Like DGR's texts and pictures associated with the Virgin Mary, this work focuses on a crucial feature of Christian devotional symbolism. The point here is to represent the structure of typological symbolism. As is always the case with DGR, however, the approach is historicist and even ethnographic.
The responses to the poem of Coventry Patmore and John Ruskin (DGR had meant
the painting for the latter) are extremely interesting and important. For
Patmore the picture's symbolism seemed vague and obscure, while for Ruskin
there was no symbolism at all. As Bentley observes, however, both might have
failed to grasp the symbolic structure because of its Catholic foundations,
which are so antithetical to “the spirit of Protestant
literalism”
(see Bentley,
The picture thus helps to explain both the difference and the continuity
between his early work, with its Christian preoccupations, and his later
work, where pagan materials get more elaborated. DGR is interested in
Christianity because it is a mythos of real spiritual presence and not of
merely symbolic forms; and he is interested
in “Pre-Raphaelite”
or Medieval
Christianity because he saw in that culture the signs of a belief in real
spiritual presence. For DGR, the Renaissance (and its attendant religious
reformations) represented a great collapse of spiritual values and the
emergence of “soulless self-reflections of man's
skill”
in art and culture.
DGR's poem replicates what he told Patmore (in a letter of 7 November 1855) about the painting to which the poem refers:
“Its chief claim to interest, if successful when
complete, would be as a subject which must have occurred during
every year of the life led by the Holy Family, and which I think
must bear its meaning broadly and instantly—not as you
say ‘remotely’—on the very face of
it,—in the one sacrifice really typical of the other. In
this respect—its actuality as an incident no less than as
a
(see scriptural type—I think you will
acknowledge that it differs entirely from Herbert's some year's
back, Millais' more recently”
In its Victorian context, where the disjunction between primitive Christian
attitudes necessarily clashes with their more attenuated contemporary
residues, the sestet of the sonnet strongly suggests that more
is “prefigured”
in the scene and the
poem than the original symbolic system would have been aware of. DGR's poem
is acutely conscious of cultural belatedness. As such, the foreboding
attitudes represented in all three figures come to suggest not only the
future life of Jesus, especially his crucifixion, but the drained state of
culture in nineteenth-century England and Europe. The figure of the young
Jesus is especially interesting, for the poem suggests that he may be
already aware of the death that lies in store for him. That typological
situation in the Christian mythos turns the boy Jesus into a
“type” of DGR, the contemporary artist who experiences
the cultural death suggested in the poem.
The sonnet was written in September 1869 (see DGR's letter to WMR of 14 September where he says that he has sent “the printer 7 new sonnets” including this one: Correspondence
DGR did a first design in 1849, though its location is not known. In 1854 Ruskin saw two designs and
commissioned one as a watercolour. By 1856 DGR had not finished it, as WMR told William Bell Scott in a letter (“He has on hand the subject, long since projected, of a Passover in the Holy Family” (see Peattie, Letters of William Michael Rossetti
Like the picture it attends upon, the poem centers in the iconographical symbolism of Christian typology. In this symbolic structure events from the Old Testament prefigure New Testament events, as type to antitype. Cultic practices that celebrate the typological events thus carry, themselves, typological meanings. The system is ultimately founded on the Christian belief—derived from the Jewish idea of Messiah—that Jesus's life fulfilled the Old Testament promises associated with Messiah.
For DGR the picture treated the Passover in “its actuality
as an incident no less than as a ‘scriptural’
type”. The patent symbolic character of the picture, however, seemed
“too remote and unobvious” to
Patmore, and wholly nonsymbolic to Ruskin (
The text was first set in type in mid-September 1869 for the
An important background text to the sonnet is the first chapter of
A Cataologue Raisonné
“The scene is in the house-porch, where Christ holds a bowl of blood from which Zacharias is sprinkling the posts and lintel. Joseph has brought the lamb and Elisabeth lights the pyre. The shoes which John fastens and the bitter herbs which Mary is gathering form part of the ritual.”
new dayof the Messiah also prefigured in the Passover.