanza with “My heart is like——“. Rossetti’s uses repeated utterance or reiteration to emphasize the narrator’s eagerness yet inability to express her joy through words. She strains to search for a correct correspondence for her feelings, using all images of celebration and joy. The laden apple-tree signifies the nourishment of life. The rainbow symbolizes God’s promise to Noah and mankind that he will not flood the earth again. Through these similes, the narrator talks about and compares her delight on the arrival of her love. This “love” could be for the other sex, but this is improbable as it appears that her “love” is somehow connected to her Christian faith. The love is for Easter and the spring, which signal rebirth and reawakening. The images in this poem point to the arrival of spring. Rossetti frequently alludes to the Second Coming of Christ as the ultimate “birthday” in her work. The Second Coming is vital to the Christian faith, because it connotes replacement of the old with the new. When she talks of the purple throne, Rossetti is referring to the Temple of Jerusalem from the Old Testament, which represents God’s presence on Earth. It is apparent that whoever the ‘love’ equates, the narrator is very ecstatic at the thought of the arrival. The singing bird in the poem sings melodiously to express itself just as men use words to express their feelings. The voice of her heart can be understood by the singing bird’s melody and movement. She personifies the other objects and talks of them as if they too are human and have emotions. This ability to bestow divinity to nature was a chief characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists and Rossetti has used it well.

 

11.13   Notes

 

Style –

 

Concentrates on disciplined study and exact description of nature

Use of bright colors Themes-

 

Subjects taken from contemporary society and literature Literary sources: Arthurian Legends, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, The Bible, Ancient Mythology, Poetry of Byron, Keats, Tennyson.

  • To have honest ideas to express
  • To study nature carefully, so as to know how to express them
  • To sympathize with what is direct and solemn and genuine in previous art, to the elimination of what is conformist and self promoting and produced through practice
  • To produce good pictures and poetry that promotes the name of brotherhood
you can view video on D G Rossetti

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