Week 10, Rossettis, Morris, Swinburne

Notes on Christina Rossetti

“Song—She sat and sang alway”

A lot of poetry places a great deal of stock in memory and hope, but in this poem, it’s suggested that they shouldn’t be given too much importance, or thought to contain or promise more than they do.

“Song—When I am dead, my dearest”

This is a wistful poem coming from a devout Anglican, but it’s appropriate in theological terms, I think. The speaker is perhaps just saying that there’s no point in becoming obsessive about states after death, especially is that obsession attaches to the departed person’s “final resting place.” The speaker will be elsewhere anyhow. Doctrinally, the point is that to mourn excessively is to show that one was attached to the most perishable component of a person (whether we mean the body or the personality), not the one that a Christian considers immortal.

“After Death”

Death lends perspective on relationships. Does the speaker gain release from what constrained her in life? She seems concerned still with the lover or husband’s thoughts about her. That isn’t always the case in Rossetti’s poems—see, for example, “Sleeping at Last.”

“In an Artist’s Studio”

The speaker finds Elizabeth Siddal and meditate on the difference between her and the one ideal (in many guises) of an aesthetic, sensuous medieval lady. Christina distances herself from the Brotherhood. She refers to the relationship between Siddal and Dante Gabriel. It may be that all erotic relations involve a degree of objectification of the other, but the Brotherhood carries this tendency much farther than necessary.

“Winter: My Secret”

As Isobel Armstrong writes in her book Victorian Poetry, the poem “turns on the refusal of expression. It is about and is itself a barrier” (357). The speaker refers to wraps and masks, coverings that are also representational. Rossetti plays with the image of a spinster with a secret of some sort, possibly one about love. Armstrong says that the poem is concerned with the way “the sexuality of the speaking subject is created and bound” (359), but I don’t think that need be the case—it seems more carefree than that kind of heavy framework suggests. It’s been said that a person with no secrets has no self, that a secret is the core around which personality is built.

“No, Thank You, John”

This witty poem makes fun of the stereotypical male “puppy dog” sensibility about relationships: obsessive, jealous, possession-oriented. I don’t suppose Christina Rossetti would have agreed with Stendhal’s dictum that “In love, possession is nothing; it’s enjoyment that makes all the difference” (En amour, posséder n’est rien; c’est jouir qui fait tout). Here, the offer is friendship of a rather businesslike sort—which of course the immature male addressee seems unlikely to consider worthwhile. Friendship requires reciprocity, whereas the kind of “love” this particular male wants is reductive, based on simple object relations.

“Sleeping at Last”

Compare this poem to earlier ones about death.

A Few Other Poems (Not Assigned):

“Up-Hill”

This poem is a mini-allegory of the sort we might find in John Bunyan or George Herbert. It stems from the traditional Christian theme of life as an arduous journey on the way to death. Is the path’s end death, or the life to come in heaven? The latter, ultimately; the voice promises hope and it answers all questions, but not in a facilely comforting way. The “beds” promised are graves—cold comfort, at least in the short run.

“Goblin Market”

This long poem has the ambience of a Grimm’s fairy tale—they often have to do with sex, violence, and death, as did a fair number of children’s tales in the nineteenth century. (See George McDonald’s novel At the Back of the North Wind.) Where are the parents here? How old are Lizzie and Laura? What is the season and the place? The poem’s context seems ambivalent—it’s a jumble of references that bewilder rather than clarify. The poem sounds like a “heard” tale, not a written one.

Laura buys fruit not with money but with a piece of herself—a lock of hair. She pines because her desires can find no object to satiate them. The fruit has been removed completely, and she can’t even express what the fruit looks like or tastes like.

What are the barriers to expression in this poem? It seems to be a feminine discourse of sacrifice, repressions, and denial. Laura and Lizzie are doubles. Expression seems to require barriers. Conventional ethics would require that Laura accept the constraints others place on her. She will grow up to be a proper Victorian matron. But notice how the cure takes place—she assents to the overwhelming power of the fruit. She enters a second innocence by accepting sexuality. But all it does is allow her to survive. From an adult perspective, what is celebrated here is also to be feared: temptation, and overflowing of sexual and expressive power.

“A Triad”

Love is cast as central to life, yet frustrating. Even married love falls short, but the other two alternatives—renunciation and shame—fall short as well.

“Echo”

Compare this poem to Ovid’s “Echo and Narcissus”; he scorned her and others, and then fell in love with his own image in a pool. He pined away and was transformed into a flower. Echo had already pined away into a voice. But this Echo can speak independently, even if she needs the lover to visit her in dreams, her “pool.” The question is whether even the physical contact the poem may suggest was a full meeting of spirits. The Echo and Narcissus story is about barriers keeping one human being from another—it’s about isolation and solipsism.

Below are some introductory remarks on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. There are a few references to material we haven’t studied because this was originally written for a Victorianist seminar at Chapman.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Introduction

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formally lasted only a few years around the beginning of the mid-Victorian Period and included painters such as D.G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones and John Everett Millais, is an early form of aestheticism or “art for art’s sake,” so it makes sense to connect the PRB to the 1880’s-90’s movement including Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, and others.

Both the precursor movement and the later flowering of aestheticism amount to a rejection of bourgeois sensibilities in art—a rejection of the facile demand that everything should “make sense” and be “realistic” in the contemporizing and vulgar sense of that term. The aesthete’s disgust at artists who copy mid-to-late Victorian “reality” and reflect back to the middle class what is already familiar to it may be seen in Wilde’s delightfully elitist comment that “in art we do not wish to be concerned with the doings of the lower orders” or his infamous quip about the public’s anger at certain caustically realistic works of art being no more than “the rage of Caliban seeing his face in a glass.”

This context should remind us that like its offshoot or revival later on, the PRB movement may be placed in the tradition of semi-romantic or “conservative” reactions against modernity. Consider the writings we have studied so far: Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin. Despite their differences, all are lovers of mystery and the realm of spirit, and all strongly oppose what they see as misguided modern demands for facile clarity and pointless precision, for vulgar materialism and soulless instrumentalism, for a world increasingly designed to fit a radical and artificial conception of human nature and not an organic one. They see all this as the breakdown of any true principle of authority by which ordinary people and their governors may be guided, and in reaction these “conservatives” attempt to reconstruct what they believe are more workable and truer principles by which to live. While the PRB does not voice such grand claims as the mid-Victorian sages, certainly their rejection of modernity stems from the same kind of discontent with the status quo.

The PRB rejected the Royal Academy’s conventionalism, which was allied with the rules (privileging “rationality, selective verisimilitude, simplicity, and balance”) proffered by High Renaissance painter Raphael (1483-1520). Ruskin-like, they see Raphael’s theory of painting as an indicator of spiritual and cultural decline, and want to turn back the literary and artistic clock. They adopt as their models the medieval painters who lived around the time of Dante Alighieri, and also draw sustenance from religion and literature—Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, and Arthurian romance. DGR in particular liked the richness of color, the vividness of imagination, and the intensely spiritual rendering of the human body one can find in these painters. It is as if Giotto and others of that time would agree with Wilde: “those who find any difference between spirit and body have neither.” (You can see some fine examples at the Getty Museum and online at Olga’s Gallery.) Here’s a good online definition of Pre-Raphaelite painting:

The Pre-Raphaelite painters insisted that a painter should paint whatever he sees, regardless of the formal or academic rules of painting. The effort at fidelity to nature and experience was manifested in clarity, brightness, and sharply realized details in their paintings. However, despite its use of naturalistic detail, Pre-Raphaelitism in both painting and poetry turned away from realism, the ugliness of modern life in the 19th-century industrial society in England . The Pre-Raphaelites took no account of the life of contemporary England ; instead, they turned to a heroic and decorative world of the Middle Ages, the art of which was destroyed by Raphael and the Renaissance. (http://www.music.indiana.edu/~u520/rossetti.html)

I think that Herbert Tucker and Dorothy Mermin are right in pointing out the tenuousness of the “transcendence” and mystery they want to see in nature, but let’s supplement this with something that shows the PRB exhibiting a bit more of the “courage of other people’s convictions.” I’ll refer to the aesthetic critic Walter Pater’s analysis of the poetry of DGR:
Walter Pater characterizes “The Blessed Damozel” as follows:

[I]n The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own. Common 205 APPRECIATIONS to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the quality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that earliest poem—a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be.[…]—an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man’s own proper speech; as that speech itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. That he had this gift of transparency in language—the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult 206 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI “early Italian poets”: such transparency being indeed the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see, deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew it.

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition of outline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family circumstances, he was ever a lover—a “servant and singer,” faithful as Dante, “of Florence and of Beatrice”—with some close inward conformities of genius also, independent of any mere circumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time, 207 APPRECIATIONS that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation.

As you can see from what I’ve quoted, Pater casts Rossetti as an impressionist, a painter and poet true to his own internal impressions.

Notes on William Morris

From “The Defense of Guenevere”

Guenevere is riveting and compelling in her self-defense, which is both passionate and wistful, an explanation more to herself than to the assembled knights who, at least in Morris’ version, are putting her on trial. This is by no means simply a modernization of Arthurian romance—there’s something genuinely “Arthurian” about Guenevere’s great strength, her loyalty to Sir Lancelot even in the face of danger. In Malory’s version, Guenevere was not so resourceful a speaker, as I recall, though she was a strong personality. There is little emphasis on sin and repentance here as a frame within which to place the Queen’s experience. Not that the concept of female virtue or chastity is altogether missing, but most striking is Guenevere’s legitimizing of her experience with Lancelot over a period of many years. Whatever happened between her and the bold knight, she feels entirely justified in uttering again and again to Gawain’s face that he is a liar for calling her an adulterer.

“How I Became a Socialist”

1491. “Well, what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor . . . in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH.” Morris holds an egalitarian ideal: a community should live rationally, without wasting what is produced or distributing it in an irrational, unfair manner. Capitalism generates profit by manufacturing a great excess of goods—something new since the ancients often had trouble just producing the necessities—but fails to solve the problem of distribution. Capitalist production, Morris agrees with Marx, turns workers into disposable tools; their humanity dwindles down to a demand for the minimum necessary to live, such as food and shelter. Even for those who manage to live comfortably, bourgeois atomism and alienation are the laws of life.

­­1492­­. “[I]n my position of a well-to-do man, not suffering from the disabilities which oppress a working man at every step, I feel that I might never have been drawn into the practical side of the question if an ideal had not forced me to seek towards it. . . . / Before the uprising of modern Socialism almost all intelligent people either were, or professed themselves to be, quite contented with the civilization of this century.” Morris cannot accept the status quo, with its satisfaction that many people must live in poverty and misery. He calls for radical changes in the social and economic structure of Great Britain—changes that would go far beyond anything imagined by Whig incrementalists, whose tepid reforms, he suggests, would never lead Britons to a just, egalitarian society. Whig reformism, he believes, is only the remnant of a bygone patriarchal, aristocratic ideal in which everyone has a place and ought to stay there.

1493. “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” It should be clear from this sentence that while Morris’ socialism is not reducible to the patriarchal socialism of Ruskin or Carlyle, neither is it to be simply conflated with Marx’s scientific socialism, even if the Socialist League he helped to found in 1885 had Friedrich Engels’ approval as genuinely Marxist. But Marxism proper shows little of Morris the artist’s interest in the production of “beautiful things,” at least in the near future: Marx’s point is that the working class, once sufficiently self-aware of its great value as the creator of the wealth accumulated by the capitalist owner-class, will take over the means of production and use them to build a truly egalitarian, classless society in which everyone works honorably and shares the benefits of work fairly. “From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs,” as the communist saying goes. Marx had nothing against modern industrial production, and by no means rejected modernity: he wanted to harness its power in a rational, humane way. But it’s true that he thought reorganizing the relations of production would allow work to become a constructive, community-building, humanizing activity—in fact, Marx’s views about the centrality of labor for life are adapted very closely from Hegel’s analysis of labor in The Phenomenology of Mind. Morris supported revolutionary socialism, but his interests as an artist and man of means inflects his own comments on the ideal towards which a socialist society should be working.

1494. Some will say, Morris admits, that “any one who professes to think that the question of art and cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork . . . does not understand what art means, or how that its roots must have a soil of a thriving and unanxious life.” However, he insists, we must bear in mind that “civilization has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread. . . .” In this sense, Morris argues, art actually leads the way, pointing ordinary people towards a higher ideal of life. Art, in Morris’ view, sets a more fully human vision of life before us, making us dissatisfied with the vulgar and spiritually impoverished present. There may be some elitism or vanguardism in Morris’ advocacy of crafts and craftsmanship as beautifying everyday life. But on the whole, he argues that healthy art can only come from a healthy society: we produce the kind of world we can imagine, and capitalism has long been making us imagine and reproduce an ugly world hostile to everything that is worthwhile in us as human beings. Modern people, Morris is suggesting, are in danger of becoming comfortable with a diminished understanding of their own capacities and purpose in life, and only a classless society in which art flourishes can turn things around.

Notes on Algernon Charles Swinburne

“Hymn to Proserpine”

Swinburne’s speaker is a late-pagan whose bitterness at the victory of the new religion (Christianity) is supreme. He takes comfort in the idea that the new religion will pass in time, just as his own is going the way of death, to be overcome, as all religions will, by what he calls “the wave of the world.” The deep sea, the power of nature, is greater than any god, in his view. What is collapsing around him isn’t only his religion—it’s an entire way of life built upon the ancient rites and sensibilities. A belief system that had once generated a feeling of community now renders the speaker isolated and weary. He is bitter and beleaguered, and in no condition to fight city hall, so to speak; it appears that the new religion has been both officially and unofficially accepted since we hear that “New gods are crowned in the city” (15). But at least his pagan creed leaves a person space really to die: there’s a place within the old order for the speaker’s natural desire to perish utterly: “I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so. . . . / For there is no god found stronger than death; and death is a sleep (106, 110). Persephone is, among other things, goddess of death and sleep, so paganism has a god devoted to his particular desire at this time of sorrow and loss.

By contrast, the “barbarous” new monotheistic religion, with its “ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted gods” (44), thinks our speaker, is out to conquer death itself, thereby taking away his final solace. Not for him is this worship of the compassionate “pale Galilean” (35) with his offer of salvation, and not for him immaculate Mother Mary, whom he considers hardly worth mentioning in the same breath as Venus, mother of Rome’s great progenitor Aeneas: “not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, / clothed round with the world’s desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam” (78-79). It’s better, the speaker insists, to keep faith with the ancient gods’ combination of beauty and pain, terror and calm. (As we know, the Greek and Roman gods could be generous or cruel as the mood struck them.) The Roman speaker prefers a religion that doesn’t try to make sense of the universe at the expense of its authenticity, whereas Christianity offers an all-embracing scheme of things in which, as Hamlet would say, “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” and absolute justice prevails. The speaker is not interested in the effects of the ineffable and transcendent; he prefers Aphrodite and her offspring Proserpina, key agents of a faith that embraces the necessity of death and remains close to the processes of the natural world. On the whole, Swinburne’s ancients aren’t the calm, dispassionate models for modern humanity that Matthew Arnold and some the German Enlightenment’s scholars make them out to be—his Greeks in particular are closer to the Dionysians of Nietzsche and Walter Pater.

As for Swinburne’s distinctive style, T. S. Eliot says rightly (though he hardly means it as a compliment) that this Victorian poet had a genius for making sound prevail over sense and for existing in a linguistic universe of his own making. Often Swinburne’s anapest-laced verse sweeps over one’s senses like an ocean wave, as if the poet doesn’t want us to pause and analyze what he says but wants us instead to experience the cumulative emotional effect of his long, classical-looking lines. (An anapestic foot runs -- -- /: unstressed unstressed stressed; it has a skipping quality and isn’t often used as the main unit in a line of English verse.) It’s also worth observing that Swinburne’s words seem strangely transposable—he tends to repeat certain images and sounds to an almost obsessive degree. (Oceanic imagery abounds—there are more waves and foam in his poetry, no doubt, than in anybody else’s.) That his style is perhaps an acquired taste for readers goes almost with saying, and Swinburne knew very well that his rebellious brand of verse-for-verse’s sake was easy to parody. In “Poeta Loquitur,” he offers this unforgettable description of his own output: “Mad mixtures of Frenchified offal / With insults to Christendom’s creed. / Blind blasphemy, schoolboylike scoff, all / These blazon me blockhead indeed.” But there’s more to Swinburne than a thicket of poetic lines in which “reason roves ruined by rhyme.” He is a genuine precursor of and then contributor to the English decadent movement of the later nineteenth century.

“Ave Atque Vale”

In this remarkable elegy to Baudelaire, the symboliste to whom Swinburne owes much of his inspiration, the English poet pays tribute to the decadent beauty of the Frenchman’s poetry, to its distinctive sensuousness and its preoccupation with sin, death, and whatever is heavy with desire, languid, mysterious, subterranean, transgressive, strange. The opening question shows Swinburne’s awareness of Baudelaire’s unique quality: “Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, / Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?” (1-2) These are conventional floral symbols, and so another and more personal option must be added: “Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before, / Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat / And full of bitter summer. . .” (7-8). Swinburne, with his aristocratic contempt of anything ordinary, found a brother in Baudelaire, whose poetry he apparently saw as the antithesis of the bourgeois concern for moral propriety in art. Neither will we find in this elegy traditional claims about the power of verse to immortalize the dead; as always, Swinburne’s poetry posits death as absolute, even luxuriating in the completeness of deprivation: “Content thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done; / There lies not any troublous thing before, / Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, / For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, / All waters as the shore” (194-98). This extreme annihilationism seems to be part of what he jokingly calls in “Poeta Loquitur” his “schoolboylike scoff” against Christian hopes for eternal salvation. Still, in spite of Swinburne’s insistence that all of humankind’s symbolic systems, its reductivist intelligibility-making schemes, will pass, we find him drawing much sustenance from the classical world and outlook in which his poetry is steeped: his tribute to Baudelaire is rife with allusions to Apollo, the latter-day Venus of Tannhäuser legend, and Sappho vexed by the currents off Leucas rock.