Although not one of DGR's most celebrated poems, it is one of his most important for explicating the programmatic character of his work both as a writer and as an artist.
As DGR initially conceived this poem in 1869, when he was preparing a collection of his verse for publication (the volume that would eventually appear as the
“This hymn was written as a prologue to a series of designs. Art still identifies herself with all faiths for her own purposes: and the emotional influence here employed demands above all an inner standing-point.”Though later withdrawn from the volume, the note is important for two reasons. First, it shows the intimate relation that DGR cultivated between his work as a writer and his work as an artist. Second, the note articulates one of DGR's key aesthetic ideas: the concept of the
“inner standing-point”, which is his peculiar and novel re-interpretation of Keatsian Negative Capability as that idea passed through the further revisionary conceptions of Poe and Browning. DGR again invoked this concept in 1871 when he responded to
The poem must be read as a kind of pastiche of an early Roman Catholic
hymn to the Virgin. It is an historicist exercise very much in the manner
of the literary ballads cultivated by the Pre-Raphaelites, and especially
by Swinburne. As pastiche, the poem plunges more deeply into the
coveted “inner standing-point”
than does the more celebrated and
cognate genre, dramatic monologue. In this connection it is important to
register that the poem is formally a hymn—an impersonal song, rather
than a subjective lyric.
Projected as a “prologue to a series of
designs”
(according to DGR's note to the title of the poem as
originally printed), we may surmise that DGR began his process of constructing
the work from its 1847 beginnings sometime between 1855 and 1858; for these
were the years when he executed the pictures that he had projected earlier for the
Marian materials of the poem. He probably also worked on the poem in
1860 when he was preparing the aborted
DGR revised the text of the poem in the fall of 1869 as it passed though the prepublication proofs for the 1870
See Commentary (Reception History) for the 1870
Like its related poems and paintings, this work elaborates Marian mythology, and in particular the Virgin's seven joys and seven sorrows (the poem is iconographically ordered in seven stanzas).
First set in type in the Correspondence
The poem was to have introduced, DGR said, a
series of “designs”
he projected in 1847 as a triptych.
The left and right panels were to have
depicted the “Virgin planting a lily and a rose, and the Virgin
in St. John's house after the Crucifixion”
, with a central panel
showing “the passover [of] the Holy Family”
(see WMR, Preraphaelite diaries and letters
it reads as though he were thinking of painting a series of pictures showing the life of the Virgin Mary. The poem is, as it were, designed in panels of paintings to set upon each side of an altar over which would stand the final picture of the Enthronement.
Like all of DGR's
More than its precursor text
The opening of Dante's
“Do you think the foot-note is sufficient as a protest?”(see
“June”, which he reads as a coded reference to DGR's father's system of reading apparently Christian texts as coded secular/gnostic revelations (see
“The surface is a Catholic seeming, but the inner truth is a hybrid of Kabbala, gnosis, the emanational Neoplatonism of Philo Judaeus, and even Manichaeanism”(40).
“I fear the sea must remain at Nazareth; you know an old painter would have made no bones if he wanted it for his background.”See
“the participants in the.ritualrepresented are aware of the types they are enacting”
covenant with Gabrielis recalled.