The poem is not one of DGR's great sonnets, and it pales before the majestic painting it was written to accompany. Nevertheless, it is quite an interesting and important text. Both sonnet and painting deliver one of DGR's most strenuous statements about his artistic purposes.
The sonnet opens with an allusion to the Book of Revelation
17:5. As Clarence Fry (who purchased the painting) observed in a
letter to DGR, this reference could easily scandalize a traditional
Christian, for it refers to “Babylon the Great, Mother of harlots and
abominations of the earth
” (see woman clothed with the sun
” of Revelation 12:1. So the
first line announces DGR's revisionary revelation that identifies
otherwise demonic and divine orders. The argument is the same as DGR's
famous “Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor/ Thee from myself,
neither our love from God
” (see
The close of the octave touches on another key idea: that the
Pythagorean music of the spheres becomes realized in one's encounter
with Astarte. Notable here is DGR's startling use (or invention) of the
expression “wean ... to
”. That verb is regularly used with
the preposition “from”; “to” here all but
reverses the idea of deprivation that lies at the heart of the word's
meaning. The suggestion is thus developed that desire (as a state of
longing and deprivation) constitutes as well a condition for realizing
an encounter with ideal orders.
Finally, the sestet develops a remarkable series of ideas
and images that take a performative view of art and the visions it calls
into being. The double meaning in the syntax of lines 9-11 argues that
Astarte's “ministers
”, figured in the picture, are any
act of artistic creation that operates with a performative
or revelatory purpose. In this respect they carry out an action
analogous to Astarte's primary agency. The latter are
emblemized in line 13: “Amulet, talisman, and oracle
” are
not simply decorative terms for “symbol”, they are three
distinctive pieces of cultic machinery with literal—that is to say, with magical— functions. They name instrumentalities.
It needs scarcely to be said that the sonnet references, simultaneously, DGR's painting as well as the ideal forms envisioned through the painting. Their ideality consists exactly in their incarnate and performative status.
DGR finished the painting on 31 January 1877. Since he
was having the sestet of the sonnet inscribed on the frame of the
picture, he would have written it probably in January or February, when
the completion of the frame was being carried out. Three manuscript copies of the sonnet are known: a
Work on the painting stretched from mid-1875 until the end of January 1877.
The sonnet was first printed as part of
F. G. Stephens' notice of the painting in Ballads and Sonnets
A letter from May Morris to T. J. Wise included in the