When DGR saw the so intensely fine that I
condescended to sit down before it and write a sonnet. You have
heard me rave about the engraving before, and I fancy have seen it
yourself. There is a woman, naked, at one side, who is dipping a
glass vessel into a well; and in the centre two men and another
naked woman, who seem to have paused for a moment in playing on the
musical instruments
” (
The sonnet is very Keatsian in its appreciation of art, or aesthetic space, as emblematic of an “immortality” unavailable to flesh and blood humans. As in the “
DGR wrote the sonnet in front of the picture early in October 1849, during
his stay in Paris. Two manuscripts survive: the
A
The major revisions were made before the poem was first set in
type (in the
First published in the
Pastorale
, and is sometimes called
Fête Champêtre
. Seen as Titian's work it is dated early sixteenth-century, shortly
after the death of Giorgione. The work is read as Titian's act of homage to
his great predecessor. Whatever the personal attribution, however, the
painting is an important instance of what Pater famously labelled
“The School of Giorgione”, which introduced a
powerfully poetic element into pictorial space.
A Moment's Monument
preferred the old line” (i.e., the line as printed in the
Silence of heat, and solemn poetry.”). DGR thought that original line “
quite bad. ‘” (seeSolemn poetry’ belongs to the class of phrases absolutely forbidden I thinkinpoetry. It is intellectually incestuous,—poetry seeking to beget its emotional offpring on its own identity. Whereas I see nothing too ‘ideal’ in the present line. It gives only the momentary contact with the immortal which results from sensuous culmination and is always a half conscious element of it
sensuous culmination” develops a “
momentary contact with the immortal”. It is crucial that in DGR's view this contact is realized in the mind as well as the body. Perhaps his most elborate treatment of this conviction comes in