COLLECTION

OF

BRITISH AUTHORS



TAUCHNITZ EDITION.





VOL. 1380.

POEMS BY DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

IN ONE VOLUME.

TO

WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI,

THESE POEMS,

TO SO MANY OF WHICH, SO MANY YEARS BACK,

HE GAVE THE FIRST BROTHERLY HEARING,

ARE NOW AT LAST DEDICATED.

“Habent sua fata libelli,” there seems to be a

goddess watching over the fates of books, equally

whimsical as she who weaves the threads of our own

mortal existence. Upon one she lavishes with un-

wearying hands the richest gifts of praise and reward,

while others have to toil and struggle in darkness and

silence.

In Mr. Rossetti's book we gladly acknowledge one

of the rare cases where the outward success of a work

of art has been proportionate to its intrinsic merits,

and the rapid run of this first-born poetic production

of its author through a number of editions, is the more

remarkable, as at first sight it seems to appeal rather to

a narrow circle of esoteric worshippers than to the

mass of readers. The reception of the book on the

part of the best organs of the English press was

most favourable; and not as the least sign of a

complete success we might consider it, that violent detractors of its merits have mixed their voices into

the almost unanimous applause: for this dissent of

a few, makes the majority of Rossetti's admirers only

the more evident.

It is natural to ask: whence this admiration and

envy, whence this astonishing success of a book, the

popularising qualities of which in the sensational, or

in fact, any other line, would be looked for in vain?

In answering this question as satisfactorily as the

limits of space will permit, I hope at the same time

to fulfil my task of introducing the work to continental

readers.

Rossetti's poems, therefore, must not be considered

only as the single emanation of a single gifted individual,

but also as the result of a movement in which many of

the most pre-eminent men of modern England co-

operate with our poet in various branches of literature

and art. I should like myself to call this movement

the renaissance of mediæval feeling , in correspondence

with that other renaissance of antique culture in the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, as it has

already been furnished with a name, or nickname (at

least in so far as its tendencies affected the schools of

painting in this country), and as the expression pre-

Raphaelite school has almost become a household

word in England, I must unwillingly abide by this, in

many respects, inappropriate denomination. The

common shibboleth of the chief representatives of this school, and at the same time, of modern English art,

like Holman Hunt, Burne Jones, and Madox Brown,

might be called a strong opposition against the smooth

conventional treatment of nature and the human

figure, as we find it in the later cinquecentists. Most

of these men are, in an eminent sense, colorists, and in

the treatment of their effects of colour, certainly

show some dependence on early Florentine masters.

But all the chief members of the school soon suc-

ceeded in delivering themselves of the “divine

crookedness” and “holy awkwardness” of their earlier

attempts, and to speak nowadays of a man, like, for

instance, Madox Brown, with his admirable faculty of

rendering dramatic effect and human passion, as a pre-

Raphaelite painter, par excellence , and therefore elec-

tively related to Fra Angelico, would be utterly absurd.

Mr. Rossetti was one of the originators and leaders

of the pre-Raphaelite movement during its ephemeral

existence as a school of painting, and he also forms

the connecting link between it and the group of poets

whose aspirations were more or less imbued with the

same spirit of revived mediævalism. The names of

the two poets, Morris and Swinburne, who form

with Mr. Rossetti himself the representative triad of

this movement, are perhaps not as popular on the

other side of the channel as they deserve. Here,

in England, they form the nucleus of a strong party of sympathisers, which daily increases in number

and importance. Their influence is also mani-

fested in the multifarious productions of younger

poets, none of whom seem as yet to have quite passed

the preparatory stage of imitators. The only poet

of independent claims, at all connected with the

medæval school of poetry, is, in my opinion, the too

little known and appreciated poet and painter William

Bell Scott, whose first efforts date back long before

the rise of the pre-Raphaelite movement. It would

be a most interesting task to trace the germs of this

movement in Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, and Keats,

and to compare it with the romantic revolutions in Ger-

many and France. But such a parallel, valuable as

its results might be, would lead us altogether from our

present subject, which is the individual poet, Rossetti.

I have mentioned the whole matter only as the

necessary foil in which we must consider his indi-

viduality, in order to understand the peculiarities of

its subjective being.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in May, 1828,

the son of Gabriele Rossetti, the well-known Italian

patriot and Dante scholar. Rossetti, the father, was

one of the leaders of the popular party at Naples,

which he inflamed with his patriotic songs. He had

to leave his position at the Museo Borbonico and his

country, in consequence of the disastrous events of the year 1821. It seems that two lines in his

poems,

• Chè i Sandi ed i Louvelli
• Non sono morti ancor,

in which tyrannicide was preached but too openly,

prevented him from obtaining a reprieve of the sen-

tence, like many other refugees. He settled down in

London, and married a lady of Italian origin, but

English birth. The weary hours of his exile the

Italian patriot beguiled with studies on Dante, in

which a comprehensive knowledge of the great poet

and historian is strongly mixed with violent modern

party spirit. According to him the whole of the

Divina Commedia is the outcry, and nothing but the

outcry, of a political and religious heretic, against the

established forms of church and state. Rossetti has tried

to show, with considerable ingenuity, how the great

work is written in a kind of Carbonari argot,—to the

knowing full of allegorical illusions to contemporary

persons and institutions. Those of my readers for

whom the subject is of interest, may find an excellent

article on Rossetti's system in Professor Witte's lately

published “Danteforschungen.” For us it is only

important as an indication how to trace back the

thoroughly Dantesque spirit which was to be of pro-

minent importance in the mental development of our

poet. How thoroughly the family of Rossetti was

imbued with this spirit, is also shown in the fact that the names of one sister and one brother of Dante

Gabriel became connected with the great Italian poet.

Mr. William Michael Rossetti, otherwise favourably

known as a critical writer, translated the Inferno into

English blank verse; and Miss Maria Rossetti has

quite lately published a valuable elucidation of the

plan of the divine poem. The second sister, Christina,

enjoys at present a great and deserved popularity as

a poetess, both in this country and America. Dante

Gabriel was in age the second member of this sin-

gularly gifted family. His artistic instinct seems to

have shown itself very early, and according to trust-

worthy information, he used to draw at the age of

five. It seems, indeed, to have been always an under-

stood thing in the Rossetti family, that Gabriel was to

be a painter. He soon became a pupil of the Royal

Academy of Painting, but never attached himself

to any of its professors. It cannot be said that Ros-

setti as a painter, is or ever has been under the in-

fluence of any English artist, with the only exception,

perhaps, of Madox Brown, in whose studio he worked

some short time. His first important picture was called

Mary's Girlhood, a sonnet descriptive of which will

be found in the present volume. Among other important

representations of religious subjects we might mention

an altar-piece in the cathedral of Llandaff. The

picture, called The Seed of David, is a triptych, and

shows in the centre-piece the adoration of Christ by high and low, i. e. by kings and shepherds at his

nativity; while the two sidepieces represent David as

shepherd and king, being respectively symbolical of

Christ's own origin from low and high. The most im-

portant subjects of the painter Rossetti, however, are

taken from the Dantesque circle. It is here that we admire

the profound mysticism of his conceptions, combined

with a glow and depth of colour scarcely surpassed by

the old Italian masters. To these Dante pictures Rossetti

also owes his position in the foremost ranks of mo-

dern English artists, a fact which is the more remark-

able as his aspirations were entirely independent of,

and to a great extent in strong opposition to, the es-

tablished authorities of official academic art. Indeed,

of all his pictures, only two, and those of his very

earliest period, were ever exhibited in public by the

artist. How on such scanty materials, as met the

public eye, a widespread popularity could be esta-

blished, a popularity, moreover, which with equal ra-

pidity was transferred from the painter to the poet, is

one of the mysteries of the rules of growing re-

putations.

With these few remarks we must leave Rossetti

the painter, and turn to the poetic side of his creative

power. The two faculties are blended in him so per-

fectly, that it would almost be impossible to fully

comprehend the one without the other. Only he who

has been fortunate enough to admire in the artist's studio those wonderfully deep representations of the

noblest womanly types, can quite appreciate the mys-

terious charms of his Blessed Damozel, who  

• . . leaned out
• From the gold bar of Heaven.
• Her eyes were stiller than the depth,
• Of water stilled at even;
• She had three lilies in her hand,
• And the stars in her hair were seven,

or of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, whose dangerous

long hair we know from Mephisto's description. Such

creations I should call essentially pictorial; the won-

derfully graphic arrangement in the grouping of the

different motives, reminds one strangely of the har-

monious effect of perfect colour and design, and is to

me only perceptible through the medium of a pre-

vious pictorial conception, as ultimately blended with

the throbbing passion of lyrical poetry, and trans-

ported from the visible world to the intangible realms

of thought and sound. I will not here enter upon a

controversial disquisition of the limits of fine art

and poetry, a task, by the way, which after Lessing

might scarcely be called grateful; much less is it my

intention to decide whether such a blending of two

heterogeneous arts is an advantage of both poetry and

painting. My wish is not to write a criticism of Mr.

Rossetti's poetry, but merely to acquaint the reader, as far as possible, with the hidden sources from which

his inspiration flows. In that respect I hope my ex-

cursion on the domain of art criticism will not appear

quite irrelevant to the subject.

Another important element in Rossetti's poetical

development seems to me his Italian origin, combined

with his acquaintance, from the years of childhood,

with the treasures of the mediæval poetry of that

country. The first fruit of this knowledge was a col-

lection of translations from “ The early Italian poets,

from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante Alighieri, together

with Dante's Vita Nuova. ” This “in all respects praise-

worthy” book, as Witte calls it, was published in

1861, and remained for ten years the only poetic

utterance of its author, if we except a few poems

now and then brought out in periodical publica-

tions.* The work naturally appealed to a limited

circle of readers, but made a decided mark in the

not very rich reproductive literature of England.

What was most admired, and is most admirable in it,

is the thorough entering of the translator into the

spirit of his remote originals, while he at the same

time reproduces in his northern idiom, the finest

nuances of their metrical artificialities, with aston-

ishing skill. Who, versed in Italian literature, can help recognising the slightly frivolous, but highly attrac-

tive and essentially southern mixture of religious and

amorous feelings as we find it in the close repro-

duction of Jacopo da Lentino's sonnet “ Of his Lady

in Heaven. ”  

• I have it in my heart to serve God so,
• That into Paradise I shall repair,—
• The holy place through the which everywhere
• I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
• Without my lady I were loth to go—
• She who has the bright face and the bright hair;
• Because if she were absent, I being there
• My pleasure would be less than nought, I know.
• Look you, I say not this to such intent
• 10As that I there would deal in any sin:
• I only would behold her gracious mien,
• And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,
• That so it should be my complete content
• To see my lady joyful in her place.

I might quote scores of other poems of far more

complicated structure than a sonnet, in which there is

no trace of that uncomfortable straight-waistcoat feel-

ing which one never loses in so many translations.

But still more we are struck with the perfect conge-

niality of author and translator in Dante's Vita Nuova.

Here the continuous equal flow of concentrated feel-

ing gave Rossetti an opportunity of rendering all

the peculiarities and mediæval quaintnesses of his great

model's style, with a fidelity which almost produces

the effect of momentary forgetfulness on the part of the reader, that he is not listening to the sonorous fall

of the lingua di sì. I would ask leave to insert here

a short passage from the Vita Nuova, in which Dante

gives the commentary of his celebrated sonnet

• Dèh peregrini, che pensosi andate.

It may be considered as a fair speciment of Mr. Rossetti's

rendering of prose, and runs thus:

 

“About this time, it happened that a great number of persons

undertook a pilgrimage, to the end that they might behold that

blessed portraiture bequeathed unto us by our Lord Jesus Christ, as

the image of his beautiful countenance (upon which countenance

my dear lady now looketh continually). And certain among these

pilgrims who seemed very thoughtful, passed by a path which is

well-nigh in the midst of the city where my most gracious lady was

born and abode, and at last died.

“Then I, beholding them, said within myself: ‘These pilgrims

seem to be come from very far; and I think they cannot have

heard speak of this lady, or know anything concerning her. Their

thoughts are not of her, but of other things; it may be, of their

friends who are far distant, and whom we, in our turn, know not.’

And I went on to say: ‘I know that if they were of a country

near unto us, they would in some wise seem disturbed, passing

through this city which is so full of grief.’ And I said also:

‘If I could speak with them a space, I am certain that I should make

them weep before they went forth of this city; for those things

that they would hear from me, must needs weeping in

any.’”

I need not add how greatly Rossetti has, by

his masterly translation, increased the general in-

terest in Dante's and his contemporaries' poetry in England, where the study of foreign languages, and

especially that of Dante's, has scarcely passed out of

its teens.

With equal distinctness as in these translations we

discern the influence of Rossetti's Italian nationality

in his original productions.

First of all we might mention in this respect, his

marked predilection for the sonnet form, which he

wields with the ease of perfect mastership, and never

applies in its so-called English or Shakespearean de-

terioration. For after all, those poems of fourteen

lines which we find in the great English bard, marvel-

lous as the may be in thought and passion, are from

a strictly formal point of view, scarcely defensible.

At any rate the expression, sonnet, as applied to them,

is a decided misnomer. I will leave it to Shakespeare-

enthusiasts quand même to decide, whether that won-

derful blossom of lyrical poetry, beginning:

• “Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
• Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy;”

or any other of the immortaly hundred and fifty-four,

is a bad sonnet, or no sonnet at all. Although Ros-

setti, as Mr. Sidney Colvin has cleverly pointed out,

seems occasionally influenced by Shakespearean in-

spiration, he happily has not followed the English poet

in this respect, and his sonnets consist, in accordance

with their innate symmetry and with the great Italian

models, of the orthodox two quatrains with twice re- peated rhymes, followed by a pair of terzine. Corre-

sponding with its form, the spirit of the sonnets

and songs in “ The House of Life” is essentially

Dantesque, nay, the very title appears racy of Italian,

and especially mediæval Italian ground. Some-

times, also, these sonnets with their deep, sym-

bolic suggestiveness, seem to allow of, or even re-

quire a commentary, as the singer of Beatrice has

added it to his Vita Nuova. In the songs of the

House of Life, we most admire the immediate im-

pulse of real passion and an adaptability to actual

musical purposes, only rarely met with in modern

English literature. Italian life and feeling of a very

different kind has also inspired that dark and terrible

picture of love turned to hatred, “ A last Confession.”

Here the drapery of mediæval costume is dropped,

and the violent outbreak of human passion appears

in undisguised nakedness. But here again we find

that wonderfully local colouring of southern in-

tensity of impulse as it is only rarely attained by

poets of our moderate zone. Whether the psycho-

logical treatment of this subject is equal to Robert

Browning's manner of most subtle characterization, I

may leave it to the reader of the Tauchnitz Edition to

decide.

Other poems in this book, show that Rossetti

is also well acquainted with the productions, and

thoroughly imbued with the spirit, of the early litera- ture of his adopted nationality. Some critics have

pointed out a certain kind of rhyme in Rossetti's

poetry in which the last syllable of a word of three

or more syllables receives a sort of artificial accent,

or to use the technical term, where a proparoxytonon

is turned into an oxytonon, and made to rhyme with a

monosyllable, like in audiblè shell, (p.254) promisèth:

death (p. 224). This, it has been said, is an affected

archaism on the part of a modern poet, and amounts

to the same as the uncouth license of ancient rhyme-

sters who coolly misaccentuate words like countrìe,

ladìe, wherever it suits their convenience. In reality,

however, these two cases are entirely different. In the

former case, the unaccentuated last but one syllable

confers to the ultima a weak or suspensive accent

( schwebender accent, as the Germans call it), which

makes its position in the masculine rhyme-syllable

quite permissible, and sometimes, indeed, adds consi-

derably to the sonorous beauty of a poem; with this,

however, I will not by any means commit myself to

the assertion that a modern poet may not here and there,

where he intends to produce a particular effect, be justi-

fied in applying the second mentioned, from a strictly

metrical point of view, decidedly objectionable kind of

rhyme. A beautiful specimen of the suspensive rhyme,

as we might call it, is to be found in Kit Marlowe's

charming pastoral

• “Come live with me and be my love.”

the last verse of which begins

• The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
• For thy delight each Maymorning.*

Another valuable addition to the variety and

beauty of his metrical formations, which Rossetti has

taken from English sources, is the burden or refrain

which forms a conspicuous part of his narrative

stanza. Sometimes, as for instance in “ Sister Helen,”

this burden is developed into a whole sentence of

deepest import, which indicates at once the source of

the whole tragic event.

So much about what Rossetti owes to the casual

influences of nationality and artistic knowledge. But

what we most admire in his work, is something which

lies entirely beyond the pale of nationality, and

much more beyond that of acquired skill. I am

speaking of his wonderfully deep conception of the

female type, of woman in her relativeness to man.

With this we have at last touched the keynote of

Rossetti's creative power. For it is this conception

of ideal beauty, as revealed in womanhood, and

the poet's ardent longing for this ideal, which form

the transcendental basis of all his creations. We

always hear the same grand, albeit monotonous sym-

phony played as in an undertone, whether the poet

sings the pure love of the “ Blessed Damozel,” or the frail beauty and boundless misery of “ Jenny,” the

unfortunate outcast of the London streets. Into the

great beauties of the last-mentioned poem, I should

much like to enter, the more so as it is almost the only

utterance of Rossetti's genius in which he shows a

strong sympathetic perception of the sufferings and

struggles of our own modern life. But I am afraid of

having exceeded already the limits of an introductory

essay, and will, therefore, no longer detain the reader

from making himself the acquaintance of a deep and

original mind, which I hope, after my remarks, will

be no more an utter stranger to him.

POEMS.

[Many poems in this volume were written between 1847 and

1853. Others are of recent date, and a few belong to the inter-

vening period. It has been thought unnecessary to specify the

earlier work, as nothing is included which the author believes to

be immature.]