Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics [1st ed.] 9783030513375, 9783030513382

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Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics Edited by Heather Bozant Witcher Amy Kahrmann Huseby

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics “The first modern book on Pre-Raphaelite poetry since Harold Bloom’s 1986 Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics will stand out in the literature devoted to Pre-Raphaelitism as the first convincing exploration of the PreRaphaelites’ lyric project: an avant-garde ars poetica written to be heard, to be seen, to be touched, to be sung. The book recovers poetry by ‘Brothers’ and ‘Sisters’ as its chapters emphasise the political radicalism and transgressive hybridity of the Pre-Raphaelite lyric. An invaluable resource for any critic fascinated with Pre-Raphaelitism, historical poetics, gender studies, and the fin de siècle.” —Ana Parejo Vadillo, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK “This rich and wide-ranging book offers a valuable and original contribution to the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies and will appeal to scholars of Pre-Raphaelitism and nineteenth-century literature. Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics focuses on PreRaphaelite poetic form in a variety of manifestations, taking in themes of gender, politics, and aesthetics, offering fresh insights into Pre-Raphaelite poetry against a broader backdrop of literary making and production.” —Amelia Yeates, Senior Lecturer in Art History, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Heather Bozant Witcher · Amy Kahrmann Huseby Editors

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics

Editors Heather Bozant Witcher Auburn University at Montgomery Montgomery, AL, USA

Amy Kahrmann Huseby Florida International University Miami, FL, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-51337-5 ISBN 978-3-030-51338-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Universal Images Group North America LLC/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

We dedicate this book to the seven men and five fur-children in our lives.

Acknowledgments

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support for this project by each of its contributors, by our Palgrave editing staff, a host of colleagues, our respective institutions, family, and friends. We want to begin by thanking two extraordinary Research Assistants who stepped into the late stages of this project and diligently provided much-needed support to see this volume to fruition. The Humanities EDGE at Florida International University, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded program that helps undergraduates in the humanities make the transition from Miami Dade College to Florida International University, enabled us to work with undergraduate student Anaridia Molina during Summer 2019. Anaridia tirelessly located research materials, crafted bibliographies, and built our permissions documentation, which was extensive. A departmental research assistantship from Auburn University at Montgomery similarly enabled us to work with graduate student Robert Lee, who undertook fact-checking and helped ensure our notes were uniform and accurate, as well as finalizing permissions documentation. Without both of these superb students, we would not have been able to complete this edited collection on time. Both intend to pursue careers in higher education, and we’re excited to see what they do next. Anaridia and Robert give us hope for the future of our profession! In addition to our Research Assistants, we’re very grateful to each of the contributors in this volume. When we began, we made a wish list

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of scholars in Pre-Raphaelite studies with whom we both hoped to work but also thought would have substantial contributions on the question of what Pre-Raphaelite poetics is, how we define it as a field, and the questions we might pursue in the future. Without hesitation, John Holmes, Beth Helsinger, Mary Arseneau, Florence Boos, Serena Trowbridge, and Dinah Roe enthusiastically agreed to get on board and have supported this collection with their acumen, kindness, patience, and rigorous scholarship throughout the process. At times, we felt less like the co-editors and more like very willing students happy to learn from each of these fine folks. Added to this list of senior scholars, we want to extend our thanks to Robert Wilkes and Hannah Comer, both of whom joined the project while also preparing to defend their dissertations. Robert and Hannah brought refreshing, valuable, and original critical perspectives to their contributions in this collection. Our gratitude also goes to Phyllis Weliver for her advice from beginning to end, to our prompt, clear, and patient editors at Palgrave (Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe), and additional thanks to Dinah Roe, who read all of the draft chapters to not only craft an excellent, generous, and thoughtful afterword synthesizing the work of this volume but also took the time to point out subtle issues that we might have missed without her guidance. For these and all of their ongoing assistance, we are profoundly grateful. And last but never least, we wish to thank our families for their support and encouragement throughout our studies, endurance on the job market, late nights of drafting and revising, occasional tears, and endless meals placed beside us gently while we worked. Clearly we can never fully express our love for them sufficiently, but we name them in this moment in order to signal, once again, that we simply could not do this alone. (From Amy) To Dennis, Cody, Bailey, and Jacob, my loves, I know my thanks will only be insufficient for all of your support and love over the years. I hope to continue making you proud and to reciprocate that love and support as I cheer each of you on in the paths upon which you set out. I love you all so hard! (From Heather) To Geoff, your unfailing support and partnership have made this collection possible in the midst of change and chaos. To Philip and Oliver, may you grow to appreciate the humanities and the joys of collaboration as much as I do. This book could not have been written without the boundless love of our families, for which we are always, daily, and ever grateful.

About This Book

Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics offers a broader range of PreRaphaelite literary scholarship than is currently available in any one volume, provoking innovative discussions into the poetic form, gender dynamics, political engagement, and networked communities of PreRaphaelitism. The authors in this collection position Pre-Raphaelite poetics broadly in the sense of poiesis, or acts of making. Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics aims to identify and explore the Pre-Raphaelites’ diverse forms of making: social, aesthetic, gendered, and sacred. Each chapter examines how Pre-Raphaelitism takes up and explores modes of making and remaking identity, relationality, moral transformations, and even, time and space. Primary themes include formal or prosodic approaches, expanded networks of literary and artistic influence within Pre-Raphaelitism, and critical legacies and responses to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and arts.

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Contents

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Introduction: Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby

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Gender Work: The Political Stakes of Pre-Raphaelitism Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby

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Investigating Intersexuality: Pre-Raphaelite Poetics and the Hermaphrodite Self John Holmes

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Second Generation Pre-Raphaelitism: The Poetry of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine Florence Boos

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“Of Chivalry and Deeds of Might”: Reviving F. G. Stephens’s “Lost” Arthurian Poem Robert Wilkes Musico-Literary Pre-Raphaelite Poetry Mary Arseneau

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CONTENTS

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Christina Rossetti’s Emblematic Poetics Heather McAlpine

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Elizabeth Siddall: Pre-Raphaelitism, Poetry, Prosody Serena Trowbridge

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Swinburne’s Expansive Poetics Elizabeth Helsinger

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“Afar from My Own Self I Seem”: D. H. Lawrence, Persephone, and Pre-Raphaelite Poetics Hannah Comer

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Afterword Dinah Roe

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Appendix

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Mary Arseneau is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and co-editor of The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Ohio University Press, 1999). She is developing an open-access database-driven digital catalogue and archive of these musical settings (Christina Rossetti in Music). Florence Boos is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She has published several books on Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, most recently History and Poetics in The Early Writings of William Morris (2015), has edited Morris’s The Earthly Paradise and His Socialist Diary, and is the general editor of the William Morris Archive. Hannah Comer recently completed her Ph.D. in the English Literature department at the University of Birmingham. Her thesis looks at the PreRaphaelite legacy in Modernism. Elizabeth Helsinger is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her books include Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (1982), Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (2008), and Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015), among others.

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John Holmes is Professor of Victorian Poetry and Culture at the University of Birmingham. His books include The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (Yale University Press, 2017) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self (Ashgate, 2005). Amy Kahrmann Huseby is Assistant Teaching Professor at Florida International University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Quantified Lives: Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and the Mathematics of Social Totality, which develops an account of how poets derived mathematical concepts from poetry in their efforts to understand unifying forms and to reconceptualize literary totalities. Her articles on poetry and poetics of the long nineteenth-century have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Women’s Writing, Victorian Periodicals Review, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Heather McAlpine is an Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, located on Stolo territory in Abbotsford, BC, Canada. Her research has appeared in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Victorian Review, and The Explicator, among other journals. Dinah Roe is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include: Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan); Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) and an anthology of Pre-Raphaelite poems, The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin (Penguin Classics). She is currently editor of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Serena Trowbridge is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Her book My Lady’s Soul: The Poetry of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall was published by Victorian Secrets in August 2018. Other publications include Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities (Ashgate, 2014), coedited with Amelia Yeates, and Christina Rossetti’s Gothic (Bloomsbury, 2013). Robert Wilkes recently completed his Ph.D. at Oxford Brookes University. His research has focused on the art and writings of Frederic George Stephens. He has published articles in the British Art Journal and the Pre-Raphaelite Society Review, and is currently planning a monograph on Stephens’s work.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Heather Bozant Witcher is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University at Montgomery. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century poetics, collaboration, and sociability, as well as archival theory and digital humanities. She is currently researching Pre-Raphaelite poetics and methods of revision. She was the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and recipient of the 2016 William Morris Award. She has published in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victoriographies, and Forum for Modern Language Studies. Her first monograph, Sympathetic Texts: Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century is currently under review.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 5.1

Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852, oil on canvas, 53 15/16 × 77 11/16 in, Manchester Art Gallery (Photo © Artmedia / Alamy Stock Photo) Walter Howell Deverell, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV , exhibited 1850, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 132.1 cm, private collection (Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images) Walter Howell Deverell, “Viola and Olivia,” 1850, etching, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham Sleeping Hermaphroditus, The Louvre, Paris (Photograph by Jastrow) Sleeping Hermaphroditus, The Louvre, Paris (Photograph by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin) The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (January Issue), Alderman Library, The Rossetti Archive Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel,” The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (November 1856), The William Morris Archive Walker & Boutall, “William Morris at 23” (© National Portrait Gallery, London) William Morris, “Riding Together,” The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (May 1856), The William Morris Archive Frederic George Stephens, Morte d’Arthur, 1849, oil on panel, unfinished, 59.5 × 74 cm, Tate, London

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Fig. 5.2 Fig. 7.1

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Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 9.1

Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. 2015.47.96.8 George Wither, Emblem III, Book 1 in A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moderne, quickened with metricall illustrations, both Moral and divine, 1635 Andrew Willet, Emblem 3, Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una, 1592 George Wither, Emblem XX, Book 3 in A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moderne, quickened with metricall illustrations, both Moral and divine, 1635 “Buy from us with a golden curl,” title page illustration for Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) Francis Quarles, Emblem VII, Book 1 in Emblemes, Divine and Moral, 1635 Turner, J. M. W. Wreckers —Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, c. 1833–1834, oil on canvas, 90.5 × 120.8 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby

From its inception in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite movement was regarded by its founders as an artistic rebellion, meant to shock and destabilize. Initially publicized through the visual arts, the self-styled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rejected the classical conventions of the London Royal Academy of Arts. Pre-Raphaelites opted instead for a return to nature, as famously memorialized by William Michael Rossetti in his sketch of the movement’s primary aims: 1, to have genuine ideas to express; 2, to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3, to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and 4, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.1

1 William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), 1: 135.

H. B. Witcher Auburn University at Montgomery, Montgomery, AL, USA A. K. Huseby (B) Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_1

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But what, specifically, is meant by this well-trodden understanding of PreRaphaelitism’s connection to nature as a means of returning to “genuine ideas” and sympathetic feeling, notably constructed post factem through memoir? John Holmes pays particular attention to the Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on natural history and geology in The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (2018), tracing the movement’s engagement with the nineteenth century’s capacious understanding of science. Pre-Raphaelitism, Holmes argues, “was one manifestation of a widespread mid-Victorian aspiration to establishing truth through unprejudiced and scrupulous observation.”2 While Holmes elucidates further implications for the forms of empirical observation, it is our belief that scholarship can do more to emphasize the diversity and variance afforded by the attentive study of nature as a means of “making new.” Such a concept links Pre-Raphaelite poetics to the early twentieth-century avant-garde. The early Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood underscore honest observation to promote a sense of “establish[ed] truth” in their art in the same way that empiricism allows for the truths of science. But what “truths” do Pre-Raphaelite poetics reveal? We contend that political truths are one of the strengths of PreRaphaelitism. In particular, our volume connects the poets’ respective use of prosodic elements and radical themes to at once critique nineteenthcentury traditions of poetic expression and to deliver political views from the perspective of everyday life. Pre-Raphaelite political objectives are certainly underresearched and underexplored. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to locate any references to politics or the political in the indices to most scholarly work on the Pre-Raphaelites. Even in a vital and refreshing study like Eleonora Sasso’s The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East (Edinburgh UP, 2018), these categories are notably absent. As a result, we read in W. M. Rossetti’s call to “sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt” a language of political action, one which we explore further in Chapter 2 and throughout this volume. Although largely considered in terms of the second stage of Pre-Raphaelitism, due in part to William Morris’s political engagement, we acknowledge the political nature inherent in a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite poetics. What’s more, the political investments of the PreRaphaelites are another ligature between their work and that of later creative groups. In addition to a similar quotidian political orientation,

2 John Holmes, The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (New Haven: Yale UP, 2018), 10.

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the Pre-Raphaelites and members of the twentieth-century avant-garde shared a central aim that involved innovating Victorian style and culture by resisting binaries and embracing diversity, hybridity, and multimodality. Although Pre-Raphaelitism began as a group of male painters committed to resisting traditional approaches to visual art—a view upheld above in W. M. Rossetti’s program—the works created by its artists underscore intertextuality, with poetry and art intertwined from the group’s conception, and a desire for destabilization. Nowhere is this destabilization of categories more apparent than in the short-lived periodical, The Germ (1850). Lindsay Smith suggests that the change in title— from The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art to Art and Poetry, Being Thoughts Towards Nature, Conducted Principally by Artists —be perceived as “radical intertextuality that presents the journal as questioning its categorization as discourse.”3 More to the point, in the first issue, sculptor John Lucas Tupper proposes the unsettling of categories traditionally deemed “High Art” and “Low Art” in his essay “The Subject in Art.” To eliminate the dichotomy between artistic categories, Tupper turns to the integrity of nature and the necessity of multiplicity: “we then have the artist, instructed of nature, fulfilling his natural capacity, while his works we have as manifold yet various as nature’s own thoughts for her children.”4 Tupper’s essay promotes the democratic spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism and aligns with the views elaborated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” an essay newly discussed by Holmes in terms of Chiaro’s sexuality in Chapter 3 of this collection. Such works of prose in The Germ’s initial issue identify the core of the Pre-Raphaelite manifesto: literary, visual, and material art as an innovative means of self-expression—or “instinctive impulse”—through the study of natural appearances, while embracing plurality.5 ∗ ∗ ∗

3 Lindsay Smith, Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and Painting (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 123. 4 John Lucas Tupper, “The Subject in Art,” in The Germ, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Eliot Stock, 1901), 1:14. 5 Ibid.

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This edited collection defines Pre-Raphaelite poetics by its plurality. That is not to say that Pre-Raphaelitism is all things and, as a consequence, to impute to the category less integrity. Instead we place their forms of self-expression under this rubric of plurality to designate heterogeneity, cultural borrowing, innovation, and evolution as the substrate for all Pre-Raphaelite forms of making. Moreover, we position Pre-Raphaelite poetics broadly in the sense of poiesis, or acts of making. Poiesis, the originary term from which poetry takes its name, initially intended all art forms involved in creative making. Our collection, therefore, like the Pre-Raphaelites, returns to these origins in our endeavor to understand their poetics. In so doing, the definitional capacity of this collection extends from poetry to music to visual arts, as well as to the making of the Pre-Raphaelites as a society themselves. In short, Defining PreRaphaelite Poetics identifies and explores the Pre-Raphaelites’ diverse forms of making: social, aesthetic, and gendered. Such forms emerge as the recognizable content, imagery, and aesthetics of Pre-Raphaelitism. Broadly, these include homosocial networks, genealogies of inspiration, and collaboration; multimedial and intertextual borrowing, homage, and reference; reaching backward and forward historically, drawing on the past and becoming inspiration for the future; political commentary and activism; complex gender dynamics, which include sensual love and the idealization of women, and women creators writing against precisely those ideals; nature and representations of inner experience; and the use of legend (Arthurian, Celtic, and Norse). Each chapter examines how the Pre-Raphaelites and Pre-Raphaelitism take up and explore modes of making and remaking identity, relationality, moral transformations, and even time and space. Ultimately, this edited collection argues that the plurality—or interlacing a variety of artistic forms—of Pre-Raphaelite poetics is its consummate defining quality. To accommodate this comprehensive understanding of poetics, Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics takes up the question of Pre-Raphaelite form. In the Fall/Winter 2018 volume of Victorian Literature and Culture, which provides keywords for the Victorian field, Stephen Arata and Herbert Tucker assert the prominence of form and formalism as a burgeoning field of literary study. As Arata and Tucker note, the

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concept of form is capacious, and should be celebrated for its openness.6 In our collection, we celebrate form’s extensive range through our emphasis on literary Pre-Raphaelitism as a conscious act of making through poetic experimentation and social networking. Extending Caroline Levine’s concept of “affordances” to link literature and politics, many of our contributors use form as an organizing principle, one which connects the literary, musical, and visual art to social and political life.7 Form thereby offers a method of defining Pre-Raphaelite poetics not as a what but as a how—as a verb, rather than as a noun. In other words, beyond the list of elements and anticipated subject matter offered above, form reorients the definition of Pre-Raphaelitism away from components and toward an awareness of method, process, and action. We conceptualize form broadly to encompass poetry’s inception from artistic conventions, and in recognition of how form shapes lived experience. Literary Pre-Raphaelitism especially uses form to unsettle artistic representations of reality. Our contributors pay close attention to this generic destabilization in their re-examination of well-known Pre-Raphaelite poets. Each chapter emphasizes literary Pre-Raphaelitism as open-minded in terms of gender, sexuality, and political influence; collaboratively experimental in technique and structure; and intermedial, using aesthetics as a way of engaging with moral and social concerns. In this way, we apprehend Pre-Raphaelitism as engaging with, and responding to, social and political life. Broadening beyond the traditional cast of Pre-Raphaelite poets, our contributors are attuned to less acknowledged Pre-Raphaelite voices. The chapters consider both the influences and departures from the recognized Pre-Raphaelite school to draw attention to innovation in terms of prosody and style—metrical patterning, rhythm and rhyme— all of which contribute to a sense of Pre-Raphaelite formal density as a precursor to Modernist poetics. Our contributors, thus, offer a broader range of Pre-Raphaelite literary scholarship, provoking innovative discussions into the poetic form, gender dynamics, political engagement, and networked communities of Pre-Raphaelitism. That said, we recognize the hubris of attempting to codify a definition of an artistic movement that so 6 Stephen Arata, “Form,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3/4 (2018): 700–702; Herbert Tucker, “Formalism,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3/4 (2018): 702–705. 7 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015).

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many scholars agree is marked by “protean shifts in membership, parameters, and objectives.” As Dinah Roe rightly observes, such a task is a “tricky business,” indeed.8 In truth, there has been no critical consensus, until now, on what constitutes Pre-Raphaelitism, due in large part to the diversity of subject matter and shifting membership. Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer note the lack of cohesion in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism from 1848 to 19199 : Pre-Raphaelitism was not a monolithic entity with a tightly focused aesthetic agenda; it was different things at different times in its long history that spanned more than half a century, from the founding of the Brotherhood in 1848 to the death of William Michael Rossetti—founder member, diarist of the Brotherhood, art critic, indefatigable chronicler, and keeper of the Rossetti legacy—in 1919.10

Demarcating the boundaries of Pre-Raphaelitism is, however, far from the “pointless” project articulated by Roe.11 Instead, the consistent efforts to take up the project of defining Pre-Raphaelitism by scholars such as Isobel Armstrong, Jerome McGann, and members of this very volume, suggests the opposite.12 By turning to poetics as forms of making, our volume offers a starting point for future directions in literary Pre-Raphaelitism. 8 Dinah Roe, “Introduction,” in The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin (New York: Penguin, 2010), xviii. 9 Tim Barringer noted in The Pre-Raphaelites: Reading the Image (1998) that “there never was, in fact, a single identifiable Pre-Raphaelite style” (14). 10 Michaela Giebelhausen and T.J. Barringer, eds., Writing the Pre-Raphaelites (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 4. 11 Roe, xxxi. David Reide concurs that “the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ remains difficult to define, partly because the Brethren did not entirely agree about what it should mean, and even more because the term, originally intended to describe a school of painting, came eventually to be associated with literature and other arts as the original brethren and their later associates developed and broadened their aesthetic interests” (“The PreRaphaelite School,” in Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, eds. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison [Malden: Blackwell, 2002], 305). Again, however, we read the changes within the Pre-Raphaelite School, from painting to multimodal forms, from a Brotherhood to a collaborative network, as an extension of the plurality and evolutionary mindset that underpins our understanding of their poetics. 12 Isobel Armstrong, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 13–31; Jerome McGann, “The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882),”

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In doing so, we continue the trend of looking outward beyond an exclusive group of, primarily male, members to consider a wider membership, historical trajectory, and sphere of literary influence than heretofore acknowledged. Despite this salutary turn outward beyond exclusive membership, we recognize that there remains a glaring omission in Pre-Raphaelite studies—a failure to account for race and non-Western forms of making. Certainly, Sasso’s monograph on “worldwide” Pre-Raphaelitism has initiated this conversation, and we acknowledge that far more work needs to occur. What would a global Pre-Raphaelitism look like? Might it reach to related acts of poiesis in other cultures within the British empire? Could it involve not only Edward Said’s cognitive categories of accretion, tuning, and restructuring, but sincere conversations about cultural appropriation, imperialism, and the colonization of the mind? We pose these questions to provoke ongoing discussion in the field and to identify an entire potential field of exploration wherein this volume admittedly falls short. For to truly assert plurality as the core of Pre-Raphaelitism would be to investigate how diversity in acts of making extended to the increasingly heterogeneous nature of the globe during the Victorian era. Nevertheless, the geographic scope of this volume remains within established Pre-Raphaelite borders. As we recognize the plurality underpinning Pre-Raphaelite poetics and raise the political value of PreRaphaelitism, we affirm the value of continuing to expand upon and define these categories yet further, beyond what this single volume is able to address. To accomplish this collection’s goals, we next offer an overview of the origins of Pre-Raphaelitism and assert a need to rethink the gendered naming convention of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the latter half of the introduction, we posit new considerations that arise from the serious inquiry of Pre-Raphaelite poetry: the centrality of the movement’s espousal of community and sociability, and political engagement.

Beginnings, Traditions, and Revolution The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that formed in 1848 famously included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 87–102.

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James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, Thomas Woolner, and William Michael Rossetti. Of this “first wave” of Pre-Raphaelitism, all but William Michael Rossetti were painters.13 The Royal Academy’s insistence on conventional techniques for composition and subject matter exerted a force on these first Pre-Raphaelites as they came together and sought ways to reject and resist such traditions. It is fair to say that these young men were doing what all groups do who believe they are revolutionary: rejecting tradition, breaking apart antiquated forms, and reassembling the pieces into something new. “With youthful arrogance,” Dinah Roe explains, “these painters, the eldest of whom was only twenty-four, rejected Academy-approved work as the ‘sloshy’ legacy of ‘Sir Sloshua’ himself, better known as the first RA President, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1732-92).”14 Emboldened by the hubris of youth, the initial PRB members at once rejected and reached back to tradition. The Pre-Raphaelites pay homage to and derive inspiration from not only the Romantic poets, particularly William Blake and John Keats, but medieval literary and visual art forms. As Jason Rosenfelt says of John Everett’s Millais’ painting, Isabella (1848–1849), the first to bear the “PRB” appellation and intended to be a statement of Pre-Raphaelite investments, their work was “inherently modern, but accesses the past in its evolution.”15 Insatiable in their intertextuality, capacious in their cultural reach, the Pre-Raphaelites build a body of work to which future artists would likewise reach for inspiration, a fact explored by Hannah Comer in our collection’s final chapter.16 At the same time, they remain 13 There are three paintings by Frederic George Stephens in the Tate Gallery, London: The Proposal (The Marquis and Griselda) (1850–1851), Morte d’Arthur (1849), and Mother and Child (circa 1854–1856), along with a pencil drawing of his stepmother Dorothy (1850), a study for an oil portrait he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. He is also known to have created pencil and ink drawings, but was largely disappointed in his artistic ability and stopped painting. As a result, Stephens is considered one of the “non-artistic” members of the Pre-Raphaelites, but that is something of a misnomer. 14 Roe, xix, citing William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir 1: 127. 15 Jason Rosenfelt, “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde,” YouTube, uploaded by Tate Britain, 17 October 2012. 16 Related work is being conducted on the Pre-Raphaelites as inspiration for Modernism by Naomi Levine and Michael Hansen. Levine, for instance, presented a paper entitled “The Fiery Moment: Pound and H.D. Read William Morris” at the North American Victorian Studies Association Annual Convention in fall 2018, in which she argued that H. D.’s work are “unapologetically Pre-Raphaelite poems.” A full version of this early

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connected to their nineteenth-century contemporaries, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their influence can be felt on Aesthetes and Decadents, such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and William Butler Yeats. By locating literary Pre-Raphaelitism as a pivotal poetic movement, our collection provides a critical overview of the range and diversity of the Pre-Raphaelites, who were deeply invested in reshaping the nineteenth-century literary and artistic marketplace. The ligatures to historical precursors remain clear, as so many scholars have pointed out, but the effect of something new is accomplished. In many ways, the poet-artists of the first wave were very similar to the early-twentieth-century avant-garde in their goals (and in some of their homage, such as a shared appreciation of Robert Browning’s work). As Ezra Pound wrote in his 81st canto, “(To break the pentameter, that was the first heave)” (l. 54), but then, in the second canto’s wry hat tip to Browning, saying, “Hang it all, Robert Browning, / there can be but the one ‘Sordello,” (ll. 1–2), the PRB created anew from old components.17 It is no coincidence that Algernon Charles Swinburne, a second-wave PreRaphaelite, would also tap Browning’s “Sordello” in Songs Before Sunrise (1871)—Swinburne’s most politically-minded collection. While Browning’s jaw-swinging rhythms and broken use of syntax appealed to Pound’s imagism, for Swinburne these same formal elements suggested the Spasmodic poetry of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Even as the Modernists dismissed the Pre-Raphaelites “as a sort of childish thing which a writer must put away upon achieving literary maturity,” they shared a fundamental investment: the decidedly political value of making new forms from old.18 This move by Pound and Swinburne was politically powerful because it actuated the positive potential of making new wholes and types. That each poet plumbed the earlier work for components that spoke to their

work is forthcoming. In a similar vein, Michael Hansen’s forthcoming exploration of British poet-critic Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s mid-twentieth-century “Obstinate Isles” establishes a Pre-Raphaelite Modernism that reaches back to the Pre-Raphaelites in order to assert modern forms of poetry. Hansen has published on Forrest-Thomson previously in “Veronica Forrest-Thomson: An Introduction” (Chicago Review, Autumn 2011). 17 Ezra Pound, The Cantos. 7th ed. New York: New Directions, 1996. 538, 6. 18 Roe, xxx.

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personal poetics is unremarkable, for that is how intertextuality and inspiration have always worked.19 Rather, the poets’ respective insistence on “making new” is where their ways of making diverge: one in the direction of Spasmodism and Pre-Raphaelitism, the other in the direction of avant-garde methods such as imagism.20 In doing so, each poet, and poetic school, located themselves in an implicitly political act as the foundation of their creative endeavor. For, as Caroline Levine has observed, wholeness can be inimical for its capacity to exclude and restrict, crafting social totalities rather than “celebrating difference and diversity.”21 Yet, the kind of new forms that Swinburne and Pound located by disassembling Browning’s work and reassembling it through different methods of making disrupted “the controlling power of other bounded shapes, the encounters themselves providing opportunities for new and emancipatory social formations.”22 While unified wholes can be “pernicious on political grounds,”23 like the “sloshy” legacy of tradition rejected by the first wave Pre-Raphaelites, new forms of making—of disruption and reformation—are “a productive alternative [that] involves not the destruction of form but its multiplication.”24 Put differently, the Pre-Raphaelites’ initial impulse to rebel against Royal Academy conventions was, in fact, “an effective strategy for curtailing the power of harmfully totalizing and unifying wholes…[by] introducing more wholes.”25 In contrast to so many, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself, who have set aside the Pre-Raphaelites as “prattle,” “lax,” “foolish,” and “obsolete,” we argue 19 Levine, 24–25. 20 The developers of the “Victorian Radicals” museum exhibit that toured US cities in

Summer 2019, likewise referred to “the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde.” See Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Unnatural Realism,” Review of “Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement” (a museum exhibition; Catalogue of the exhibition by Martin Ellis, Victoria Osborne, and Tim Barringer), The New York Review of Books (21 March 2019). Accessed 2 July 2019; and Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans, eds. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art (Yale: Yale UP, 2018). 21 Levine, 45. 22 Levine, 24. 23 Levine, 45–46. 24 Reportedly D. G. Rossetti to Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(London: Elliott Stock, 1882), 219; William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir, 1:137; Letter to John Nichol, 2 April 1876, quoted in George Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1928), 2:38. 25 Levine, 46.

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that Pre-Raphaelite ways of making, their poiesis, shouldered substantial political weight.26 Consequently, no matter the content of their work, or accusations of being “glibly immitative,” the Pre-Raphaelites were engaged in a political project of which even some of their own members were unaware, a claim that our volume further explores in its second chapter.27

Rethinking the Gendered Language of the PRB Here, however, it is imperative to turn attention to reconsiderations of gendered language, recalling, of course, that gender deconstruction is a political act. By forms of making, this volume intends poiesis writ large, as any activity that manifests in reality what had not previously existed in that form. When conceiving of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, we realized that, while the focus remains on defining the hallmarks of literary PreRaphaelitism, we were invested in rethinking the gendered language of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to provide a more realistic understanding of the diversity among the movement’s membership. Consequently, central to this volume is a resistance to the gendered language of Brotherhood or Sisterhood. Rather than segregating these groups, we endeavor to explore a spectrum of gender identities alongside each other and in relation with one another. Although much scholarship examines only the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers or Pre-Raphaelite Sisters—often to the point of detrimental exclusivity—we embrace Pre-Raphaelitism for its collectivity, inclusiveness, and fluidity. Scholars have recognized for some time now that the appellation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood unnecessarily narrows the movement and defines it as male.28 The Pre-Raphaelites, however, were inclusive and open-minded, using their poetry and art to explore diversity, often to

26 Robert Buchanan (as “Thomas Maitland”), “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti,” Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871), 350. 27 Rosenfelt, “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.” 28 See Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge, eds., Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities:

Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature (Routledge, 2014); Elizabeth Prettejohn, After the Pre-Raphaelites (Manchester, 1999); any one of a number of books by Jan Marsh, such as her Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (London: Quartet Books, 1985), Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), and Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity (New York: Crown, 1988).

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the shock of their contemporaries. Although the Brotherhood began as a group of male painters, the Pre-Raphaelites maintained multiplicity as central to their creed, and quickly expanded beyond this foundation to include women and those who identified as what we would consider today as queer. In Chapter 3 of this collection, John Holmes examines how three Pre-Raphaelite poets—John Lucas Tupper, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Swinburne—conducted sustained investigations of the condition that we would now call intersexuality, where a person combines male and female physical features and gender identities. Holmes’s work makes it clear that Pre-Raphaelite poets were reaching out imaginatively in an attempt to comprehend and empathize with intersexual lived experience. Many of our chapters, including those by Holmes, Hannah Comer, Robert Wilkes, and Serena Trowbridge, widen conceptions of literary Pre-Raphaelitism by disclosing networks of artistic and literary influence. These chapters foreground individuals that have not traditionally been associated with the movement—such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and H. D.—or upon whose literary work little critical attention has been placed, including Elizabeth Siddall, F. G. Stephens, John Lucas Tupper, and Georgiana Burne-Jones. Such efforts to grapple with new concepts and understanding underpins Pre-Raphaelite poetics, an investment in plurality and collaboration that expanded to include other forms of making, such as music and visual arts.

Networks, Collaboration, and Communities From the founding members’ joint contributions and later collaborations included in, among other ventures, the construction and design of William Morris’s Red House, the Pre-Raphaelites were inherently collaborative and community-oriented.29 As Giebelhausen and Barringer note: “Although the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood may have lacked a clear manifesto, it established a group identity that depended on ritualistic practices: seven members, regular meetings, a portfolio of drawings passed around for mutual critique, a diary that chronicled the group’s activities, and a

29 Red House was Morris’s first married home and became a central gathering place for artists and poets.

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literary magazine.”30 The regularity of their interactions, coupled with the intrinsic materiality of their work, imbued their respective art and the members themselves with the shared circulation of ideas and lived experience that functions as a hallmark of literary Pre-Raphaelitism. Though The Germ was a commercial failure, it provides a useful starting point for reinforcing the sense of community and diversity that we identify as central to the movement. Within the periodical, contributors coalesce around similar aesthetic principles, promoting not only an egalitarian spirit—“permitting works of less obvious merit to ride on the coat-tails of its better productions”31 —but the formation of a larger social network. Nineteenth-century sociability is receiving renewed interest in literary scholarship, which focuses specifically on the circulation of ideas present in manuscript culture and archival traces. Such a focus on the poetic manuscript is further explored here by Serena Trowbridge in her chapter on Elizabeth Siddall’s poetics. Additionally, Dante Gabriel Rossetti provides another representation of such networked circulation and collaboration.32 Rossetti’s work is founded upon a collaborative sense of creation: the intimacy experienced through what Roe considers the “dining club atmosphere”33 of the Pre-Raphaelites, but what could also be traced to Romantic networks and the integrity of scribal publication, or the circulation of manuscripts within social circles.34 Moreover, Rossetti’s indoctrination in the “ritualistic practices” of the early years of Pre-Raphaelitism continued to serve his aesthetic purposes throughout his life, as modeled in his creative process with its reliance on the “mutual critique” of his social circle. In preparation for the publication of Poems (1870), Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott, friend and poet, of his intention to collect his poetry in the hopes of forming a volume. Initially, the volume was conceived as a private publication, and Rossetti writes of having his stock printed into “slips” for ultimate selection as well as motivation and circulation: “This 30 Giebelhausen and Barringer, Writing the Pre-Raphaelites, 10. 31 Roe, xxii. 32 See Heather Bozant Witcher, “Brainwork and Community in ‘Eden Bower,’” eds. Dinah Roe and Serena Trowbridge, Special issue “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Victoriographies 10, no. 1 (2020): 90–107. 33 Roe, xxxii. 34 See Andrew O. Winckles and Angela Rehbein, eds., Women’s Literary Networks and

Romanticism: “A Tribe of Authoresses” (Liverpool UP, 2018).

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will induce me to write more & to get advice from the few friends one cares to show the things to. I shall only print a few copies.”35 Rossetti’s process of gathering, creating, and, ultimately, revising his poetry, thus, furthers our insight into literary Pre-Raphaelitism as an innovative social endeavor that influences poetic technique. In numerous correspondences between those “few friends,” Rossetti betrays a sense of dialogue occurring between individuals, moving beyond the physical social space—such as Red House or within Victorian salon culture—into a more ambiguous metaphysical realm within the genre of letter-writing.36 Moreover, this larger realm can be seen as an influence from the Pre-Raphaelites’ initial manifesto project that promoted a coalescence of shared aesthetic principles. Indeed, part of the innovation of literary Pre-Raphaelitism, as this collection argues, arises from the social connections between individuals and the ways in which those networks, preserved within archival, manuscript, and published traces, become embedded in the plurality of Pre-Raphaelite modes of making. The communal and collaborative atmosphere of literary Pre-Raphaelitism is expanded beyond the boundaries of poetry within Mary Arseneau’s chapter on musical settings of Pre-Raphaelite poetry; Heather McAlpine’s innovative reading of Goblin Market and Other Poems as an emblematic volume that places the “Other Poems” in dialogue one another; and Elizabeth Helsinger’s chapter on Swinburne’s poetic technique as influenced by the art of J. M. W. Turner and the musical theories of Richard Wagner, among others. In contrast to Tim Barringer’s claim that there is no “identifiable PreRaphaelite style,”37 Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics repeatedly identifies and demonstrates the stylistic elements of Pre-Raphaelitism. The chapters that follow can, therefore, be thought of in roughly three subject sections: sexuality and homosociality; intermedial creative networks and collaborations; and transhistorical Pre-Raphaelitism. In each, the style of Pre-Raphaelitism rejects separation, tidy binaries, individuality, and singularity. Instead, literary Pre-Raphaelitism embraces androgyny, hybridity, connectivity, relationality, and sympathy. Their style,

35 William E. Fredeman, ed., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002–2015), 4: 205. 36 See Witcher, “Brainwork and Community in ‘Eden Bower.’ 37 See Footnote 9.

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therefore, from the moment of inspiration through the sharing of the final image or text, is best identified by amalgamation, composites, blending, admixtures, and heterogeneity. Further, the work of this project has shown that literary Pre-Raphaelitism was politically active and bidirectionally historical, a combination that enabled them to reach to the past for powerful models of social activism and to become models of artistic production, collaboration, and advocacy for those who followed. Our second chapter issues a call for scholars to rethink two overlapping elements of Pre-Raphaelite studies: the gendered language of the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” and the “sister arts,” and the notion that Pre-Raphaelitism was always aesthetic and never political. We begin here because gender and political commentary percolated through the drafts of each chapter until they made themselves evident as issues with which our volume must contend. At the risk of too casual an explanation, framing the chapters through the lens of gender, politics, and gender politics for the Pre-Raphaelites sounded the proper opening note. Both issues so clearly speak to each other that we elected to critically engage and contextualize gender and political activism in the same space. What’s more, we opted to address that engagement in a space separate from the introduction to reinforce the importance we place on discussing gender and political action in Pre-Raphaelitism. As a wedge into this discussion, the chapter opens with a close reading of Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work (1863). A street scene of men and women from diverse socioeconomic rungs ranged visually in a pyramid, Brown’s painting captures a moment of an unremarkable day, with various individuals going about their tasks in a sort of “throwntogetherness” of activity.38 (Some might even call it a “hubbub,” to borrow from Emily Cockayne’s book of the same title.)39 From a young women (whose face we never see) minding two little boys and a baby to the two aristocraticlooking gentleman loitering on the edge of the frame, the image is one of social negotiation, and it is politically fraught. As Doreen Massey affirms, “politics is the (ever-contested) question of our being-together.”40 How 38 We borrow the term “throwntogetherness” from Doreen Massey’s description of the ways that spaces demand negotiation that is inherently political. See For Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2005), 140–141. 39 Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (Yale: Yale UP, 2008). 40 Massey, 142.

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to be together was a perpetual question for the Pre-Raphaelites, whether it took the forms of artistic collaboration or their infamous romantic entanglements. Brown’s painting has in mind precisely such physical, gendered, and spatial navigations, as it tasks the viewer with the necessity of humans being-together despite their differences. By beginning with Brown’s painting, we hope to do away with the long-outdated criticism that understood Pre-Raphaelitism as a “fleshly,” self-indulgent school popularizing the notion of “art for art’s sake.”41 Building from the reading of Brown’s painting, we offer close readings of Elizabeth Siddall’s poem “Lord, May I Come?” and Christina Rossetti’s underexplored sonnet “A Triad” as case studies of the range of political work available in Pre-Raphaelitism. We chose these poems because each seems to pull triple duty: first, by resisting the assumptions of male-oriented creators that hover around the Pre-Raphaelites; second, by illustrating methods that tease out the political in Pre-Raphaelite poetics; and third, by emphasizing women’s lived experience. Siddall’s poem, traditionally read through a biographical lens, offers, we suggest, a political statement about the value of women’s interiority. Rather than reaching to the divine for psychological support, Siddall’s prosody turns to natural settings as a source of stability while grieving to provide reassurance during times of mental stress. Rossetti, in a similar fashion, employs the sonnet form to issue a politically charged warning against efforts to standardize, categorize, or generalize women. Within a liminal space between a colon and a comma, Rossetti grapples with the ways that counting women altogether discounts them, displacing women much in the same way that nineteenth-century coverture erased a woman’s identity legally and politically. Like Brown, both Siddall and Rossetti grapple with negotiating the gendered spaces in life, whether those are internal spaces of thought or public spaces of counting, quantification, and evaluation. From this foundation, John Holmes continues our section on gender and sexuality by considering how three Pre-Raphaelite poets—John Lucas Tupper, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Swinburne— conducted sustained investigations of the condition that we would now call intersexuality, where a person combines male and female physical features and gender identities. Rossetti’s androgynous women and BurneJones’s androgynous men are well known. Rossetti commented that the

41 Robert Buchanan, 334–350.

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“supreme perfection” of beauty in man and woman was “the point of meeting where the two are most identical.”42 But he also insisted that art had to adopt “an inner standing point,” recalling Ford Madox Brown’s advice in The Germ that the painter of a historical picture should enact the emotions and thoughts of his characters for himself in order to be able to find the correct poses for them. The Pre-Raphaelite poets reach out imaginatively in an attempt to comprehend and empathize with intersexual lived experience. Holmes demonstrates the Pre-Raphaelites’ intersexual affinity through a close reading of three main texts. In “Viola and Olivia,” published in The Germ in 1850, the sculptor and poet John Lucas Tupper explains Olivia’s love for Viola in Twelfth Night by divorcing the gendered body from the soul, which transcends gender. In his recognition and appreciation of what he imagines to be a true and reciprocal relationship, not merely onesided or the product of disguise and deception, he extends the range of Shakespeare’s play to better understand love and desire unconstrained by gender. In “Hand and Soul,” Rossetti’s famous short story or extended prose-poem, again published in The Germ, the painter Chiaro only finds his vocation as an artist after an encounter with his own female soul. Holmes understands this meeting with the female soul as a moment of self-recognition on Chiaro’s part. Finally, in “Hermaphroditus,” written in 1863 and published in Poems and Ballads (1866), Swinburne articulates the beauty of the intersexual body and his own troubled desire for it, as he does in the following poem in the collection, “Fragoletta.” In a stark contrast between the two poems, however, Swinburne seeks sexual and platonic love shared with the hermaphrodite. In all three texts, the sympathy for and comprehension of intersexuality bears out William Michael Rossetti’s account of the honesty, scrupulousness, and openmindedness of Pre-Raphaelite art, providing us with conceptualizations of intersexual identities that remain viable to this day. Florence Boos builds on Holmes’s exploration of intersexual identification in Chapter 4, which asks about the poetics of the homosocial networks extant at the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Though shortlived, the 1856 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine was, in many respects, a remarkable venture. Perhaps the most ambitious English student publication of its century, it attempted to survey a broader range of topics than its 42 William Michael Rossetti, The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 1. (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1897), 510.

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predecessor, The Germ (1850). William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones became acquainted with Rossetti through soliciting the latter’s contributions to the Magazine, a relationship which led to Rossetti’s mentoring of Morris in writing and art during the period of his composition of The Defence of Guenevere and afterwards. More surprising and less noticed has been the reciprocal influence between the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and Rossetti, as his three contributions to this publication— “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Staff and the Scrip,” and “The Burden of Nineveh”—show startling advances over earlier drafts, and arguably also reflect some features of the Magazine’s general ethos and tone. Boos explores the Magazine’s poetry, contributed by only four authors—Morris, Rossetti, William Fulford, and Georgiana MacDonald (Burne-Jones)—asking to what extent their poems exhibit signs of crossinfluence and/or reflect an avant-garde aesthetic in form and content. Also, she questions whether they bear thematic relationships to the Magazine’s articles on contemporary topics, such as women’s education and the Crimea. In addition, since Morris and Rossetti were clearly the periodical’s major poets, Boos traces the ways in which each improved his skill at organizing narrative and dramatic poetry during the period of the Magazine’s floruit. What resulted from these collaborative relationships and their aftermath? Boos argues that Rossetti benefited from the enthusiasm of his friends to experiment with more psychologically and socially complicated material; and, under Rossetti’s encouragement, Morris acquired greater skill in the use of strong rhythms, visual images, and the portrayal of erotic emotions. Building on Boos’s focus on homosocial networks, Robert Wilkes explores male homosociality in the composition and content of a newlydiscovered poem by Frederic George Stephens. Although scholars have recognized that Stephens wrote poetry during the early years of the PRB, only two small examples of his work were known to have survived (and even these were neglected). Wilkes’s discovery of several additional manuscripts by Stephens, none of which have been previously published or analyzed, sheds new light on our understanding of Stephens’s literary output as a member of the PRB. The most substantial of these poems is “Arthur,” a dramatic monologue inspired by the legends of King Arthur, composed, but never completed, in the early summer of 1849. It survives in four fragments (published for the first time in our Appendix), which, when pieced together, disclose the tale of a first-person narrator from the present day who falls asleep and dreams himself into a bygone age “[o]f

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Chivalry, and deeds of might.” He embodies the persona of a roving Breton minstrel who befriends Arthur and Sir Gawain and joins them on their quest. Anticipating the later writings of William Morris, such as News from Nowhere (1890) and the famous prologue of The Earthly Paradise (1868), Stephens distances himself from industrial modernity and imagines the Middle Ages as a haven of friendship, heroism, and beauty. Concomitant with writing “Arthur,” Stephens—preoccupied with Arthuriana—began an oil painting depicting Sir Bedivere and the dying king (titled Morte d’Arthur, now in the Tate). Together, the poem and picture constitute the earliest Pre-Raphaelite response to the Arthurian mythos. Deborah N. Mancoff observed in 1990 that “[t]he extent to which Stephens’s unfinished painting illustrates his lost poem cannot be judged”—a point which Wilkes’s chapter now redresses. The relationship between these two works is not straightforward: the poem was intended to be a separate creative work rather than an ekphrastic elaboration of the painted subject. Furthermore, unlike the painting, which illustrates Tennyson’s 1842 poem “Morte d’Arthur,” the narrative of “Arthur” was Stephens’s own invention and not a retelling of a preexisting story. Despite these differences, the poem and painting equally stress the importance of male homosocial bonds. This homosociality can be contextualized in the real-life relationships formed between Stephens and his Pre-Raphaelite Brothers in the late-1840s. A brief examination of the Morte d’Arthur painting in our fifth chapter also reveals similarities with Holman Hunt’s contemporaneous Rienzi (1848–1849), both in terms of design and the theme of close fraternal bonds. Wilkes’s discovery of Stephens’s archive thereby offers an original contribution to the wider discussion of the interaction between the literary and visual arts in Pre-Raphaelitism. From the benefit of intersexuality and homosociality, the collection pivots in Chapter 6 to consider the intermedial networks of Pre-Raphaelitism. From its inception, Pre-Raphaelitism was an inter-art project in the visual and literary arts, but it is less acknowledged that, as early as the 1860s, the Pre-Raphaelite influence had also migrated into another intermedial and collaborative field of artistic expression, one that combined word and music. Mary Arseneau explores the significant role that music has played in the development, dissemination, reception, and understanding of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and poetics. The emergent musico-literary interdisciplinary field of Pre-Raphaelite studies demands an appropriately interdisciplinary methodology, and Arseneau discusses various models of text-music criticism, or “melopoetics.”

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Musical settings, by their very nature, are both collaborative and interpretive. When the composer selects a poetic text and sets it to music, he or she engages in an act that calls for both literary sensibility and musical creativity. Although incorporated into a new entity, the poem nevertheless maintains its identity; however, the poem’s meaning within the setting is now supplemented, shaped, or even distorted by musical meanings. Within the new composition, text and music enact a contest and struggle for meaning: as musical gestures reinforce or resist textual meanings, the interpretation of the poem is altered. Arseneau examines this dynamic in relation to a number of examples. Musical compositions sometimes involve significant textual changes—as in the significantly altered variant text of “Goblin Market” on which Christina Rossetti collaborated with composer Emanuel Aguilar for his 1880 cantata. Settings very often also break new ground interpretively, as does Ruth Gipps’s 1954 feminist setting of “Goblin Market,” a musical interpretation that anticipates the recuperation of Rossetti by feminist literary criticism beginning in the 1970s. Finally, Arseneau discusses Claude Debussy’s La Damoiselle Élue and a variety of Christina Rossetti poems translated into languages including French, German, Italian, Welsh, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese to examine music’s function in spreading Pre-Raphaelite poetry to new international audiences. Like music, the representational strategies that characterize English emblem books play a more central role in Pre-Raphaelite poetics than has been acknowledged. Reading Pre-Raphaelite works with an awareness of this connection offers a new way to understand the movement’s engagements with questions of ontology, religion, and representation. As Heather McAlpine argues in Chapter 7, in its most recognizable form, the emblem is a genre of literature arising in the Renaissance that combines an allegorical picture (pictura) with a verse explication of that picture (explicatio) and an enigmatic motto in a single page design. Her approach to the emblem, however, follows recent scholarship in conceiving of it as a flexible discourse or strategy employed in a variety of texts. McAlpine places Christina Rossetti within the context of the English emblem tradition by closely examining the emblematic strategies that organize her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Considered as a coherent whole, the poems in the volume assert the importance of cultivating one’s ability to “read” the world correctly and act accordingly. By embedding “Goblin Market” within the volume to which it

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belongs, and re-contextualizing that volume within the emblem tradition, McAlpine suggests that Rossetti conceived Goblin Market and Other Poems as an extended “naked” emblem: the imagistic title poem is the verbal equivalent of a pictura, while poems in the “Devotional Pieces” section act as an elaborate explicatio, instructing our reading of “Goblin Market” by reprising and moralizing its imagery through direct references to scripture. The combination of allusiveness, explication, and elaborate attention to order in Rossetti’s poetry is fully emblematic in its production of meaning: particular images and themes introduced in “Goblin Market” reappear in the “Devotional Pieces” alongside biblical teachings and admonitions which explicitly moralize these elements, effectively transforming the volume into an emblem book. While the Pre-Raphaelite poets pursued different ontological and aesthetic paths, all hoped to reintegrate morality and aesthetics by reaffirming the connections between signs and things. The emblem played a key role in this project by offering a practice of signification and interpretation that promises to stabilize language in the face of ontological doubt. This makes the emblem especially interesting as a site on which a variety of responses to the Victorian crisis of representation intersect. In its final section, this edited collection casts Pre-Raphaelitism into more inclusive historical, social, and gendered networks and scales. Doing so enables our final three authors to account for as yet unrecognized PreRaphaelite voices and methods, each of which contributes to a greater understanding of what constitutes a definition of Pre-Raphaelite poetics. For example, although Elizabeth Siddall is the face of Pre-Raphaelitism, her voice is rarely heard. She wrote her poems in secret, and when they were published after her death, they were edited by W. M. Rossetti. In “O Mother open the window wide,” it is possible to trace how Siddall is influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy (1802–1807); however, whilst transforming the details and the prosody into something entirely her own, these invented signifiers “display Siddall’s artistic confidence and announce her originality.” Yet, little critical work has been done on Siddall’s poetry, which is often used as biographical evidence rather than the focus of serious study. In Chapter 8, Serena Trowbridge considers Siddall’s poetry in context, positioning her as a Pre-Raphaelite poet and a woman writing in the nineteenth century. Trowbridge examines Siddall’s poetics in light of the subject and form deployed by her contemporaries, including the Brontës, Dora Greenwell, Adelaide Proctor and, of course, Christina Rossetti.

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Siddall’s poetry focuses on natural imagery, through which she explores love, loss, and the passing of time. Her simplicity of tone is often belied by her awareness of metrical patterning in poems such as “I Care not for my Lady’s soul,” in which meter lurches from iambic to trochaic with frequent substitutions, catalexes, and enjambments. Siddall’s poetry is influenced by her relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly in her strategic use of color and visual imagery. These aesthetics, focused closely on the natural world, seem to owe much to the photographic style of Pre-Raphaelitism, and yet she imbues these details with a meaning not historical but utterly contemporary. In doing so, Siddall offers critiques of the role of the model, the place of women in relationships, and the sympathy between nature and the grieving woman. There is no doubt that Siddall learned from D. G. Rossetti, but she also moves away from his poetic approach to a fresh one which offers a woman’s Pre-Raphaelite poetics, transformed and distinct from the more familiar masculine approach. Trowbridge’s chapter, therefore, investigates the ways in which Siddall resists and mutates Pre-Raphaelitism, as much as she embraces its influence upon her writing. In a similar way, Chapter 9 asserts the co-constitutive influences of the Pre-Raphaelites and A. C. Swinburne. Swinburne was, of course, very much a part of the social and professional circles surrounding D. G. Rossetti in the late 1850s and the 1860s. In 1871, his poetry was denounced by Robert Buchanan as part of the same “fleshly school” as Rossetti’s (in Poems, 1870), William Morris’s (in The Defence of Guenevere, 1858), and George Meredith’s (in Modern Love, 1862). But his own poetry, with its sustained and insistent beating, elaborate rhyming, and intentionally diffuse imagery, might seem to have little in common with the brilliant, but small-scale, highly detailed, and sharply focused drawings, paintings, and watercolors of the Pre-Raphaelites (early Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais), or the early lyrics of the Rossettis, Morris, or Meredith (all poets whose work was identified by contemporaries as Pre-Raphaelite). However, Pre-Raphaelite literary work from its earliest manifestations used formal means to unsettle conventions of realist representation by going back to the apparent simplicities of pre-Renaissance art and literature. Much like later Modernist poetics, Pre-Raphaelite poetics went back in order to move forward, disrupting readerly expectations in order to make English poetry new. Swinburne, like Rossetti and Morris, borrowed freely across historical, linguistic, and media boundaries

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(between literature and art but also between poetry and song), and elaborated the surface patterning of his poems. But Swinburne’s poetry does not look, sound, or read much like the Pre-Raphaelite work of his friends. Reading Atalanta in Calydon (1865), as well as later poems, Elizabeth Helsinger argues that we can best see how Swinburne’s poetry relates to Pre-Raphaelite poetics by attending to similarities of formal aims and practices applied on a wholly different scale. Both prosodically and philosophically, Swinburne is interested in scales of time and space far greater than those invoked by his Pre-Raphaelite friends, or indeed most of his Victorian contemporaries. The sweeping rhythms, elemental landscapes, and attention to the “bleak beauty of little words” (as John D. Rosenberg perceptively noted in 1967) found in some poems from the more famous volume, Poems and Ballads (1866), were already evident in Atalanta and are magnificently exemplified in later poems, from “A Forsaken Garden” (1876, 1878) to “By the North Sea” (1880), Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), The Tale of Balen (1896), and “The Lake of Gaube” (1904).43 In these poems, Swinburne invokes an inhuman— or, a more than human—scale of both time and space that reflects his distinctive development of the formal and thematic strangeness of poetic Pre-Raphaelitism. Our final chapter reaches to a greater scale of time and space. Much as the Pre-Raphaelites “went back in order to move forward,” Hannah Comer locates in D. H. Lawrence’s poetry and prose a Pre-Raphaelite Modernism that reaches back to the Pre-Raphaelites in order to assert modern forms. Specifically, Comer draws on Lawrence’s engagement with Pre-Raphaelite poetic and visual depictions of Persephone in order to offer a case study of one Modernist author looking to the Pre-Raphaelites for inspiration and collaboration. Lawrence’s primary Pre-Raphaelite inspirations were from D. G. Rossetti and Swinburne, each of whom represents Persephone as the queen and goddess of death. All three writers use myth as a key element within their poetics. Throughout his works, D. H. Lawrence shows his continued fascination with the Persephone myth through direct references to, depictions of, or allusions to the figure of Persephone. Keith Sagar, in D. H. Lawrence: A Poet, notes the extent of Lawrence’s engagement with the myth, claiming that, for Lawrence, “every flower acts out the myth of Persephone” (Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Poet, p. 54). Most importantly,

43 Jason D. Rosenberg, “Swinburne,” Victorian Studies 11, no. 2 (1967), 131–152.

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Comer argues that Lawrence repeatedly responds to Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” and “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866) and Rossetti’s painting and sonnet “Proserpina” (1875) across his poems and prose works. In his poems “Pomegranate” (1921) and “Bavarian Gentians” (1929), Lawrence’s treatment of the Persephone myth aligns with Rossetti’s portrayal of Persephone and his use of symbolism exploring female sexuality, the sense of selfhood, and the dualities inherent in the figure of Persephone. Equally, Swinburne exerted a major influence on both Rossetti’s and Lawrence’s portrayals of Persephone; Lawrence repeatedly quotes from Swinburne’s Proserpine poems in his fiction, for instance, in “The Ladybird” (1923) and in the three different versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Lawrence’s use of the myth in his fiction is an extension of his poetics. In all three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there are direct references to and quotes from Swinburne’s poems. These quotations are used to explore Constance Chatterley’s sense of being in relation to her surrounding environment and as a means of self-expression. Lawrence’s poetry, especially “Autumn Sunshine” (1914–1916) and “Grapes” (1921), contain intertextual references to Swinburne’s poems. Both Swinburne and Lawrence use the figure of the goddess to explore language, death, and the opposition between Christianity and pagan myth, thereby thematizing theology, agnosticism, gender, and sexuality. Throughout his work, then, Lawrence demonstrates the importance of Pre-Raphaelite poetics to his treatment of mythology. Overall, there has been little consideration of Lawrence’s influence from the Pre-Raphaelites, or writers from the Pre-Raphaelite circle, in his portrayal of the myth and figure of Persephone. Critics tend to overlook Lawrence’s use of Pre-Raphaelite literature, especially his continued imaginative engagement with Rossetti’s and Swinburne’s poetry, and what the Pre-Raphaelite depictions of these literary and mythological works offered to Lawrence. This remapping of Pre-Raphaelite influence on Modernism fundamentally alters our history of twentieth-century poetics. With PreRaphaelitism at the center of Comer’s Modernist account, the close of this volume looks forward to Pre-Raphaelite poetics’ enduring ability to influence, inspire, and inform the imaginative productions of others well into the twentieth century. Our volume concludes with an afterword by Dinah Roe that emphasizes the “transgressive hybridity” of Pre-Raphaelite poetics. She offers insight into the poet-artists’ fascination with thresholds and borders,

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locating hybridity in the expansive and mobile qualities of language. Further, heeding the call of this volume, the afterword hints at six possible future directions for research and scholarly discussion: literary Pre-Raphaelitism as proto-modernist; the exploration of Pre-Raphaelite journalism; Pre-Raphaelitism’s music and oral cultures, as well as global contexts; and, finally, continued inquiry into gender and form. Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics offers new ways of thinking about literary Pre-Raphaelitism in an effort to reinvigorate what we deem an essential—and coherent—poetic movement of the nineteenth century. Both within this volume—Trowbridge and Robert Wilkes’s explorations of Siddall and Frederic George Stephens, respectively—and in international news—Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s once-“lost” Death of Breuze Sans Pitié (late 1850s)—archival findings demonstrate that Pre-Raphaelite poets and their archives are continually being discovered and analyzed. As our contributors assert, the discussion surrounding the poetic legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites has not been exhausted and warrants further, sustained study.

References Arata, Stephen Arata. “Form.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3/4 (2018): 700–702. Barringer, Tim. The Pre-Raphaelites: Reading the Image. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Buchanan, Robert (as “Thomas Maitland”). “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti.” Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871), 350. Caine, Hall. Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Elliott Stock, 1882. Cockayne, Emily. Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770. Yale: Yale UP, 2008. Fredeman, William E. ed. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. vol. 4. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002–2015. Giebelhausen, Michaela and T.J. Barringer, eds. Writing the Pre-Raphaelites. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Holmes, John. The Pre-Raphaelites and Science. New Haven: Yale UP, 2018. Lafourcade, George. La Jeunesse de Swinburne. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1928. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. Marsh, Jan. Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. London: Quartet Books, 1985. Marsh, Jan. Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999.

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Marsh, Jan. Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity. New York: Crown, 1988. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Los Angeles: Sage, 2005. McGann, Jerome. “The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882).” In The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites. ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, 87–102. Owens, Susan and Nicholas Tromans, eds. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art. Yale: Yale UP, 2018. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. 7th ed. New York: New Directions, 1996. Prettejohn, Elizabeth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, 13–31. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. After the Pre-Raphaelites. Manchester, 1999. Reide, David. “The Pre-Raphaelite School.” In Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, Edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. Roe, Dinah. The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin. New York: Penguin, 2010. Rosenberg, Jason D. “Swinburne.” Victorian Studies 11, no. 2 (1967): 131–152. Rosenfelt, Jason. “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.” YouTube, uploaded by Tate Britain, 17 October 2012. Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir, vol. 1. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895. Rossetti, William Michael. The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 1. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1897. Smith, Lindsay. Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and Painting. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Tucker, Herbert. “Formalism.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3/4 (2018): 702–705. Tupper, John Lucas. “The Subject in Art.” In The Germ, vol. 1, ed. William Michael Rossetti. London: Eliot Stock, 1901. Winckles, Andrew O. and Angela Rehbein, eds. Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: “A Tribe of Authoresses.” Liverpool UP, 2018. Witcher, Heather Bozant. “Brainwork and Community in ‘Eden Bower.’” Special issue “Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Victoriographies 10, no. 1 (2020): 90–107. Yeates, Amelia and Serena Trowbridge, eds. Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature. Routledge, 2014. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “Unnatural Realism.” Review of “Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement.” The New York Review of Books (21 March 2019). Accessed 2 July 2019.

CHAPTER 2

Gender Work: The Political Stakes of Pre-Raphaelitism Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby

When Ford Madox Brown completed his Socialist painting Work in 1865 (see Fig. 2.1), he published a pamphlet with an explanation, written by the artist himself, describing the image’s political work.1 Far from Pre-Raphaelitism’s nineteenth-century reputation from Robert Buchanan’s 1871 critical attack of the movement as a “fleshly,” selfindulgent school popularizing the notion of “art for art’s sake,”2 Brown’s

1 F. M. Brown, Description of Work and Other Paintings: Nature and Industrialisation, pp. 316–20. The painting exists in two forms, a smaller version commissioned in 1859 and completed in 1863, and the larger version completed in 1865 for Plint. The smaller version is currently held by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the larger version is held by Manchester Art Gallery. The image offered here is the Manchester version. 2 Robert Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” The Contemporary Review 18 (August–November 1871): 334–350.

H. B. Witcher (B) Auburn University at Montgomery, Montgomery, AL, USA A. K. Huseby Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_2

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Fig. 2.1 Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852, oil on canvas, 53 15/16 × 77 11/16 in, Manchester Art Gallery (Photo © Artmedia / Alamy Stock Photo)

painting, commissioned by Thomas Plint, was always a political statement. Plint, a religious evangelical and stockbroker, had purchased several Pre-Raphaelite paintings, but he died before Work was completed. What possible reason could Brown have for painting this collision of social classes for Plint? These laboring men, bereft homeless children, wealthy riders on horseback, and lovely ladies—all of whom are watched over by the avatars of Thomas Carlyle and Frederick Maurice (the famous essayist, polemicist, and antidemocrat and the founder of Christian socialism, respectively)— were meant to hang in the home of a man who had based his life upon capitalism and Christian ideology.3 One might imagine that Plint anticipated receiving an image that lauded the Protestant work ethic. Instead, Brown represented negotiations of space, economics, gender, and belief 3 Dianne Sachko Macleod, “Plint, Thomas Edward (1823–1861),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (2004); Tim Barringer, “Brown, Ford Madox (1821–1893),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (2004).

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with which Victorian England had to contend. What he made for Plint was not a celebration of Protestant values but a condemnation of the assumptions that frugality and hard work benefit all equally. Although the laborers and vagrant children occupy the center of the composition, notice the postures and regard of Carlyle and Maurice looking on to the right of the painting. Maurice leans against a fence, legs crossed, observing the aggregation of society in front of him. His posture might be read as relaxed were it not for the intensity of his gaze and the direct line of sight between that regard and the young “navvy” shoveling dirt. Maurice and the navvy offer mirror images of age and youth, upper class and working class; their profiles even appear to be something of a reversal. Maurice sees in this young laborer his own humanity and, perhaps, his responsibility to labor on behalf of those who need his advocacy. At the same time, his line of sight continues beyond the laborer to the fashionable woman with the blue parasol and the vagrant flower seller at left—two figures whose sartorial contrast is stark. Ford has placed in the sphere of Maurice’s gaze allegorical representations for three rungs of society: the poor, the working class, and the elite. All negotiate the same profoundly geometric space, and in doing so, craft what Doreen Massey terms “throwntogetherness”: a politically contested space presenting individuals with the “unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now.”4 Carlyle, for his part, is breaking the frame. He looks directly out of the image at the viewer, a viewer who was meant to be Plint. Carlyle’s role is, therefore, at once witness and accuser. He confronts the viewer with a wry look that seems to say, “Do you see what I see?” He offers, in fact, what we might today call “side eye,” an expression of scorn and disapproval that challenges the viewer. In these ways, both figures elevate Brown’s image from quotidian scene to social commentary. Certainly one might stop here with an inquiry into this painting’s political work; however, Brown has not only thrown together social classes, but genders. Whether viewed as a pyramid or an oval, the grouping of characters holds at its center laboring men, the classical male bodies of whom are discussed at length in Tim Barringer’s Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). Although Barringer situates Brown’s painting at the crossroads of political economy, religion, history painting,

4 Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2005), 140.

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and gender, his claim about gender emphasizes the tension between physical work and Victorian anxieties about mental work as “effete.” Barringer acknowledges that he is not promoting or approving of the Victorian trope of the working man, yet “the representation of the male laboring body, [which] provided the most powerful and significant formulation of work as the nexus of ethical and aesthetic value” still delimits the scope of his project (1–2). Addressing the separation of spheres later in his monograph, Barringer is absolutely correct in his awareness that, for many Victorians, the male laboring body obtained a wholly different valuation than those of laboring women.5 Further, he observes elsewhere that, “It is essential to acknowledge that this cultural construction of ‘separate spheres’ does not provide an adequate, or even necessarily a useful, device for an historical understanding of the social functioning of gender in the nineteenth century.”6 Consequently, in what follows we build on this important work by giving more direct attention to aesthetic and political value of the figures of women who also occupy Ford’s image. There are five (possibly more) visible women, all of whom occupy the periphery of the image: one on horseback accompanying her father or husband or brother; two beneath parasols stepping daintily around the muck in the street; one small, perhaps older, sister in her tatty red dress, who sadly does not “rest” at the base of the image but labors to wrangle her three siblings and their mongrel dog; and what might be a traveler, beneath the tree to the right, opening what appear to be the wrappings on her meager lunch of bread or cheese. Centering the traditional laborers, the reflexive subjects of Work, as Brown does, invites a reading like Barringer’s that constitutes the work of the title as, ultimately, the work of men, while the work of women remains itself somewhat difficult to locate, unless it be in the juvenile sister minding her siblings or in the gender ambiguous flower seller. However, as Barringer points out, knowledge of the separation of spheres and expectations that women’s work was decidedly domestic, and constrained within such spaces, provides an explanation for Brown’s choice.

5 Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labor in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005), 29–34. 6 Tim Barringer, “The Gendering of Artistic Labour in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in Representations of Gender from Prehistory to Present, ed. M. Donald, et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 153–167, 154.

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The grouping of children at the base of the image tells a story of maternal absence, and of the types of women’s work that occur within private spaces rather than in the middle of a public street—the labor of bearing children (four in this image) and the daily necessity of house work, such as mending and washing clothes for those same children. Brown does not erase women’s labor from this image simply by omitting explicit depictions; rather he weighs it against that of men’s labor by way of the spatial orientations of the image. As Maurice and the young navvy create the horizontal axis of this image, so the homeless adolescent girl and her reflection in the wealthy young woman on horseback form its vertical. Unlike Maurice and the navvy, however, it is impossible to draw a 90-degree vertical from the young girl to the woman on horseback because this figure and her siblings are slightly off-center. Indeed, Brown had room to place them further to the left, as what occupies that space in the image is but a pully and a laborer’s boot. Therefore, it was a choice to place them off-kilter, not quite on plumb. So while the political work of this image is evident, and an effort on Brown’s part to depict some sort of gender relations, our claim does not suggest that Brown advocates for women’s equality. The types of labor suggested by the orphaned children are still those of childbirth and housekeeping. Their left-of-center placement suggests that the kinds of physical (and emotional) work done by women are not quite “up to snuff” or “workmanlike,” failing to doublecheck the geometry and amount to what they should. Other types of women’s “work” hinted at in the image are equally sexist: they include care work (the woman handing out lunch under the tree), companionship (the young woman on horseback), beautifying one’s surroundings (the two upper-class ladies with parasols), and engaging in the light physical labor of selling flowers. In contrast with the hard labor of the construction workers digging the sewer, the flower-seller is particularly of interest from a gendered perspective. Their poverty (and we use the plural pronoun with intention here) complicates a viewer’s ability to perceive gender. The figure appears to wear both pants and skirts, but their age and disheveled nature suggest much-worn and little-washed hand-me-downs that might as well have worked for a man as for a woman. The flower basket they carry also troubles our ability to discern gender for this character, as the basket crosses in front of their chest. Their broad shoulders, large feet, and somewhat square jawline might suggest a male figure, while their curly black hair and feather hat could indicate a woman. Perhaps we are meant to read

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the figure as a woman strictly based on the item for sale: flowers. Like the cluster of children forming the base of the image, the flower-seller skews the reader’s focus from the tidy straight line formed between Maurice and the navvy. The flower-seller, as a character, doesn’t quite fit the clear gender binary of the rest of the image, and so, like the children, draws the eye and demands attention. It is worth noting, also, that the flower-seller is the only other character besides Carlyle to break the fourth wall. They look directly at the viewer from beneath the shadow of what is either their torn or veiled hat. Further, returning to the geometry of this reading, with Carlyle the flower-seller does form a balanced horizontal line. Therefore, as with other such pairings in this image, it is fair to say that Brown intended the viewer to consider Carlyle and the flower-seller in unison. Both condemn the viewer; both demand change. Unfortunately, from Brown’s perspective, it appears that change was only for socioeconomic status and not gender. Gender inequality finds its way into this image as a collection of acute angles, elisions, and social norms. Thus while Brown crafted his painting to reveal to Plint the economic inequities of Victorian society, he inadvertently disclosed his own gender biases and sexism in the process. We open this chapter with Brown’s painting to emphasize the importance and necessity of turning to the Pre-Raphaelites for their puissant political aptitude. Critics of the Pre-Raphaelites—in the nineteenth century and today—foreground (and condemn) their innovation. However, we recognize in that innovation an explicit political project sidelined by a critical emphasis on Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics. On the one hand, Pre-Raphaelite art is experiencing renewed popularity, with a number of recent international exhibitions proposing to solidify the thematic and formal elements of the visual arts.7 Pre-Raphaelite poetry, on the other hand, has not yet shaken off the aforementioned nineteenthcentury reputation of “fleshliness.” Such a reputation has polarized study surrounding the Pre-Raphaelites, marking them as disengaged or disinterested members of Victorian society who care only for etherealized

7 To name just a few recent exhibitions: Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to

the Arts & Crafts Movement (Birmingham Museums and traveled internationally, 2018– 2021); Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (National Portrait Gallery, 2019–2020); Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters (international, 2018); Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites (National Gallery, 2017–2018); and Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian AvantGarde (Tate Britain, 2012–2013).

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themes of sexuality, love, and creative inspiration. Put differently, PreRaphaelitism’s reputation as strictly aesthetic and sensual has enabled a view of their poetry and prose as noncritical, or unworthy of “serious” scholarly attention. This critical divide, however, has marginalized a fairly influential political movement. In this chapter, we explore one facet of Pre-Raphaelite political imperative through the lens of gender. Analyzing Elizabeth Siddall’s “Lord, May I Come?” and Christina Rossetti’s “A Triad,” the chapter continues an interrogation of how, unlike Brown, these Pre-Raphaelite poets resist gendered conventions by making visible the lived experience of women and feminine thought. We offer these readings in order to set up a central concern of this volume: rethinking the gendered language surrounding Pre-Raphaelitism. This chapter might therefore be read as two distinct, but interrelated, halves. The first half offers close readings of poems by Siddall and Rossetti in order to establish a foundation for understanding Pre-Raphaelite poetics as political, and especially as gender politics. We read Siddall and Rossetti’s poetry to provide a field site, one specific to the creative work of Pre-Raphaelite women and which stands in contrast to the reading of Brown’s decidedly androcentric political statement in Work with which we opened. The second half then shifts to a discussion of the “sister arts.” We do so in an attempt to annex the gender politics of Pre-Raphaelite poetics with the gendered language that instantiates the movement. The so-called “sister arts”—famously characterized in Horace’s Ars Poetica by the dictum “ut pictura poesis” (“as is painting, so is poetry”)8 —have often been aligned with Pre-Raphaelitism. But what does it mean to emphasize the gendered nature of these arts? The latter part of this chapter explores these gendered naming conventions in order to identify the political work of those names, even as we resist them. In doing so, this chapter, and our volume in its entirety, stresses the centrality of the genre hybridity of literary Pre-Raphaelitism—the integration of music, art, and poetry—and the transgressive quality of border-crossings, or “genre crossing,” as a political endeavor that upholds the plurality sought by the poet-artists.9 8 Ian McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 707. 9 Margaret Stetz applies the term “genre crossing” to late nineteenth century writing, pinpointing the 1890s as the moment when the “inflexible laws of genre began to give way” with the term belles lettres, marking an indistinction between poetry and prose. It

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Traditionally, scholarship has marked the first wave of Pre-Raphaelitism as apolitical, while attributing political awareness to the second wave in 1856. Emerging again as a collaboration of painters and poets, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris produced the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, a periodical substantially influenced by The Germ, and analyzed in detail by Florence Boos in the fourth chapter of this volume. Members of this second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism include Arthur Hughes, Valentine Prinsep, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne’s poetry, for instance, was decidedly political in its subject-matter, openly addressing sexuality and queer desire. One need only consider the sadomasochism of “Anactoria,” with its references to “Quivering; and pain made perfect” (l. 128), a physicality that imbues its rhythms, to recognize that Swinburne demands readers consider the power structures of intimacy, and, in the case of “Arthur’s Flogging,” of childhood. However, less attention has been paid to the sexuality and diversity inherent in the earlier Pre-Raphaelites, as John Holmes’s chapter posits. Alongside these examples of art and poetry written by men, we can add, also, Pre-Raphaelite women such as Christina Rossetti and, less often realized, Elizabeth Siddall, both of whom had clear political investments. We look, therefore, to the poetry of Siddall and Rossetti as case studies of a specifically gendered form of political engagement recognizable in Pre-Raphaelite poetry. ——————————————— Critical consideration of Siddall’s poetics has been hampered by William Michael Rossetti’s assessment of the “wail of pang and pathos” that runs throughout many of her poems.10 Yet, Constance Hassett and Serena Trowbridge have argued that while the dead or dying woman, the tendency toward melancholy, and the negative outlook toward romantic relationships are prominent in Siddall’s work, these attributes are not

might be possible, however, to see this sense of genre crossing as early as the 1850s in the work of Pre-Raphaelitism, which blurs the boundaries between the genres of art, poetry, and song. See Stetz, “‘Ballads in Prose’: Genre Crossing in Late-Victorian Women’s Writing,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 2 (2006): 619–629. 10 William Michael Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti (London: Brown, Langham, & Co., 1906), 1: 196.

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uncommon for the period.11 Therefore, rather than being set back by W. M. Rossetti’s off-putting remarks, reading Siddall’s work within the context of Pre-Raphaelitism asks us to reconsider the ways in which a woman’s voice establishes a lyric intensity that offers a unique way of seeing through close attention and introspection, paralleling a reversal of priorities in order to make a gendered and political statement through its attention to women’s thoughts, or that which is often perceived as trivial. Initially published, and heavily edited, in W. M. Rossetti’s Some Reminiscences (1906), “Lord, May I Come?” appears, at first glance, to be a simplistic poem, structured with double- and repeated-rhymes, and framed by repetitive questions.12 Often in aestheticized (and predominantly masculine) poetics, a dying woman is depicted in idealized terms and remains silent.13 Here, however, Siddall uses direct language to offer not only a voice to the woman, but a poetics grounded in patterns of introspection and observation. In doing so, priority is placed not on the bodily or material world, but on the internal self, depicted through close attention to landscape elements. Traditionally, the poem has been read biographically, driven by W. M. Rossetti’s commentary on the shakiness of the manuscript hand, which he reads as an indication of “the influence of laudanum,”14 and Siddall’s grief after the birth of her stillborn daughter. However, beyond this context, Siddall’s poetics reveal a sense of PreRaphaelite primitiveness in the poem’s keen observation of the natural world that depicts an inward turn toward the speaker’s psychological state, thereby valuing feminine interiority over the bodily exterior. Through new forms of making, her poetics engages in a radical politics consonant with the Victorian era’s tension between faith and doubt, reimagining traditional modes of religious conviction as rooted not in the divine, but in the known, natural environment as a means of psychological assurance. If the first two stanzas are marked by repetitive religious questioning—“Lord, have I long to go?” (line 5); “Lord, may I come” (lines 11 Constance Hassett, “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions,” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 4 (1997): 443–470; Serena Trowbridge, My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (London: Victorian Secrets, 2018). 12 Trowbridge’s My Ladys Soul contains a transcription of the MS of the poem. For ease of reading, however, in this chapter, citations of the poem come from Dinah Roe’s The Pre-Raphaelites: From Ruskin to Rossetti (New York: Penguin, 2010). 13 Trowbridge, 16. 14 Qtd. in Roe, 348 and Trowbridge, 53.

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8 and 14)—and a relatively straightforward rhyme scheme (AABBBAAA CCDAAD), the final stanza transitions to double rhymes punctuated by a plea for remembrance—“O Lord, remember me!” (line 19)—before devolving into a series of questions regarding the “unknown land” (line 20). In this transitional poetics, the speaker seeks reassurance: “How is it in the unknown land? / Do the dead wander hand in hand? / Do we clasp dead hands, and quiver / With an endless joy for ever?” (lines 20– 24). The unknown is articulated by Siddall through natural observation, a likening of the mysterious world to the known world through a comparison, first, of physical activity and emotion, before a return to the natural environment: “Are there lakes, of endless song, / To rest our tiréd eyes upon? / Do tall white angels gaze and wend / Along the banks where lilies bend?” (lines 26–29). Like her fellow Pre-Raphaelites, Siddall relies upon synaesthesia to convey her inquiries, mixing sight with song, and movement with stasis. In so doing, the poetic voice amalgamates external observation with introspection to generate a voice permeated by doubt and desiring reassurance, as illustrated in the poem’s final lines: “Lord, we know not how this may be; / Good Lord, we put our faith in Thee – / O God remember me” (lines 30–33). Such a turn might initially seem consistent with normative understandings of nineteenth-century women’s devotional poetry: doubt and reassurance provided by faith in God. But here, Siddall reverses gender politics by suggesting that reassurance is found not only in religion, but in the certainty provided by natural observation, guided by the resolve to endure grief through close attention of the surrounding landscape as evocative of the world to come. She offers, in other words, a new form of seeing—a new form of making—guided by her quest for internal truth, a new form reliant on female introspection. A further example of Pre-Raphaelitism’s political investments exists in Christina Rossetti’s often-anthologized but under-researched sonnet, “A Triad.” Rossetti’s poem interrogates not only the notion that women are of certain types, but that marriage and married love are the appropriate condition for all women. Constance Hassett considers “A Triad” to be “a signal poem” among Rossetti’s more harshly judgmental works. She suggests that “one of the implicit subjects of the quarrelsome pieces,” of which “A Triad” is one, “is their own embarrassment, their volume and volubility.”15 We fail to recognize the embarrassment 15 Constance Hassett, Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 2005), 39.

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Hassett assigns to “A Triad,” but agree that it is “a fierce little allegory, [that] ponders love’s deformities.”16 By aligning Rossetti’s sonnet with the nineteenth-century demographic discourse about marriageable and surplus women, we suggest here one way that Pre-Raphaelite poetry challenged normalizing processes and attempted to deconstruct women solely as marriageable types, each distinctly political processes. “A Triad” refuses social counting (e.g., statistical analysis and demography) that collapses numerous distinct women into single categories. As she weighs each gendered category, Rossetti suggests that individual wholeness is never actually the goal for women, nor is it even a possibility. Although wholeness is the normative standard for women, taking as it often did in the Victorian era the form of the institution of marriage, society is always dividing women into types even as it perpetuates a discourse of wholeness. Rossetti knows that there are different kinds of wholeness, and that the integrity of the liberal subject, of identity, is not one on offer for women. As Rossetti’s sonnet refuses the simplicity of the marriage plot by problematizing a tidy social sorting into pairs, she simultaneously recognizes the impossibility of individual identity for women in the face of demographic categorization and institutional flattening. That said, it is important to bear in mind how, in the process of locating poems as a response to generalizations about a group, one can inadvertently fall prey to precisely the same sort of generalization. Isobel Armstrong makes a similar point, writing, [I]t is too easy to describe the work of these very different women as a women’s tradition based on a full frontal attack on oppression. Though such an attack undoubtedly often existed, a concentration on moments of overt protest can extract the content of a direct polemic about women’s condition in a way which retrieves the protest, but not the poem […] so that all poems become poems about women’s oppression.17

Armstrong cautions us not to look only for resistance to “oppression” in women’s work at the expense of the other work a poem might do. When feminist scholars first began recovering Rossetti’s work, though, this was precisely the reading “A Triad” received. Germaine Greer, for 16 Hassett, Patience of Style, 40. 17 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge,

1993), 319.

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example, claimed that the poem expressed “rage against the pettiness” of women’s “cramped existence.”18 However, a reductive reading of “A Triad” as resisting gender oppression not only risks generalizing women’s experiences under one critical category but also overlooks how the poem is formalizing and thematizing generalization itself as a problem. Helena Michie makes the excellent point that “the equation of ‘other’ and ‘woman’ that makes all women other threatens to make all women the same,” or what she calls “otherness reduced to sameness.”19 Put differently, if all women are the “other,” then all women are the same as the “other.” We want to avoid this pitfall of creating one generalization while investigating another. While Rossetti is saying that women have things in common and can be classified together under certain types, her poetics preserve the difference that avoids the paradoxical threat of all women as both the other and the same. An initial reading of “A Triad” might suggest a fairly simplistic sonnet about three women, each of whom reaches a less than happy ending. And, indeed, such a reading might account for the lack of critical attention paid to this poem. However, close attention to “A Triad”’s formal elements uncovers the substantial work that this poem does in thinking about social counting, gender, and women’s lives. To illustrate Rossetti’s working through this relationship between poetic form and social counting, one need only examine the sonnet’s rhyme scheme. Though “A Triad” begins with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme ABAB, it then departs from that pattern. The BCBC is a portion of a Spenserian rhyme scheme, while the CDE is one sestet option for Petrarchan sonnets. The poem subsequently peters out into repetition of the DEDEDE, as though the poem is ironizing patterns with monotony or tapping into the daily burdens of intimacy. Rossetti recombined three types of male sonnets into one poem that reflects the dangers of essentializing practices, a formal model which proclaims that a sonnet needs no more conform to type than “a woman.” And, indeed, Rossetti extends her reformulation of poetic structure to the women, or woman, she depicts, for the poem can be read either way. One might read three women as types in this sonnet, as

18 Germaine Greer, Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection, and the Woman Poet (London: Viking, 1995), 372. 19 Helena Michie, Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 3–4.

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done here, but the reading of a single woman composed of all three types is equally available. All three women in Rossetti’s triad are types, “one” who does or feels something, or one who possesses certain attributes or talents; they are not individuals. As Mary Arseneau points out: It must be acknowledged that Rossetti participated in a pervasive Victorian revival of typological and sacramental ways of thinking about nature and art […] Rossetti would have early in life imbibed an emblematic view of creation and an allegorical bent from childhood reading including John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Filippo Pistrucci’s Iconologia, Peter Parley’s Tales About Plants, and John Gray’s Fables.20

Rossetti was not only familiar with but regularly interrogated such types in her own writing, successively exploring their complexity and challenging them, precisely as she does in this sonnet. In “A Triad,” Rossetti’s quantification, her “ones” can also be understood as a component of the “double poem” that involves Thomas Carlyle’s “movable type,” as reconceptualized by Armstrong.21 Moveable type, for Armstrong, is “where technology mobilises logos, makes the process of signification a political matter as it opens up a struggle for meaning of words, which is part of the relations of power explored through the structures of the poem.”22 Like a “double poem,” Rossetti explores typologies of gender in both the thematic and formal elements of “A Triad.” For example, none of the women in the poem are given names but instead are associated with their sexuality (“lips / Crimson”; “bosom in a glow”; “yellow hair and finger tips”), talents (“one there sang”; “hyacinth at a show”), colors (Crimson, yellow, blue), or emotions (“one was blue,” so she “snapped rang harsh”). Having given us these types of women, Rossetti provides equally typical outcomes: the lusty woman “shamed herself in love,” the woman taught only to sing and be pretty grows “gross” as a “sluggish wife,” and the snappish woman “famished died for love.” The poet then calculates the cost of such social expectations for 20 Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 102. 21 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [1833], ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 31. 22 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 16.

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women to conform to certain categories and modes of being. Subtracting “two of three,” we are told, the one who “shamed herself” and the one who “rang harsh” each “Took death for love.” In other words, the sensuous woman becomes socially dead as a result of her sexual activity and the harpy who “snapped,” having never experienced love because of her apparent unpleasantness, either literally dies from a broken heart or is never fully alive in society’s estimation because she fails to marry and have children. And the “sluggish wife” lives out her days like a complacent “fattened bee”; she “droned,” hummed along monotonously or drowned, if you allow the homophone, “in sweetness” of quotidian expectations and activities. One can infer that life for a woman in Rossetti’s calculus should not be defined by her appearance or by the silly skills that women were taught, like singing for company or participating in the local garden club, nor should life depend upon whether one finds love in a heteronormative marriage. In contrast to Siddall’s decision to give voice to her speaker, withholding speech from these women is Rossetti’s refusal to acknowledge women who allow themselves to be typified in this manner. Even Rossetti saw “A Triad” as one of her harsher pieces, which might account for her decision to exclude it from the 1875 collected edition of her poetry. Added to this, a formal reading of the poem reinforces Rossetti’s disdainful tone, materially embodies the women, and resists the statistical impulse to group all women “together.” Each woman, or category of woman, is manifested metrically in Rossetti’s poem, as though the poet is trying to conjure a sonorous avatar of their respective types. For instance, the enjambment of “one with lips” and “[c]rimson” synecdochically associates the first woman only with her lips and emphasizes that both her lips and her self are desirous, erotic, or made up like a loose woman. Lips, as we know from French feminism, need not only refer to those of the face, but can also assume a labial connotation, an alternative reading which decidedly sexualizes Rossetti’s miniature blazon. Phrasal scansion, which understands various phrases and punctuation in a poem as movements like that in a musical score, is especially helpful here.23 Rossetti’s enjambment creates a phrasal reading

23 In Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), Derek Attridge explains that phrasal scansion “reflects a reader’s sense of the way a poem goes— its high points, its unemphatic moments, its tonal variations, its shifts in feeling, its complex meanings.” It is a method of providing a “snapshot” of the movements of a poem and discerning how these overlap with the meter. Phrasal scansion tracks statements

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that pulls the reader’s anticipation toward the remaining description. At one level of phrasal scansion, the anticipation might stop at the scandalized note of “[c]rimson,” causing the reader to linger like a lover over the woman’s red lips. This incandescent girl is “in a glow” and “[f]lushed” to the roots of her hair and tips of her fingers with passion. At all but the highest level of mere statement, the phrasal scansion reaches closure here, and anticipation to know more about this “one” arrives at the end of this woman’s finger tips. We “know” her in both senses, descriptively and carnally, as her fingers become an answer to our curiosity about her: a haptic, phenomenal encounter between the reader and the woman’s sensuality. Further embodying her, the pyrrhic foot “in a” causes a rising stress group, so that her “bosom” falls on the iamb and rises with “in a glow.” This same pattern repeats in line 5: “Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show,” though in this case the rising stress group enables that woman to stand up and be admired for her talents. The third woman’s emotional state is likewise embodied metrically. The opening of the line offers another rising character group like that of the first woman’s bosom and the second woman’s blooming. But here, it begins the line so that the feeling is one of reaching an emotional breaking point. The pyrrhic “Who like” gently eases us into a line so that we are unprepared for the succession of stressed syllables, “snapped rang harsh.” Her emotions, like the meter, shift wildly from stressed to unstressed. After which, she declines again into the iambs “and low / The burden,” softening like the meter as she sinks under the weight of “what those were singing of”—social norms and expectations. The enjambment of “low” also enables the “harpstring […] harsh” to continue reverberating into the following line. Phrasal scansion reveals this reverberation as the phrases continue past this point until the full stop at “singing of,” as though the woman’s overwrought ranting continually rings in the reader’s ears until that moment. After this woman snaps, the remainder of the poem becomes metrically stable, each line beginning with a spondee offering a piece of information that brings a succession of arrivals in phrasal scansion: “One shamed,” “Grew gross,” “One famished,” “Took death,” “One droned.” This is the moment in the poem where the rhyme scheme likewise resolves itself (STA), extensions (EXT), anticipation (ANT), and arrivals, or the fruition of anticipation (ARR); in addition to the metrical scansion, it provides another sense of how many ways and levels there are at which to quantify poetry.

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into repetition. Rossetti is especially well known for her use of repetition in poetry.24 Although her repetition need not be read as uniformity, monotony, or routine, such a reading of “A Triad” seems warranted. Here, the repetitions do the work of meditating on the burdens of gendered expectations, intimacy, and social norms. As a result, the meter and rhyme signal an approaching resolution before the poem’s final line, while the “one”s offer types, separation, and a world-weary view of women’s options when single. Rossetti had a very different perspective about single life, as she was surrounded by positive, productive examples of single women who did not conform to the extensive Victorian discourse that claimed single women were defective and worthy of pity. Instead, Rossetti would have viewed singleness as a position which enabled women to do great charitable and social work.25 The poem effectively suggests that a woman’s options in marriage are no better than a woman’s options in single life. A woman will still be understood as a type in either case. Consequently, Rossetti’s attention to quantification both thematically and metrically in “A Triad” troubles typification and the statistical pull in a newly quantifying era that accounted for every moment and way of being throughout life.26 Attempts to standardize women as “one” of a type ultimately fail here. Marriage is not a solution for the ones in this sonnet’s equation, so the poem constructs instead a meditation on the impossibility of social counting, of distinguishing ones from twos, and of ways of mattering in the modern world. Rossetti’s work rejects that outcome, offering instead social counting founded upon the understanding that

24 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 352; Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 218–220; Michie, Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 33. See also Suzy Waldman, “‘O Wanton Eyes Run over’: Repetition and Fantasy in Christina Rossetti,” Victorian Poetry 38, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 533–553. 25 Christina Rossetti was herself an “Outside Sister” of Highgate Penitentiary, living outside of the convent for many years while retaining the status of a sister connected to that community. Mary Arseneau, Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 27; Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), 221; Letters of Christina Rossetti, Vol. 1, 125 (Letter 103); Letters of Christina Rossetti, Vol. 1, 151–512 (Letter 145). 26 Indeed, the Victorian era attraction to new methods of social counting resulted in what Ian Hacking calls “an avalanche of numbers.” Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2.

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women will always be many, even when they are few. Instead of women fitting into only “one” category, Rossetti suggests that women are an aggregation of such characteristics, one which does not flatten or mass women into a general type or category. Consequently, Rossetti’s poem, as does Siddall’s, takes on political activism and commentary as a form of poiesis . Each poet seeks methods of making women’s lived experience visible, and, in so doing, exercises a political inclination. In what follows, we suggest that Pre-Raphaelite scholars might follow in the steps of Rossetti and Siddall to recognize women’s very real presence and important political contributions to Pre-Raphaelitism. One way scholars might do that is by jettisoning the outdated and counterproductive terminology of the “sister arts” in favor of language highlighting the multimodality or plurality of Pre-Raphaelitism. As this collection makes clear, the genre hybridity of Pre-Raphaelitism forms the foundation of their acts of making. We, the editors, remain unconvinced that the sanctioned gender binaries with which scholarship discusses PreRaphaelitism—brotherhood and sisterhood—are adequate to the task of accounting for, let alone strategically opposing, the tenacious legacies of gender inequality and accusations of Pre-Raphaelitism as “light,” strictly aesthetic, and lacking political value. Such binaries run the risk of simply restating, rather than overturning, dominant notes of power and genre in relation to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. Instead, we assert that the richness of genre hybridity, collaborative exchange, and creative combination expands Pre-Raphaelitism to include a diverse politics of agency and innovation, one which emerges in their creative multimodality. It is not that we want to merely yoke gender and political work together in Pre-Raphaelitism. Rather, we seek to understand how both came into existence for Pre-Raphaelitism in and through relation to each other. As we know from decades of feminism, the personal is always political. The end of the nineteenth century made this reality manifest in women’s rights movements. From the Matrimonial Causes Acts (1857, 1884)—that enabled secular divorce—to the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882),—that gave women the right to their earnings and personal property—the pursuit of, and demands for, gender equality has always been political activism. For Pre-Raphaelites like Siddall and Rossetti, political activism often took form in their poetry. However, as we detail in the next section, poetry was still associated with gendered expectations for men, namely, that men created poetry while women created

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visual arts. To then lump all Pre-Raphaelite forms of making under the singular banner of the “sister arts” suggests a problematic, almost paradoxical, construction in which nineteenth-century gendered hierarchies of the arts that assigned poetry to men are, effectively, ungendered and made womanly again by association with women’s arts. Rather than continuing to rely on the language of the “sister arts,” the following section asserts the political potential of making old forms new through recombination, aggregation, and hybridity. As we point out in the introduction to this collection, Pre-Raphaelites such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Modernists such as Ezra Pound alike recognized the political potential of making new by celebrating diversity and recombining parts from the past with methods from the present. Pre-Raphaelitism repeatedly rehearses this knowledge—plurality is politically powerful.

The Sister Arts? The Multimodal Politics of Sound, Image, and Text In order to model scholarship that no longer needs the obsolete language of “sister arts,” and to demonstrate the political stakes of each separately and jointly, we explore three articulated aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism— music, painting, and poetry. By routinely considering the arts as sisters, in the tradition of classical antiquity, scholarship maintains a gendered hierarchy that others feminine forms. Indeed, in eighteenth-century Britain, poetry, painting, and sculpture were companionable, argues Michele Martinez, “so long as the family of genres reflected the social order: pastoral verse and flower painting were classified as feminine pastimes suitable for lady amateurs; and epic poetry and history painting as masculine genres for a gentleman […].”27 Furthermore, W. J. T. Mitchell asserts that the discourse of all “sister” arts “has to do with proper sex roles”— that is, the “sister” arts are conditioned by socially constructed gender roles and political ideologies28 : “Paintings are confined to the narrow sphere of external display of [women’s] bodies and of the space which 27 Michele Martinez, “Women Poets and the Sister Arts in Nineteenth-Century England,” Victorian Poetry 41, no. 1 (2003): 621–628, 621. 28 “Sister arts” theory was introduced in England in the seventeenth century by Dryden’s 1695 preface to the translation of Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy’s treatise De arte graphica (1668). While predating Pre-Raphaelitism by two centuries, the theory was still relevant in the nineteenth century, and, indeed, in scholarship today.

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they ornament, while poems are free to range over an infinite realm of potential action and expression.”29 In this discourse, then, poiesis is relegated to men and display relegated to women. Indeed, this assigning of gendered forms and, along with it, a strict demarcation of the arts is one of the many critiques that Buchanan levels at the Pre-Raphaelite poets: “The truth is that literature, and more particularly poetry, is in a very bad way when one art gets hold of another, and imposes upon it its conditions and limitations.”30 In critiquing the “fleshliness” or “nastiness” of literary Pre-Raphaelitism, Buchanan, in a sense, denigrates the movement for its reversal of the social order: not poiesis , he might argue, but display. Moreover, he lambastes the fluidity of genre practiced by the Pre-Raphaelites. Much like the rise of professional women poets and painters in the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites transform Victorian conceptions of the arts, merging the lyric voice with song and visual representation. The insistence on genre crossing and recombination of forms that becomes a hallmark of Pre-Raphaelitism, then, is a political statement that challenges conventional Victorian social and literary forms by celebrating generic diversity and intermedial amalgamation. Pre-Raphaelite music, visual arts, and literature (poetry predominantly) each evolved as integrated forms of making. We begin our focus on the intermedial aspects of the Pre-Raphaelites with music because it is the most under-researched and profoundly multimodal of Pre-Raphaelite poetics. Music played a vital role in Victorian life; yet there persists an omission of the ways in which music influenced nineteenth-century culture, aesthetics, and literature.31 This exclusion extends to the PreRaphaelites, generating an incomplete picture of the intermedial effects of Pre-Raphaelite poetics, as discussed in Chapter 6 by Mary Arseneau. While most attention has been paid to claims of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s supposed unmusicality,32 despite earlier inclusion of musical themes in

29 Ibid., 624. 30 Buchanan, 341. 31 See Phyllis Weliver’s ongoing digital humanities project, Sounding Victorian. 32 Karen Yuen, “Bound by Sound: Music, Victorian Masculinity, and Dante Gabriel

Rossetti,” ed. Graeme Smart and Amelia Yeates, special issue on “Victorian Masculinities,” Critical Survey 20, no. 3, special issue on Victorian Masculinities, guest edited by Graeme Smart and Amelia Yeates (December 2008): 79–96.

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both his poetry and painting, more recent scholarship locates the importance of musical settings and sound in an attempt to reread literary PreRaphaelitism to recover the sonorous aspects of the movement’s poetics. Thus, as scholarship initiates connections between Pre-Raphaelitism and music, we locate a shift away from biographical context toward a larger exploration of the influence of socially lived experience. In reconsidering Pre-Raphaelite poetics, therefore, we participate in recent trends linking music and literature with our volume’s focus on aesthetic sound. As Phyllis Weliver describes in her overview of the Digital Humanities project Sounding Victorian, attention to sound “comprises elements of verbal and non-verbal articulation, musicality, and soundscape.”33 In addition to the focus on musical settings, the act of listening to poetry set to music allows us to more clearly envision the PreRaphaelite fascination with attention as a way of enabling new forms of reading. “Music rendered ideas of sense and sensation intensely perceptible through the body,” argues Elizabeth Helsinger, “heard and felt in the vibrations of breath from throat, the touch of the hand or body moving to music, the peculiar penetrating of music-borne language.”34 Music, thus, becomes yet another form of making, as literary PreRaphaelitism uses music to generate an embodied experience of sound within their poetry. To foreground the aural components of poetry—that tangible aspect of visceral, bodily response—the Pre-Raphaelites turn to orality to make explicit their genre crossing; in doing so, they transform the arts through a recombination of music and poetic forms. Reading with an eye toward the interconnected threads of PreRaphaelite poetics, one is struck by a commitment to orality, which has its roots in the group’s communal culture. A large part of this culture relies upon the circulation of texts, as well as poetic recitation and performance—both of which are combined when considering the century’s musical influence upon Pre-Raphaelite poetics. Indeed, William Morris’s recitation of his poems is well-known and, in fact, caricatured by Edward 33 Indeed, the field of Digital Humanities provides innovative and fruitful avenues to explore the musicality of Pre-Raphaelitism, with—at the time of this writing—two projects that make accessible the archival and published musical settings for the poetry of Christina Rossetti (see Mary Arseneau’s Christina Rossetti in Music) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (see Michael Craske’s Sounding Swinburne, which forms part of Weliver’s Sounding Victorian consortium). 34 Elizabeth Helsinger, “Listening: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Persistence of Song,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 3 (2009): 409.

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Burne-Jones in an archival sketch depicting Morris seated behind an expansive desk, papers in front of him, and Burne-Jones slumped into a chair, fast asleep.35 While humorous, the caricature points toward Morris’s own preoccupations with the musicality of his poems, which makes sense when considering the often almost-claustrophobic patterning of sound in his ballads and lyric narratives. Moreover, Swinburne was also noted for his recitations from memory of his own poems, read aloud at large social gatherings with grandiose gesticulations to involve his entire body. In this way, poetic recitation—like concert-going—becomes a means of embodied performance. Further, noting the Pre-Raphaelite tendency toward recitation, sound, and musical engagement aligns with Walter Pater’s end-of-the-century affirmation of music-making as a social activity in The Renaissance.36 By linking poetic recitation to a wider engagement with the musical culture of the period, we become aware of the inherent genre crossing within the very style and form of PreRaphaelite poetics. Its rich prosody and close attention to sweeping rhythms that create patterns of sound to articulate a vivid sensory experience partakes in both the verbal and nonverbal elements that are indebted to the musical culture of Victorian England. Thus in recombining sensorial elements—sound, visual, and lyric—the Pre-Raphaelites embed, in their prosody, their lived experience of nineteenth-century sociability. In doing so, they foreground community over the individual; privileging the political potential of hybridity over bifurcating forms. As Pre-Raphaelite music incorporates and evokes Pre-Raphaelite text and image, causing each to be involved with the other, so, too, do PreRaphaelite text and image incorporate each other. We have mentioned the evolutionary model for understanding Pre-Raphaelite plurality, but within the traditional understanding of the “sister arts” is perhaps the best example of what Darwin might have called the “entangled bank” of this creative movement. This entanglement of poetics existed from the conception of Pre-Raphaelitism. (It was in its genes, you might say.) At an informal May 15, 1849 meeting in John Millais’s studio, recorded in the first entry of the P.R.B. Journal , visual art was certainly on display, but so too was poetry. Of the initial seven Pre-Raphaelites, 35 Edward Burne-Jones, “MR MORRIS Reading Poems to MR BURNE JONES,” 1865–1880, Pen and black ink, British Museum, London. 36 Phyllis Weliver, “Liberal Dreaminess and The Golden Stairs of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1891),” The British Art Journal 17, no. 3 (Winter 2016/2017).

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Rossetti was highly regarded for his poetry and translations, but all of the members were practicing a form of literary Pre-Raphaelitism.37 Indeed, at the inaugural meeting of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais was working on a poem, while Rossetti read aloud from one of his poems-in-progress. In addition to their own creative aspirations, the men discussed the poetry of Coventry Patmore, generating a social environment grounded upon interdisciplinary modes of making. Thus, this initial entry records the embedded interweaving of the Pre-Raphaelites’ artistic and literary endeavours, demonstrating that the one cannot necessarily be divided from the other. As a result, we think about each form of making in connection with the other here in an effort to conceptualize genre hybridity as an act of political intervention through its experimentalism. We are certainly not the first to claim Pre-Raphaelite art as “literary” in its mode of observation.38 Indeed, Pre-Raphaelite illustrations were construed as close readings of poetry, following Rossetti’s assertion to William Allingham of “allegorizing on one’s own hook.”39 In his memoirs of the Pre-Raphaelites, William Holman Hunt concretely associates art with poetry, asserting that the Pre-Raphaelites distinguished themselves from “dull imitators who were destitute of poetic discrimination.”40 It is fair to say that poetry served as inspiration first for the

37 Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 40; Giebelhausen, Michaela and T. J. Barringer, eds., Writing the Pre-Raphaelites (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 9. 38 See, for instance, Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly’s 2018 collection, Poetry in PreRaphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries, and Colin Cruise’s work on poeticism in visual Pre-Raphaelitism, including “Poetic, Eccentric Pre-Raphaelite: The Critical Reception of Simeon Solomon’s Work at the Dudley Gallery,” in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites (2009) and “Among the Ruins: Burne-Jones, Browning and Time,” in Erzählte Zeit und Gedächtnis: Narrative Strukturen und das Problem der Sinnstiftung im Denkmal, ed. Götz Pochat and Brigitte Wagner (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 2005), 111–124. 39 DGR to William Allingham, 23 January 1855 (Doughty, Letters vol. 1, 239). See, also, Andres and Donnelly’s articulation of the visual arts developing out of individual artist’s interpretations of poetry (4). After the publication of the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857), Tennyson was famously disappointed in the illustrations provided by Pre-Raphaelite artists, including D. G. Rossetti and William Holman Hunt because the artists seemingly disregarded the poet’s intentions, offering instead a close reading in visual form. Andres, Sophia and Brian Donnelly, eds., Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries (New York: Peter Lang, 2018). 40 William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 2 (London, Macmillan, 1905), 400.

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Pre-Raphaelites and as original artistic production second. Indeed, Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly’s introduction to Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries (2018) begins from the premise that poetry was always an inspiration first to Pre-Raphaelite painters. Moreover, they affirm John Ruskin’s attribution of the Pre-Raphaelites as “‘poetical painters,’ not just seeking inspiration in poetry […] but […] ‘inventing the story as they painted it.’”41 To this we would add a third sense of “poetic painters,” that of literary critic. Michaela Gibelhausen and Tim Barringer, in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites, emphasize the importance of “textual acts” to the history of Pre-Raphaelitism: “In addition to […] public writings […] which often formed the basis of biographical or autobiographical narratives. It is this wealth of extant literature […] that determines how we see the Pre-Raphaelites.”42 By adding literary critic to our understanding of “poetic painters,” we assert that Pre-Raphaelite painters were, more than seeking inspiration as a jumping off place for the subject matter of visual art, interpreting poetry, close reading it, and then offering their own “readings” of poetry in a visual format. In other words, we embrace the truly intermedial quality of the critic as an embodiment of genre crossing and hybridity. Yet, poets whose work provided interpretive content for the Pre-Raphaelites were not always eager to have their poetry “read” in this way, as the famous story about Tennyson’s reaction to Holman Hunt’s illustrations for “The Lady of Shalott” reveal.43

41 Ruskin, John, “Modern Painters,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and

Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 5: 127; qtd. in Andres and Donnelly, 2–3. 42 Giebelhausen and Barringer, Writing the Pre-Raphaelites, 10–11. 43 Tennyson famously “beset [Holman Hunt] with disconcerting questions about his

illustrations” and insisted that Holman Hunt had misread him (fn: Andres and Donnelly 4). The poet especially objected to the painter’s interpretation of “Out flew the web and floated wide,” pointing out that Holman Hunt’s representation showed the thread “round and round her like the threads of cocoon.” When Holman Hunt defended his effort to “convey the impression of weird fate,” the laureate replied that “an illustrator ought never add anything to what he finds in a text” (fn: William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2: 124–125). Tennyson’s claim implies that visual artists have no place interpreting literary texts. What is more, he suggests that all readers should not read into a text what an author never intended. Tennyson’s position was essentially that authorial intent took precedence over interpretation. However, Holman Hunt understood that his goal was not to “give expression to the complete idea” as the poet had but to grasp one brief “impression” in vastly different format and medium. Their debate evokes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s famous line, “A Sonnet is a moment’s

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Ruskin, too, would recognize the Pre-Raphaelites for deriving inspiration from poetry, as well as depicting and reassessing intense emotion— often associated with nineteenth-century poetic themes and forms. In their collection, Andres and Donnelly suggest further considerations of intertextuality by exploring moments in which poetry and painting coalesce. They, too, argue for a focus on Pre-Raphaelitism as a movement that destabilizes boundaries, but draw attention to the “coalescing spatial and temporal arts, thus infusing one art with the power and intensity of the other.”44 Yet, despite this argument for infusion, their focus remains on poetry in service to art: “Through the temporal dimension of poetry, the subjects of Pre-Raphaelite art acquired a voice and quite often a subjectivity that the spatial essence of painting had denied them. Poetry removed the static quality of paintings, infusing them with movement, vitality, dynamism, and multitudinous perspectives.”45 As we have argued, however, reassessing Pre-Raphaelitism through diverse forms of making underscores the intermedial and collaboratively experimental effects of Pre-Raphaelite technique and lived experience. Rather than posing poetry in service to visual art, we acknowledge the social creation of art and its intermedial qualities with our focus on poiesis and genre crossing; moreover, we recognize that, as a whole, the aims of Pre-Raphaelitism in both visual and literary art forms are aligned.46 Rossetti’s, Millais’s, and Holman Hunt’s ambitious pictures at the 1848 Royal Academy exhibition underscored the seriousness of art and received considerable press attention for their revolt on the English artistic establishment as an “attack from above.”47 If, as recent exhibitions have done, we consider the Pre-Raphaelites as members of the avant-garde, traditionally avant-garde painters “are seen to express

monument,” a claim that we can extrapolate to Pre-Raphaelite painting as trying to capture the momentary impressions of poetic fullness. 44 Andres and Donnelly, 3. 45 Ibid. 46 While our focus remains on poetics, we would be remiss to neglect the visual strand of Pre-Raphaelitism. Indeed, art historians have made significant progress in resuscitating Pre-Raphaelitism, and provide a clear path for literary scholars to assess a uniquely PreRaphaelite poetics. 47 Rossetti displayed his religious subject in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, while Millais and Holman Hunt exhibited literary subjects in their respective Isabella and Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother.

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radical political views not only choosing episodes from the everyday lives of ordinary people as fit subjects for painting, but by opposing the ‘aristocratic’ traditions of the French Academy.” This was different in England: Royal Academicians achieved commercial success by representing “pleasant, anecdotal subjects suited to the domestic environment of the prosperous middle classes.”48 With their chosen subjects, then, the Pre-Raphaelites built their manifesto around the aim that art should deal with “serious” issues—politics, morality and religion, social problems—rather than commercial trivialities to appease the middle classes. In the following year’s exhibition, criticism surrounding Pre-Raphaelite art intensified. Elizabeth Prettejohn records the abusive and medically laced diction of the 1850 reviews to describe a “campaign of vituperation”: “adjectives such as ‘loathsome,’ ‘revolting,’ ‘disgusting’ recurred in review after review.” Instead of the traditional vocabulary of art criticism, “critics adopted a pseudo-medical vocabulary centred on words such as ‘disease,’ ‘deformity,’ and ‘dissection.’”49 Pointing to the unconventional and complicated poses of Pre-Raphaelite figures, reviewers overlook the aim of Pre-Raphaelitism, with its focus on close looking (and reading). Pre-Raphaelite art prompts fresh, innovative observation; in the 1850 paintings, the human body is reconsidered without reliance on proportion and anatomical systems, which would produce a normalized understanding of the body.

Conclusion Pre-Raphaelite poetics generate new forms of reading, as we have seen in the examples of Siddall and Rossetti above. Literary Pre-Raphaelitism urges innovation through a reassessment of poetic convention and formal techniques shaped by the seriousness of experience—personal, professional, and social. Indeed, we might also recall that the same abuse and disease-centered terminology found in the exhibition reviews of 1850 have their literary counterpart in the Buchanan controversy. He, too, described Pre-Raphaelitism as a cycle of disease and degeneration: “the fleshly school of verse-writers are […] diligently spreading the seeds

48 Prettejohn, Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 37. 49 Ibid., 46–48.

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of disease broadcast.”50 Like the art critics, Buchanan misreads PreRaphaelite technique through a removal of context that pushes aside the “seriousness” of Pre-Raphaelite poetics in favor of reading indecency and immorality. In attempting to retain the perceived integrity of traditional forms, and the wholeness of a society abiding by such norms, Buchanan overlooks the value of the Pre-Raphaelite project. In other words, critics of Pre-Raphaelitism, then and now, have opted out of closely reading the innovative, multimodal forms that call direct attention to lived experience and cultural relations as intrinsically political for the Pre-Raphaelites. As we have argued throughout this chapter, those political investments were often gendered. For Brown, they emerge as an emphasis on socioeconomic inequalities that literally marginalize women in the space of his painting, sequestering them to the edges both visually and in the ideology of separate spheres. Brown’s women only contribute to “Work” by tending children, looking lovely, and being companionable. Brown’s apparent blindness to his own sexist attitudes is countered in appealing ways by turning to the work of Siddall and Rossetti. As PreRaphaelite poets, both women employed their poetry to lay claim to the value of women’s lived experience and to reject typologies that assigned women to narrow ontological categories and restrained them within a traditional gender binary. By rereading Pre-Raphaelitism with an eye toward its political engagements, we draw attention to the ways that these poet-artists not only transgressed boundaries—socially, artistically, and formally—but furthered Brown’s argument of socioeconomic inequities in Work. Through experimentations in form—or genre crossing—the PreRaphaelites engage in nineteenth-century gender politics and, as the next chapter illustrates, offer insight into diverse sexualities.

References Andres, Sophia and Brian Donnelly, eds. Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries. New York: Peter Lang, 2018. Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993. Arseneau, Mary. Recovering Christina Rossetti: Female Community and Incarnational Poetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

50 Buchanan, 337.

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Attridge, Derek. Poetic Rhythm: A Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Barringer, Tim. “Brown, Ford Madox (1821–1893).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed 1 September 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3604. Barringer, Tim. “The Gendering of Artistic Labour in Mid-Victorian Britain.” In Representations of Gender from Prehistory to Present, Edited by M. Donald et al. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. 153–167. Barringer, Tim. Men at Work: Art and Labor in Victorian Britain. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005. Brown, Ford Madox. The Exhibition of WORK, and other Paintings, by Ford Madox Brown, at the Gallery. Piccadilly, London: M’Corquodale, 1865. Buchanan, Robert. “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” The Contemporary Review 18 (August–November 1871): 334–350. Burne-Jones, Edward. “MR MORRIS Reading Poems to MR BURNE JONES,” 1865–1880, Pen and black ink, London, British Museum. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus [1833]. Edited by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Cruise, Colin. “Poetic, Eccentric Pre-Raphaelite: The Critical Reception of Simeon Solomon’s Work at the Dudley Gallery.” In Writing the PreRaphaelites, Edited by Michaela Giebelhausen and T. J. Barringer. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. 171–191. Cruise, Colin. “Among the Ruins: Burne-Jones, Browning and Time.” In Erzählte Zeit und Gedächtnis: Narrative Strukturen und das Problem der Sinnstiftung im Denkmal, Edited by Götz Pochat and Brigitte Wagner. Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 2005. 111–124. Giebelhausen, Michaela and T. J. Barringer, eds., Writing the Pre-Raphaelites. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Greer, Germaine. Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection, and the Woman Poet. London: Viking, 1995. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hassett, Constance. “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions.” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 4 (1997): 443–470. Hassett, Constance. Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 2005. Helsinger, Elizabeth. “Listening: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Persistence of Song.” Victorian Studies 51, no. 3 (2009): 409–421. Holman Hunt, William. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 2. London: Macmillan, 1905.

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Macleod, Dianne Sachko. “Plint, Thomas Edward (1823–1861).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford UP, 2004. Accessed 1 September 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/62851. Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose. London: J. M. Dent, 1994. Martinez, Michele. “Women Poets and the Sister Arts in Nineteenth-Century England.” Victorian Poetry 41, no. 1 (2003): 621–628. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Los Angeles: Sage, 2005. McCalman, Ian, ed. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. McDonald, Peter. Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in NineteenthCentury Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Michie, Helena. Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Robson, Catherine. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Roe, Dinah. The Pre-Raphaelites: From Ruskin to Rossetti. New York: Penguin, 2010. Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. London: Brown, Langham, & Co., 1906. Rossetti, Christina. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Vol. 1. Edited by Antony H. Harrison. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1997. Ruskin, John. “Modern Painters.” In The Works of John Ruskin, Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Vol. 5 of 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903–1912. Stetz, Margaret. “‘Ballads in Prose’: Genre Crossing in Late-Victorian Women’s Writing.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 2 (2006): 619–629. Trowbridge, Serena. My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall. London: Victorian Secrets, 2018. Waldman, Suzy. “‘O Wanton Eyes Run over: Repetition and Fantasy in Christina Rossetti.” Victorian Poetry 38, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 533–53. Weliver, Phyllis. “Liberal Dreaminess and The Golden Stairs of Edward BurneJones (1833–1891).” The British Art Journal 17, no. 3 (Winter 2016/2017): 55–63. Yuen, Karen. “Bound by Sound: Music, Victorian Masculinity, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Edited by Graeme Smart and Amelia Yeates. Special issue on “Victorian Masculinities.” Critical Survey 20, no. 3 (2008): 79–96.

CHAPTER 3

Investigating Intersexuality: Pre-Raphaelite Poetics and the Hermaphrodite Self John Holmes

In December 1849, Dante Gabriel Rossetti composed a short story in which an ostensibly male painter encounters a woman who turns out to be his own soul. A few months later, two of his friends, the painter Walter Deverell and the sculptor John Lucas Tupper, collaborated on a counterfactual reimagining of Twelfth Night in which the mutual love between Olivia and Viola is a testament to their souls’ freedom from the constraints of biological sex. In March 1863, another close friend of Rossetti’s, Algernon Charles Swinburne, stood in the Louvre contemplating an ancient marble statue of a sleeping hermaphrodite which would become the subject of a poem made up of four separate sonnets. These three works—Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” Deverell and Tupper’s double work of art “Viola and Olivia,” consisting of an etching and an accompanying poem, and Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus”—are discrete and take different forms. Yet they are all indicative of the same fundamental principle of Pre-Raphaelite poetics as articulated in their manifesto magazine The Germ and elsewhere: that any work of art should be a rigorous,

J. Holmes (B) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_3

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independent, and open-minded investigation of its subject. In each case, through the contemplation and creation of art, the act of investigation leads to insights that are remarkably prescient and enabling, as the artists seek to apprehend individual lives that transcend binary models of sex, gender, and sexual identity. Rossetti’s story, Deverell’s picture and Tupper’s poem all appeared in The Germ in 1850, while Swinburne’s poem was published in his controversial collection Poems and Ballads in 1866. Poems and Ballads is the locus classicus for discussions of sexual difference in Victorian poetry. By contrast, “Hand and Soul,” though well known, has not been considered in this light before, while “Viola and Olivia” has received no critical attention whatever. “Hermaphroditus,” too, deserves more consideration for the ways in which it differs from, rather than simply exemplifying, the self-conscious perversity of much of Swinburne’s erotic poetry. All three texts, I will argue, seek to understand radically different forms of sexuality and gender identity through a sympathetic imaginative engagement with the possibility of human bodies and souls that cannot be delimited as exclusively male or female. In each case, a response to a preexisting work of art, whether actual or fictional, prompts this engagement. Acts of looking and visual reimagining, pursued steadily and with persistence, become the means by which the artist or writer can grasp difference, while further acts of looking that take place within the works themselves enable their characters to recognize their own distinctive subjectivities. In their openness to diversity, these texts stand in stark contrast with the medical and anthropological discourses around homosexuality and hermaphroditism that were beginning to take shape in the period. Instead they anticipate aspects of the liberationist sexology which would develop over the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This discourse was concerned primarily with establishing the legitimacy of homosexuality and the rights of homosexuals. While this is the overt concern of “Viola and Olivia” and has been an explicit preoccupation of some readings of “Hermaphroditus,” I want to suggest that these three texts also speak to a more recent emancipatory movement that seeks to affirm the right to nonbinary sexual and gender identities, both for people who are born biologically intersex and for those whose sense of themselves does not match these binaries. In so doing, these texts exceed the normal conceptual limits of mid- or even late Victorian discourse on sexuality. To understand how they achieve this, and to glean what they can offer us in our own moment, requires us to approach them through a frankly anachronistic but carefully chosen vocabulary. In the

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nineteenth century, the terms “hermaphroditism” and “bisexuality” both referred to the condition of combining both sexes in one individual, but their connotations have changed, freighting them in different ways, the first toward specific anatomies, the second toward a particular framing of sexual preference. As a more capacious category recognized to take many forms, “intersexuality” avoids limiting the identities opened up by the Pre-Raphaelite practice of investigative poetics, while allowing us to recognize the continuities between the different subjectivities through which Rossetti and his circle challenged the presumption that everyone who was not a monster was either a man or a woman.

A Poetics of Inquiry Writing in the Spectator in 1851, William Michael Rossetti declared that the credo of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was “investigation for themselves on all points which have hitherto been settled by example or unproved precept, and unflinching avowal of the result of such investigation.”1 Though writing anonymously, Rossetti was himself a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As editor of The Germ, he had been instrumental in coordinating the writing and publication of a collective manifesto for the movement. Each of the magazine’s four issues carried on its cover a modest but assertive sonnet by him insisting on precisely these principles: When whoso merely hath a little thought Will plainly think the thought which is in him,— Not imaging another’s bright or dim, Not mangling with new words what others taught; When whoso speaks, from having either sought Or only found,—will speak, nor just to skim A shallow surface with words made and trim, But in that very speech the matter brought: Be not too keen to cry—“So this is all!— A thing I might myself have thought as well,

1 William Michael Rossetti, “Fine Arts: Pre-Raphaelitism,” Spectator 24, no. 1214 (October 4, 1851): [955–957] 956. For a discussion of how William Rossetti’s own poetry fulfills this key principle of Pre-Raphaelitism, see John Holmes, “Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite Principles: Science, Nature, and Knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s ‘Fancies at Leisure’ and ‘Mrs. Holmes Grey’,” Victorian Poetry 53, no. 1 (Spring 2015), 15–39.

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But would not say it, for it was not worth!” Ask: “Is this truth?” For is it still to tell That, be the theme a point or the whole earth, Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?

This sonnet was composed in August 1849, just days after the plan to publish a Pre-Raphaelite magazine was hatched.2 In the notes to his edition of the P.R.B. Journal , William Fredeman cites an unpublished letter from Rossetti to his mother in which he explains that the sonnet was composed to articulate “the general intention and aim which are to actuate all of us, without entering too much into details and individual preferences.”3 As a collectively agreed statement of the standard to which the Pre-Raphaelites sought to hold themselves and other artists, Rossetti’s sonnet corroborates his assertion a year later of their commitment to independent investigation through their art. Both its form, as a sonnet, and its terms of reference, invoking writing and speech, show that this program extended to poetry as well as painting. Indeed, an independent investigation was at the heart of Pre-Raphaelite poetics in the fullest sense, being fundamental to their conception of art. For the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artwork was to be a work of inquiry. Accordingly, within Rossetti’s sonnet, seeking is rated more highly than mere finding, as if to say that insights that artists happen upon, although they should be respected, are of less intrinsic merit than their deliberate investigations, even when these do not lead to definite findings. The sonnet is not only propositional but also didactic. Where the octet sets out the kinds of humble but earnest investigations in “Poetry, Literature, and Art,” to quote the magazine’s subtitle, that The Germ’s readers can expect to find within its covers, the sextet instructs those readers in how to receive them. Any inquiry undertaken by the writer or artist has to be matched by an equivalent inquiry by the reader or viewer, willingly following their lead in order to test the mettle of their findings and so answer Rossetti’s question “Is this truth?” for themselves. The greatest risk, Rossetti suggests, is the all-too-easy reinforcement of conventional opinion. For writers or artists, the risk is that, through

2 William E. Fredeman, ed., The P.R.B. Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1849–1853 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 11–12. 3 Fredeman, P.R.B. Journal, 199.

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rehearsing others’ ideas, they will not only compromise their independence and stifle their own insights, but they will also diminish what may once have been original and truthful teaching by turning it into received wisdom. For readers and viewers, the risk set out in the sonnet is that they will be naturalized within conventional values and ideas to such an extent that they will simply presume that the artwork is too, and so fail to register its distinctiveness and potential truth. The poetics of inquiry set out by Rossetti in his sonnet are reiterated and refined across several critical essays published in The Germ. In “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” Frederick George Stephens exhorts “Let us have the mind and the mind’s-workings, not the remains of earnest thought which has been frittered away by a long dreary course of preparatory study.” This independence and freshness of mind, Stephens implies, lead to an openness to different possibilities and new discoveries. “Never forget,” he writes, “that there is in the wide river of nature something which every body who has a rod and line may catch, precious things which every one may dive for.”4 The Pre-Raphaelite program for art is deliberately inclusive, both in its democratic invitation to us all to pursue our own inquiries through art and in its encouragement to value whatever “precious things” we and other artists may find through them. To sustain this generosity of spirit, the viewer or reader “must not dictate under what aspect nature is to be considered, stigmatizing the one chosen, because his own bent is rather towards some other,” as William Michael Rossetti puts it in a review of Robert Browning’s poetry in the last issue of The Germ.5 In an essay on “The Subject in Art,” Tupper lists a wide range of potential subjects before summing them up as “every thing or incident in nature which excites, or may be made to excite, the mind and the heart of man as a mentally intelligent, not as a brute animal.” Tupper’s catalogue itself, though extensive, might nonetheless seem to contravene Rossetti’s demand because he insists that, whatever the subject might be, it should stimulate our “rational and benevolent powers” and “leave the artist wiser and happier.” But this demand that the subject of works of art be “consistent with rational benevolence” is in practice a stipulation for the artist’s outlook rather than a limit to what art itself 4 Frederick George Stephens (as John Seward), “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” Germ 1, no. 2 (February 1850): [58–64] 60. 5 W. M. Rossetti, “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850): [187– 192] 190.

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can examine.6 Pursued in the spirit of “rational benevolence,” the PreRaphaelite poetics of inquiry can be trusted to increase understanding and fellow feeling, and thereby both wisdom and happiness, to use Tupper’s terms, whatever the object of that inquiry may be. The full subtitle of The Germ is “Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art.” Stephens, Rossetti, and Tupper all speak of “nature” as the subject of inquiry in art. For the Pre-Raphaelites, however, “nature” is a comprehensive, not a restrictive, term. In a second essay for The Germ, entitled “Modern Giants,” Stephens condemns “the dry operose quackery of professed doctors of psychology, mere chaff not studied from nature, and therefore worthless, never felt, and therefore useless.” Against the failures of this abortive science of the mind, Stephens sets the achievements of art, as typified by the poetry of Browning who, he says, “has looked into the heart of man, and shown you its pulsations, fears, self-doubts, hates, goodness, devotedness, and noble world-love.”7 Browning’s practice as a poet, as Stephens describes it here, combines the close observation of individual cases with humane sympathy. This appreciative account of Browning is a manifesto for the Pre-Raphaelites’ own poetics in which the arts undertake direct inquiry into human experience. If sufficiently rigorous, Stephens suggests, poetry, (other forms of) literature, and art are better equipped to comprehend and analyze the breadth of human nature than the abstractions and generalizations of a discourse looking to establish itself as a science without a sound empirical foundation. The three texts that I discuss in detail in this chapter embody the PreRaphaelite principle of investigation through art in the ways in which they seek after a wider, unprejudiced understanding of sex and sexuality. By contrast, according to Ivan Crozier, the analysis of sexual difference by the “professed doctors of psychology” of the 1850s—alienists such as John Charles Bucknill, Daniel Hack Tuke, and Joseph Williams—was dominated by the prejudicial diagnosis of erotomania as a form of moral

6 John Lucas Tupper, “The Subject in Art (No. 1),” Germ 1, no. 1 (January 1850): [11–18] 18. 7 Stephens (as Laura Savage), “Modern Giants,” Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850): [169–173] 172.

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insanity.8 Even in Germany, where sexology first developed as a field of study, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs only began publishing his pioneering work defining homosexual identities through a complex taxonomy of intersexes in 1864. It would not be until nearly the end of the century that his ideas would receive much notice in England, and even then they remained “outside the mainstream of the developing medical explanations of homosexuality,” as Hubert Kennedy remarked in an essay recovering Ulrichs and his work in the 1980s.9 In their investigations of intersexuality—or, more precisely, of human diversity through various tropes of intersexuality—the Pre-Raphaelites were themselves pioneering both a new poetics of inquiry across multiple art forms and a new openness to sexual difference.

Sexing the Soul in The Germ Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” his only published piece of prose fiction, was included in the first issue of The Germ in January 1850. Walter Deverell’s etching and John Lucas Tupper’s poem were paired together under one title, “Viola and Olivia,” forming a single collaborative piece combining visual and verbal components at the beginning of the fourth and final issue of the same periodical. Both works are counterfactuals inspired by and responding to earlier works of art, and both stage multiple acts of looking, each a synecdoche for the inquiring gaze of The Germ’s artists and readers as they look with open minds for “precious things” in the “wide river” of human nature.10 Rossetti’s story concerns an Italian painter, Chiaro dell’ Erma, who, we are told, was born in Arezzo and worked in Pisa. His most remarkable painting, now in Florence, is dated 1239, the year before the traditional date of the birth of Cimabue, whose career was taken by Vasari as the point of origin for what would come to be called the Renaissance. Chiaro is fictional,

8 Ivan Crozier, “Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatric Writing About Homosexuality Before Havelock Ellis: The Missing Story,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64, no. 1 (January 2008): [65–102] 71–72. 9 Hubert C. Kennedy, “The ‘Third Sex’ Theory of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,” Journal of Homosexuality 6, nos. 1/2 (Fall/Winter 1980/1981): [103–111] 109. See also Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 10 Stephens, “Purpose and Tendency,” 60.

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but Rossetti’s story is artfully constructed to imply otherwise through what his brother rightly characterized as “a curious aptitude at detailing figments as if they were facts.”11 Rossetti’s modern narrator claims to have seen the painting by Chiaro at Florence in 1847. He refers to recent scholarship on some further paintings in Dresden identified as his by one Dr. Aemmster, and generally wears lightly an apparently expert knowledge of Italian art. The story thus appears to be a counterfactual history of art in which the apotheosis is not the paintings of Raphael but those of a long-forgotten late medieval artist. Chiaro stands in for the authenticity of medieval and early Renaissance art as a whole and is thus an exemplary Pre-Raphaelite. The source for “Viola and Olivia” is more specific, but it too reimagines prior art to reinterpret its significance. Deverell’s etching illustrates the moment in Act 1, scene 5, of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night where Viola, in disguise as Duke Orsino’s page Cesario, looks at Olivia’s unveiled face. In Tupper’s companion poem, this same moment becomes the starting point for an alternative version of the story in which Viola returns Olivia’s love rather than spurning it. Integral to the counterfactuals in both these works is the idea that a person’s soul might be differently gendered from their physical sex. In “Hand and Soul,” Chiaro’s finest work is apparently a portrait of a woman but it is actually a painting of his own soul. The story in which this is revealed is framed but not glossed by the contemporary narrative, allowing the illusion that this is a tradition such as might have been recorded in an artist’s or a saint’s life, rather than a mere fiction. In Tupper’s poem, the mutual love between two women is explained by the proposition that the source of love is the spirit which does not have a sex at all and is, therefore, not constrained by it. Rossetti’s story does not concern sexuality as such, although it anticipates Ulrichs’ conception of the Urning, a man whose soul is female and whose sexual desires, for Ulrichs, are therefore directed toward other men. “Viola and Olivia,” by contrast, does directly address homosexuality, but it does so not by imagining that Viola and Olivia have male souls but rather by freeing sexuality from gender altogether. “Hand and Soul” is typically read as a manifesto for Rossetti’s particular brand of Pre-Raphaelite art, combining medievalism with a commitment to truth, not directed outward toward the world around but inward 11 W. M. Rossetti, “Introduction,” in The Germ: The Literary Magazine of the PreRaphaelites, ed. Andrea Rose (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1979), [5–30] 19.

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to the artist’s own soul. To quote William Michael Rossetti’s gloss on the story fifty years later, “The only satisfactory works of art are those which exhibit the very soul of the artist.”12 David Riede has noted, however, that “as a confession of artistic faith it raises more questions than it answers.”13 One of these questions is surely why the soul of this particular male artist should appear as a woman. In one of the fullest critical studies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s story, John Pfordresher details several likely sources for this motif, viewing Chiaro’s soul as an archetype indebted to medieval representation of angels, Dante Alighieri’s projection of an aspect of himself as Beatrice, and Gothic and Romantic traditions representing supernatural female visitants.14 Of these sources, the Dantesque tradition seems most immediately apt. Paola Spinozzi’s observation that Rossetti develops a “neo-Dolce-Stil-Novo aesthetic discourse in which the incorporeal soul acquires feminine corporeality” is surely correct, as the aesthetics of the story match and serve to authenticate its supposed historicity.15 Yet as Riede points out, “the vision is explicitly subjective and personal—not a mythical being, but his very self.”16 On these grounds it is not sufficient to see the soul as either an archetype or merely one projected aspect of the male artist, an anima that allows also for an animus. Riede acknowledges the temptation to read the soul in “Hand and Soul” as an image of Rossetti’s own self, projecting her onto Rossetti’s paintings of and poems about women, as many critics have indeed done. But while he himself sees Rossetti as “trying to paint his own soul in portraits of women,” Riede rightly notes that these came “many years later,” as did Rossetti’s own claim that “Hand and Soul” was his personal manifesto.17 If we take the narrator rather than Chiaro to be

12 W. M. Rossetti, “Introduction,” 18. 13 David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1983), 35. 14 John Pfordresher, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Hand and Soul’: Sources and Signifi-

cance,” Studies in Short Fiction 19, no. 2 (1982): [103–132] 120–126. 15 Paola Spinozzi and Elisa Bizzotto, The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 105. 16 Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 36. 17 Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 38. For a summary and bibliography of this critical

tradition, as well as a contribution to it, see Catherine Maxwell, “‘It Once Should Save As Well As Kill’: DG Rossetti and the Feminine,” in Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis Then and Now, ed. David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon (London: Anthem, 2004), 223–236.

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Rossetti’s primary self-image within the story—the urbane, sophisticated art student with a rare appreciation of early Italian painting—what we witness is not a recognition of sameness but a moving embrace of difference. Seeing Chiaro’s painting in Florence, the narrator remarks that “the most absorbing wonder of it was its literality. You knew that figure, when painted, had been seen; yet it was not a thing to be seen of men.”18 The picture exerts a fascination over him which other viewers do not experience. Some Italians scoff at his interest in it as typical of the English obsession with mysticism, while another English visitor to the gallery who does not share this obsession remarks archly “‘Very odd, is it not?’”19 A Frenchman comments to a friend that he cannot understand it and, therefore, presumes it to be insignificant. Even the curator is dismissive. Each of these responses is its own affirmation of conventional aesthetic judgments, revealing together not merely a skepticism but even a hostility toward difference. The narrator, by contrast, comes to see the painting as “my picture,” the italics here being the only hint at identification with either the painter or the subject.20 The primary meaning of both the phrase and its emphasis, however, is that of possession: the narrator claims the picture because he alone appreciates it. The last line of the story—“My reader thinks possibly that the French student was right.”—is a teasing challenge, asking us whether we too wish to close our minds to difference or whether, like the narrator, we would be willing and able to see something unique and valuable in the picture.21 This invitation to open our minds and eyes is clearly a call for readers of The Germ to emancipate themselves from the hidebound prejudices of aesthetic convention but, in line with the Pre-Raphaelite poetics of inquiry, there is another prejudice under scrutiny here too. Chiaro’s own emancipation comes when he realizes that, although he is physically male, his soul is female. His encounter with her—that is, with himselfas-her(self)—comes as a sudden and profound epiphany, experienced first through sight but expressed through a wider synesthesia:

18 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” Germ 1, no. 1 (January 1850): [23–33]

32. 19 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 33, italics in the original. 20 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 33, italics in the original. 21 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 33.

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A woman was present in his room, clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey raiment, fashioned to that time. It seemed that the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dreams. […] She did not move closer towards him, but he felt her to be as much with him as his breath. He was like one who, scaling a great steepness, hears his own voice echoed in some place much higher than he can see, and the name of which is not known to him. As the woman stood, her speech was with Chiaro: not, as it were, from her mouth or in his ears; but distinctly between them.22

Her first words to Chiaro are “I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee.”23 But before she speaks his “spirit” has already recognized its own “intimate presence” in her.24 Chiaro’s realization that he has always been this woman is traced carefully and thoughtfully. The suggestion that “the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes” holds two apparently contradictory meanings in suspense, as Chiaro’s encounter with his soul’s image is at once a new beginning, revealing himself to himself for the first time, and a revelation of something that has been true of him since his very first thoughts. These two possibilities are not in conflict after all but rather complementary, as he realizes that his unconscious self—the self who dreams—has been her all along. In the moment of self-revelation, his breath, his voice, his thoughts become hers. Rossetti’s story stages an intimate moment of coming to know oneself as different from the person the internalized assumptions of convention have always led one to be. His soul’s image instructs Chiaro “‘See me, and know me as I am.’”25 Recognizing the moral fear attendant on such a transition, she reassures him that “‘God is no morbid exactor,’” adding “‘In all that thou doest, work from thine own heart, simply; for his heart is as thine, when thine is wise and humble; and he shall have understanding of thee.’”26 Her prescription concerns his paintings, which had previously sought to teach religious morality through “cold symbolism 22 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 29–30. 23 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 30. 24 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 29. 25 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 30. 26 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 31.

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and abstract impersonation,” betraying “the measure of that boundary to which they were made to conform.”27 What goes for Chiaro’s art goes for himself. The soul’s theology is generous and accepting. To paint from his own heart, Chiaro must paint in frank acknowledgment of who he is. For this reason, the soul tells him “‘paint me thus, as I am, to know me […] so shall thy soul stand before thee always, and perplex thee no more.’”28 Confronted with the presumption and disingenuousness of his earlier religious art—predicated, we are told, on his having “misinterpreted the craving of his own spirit”—Chiaro experiences “the bitterness of shame.”29 By contrast, after painting his soul, he sleeps, “quieted” by his female soul.30 For Pfordresher, Chiaro’s “vision of the anima, the feminine, generative aspect of the psyche,” comes “at the expense of his masculine self.”31 But it is not at all clear from the narrative that there is any such cost. The last, short paragraph of the medieval story, before we return to the narrator in the gallery in Florence, refers to a battle between factions in Pisa that left many dead. Chiaro himself has been oblivious to this violence during his encounter with his soul, and we leave him asleep and at peace with himself. Chiaro’s intersexuality in “Hand and Soul” remains enigmatic. As a symbol, it stands as an emblematic type of individual uniqueness at odds with convention. As a psychological portrait, it is remarkable for the sensitivity with which Rossetti depicts what would, in current terms, appear to be a case of gender dysphoria. To call Chiaro transgender would be anachronistic, as well as begging the question. The story does not reveal, for example, whether his acceptance of his female self comes at the exclusion of his male self or not. Chiaro recognizes that he is a woman, but he may still hold himself to be a man at the same time. But it remains the case that, whatever one makes of it, Rossetti’s story asks us to accept a painting by a man of his own female soul as beautiful and moving and not unworthy or just “very odd.” Apart from the touching physical intimacy of Chiaro and his soul as they come to know one another, sexuality is not at issue in “Hand and 27 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 26–27. 28 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 31. 29 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 26, 31. 30 D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” 32. 31 Pfordresher, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Hand and Soul’,” 129.

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Soul.” In “Viola and Olivia,” Deverell and Tupper use the same disaggregation of the soul from the body to seek to understand homosexual love. The genesis of “Viola and Olivia” can only be traced by omission and association. William Michael Rossetti kept a very close record of the production of the first three issues of The Germ in the P. R. B. Journal, but his journal lapsed after April 8, 1850, and he did not pick it up again until July. Given that neither Deverell’s etching nor Tupper’s poem is mentioned before this hiatus, it seems most likely that both were produced rapidly in April 1850 ahead of publication at the beginning of May. Because of this gap in the record, it is also not possible to say what the process of composition was—whether the etching was drawn to illustrate the poem, the poem written as a meditation on the etching, or both composed jointly as pendants to one another. The choice of Shakespeare’s play as a source could likewise have been down to either artist or both. Deverell would have been thinking about Twelfth Night intently for some time, as he had been working on a painting illustrating Act 2, scene 4, of the play since the previous year. This painting had just gone on show alongside Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! at the National Institution exhibition, which opened on April 13, 1850, so he may have hoped that the etching would help to generate interest in it.32 For his part, Tupper had long been an enthusiast for Shakespeare—he reminisced in the mid-1850s that he had “bathed in twelve volumes of Shakespeare” as a boy—so he may also have suggested the subject, as indeed William Michael Rossetti may have done as editor, or any other member of the close Pre-Raphaelite circle.33 If the subject of Deverell and Tupper’s collaboration could have come from either of them, so too could the theme. Deverell’s painting Twelfth Night is a study in unrequited heterosexual love, both Orsino’s for the absent Olivia, as, preoccupied, he leans his back against a pillar in a desultory way, and Viola’s for Orsino, as she gazes at him, attentive but unnoticed.34 To turn from this to the etching is to see the possibility of homosexual love unfold even though, in the play itself, this possibility is only ever entertained as a misapprehension because of Viola’s

32 The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Gallery, 1984), 73–74. 33 John Lucas Tupper, “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist: No. ii,” Crayon 2, no. 18

(October 31, 1855): [271–272] 271, spelling as in original. 34 Walter Howell Deverell, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV , exhibited 1850, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 132.1 cm, private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

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disguise.35 The continuity and therefore the contrast between the two pictures is intensified by the fact that Viola is represented by the same model, Elizabeth Siddall, featuring alongside Deverell himself as Orsino, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Feste and, if William Michael Rossetti’s memory was correct, one of Deverell’s sisters as Olivia.36 Viola wears the same costume in both pictures; she is placed on the left-hand side in each composition, and in each she is shown in the act of looking. But where in Twelfth Night she stares protractedly at Orsino without him returning her even a glance, in “Viola and Olivia” she is herself the object of Olivia’s intense gaze. In Deverell’s etching, cross-hatching darkens her front, including her face, because the light of the window is behind her and the fringe of her hair hangs down over her eyes. The shading on her face could be simply a shadow, or it could be blushing. Ultimately, it allows her response to Olivia’s look of desire to remain hidden, open to us to imagine (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). Tupper’s poem fills this imaginative space in a surprising way: When Viola, a servant of the Duke, Of him she loved the page, went, sent by him, To tell Olivia that great love which shook His breast and stopt his tongue; was it a whim, Or jealousy or fear that she must look Upon the face of that Olivia?

’Tis hard to say if it were whim or fear Or jealousy, but it was natural, As natural as what came next, the near Intelligence of hearts: Olivia Loveth, her eye abused by a thin wall Of custom, but her spirit’s eyes were clear.

Clear? we have oft been curious to know The after-fortunes of those lovers dear; Having a steady faith some deed must show 35 Walter Howell Deverell, “Viola and Olivia,” 1850, etching, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 36 W. M. Rossetti, “Introduction,” 25.

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Fig. 3.1 Walter Howell Deverell, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV , exhibited 1850, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 132.1 cm, private collection (Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images) That they were married souls—unmarried here— Having an inward faith that love, called so In verity, is of the spirit, clear Of earth and dress and sex—it may be near What Viola returned Olivia?37

Between them, Deverell’s etching and Tupper’s poem subtly and then drastically recast the narrative of Shakespeare’s play. In the play, Olivia unveils herself on Viola’s request. Here Viola’s request, “Good madam, let me see your face,” is literalized in the act of her unveiling Olivia.38 Olivia’s attraction to Viola follows on this act in Tupper’s poem; in 37 Tupper, “Viola and Olivia,” Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850), 145. 38 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor,

et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1841 (1.5.186).

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Fig. 3.2 Walter Howell Deverell, “Viola and Olivia,” 1850, etching, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham

Deverell’s etching, her composure and gaze, unflinching even at such close proximity, suggest that she may have already prepared herself to be looked on, willingly assuming the role of an object of attraction. In Shakespeare’s script, it is not until after Viola departs that Olivia admits to herself “Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections / With an invisible and subtle stealth / To creep in at mine eyes.”39

39 Shakespeare, Complete Works, 1843 (1.5.250–252).

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These slight changes to the play’s action and chronology are no more than any stage production might make, but they prepare the ground for Tupper’s reinterpretation of the relationship between the two women in the second and third verses of his poem. As the two women look at one another in Deverell’s etching, so Tupper looks at their exchange of gazes and seeks to interpret it. In doing so, he changes the relationships as they appear within Shakespeare’s play in two striking ways. Firstly, he posits that, although Olivia was deceived by the “thin wall / Of custom” into believing Viola to be a man, her love for her was nonetheless real because, in her spirit, she was drawn to Viola herself. Secondly, in a still more radical departure from his source, he imagines this love as reciprocal, so that, where at the beginning of the poem Viola loves the Duke, by the end she has woken up to her love for Olivia and returns it. As neither of these characters ends up in love with the other in the play, Tupper and Deverell construct this scenario of homosexual love between women for themselves, with Tupper setting himself the challenge to account for it at a time when there was no prior psychological or sexological discourse on which to draw. Tupper’s repeated rhetorical questions perform the act of inquiry that his poem undertakes. They are implicitly addressed to himself as he questions and yet ultimately affirms, albeit tentatively and by implication, his own assertions. His solution to the problem he sets himself is to suggest that love, whether viewed as the intelligence of hearts or the marriage of souls, is not determined by and therefore not circumscribed by biological sex. In “Hand and Soul,” Rossetti draws a distinction between the boundaries within which people are obliged to conform and their own intrinsic selves. Here, too, Tupper contrasts that which is customary with that which is “natural,” although in Olivia’s case they both lead to the same point: love for Viola, whether in disguise or as herself. Tupper’s ideal of love between souls as “clear / Of […] sex” tactfully evades the question of sexual intimacy, but it does not preclude it. His point is rather that love can arise irrespective of gender. For Tupper, all souls are sexless; love between any two individuals can, therefore, be “natural” for them. Where Shakespeare’s play ends with a series of comically facile heterosexual marriages, Tupper’s poem imagines the possibility of a true marriage of souls, forbidden by custom and so “unmarried here,” between Viola and Olivia. The Germ professed to offer its readers “Thoughts towards Nature.” In “Hand and Soul” and “Viola and Olivia,” Rossetti, Deverell, and Tupper,

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together with Siddall in reprising the role of Viola, radically extend Victorian conceptions of what might be considered natural. Working across multiple forms, each enacts a dialogue with prior works of art and between visual and verbal media. In a spirit of inquiry guided by what Tupper calls in his essay “rational benevolence,” each tests and contests conventional assumptions, opening first the artists’ and then the readers’ and viewers’ minds to new ways of being, and encouraging us to approach the possibility of intersexuality with the same open eyes with which Chiaro looks on his female soul, Olivia and Viola look at each other, and Rossetti’s narrator and Tupper’s speaker examine their respective manifestations in art. In separating the sex of the physical body from that of the soul or inner self, they allow for the possibility of nonbinary gender identities regardless of sexuality and of sexualities regardless of gender. Equally importantly, while the artists themselves show little sign that they share these identities themselves, they extend a welcome to those who do.

“Not Fear But Love”: Inquiry and Discovery in Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus” “Hand and Soul” and “Viola and Olivia” are early Pre-Raphaelite texts characteristic of the movement’s poetics of inquiry, explicitly in Tupper’s poem, implicitly in Rossetti’s story and in Deverell’s return to Twelfth Night in his etching. They are characteristic, too, of the Pre-Raphaelites’ conscious engagement with and reflection on earlier works of art, revisiting them as a means to think through newly imagined possibilities for art and life. Swinburne’s poem “Hermaphroditus,” though written during a later phase of the movement, works on the same principles.40 Starting from another act of looking, it addresses the sleeping Hermaphroditus represented in the antique Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue in the Louvre in order to understand intersexual identity and experience. While the statue is the principle subject of the poem, Swinburne is aware of several literary texts associated with it, responding to them in either the poem itself or various paratexts, including his discussion of it in his pamphlet defending his poetry against his critics, Notes on Poems

40 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 65–67. References to the poem will be given parenthetically as line numbers.

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and Reviews, and the subsequent poem in Poems and Ballads, “Fragoletta,” which also concerns an intersexual character. These sources include Ovid’s account of the fusion of Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, with the nymph Salmacis to form the hermaphrodite in the Metamorphoses; the character of the Hermaphrodite in Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas; and a cluster of texts on the same theme by nineteenthcentury French writers including Henri de Latouche’s novel Fragoletta and Théophile Gautier’s poem “Contralto.” Unlike “Hand and Soul” and “Viola and Olivia,” “Hermaphroditus” has received a fair amount of attention from scholars of Victorian sexualities. Thaïs Morgan’s conclusion that “Ultimately, Swinburne’s discourse on hermaphroditism—in ‘Hermaphroditus’ and its defense in Notes —is a localized topic within his larger discourse on perversity” is representative of these readings.41 Certainly, it is easy to see the “strong desire begot on great despair” (l. 13) that Swinburne claims the hermaphrodite inevitably stimulates as one of the forms of polymorphous perversity that he revels in across Poems and Ballads alongside sadomasochism, necrophilia, and lesbianism, characterized in “Anactoria” as obsessive and destructive. The forms of desire articulated in “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta” have been read by Richard Dellamora as coding homosexuality through hints at anal sex and fellatio, respectively, although, as Deborah Lutz has pointed out, the imagery in the second poem might as readily suggest cunnilingus, both perverse practices by Victorian standards.42 What these readings neglect, however, is the marked difference between “Hermaphroditus” and the other poems that surround it. Poems and Ballads is dominated by poems that indulge their own desires, often leading to repetition and even prolixity. “Hermaphroditus” by contrast is uncharacteristically disciplined, contained within the structure of its four sonnets, and much more concerned with the subjectivity and predicament of its object than it is with the speaker’s erotic fantasies. Where poems such as “Faustine” or “Dolores” are accretive, intoxicating through the extension and intensification of the same motifs—a version of the expansive poetics discussed by Elizabeth Helsinger in Chapter 9 41 Thaïs E. Morgan, “Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (Spring 1993), [315–332] 322. 42 Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 80–83; Deborah Lutz, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (New York: Norton, 2011), 46–47.

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of this volume—the sonnets of “Hermaphroditus” enact the successive stages of a sympathetic but restrained inquiry into intersexuality. The first and second sonnets, comprised entirely of statements, address the statue from a perspective determined largely by preconceptions. Tentatively in the third sonnet and more wholeheartedly in the fourth, Swinburne, like Tupper, uses rhetorical questions to interrogate these presumptions and open a path to fresh insights and new sympathies. Morgan, Dellamora, and Lutz all tend to collapse the difference between the hermaphrodite and the androgyne in Swinburne’s poetry, in Lutz’s case extending this to cover variously androgynous or masculine women in the paintings of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and feminine boys and men in those of Simeon Solomon.43 But where androgyny depends upon indeterminacy, as Lutz’s reading of “Fragoletta” implies, any indeterminacy to the statue of the sleeping Hermaphroditus is dispelled as the viewer moves around the statue from the back to the front. With female breasts and male genitalia, Hermaphroditus is an unmistakably intersex being. At the same time, the statue represents an idealized form of intersexuality distinct from the discourses around hermaphroditism in physical anthropology and medicine which emerged later in the 1860s. As Alice Domurat Dreger has shown, doctors sought to resolve cases of intersexuality by establishing whether or not the individual in question had ovaries or testicles, much as Swinburne’s friend Richard Burton did in his paper “Notes on an Hermaphrodite” published by the Anthropological Society.44 Charlotte Ribeyrol has shown how “Fragoletta” anticipates this discourse in its insistent questioning of its object of desire.45 In “Hermaphroditus,” by contrast, there is no uncertainty and no scope for a resolution. Precisely because Hermaphroditus is a mythical being comprised of the union of a male youth and a female nymph, they—and 43 Morgan, “Reimagining Masculinity,” 322; Dellamore, Masculine Desire, 80; Lutz, Pleasure Bound, 187–188. 44 Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Richard Burton, “Notes on an Hermaphrodite,” Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1865–1866), 262–263. 45 Charlotte Ribeyrol, “L’‘Hermaphroditus’ d’Algernon Charles Swinburne, entre mythe et science,” Études anglaises 64, no. 2 (2011), [224–235] 230.

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the current usage of “they” as the intersexual pronoun is apt, in spite of the anachronism, because it is literally correct in this case—cannot be subject to a regime which aims to enforce binary categories of gender through insisting on a binary model of sex (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). Swinburne’s poem enacts its own struggle with these binary categories as the poet seeks to understand the significance of the statue’s intersexuality. Early in the poem, the speaker encourages Hermaphroditus to resolve their own sexuality: Ah sweet, albeit no love be sweet enough, Choose of two loves and cleave unto the best; Two loves at either blossom of thy breast Strive until one be under and one above. (ll. 5–8)

The pressure applied here is gentle and thoughtful, but it enforces convention even so. Swinburne recognizes that the suppression of one of Hermaphroditus’s two sexes will be a hard task and inevitably cannot be as fulfilling as an ideal which might satisfy them both. Even so, at this stage in the poem his thinking is that this choice is necessary—that, regretfully, society cannot accommodate the intersex individual. It is nonetheless a choice to be made by Hermaphroditus themselves, not by an arbiter who will decide their sex for them. It is also an active choice, in the sense that

Fig. 3.3 Sleeping Hermaphroditus, The Louvre, Paris (Photograph by Jastrow)

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Fig. 3.4 Sleeping Hermaphroditus, The Louvre, Paris (Photograph by PierreYves Beaudouin)

it concerns the deliberate affirmation of one sexual identity or other, with each being a legitimate alternative. In the second and third sonnets of the poem, Swinburne turns from Hermaphroditus’s subjectivity to the purpose of their existence. Like the first sonnet, these two assume a conventional point of view. Imagining Hermaphroditus as sterile (l. 19), Swinburne raises the question why a being who cannot reproduce should be beautiful. “To what strange end,” he asks, “hath some strange god made fair / The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?” (ll. 37–38). At the same time, these sonnets reinforce the heteronormativity implied in the choice forced upon Hermaphroditus in the first sonnet: Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right, Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise Shall make thee man and ease a woman’s sighs, Or make thee woman for a man’s delight. (ll. 33–36)

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Regardless of which choice Hermaphroditus makes, the love of women on the one hand or of men on the other, they cannot disguise their intersexuality, even by night. The implication is that they will not be able to provide either lover with sexual satisfaction; a further implication follows, that even if they seek to conform, they will be rejected. These first three sonnets question the place of the hermaphrodite, but they also surreptitiously question the conventions through which the speaker seeks to understand them. In stark contrast with most of the poems in Poems and Ballads, the tone of “Hermaphroditus” is gentle, sympathetic, solicitous. In the fourth sonnet, this tone and the fellow feeling that it implies to allow the speaker to move to a new understanding that rejects the conventions enforced earlier in the poem. Again, this move occurs through acts of looking, or more precisely in moments of seeing, and is formulated as a series of rhetorical questions like those that Swinburne had begun to adopt in the preceding sonnet: Yea, love, I see; it is not love but fear. Nay, sweet, it is not fear but love, I know; Or wherefore should thy body’s blossom blow So sweetly, or thine eyelids leave so clear Thy gracious eyes that never made a tear – Though for their love our tears like blood should flow, Though love and life and death should come and go, So dreadful, so desirable, so dear? Yea, sweet, I know; I saw in what swift wise Beneath the woman’s and the water’s kiss Thy moist limbs melted into Salmacis, And the large light turned tender in thine eyes, And all thy boy’s breath softened into sighs; But Love being blind, how should he know of this? (ll. 43–56)

The tenderness which Swinburne ascribes to the intersexual Hermaphroditus after the youth has “melted into Salmacis” is characteristic of this sonnet itself. The “strange end” for which they have been created is “love” after all, but it takes the intimate realization that Hermaphroditus is lovely for the poem to recognize this. Swinburne returns to the “strong desire” of the first sonnet here, but it is no longer felt as despair. Though this new sonnet retains for a time an edge of apprehension, that fear is succeeded by desire which is itself transcended by the feeling that the hermaphrodite is “dear.” As Morgan observes,

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this desire, shading into love, subverts “the very concept of sexual difference,” while, as Ribeyrol has noted, the closing sonnet also repudiates the logic of reproduction which is presumed to be the defining purpose of sexuality earlier in the poem.46 Like the equally hermaphroditic “blossom” of a fruit tree, Hermaphroditus is not barren after all, as they can bear the fruit that is love. Significant too is the realization that the tragic mood attributed to them earlier in the poem is a projection of a misery they do not feel. Like Chiaro after the encounter with his/her soul, Hermaphroditus is sleeping peacefully, their eyes showing no sign of tears. It is only convention, figured in the poem’s closing line as the blindness of Love, that demands that they be ill at ease, not their own difference. As for Swinburne himself, his repetition of “I know,” echoing and occasioned by “I see,” and paired in each case with the address to Hermaphroditus as “sweet,” is a direct avowal both of the new knowledge that his poem has reached and that that knowledge has come to him through the love that he extends to them. As an ideal figure, Hermaphroditus stands in for any form of intersexual self. Swinburne’s tenderness in this poem, untypical as it is, is not exclusive or selective, but comprehensive. In his reminiscences, Tupper recalls how, when studying sculpture at the British Museum, he and his fellow students “made discoveries in the Theseus; laid our hands on the awful shoulders, between the great collar-bones, and felt for the beating of his heart.”47 In Notes on Poems and Reviews, Swinburne remarks that “the Fates have allowed us to possess at once […] Theseus and Hermaphroditus.”48 Like Tupper, Swinburne seeks to understand the statue from within, to feel its life as Hermaphroditus feels it. Restraining the autoerotic enthusiasm that characterizes much of his poetry, he too makes discoveries, about the possibilities of intersexual identity, about the social conventions that seek to constrain them, and about the capacity to breach these constraints from both sides through a love that does not deny desire but that is not dependent on or confined to it. ∗ ∗ ∗

46 Morgan, “Reimagining Masculinity,” 321; Ribeyrol, “L’‘Hermaphroditus’,” 227. 47 Tupper, “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist: No. vi,” Crayon 2, no. 26 (December

26, 1855): [400–401] 400, italics in the original. 48 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, 411.

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It was a fundamental tenet of Pre-Raphaelitism that, in William Michael Rossetti’s words, “No man is born into the world under obligation to subscribe to the opinions or see according to the perceptions of another.”49 In defending Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads from a barrage of hostile criticism, Rossetti praised his friend for his “healthy and open mind,” borne out by his ability to “think without intolerance, and write with amazing candour and beauty, about ‘Hermaphroditus.’”50 The Pre-Raphaelites’ investigations of sexuality and gender identity through art—fiction, pictures, poetry—and in response to art—paintings, theater, sculpture—are indeed remarkably open-minded. In sharp contrast with the rigid binaries of popular opinion and Victorian medicine, they disentangle sex, sexuality, and gender. In addition to being well in advance of the liberation sexologists, they offer alternative models of sexuality that are free from taxonomy and that come down ultimately to the choices individuals can be enabled to make according to what seems and, therefore, is “natural” to them. Even staying alert to the risk of anachronism, there is something surprisingly contemporary and still refreshing about the perspectives on sexuality realized by the Pre-Raphaelites through their poetics of inquiry.

References Bauer, Heike. English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Burton, Richard. “Notes on an Hermaphrodite.” Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1865–1866): 262–263. Crozier, Ivan. “Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatric Writing About Homosexuality Before Havelock Ellis: The Missing Story.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64, no. 1 (January 2008): 65–102. Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Deverell, Walter Howell. Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV . Exhibited 1850. Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 132.1 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images. Deverell, Walter Howell. “Viola and Olivia.” 1850. Etching. Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 49 W. M. Rossetti, “Fine Arts,” 955. 50 W. M. Rossetti, “Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads,” in Algernon Swinburne: The

Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde K. Hyder [57–91] 64–65.

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Dreger, Alice Domurat. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Holmes, John. “Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite Principles: Science, Nature, and Knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s ‘Fancies at Leisure’ and ‘Mrs. Holmes Grey’.” Victorian Poetry 53, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 15–39. Kennedy, Hubert C. “The ‘Third Sex’ Theory of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.” Journal of Homosexuality 6, nos. 1/2 (Fall/Winter 1980/1981): 103–111. Lutz, Deborah. Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. New York: Norton, 2011. Maxwell, Catherine. “‘It Once Should Save As Well As Kill’: DG Rossetti and the Feminine.” In Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis Then and Now, Edited by David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon. London: Anthem, 2004. Pfordresher, John. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Hand and Soul’: Sources and Significance.” Studies in Short Fiction 19, no. 2 (1982): 103–132. Ribeyrol, Charlotte. “L’‘Hermaphroditus’ d’Algernon Charles Swinburne, entre mythe et science.” Études anglaises 64, no. 2 (2011): 224–235. Riede, David G. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “Hand and Soul.” Germ 1, no. 1 (January 1850): 23– 33. Rossetti, William Michael. “Christmas Eve and Easter Day.” Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850): 187–192. Rossetti, W. M. “Introduction.” In The Germ: The Literary Magazine of the Pre-Raphaelites, Edited by Andrea Rose. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1979. 5–30. Rossetti, W. M. “Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads.” In Algernon Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, Edited by Clyde K. Hyder. New York: Routledge, 2012. 57–91. Rossetti, W. M. “Fine Arts: Pre-Raphaelitism.” Spectator 24, no. 1214 (October 4, 1851): 955–957. Sleeping Hermaphroditus. The Louvre, Paris. Photograph by Jastrow. Sleeping Hermaphroditus. The Louvre, Paris. Photograph by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin. Spinozzi, Paola and Elisa Bizzotto. The Germ: Origins and Progenies of PreRaphaelite Interart Aesthetics. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Stephens, Frederick George (as John Seward). “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art.” Germ 1, no. 2 (February 1850): 58–64. Stephens, Frederick George (as Laura Savage). “Modern Giants.” Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850): 169–173. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Gallery, 1984. 73–74. Tupper. “Viola and Olivia.” Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850): 145.

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Tupper, John Lucas. “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist: No. ii.” Crayon 2, no. 18 (October 31, 1855): 271–272. Tupper, John Lucas. “The Subject in Art (No. 1).” Germ 1, no. 1 (January 1850): 11–18. Tupper, John Lucas. “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist: No. vi.” Crayon 2, no. 26 (December 26, 1855): 400–401. William E. Fredeman, ed. The P.R.B. Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1849–1853. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. William Shakespeare. The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition. Edited by Gary Taylor, et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016.

CHAPTER 4

Second Generation Pre-Raphaelitism: The Poetry of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine Florence Boos

Though short-lived, the 1856 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine was influential far beyond its limited initial audience. Perhaps the most ambitious English student publication of its century, it survived for a slightly longer period and attempted to survey a broader range of topics than its artistic predecessor, The Germ (1850).1 Differentiated from other Oxford University-centered journals in its resolutely secular stance,2 the magazine nonetheless aspired to an activist ethic, as Edward Burne-Jones wrote to his cousin during its planning stages: “We may do a world of good, for 1 Until recently it has been difficult to access the OCM , which may account in part for its relative neglect in accounts of the development of literary Pre-Raphaelitism. It is now available on the Rossetti Archive, www.rossettiarchive.org and the William Morris Archive, williammorrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu (hereafter RA and WMA). 2 For a discussion of the OCM and religion, see Florence Boos, “‘A Holy Warfare Against the Age’: The Essays and Tales of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 3 (2014): 344–368.

F. Boos (B) University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_4

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we start from new principles and […] are as full of enthusiasm as the first crusaders.”3 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine further maintained a distinctive focus on creative writing and the arts atypical for a university periodical of the time, including both poetry and stories in each issue. As is well known, shortly after Morris and his close friend Edward Burne-Jones became acquainted with Dante Gabriel Rossetti they joined in soliciting the latter’s contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (hereafter OCM ). The resulting relationship led to Rossetti’s mentoring the younger poet in both writing and art during the period of Morris’s composition of The Defence of Guenevere (1858) (see Fig. 4.1). More surprising and less noticed by later critics has been the reciprocal influence on Rossetti of his association with the OCM , as his three contributions to this publication—“The Blessed Damozel,” “The Staff and the Scrip,” and “The Burden of Nineveh”—show a startling stylistic advance over earlier drafts, and arguably also reflect some features of the OCM ’s more socially critical ethos and tone. Morris’s OCM poems likewise show noticeably greater sophistication than his earlier youthful efforts, and during the magazine’s year-long floruit they developed the dramatic and narrative complexity which characterized Morris’s Defence of Guenevere, published only fifteen months later. In what follows, I will examine the poetry of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, contributed by only four authors—Morris, Rossetti, William Fulford, and Georgiana MacDonald (Burne-Jones)— asking whether their poems exhibit signs of cross-influence, reflect an avant-garde aesthetic in form and content, or bear a thematic relationship to the OCM ’s articles on contemporary topics such as women’s higher education and British militarism in the Crimea. In addition, since Morris and Rossetti were clearly the periodical’s major poets, I will trace the ways in which over the course of the year each improved his skill at organizing heavily symbolic narrative poetry in the service of blended erotic, spiritual, and artistic ideals, often within the framework of an idealized reformist medievalism.

3 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London: Macmillan, 1904), 1:123–124.

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Fig. 4.1 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (January Issue), Alderman Library, The Rossetti Archive

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) One of the OCM ’s projectors, Cambridge undergraduate Wilfred Heeley, first invited Rossetti to contribute to the magazine sometime in late 1855.4 By the time the latter’s initial contribution appeared in August 1856 he had become acquainted with several of the “brothers,” including Edward Burne-Jones, who had introduced himself to Rossetti at the Working Men’s College in London.5 Burne-Jones had also cited Rossetti favorably in the Magazine; in February he used a stanza from the Germ version of “The Blessed Damozel” as an epigraph for chapter eight of his “a Story of the North,” and he devoted two long paragraphs of his January review of Thackeray’s The Newcomes to praise of The Germ, which had “spoken something that will live in echoes yet” (60).6 As for Rossetti himself: Why is the author of the Blessed Damozel, and the story of Chiaro, so seldom on the lips of men? If only we could hear him oftener, live in the light of his power a little longer. (60)

And in August, Vernon Lushington’s “Two Pictures” included six dense pages of praise for Rossetti’s painting of the death of Beatrice—a work which had been recently rejected by the Royal Academy: Who has done this? Who is it who has thus made new again and beautiful this old touching story, which so endears to us the memory of the great Voice of Italy?—One Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (484)

Rossetti had been touched by the praise in Burne-Jones’ January review, and wrote William Allingham:

4 See the headnote to “The Blessed Damozel,” http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/ 1-1847.s244.raw.html. 5 When proposed, the magazine had at first been tentatively titled “The Brotherhood,” after the informal name “The Oxford Brotherhood” assumed by the Oxford undergraduates (Burne-Jones, Morris, Charles Faulkner, William Fulford, Cormell Price, and Richard W. Dixon) who had formed a reading, writing, and discussion group. J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (London: Longmans, 1899), 1, 68. 6 OCM , February, 95; st. 9 in the Germ version; there were also several epigraphs from Tennyson.

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That notice in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine was the most gratifying thing by far that ever happened to me—and unmistakably genuine. It turns out to be by a certain youthful Jones, one of the nicest fellows in Dreamland, for there most of the writers in that miraculous piece of literature seem to be.7

As a token of his gratitude, he offered to provide tutorials in painting, and Burne-Jones, Morris, R. W. Dixon and later another Oxonian, Valentine Prinsep, took lessons from him. In 1857, Morris, Rossetti, and BurneJones joined in a “Jovial Campaign” to paint murals for the Oxford Union Debating Hall, and Rossetti, six years older than Morris, began to take a keen interest in the latter’s poetry. In Val Prinsep’s words, “[Rossetti] was loud in the praise of Morris’ and Swinburne’s [poems], and always listened to them with pleasure.” He remembered his first evening in Rossetti and Burne-Jones’s Oxford flat, where Rossetti invited Morris to read his poems to Prinsep, for “they are devilish good.” Emphasizing the oral qualities reflected in both poets’ use of refrains, Morris read “in a kind of melodious growl with a considerable sing-song.”8 As mentioned, Rossetti’s writing also matured under the stimulus of these young admirers. Of the three poems he published in the OCM , two were essentially new, and the third, “The Blessed Damozel,” was significantly refined, reworded, and rearranged for the occasion. The many stages of “The Blessed Damozel” included its original draft in 1846– 1847, the Germ version in 1850, the November 1856 OCM text, and further-revised versions for the editions of Rossetti’s Poems in 1870 and 1881 (see Fig. 4.2).9 Most of the changes for the 1856 version quickened the poem’s pace and excised uninspired diction and repetitious sentiments. For example, two of the four stanzas present in 1850 but removed in 1856 read as follows:

7 Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber and Faber,

1994), 115; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Allingham, ed. George Hill, T. F. Unwin (1897), 173. 8 Val Prinsep, Magazine of Art, 1904, part 1, 168. The poems he read both appeared in the 1858 Defence of Guenevere. 9 Rossetti later reinserted parts of the 1850 text, but retained most of his 1856 alterations in the later versions.

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Fig. 4.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel,” The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (November 1856), The William Morris Archive

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(Alas! To her wise simple mind These things were all but known Before: they trembled on her sense,– Her voice had caught their tone. Alas for lonely Heaven! Alas For life wrung out alone! Alas, and though the end were reached? Was thy part understood Or borne in trust? And for her sake Shall this too be found good?— May the close lips that knew not prayers Praise ever, though they would?). (The Germ, 1850, 2, ll. 91–102)10

Perhaps Rossetti decided that the diction of these stanzas was labored, that the lover’s self-accusations were ambiguous, and that the characterization of the damozel’s “wise simple mind” was faintly condescending. In the OCM version Rossetti also inserted the important stanza in which the lover imagines the beloved’s presence: (Ah sweet! Just now, in that bird’s song, Strove not her accents there Fain to be hearken’d? When those bells Possess’d the midday air, Was she not stepping to my side Down all the trembling stair?). (st. 17, ll. 97–102)

This new stanza added an earthly touch in the male lover’s fantasy of the damozel’s voice immanent in songs and the sounds of bells, and in the 1870 version he moved this stanza forward, a decision which improved the poem’s thematic and structural balance. Almost all of Rossetti’s 1856 revisions similarly replaced clumsier phrases with more fluid counterparts. In 1850, one three-line passage had read: And still she bowed herself, and stooped Into the vast waste calm, Till her bosom’s pressure must have made 10 Citations to Rossetti and Morris texts are from the RA and WMA respectively.

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The bar she leaned on warm, […]. (st. 8, ll. 43–46)11

In 1856 it read, less ponderously: And still she bow’d above the vast Waste sea of worlds that swarm; Until her bosom must have made The bar she lean’d on warm, […]. (st. 17, ll. 97–102)

Rossetti made even more drastic modifications in “The Staff and Scrip,” his last contribution to the OCM in December of 1856. In 1849 he had drafted an early version of the poem, now lost, based on a tale in the Gesta Romanorum, and according to William Michael Rossetti, in 1851–1852 he prepared another version replete with strike-outs and overwritings. A seven-page manuscript now in the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas is apparently a revised version of this draft, with deletions and insertions for the 1856 OCM text. For this new version, Rossetti deleted 38 stanzas and added twelve new ones.12 The deletions sharply moderated the poem’s religious associations and emphasized the pilgrim’s courage and heroism in war, changes consistent with the OCM ’s more secular stance and patriotic respect for the soldiers then fighting on Britain’s behalf in the Crimean conflict. “The Staff and Scrip” was Rossetti’s only poem in which a medieval protagonist fought a pitched battle, a quasi-military emphasis perhaps prompted by the widespread accolades offered to (the Queen’s) soldiers at the close of the Crimean War. Rossetti’s revisions also foregrounded the poem’s symbolic patterning of colors and the erotically charged quality of the bond between Pilgrim and Queen: She sent him a sharp sword, whose belt About his body there As sweet as her own arms he felt. He kiss’d its blade, all bare, Instead of her […]. (st. 18, ll. 86–90)

11 Bolded passages are those later changed. 12 In addition to many revisions of individual words and lines, one stanza placed earlier

was moved to the final position for emphasis.

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His changes heighten the sublimated serval tensions between the Pilgrim and a younger, more feminized Queen: Like water-reeds the poise Of her soft body, dainty thin; And like the water’s noise Her plaintive voice. (st. 7, ll. 32–35)

In a genteel Victorian touch, the “Queen” refuses to fight in her own defense and sequesters herself fearfully in her palace until servants bring her the Pilgrim’s corpse: His bloodied banner cross’d his mouth Where he had kiss’d her name. “O East, and West, and North, and South, Fair flew these folds, for shame, To guide Death’s aim!” (st. 31, 151–155)

The ending wavers between the romanticized reunion in heaven of “The Blessed Damozel” and the earlier draft’s appeal to religion, as the final stanza, retained from the earlier version, identifies the Pilgrim’s love with service to his deity: Not tithed with days’ and years’ decease, He pays thy wage He owed, But in light stalls of golden peace, Here in His own abode, Thy jealous God. (st. 41, ll. 201–205)

Perhaps the conflation of chivalric love with fidelity to a demanding God seemed strained, for this stanza disappeared in the 1870 version. “The Burden of Nineveh,” Rossetti’s sole contribution placed in a present-day setting, was likewise greatly expanded from an 1850 fragment whose three stanzas corresponded roughly to stanzas four through six of the OCM version. Rossetti thus either wrote or drastically revised the poem for the Magazine, though he improved it yet further for the 1881 version.13 The ambience of the “Brotherhood” may have encouraged him to write in the voice of a socially critical contemporary artist, 13 Andrew Stauffer, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’: Further Excavations,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 16 (Spring 2007): 45–58; Florence Boos, The

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for in the opening stanzas of the OCM text, the speaker’s tone is initially supercilious: I have no taste for polygot: At the Museum ’twas my lot, Just once, to jot and blot and rot In Babel for I know not what […]. And as I made the last door spin And issued, they were hoisting in A winged beast from Nineveh. (ll. 1–4. 7–9)

Only the last two lines survived in its 1881 counterpart: In our Museum galleries To-day I lingered o’er the prize Dead Greece vouchafes to living eyes,– Her Art for ever in fresh wise From hour to hour rejoicing me […]. And as I made the swing-door spin And issued, they were hoisting in A wingèd beast from Nineveh.14 (st. 1, ll. 1–5. 8–9)

Perhaps Rossetti later decided that the flippant tone of the original opening ill comported with the poem’s concluding indictment of imperial hypocrisy and power. In other respects, however, the OCM stanzas remained much more intact than their counterparts in “The Blessed Damozel.” The poem’s blunt comparison of Nineveh with imperial Britain, for example, was retained in later versions, and its final three stanzas were entirely unchanged:

Poetry of Dante G. Rossetti (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 207–215. The 1881 version also deleted stanza 17, beginning “Then waking up, I turn’d, because / That day my spirits might not pause […].” 14 Other changes improved wording, e.g.: “Delicate harlot—eldest grown / Of earthly queens! There on thy throne” became “Delicate harlot! On thy throne / Thou with a world beneath thee prone […].” Sculptures from Nineveh were brought to the Nineveh Gallery of the British Museum 1851–1883.

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The smile rose first,... anon drew nigh The thought:... Those heavy wings spread high So sure of flight, which do not fly; That set gaze never on the sky; Those scriptured flanks it cannot see; Its crown, a brow-contracting load; Its planted feet which trust the sod:…. (So grew the image as I trod) O Nineveh, was this thy God,— Thine also, mighty Nineveh? (st. 21, ll. 201–210)

Arguably, “The Burden of Nineveh” was Rossetti’s most successful poem on a contemporary moral/artistic theme, perhaps the more so because its critique of cultural blindness (“those scriptured flanks it cannot see”) and the arrogance of power (“its crown, a brow-contracting load”) could evoke a multitude of contradictory referents from the realms of politics or religion. Its generally skeptical stance toward Victorian pretensions to enlightenment and mastery also harmonized with the OCM ’s initial aim of providing an idealistic counterweight to conventional journalism. Writing for the receptive audience of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine thus inspired an important stage in Rossetti’s poetic development, during which he significantly revised his best-known poem, “The Blessed Damozel,” and brought two rough drafts to completion. The revisions to “The Staff and Scrip” mark a transition from his initial Art Catholic style toward lessened religiosity and somewhat greater narrative concision, and its protagonist’s heroic death in defense of his Queen makes him Rossetti’s sole warrior protagonist. “The Burden of Nineveh” is likewise timely in its focus on an alien form of art—the Assyrian bulls—and the cycles of empire rather than romantic love. The desire to please his youthful admirers prompted Rossetti to revise his previous poetic drafts with care, and the OCM gained from the inclusion of his dramatic, symbolic, and visually arresting verses. In turn, he was encouraged by the pragmatic and activist tastes of his new audience to situate his evocations of moral and spiritual themes within a somewhat broader social frame.

William Morris (1834–1896) Morris was one of the OCM ’s founders, though Richard Watson Dixon had first suggested the idea of such a project, and he and BurneJones visited the latter’s friend Wilfred Heeley in Cambridge in July

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Fig. 4.3 Walker & Boutall, “William Morris at 23” (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

of 1855 to discuss the initiation of a magazine they tentatively called The Brotherhood (see Fig. 4.3).15 Morris volunteered to underwrite the projected magazine with the aid of an inheritance he had received from his mother on reaching his majority the preceding year,16 and its first issue appeared in January 1856 with reviews, short stories, essays, and a single poem, Morris’s “Winter Weather.” Morris further arranged for 15 Mackail, 1, 68. 16 Edward Burne-Jones had estimated that it would cost 300–500 pounds, plus the 100

pounds to Fulford (Memorials, 1, 121). Morris’s income at the time of his inheritance was 700+ pounds; the bulk of his 1856 income was thus dedicated to the Magazine.

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the OCM ’s generous layout and decorated initials with the publisher Bell and Daldy (who later brought out his Defence of Guenevere and Life and Death of Jason), edited its first number, and paid William Fulford to edit numbers two through twelve.17 Eight of his contributions were prose tales, although three of the latter included inset lyrics, and he contributed an essay, two reviews, and five poems, in addition to the three interpolated “songs.”18 Morris was a severe critic of his own early work. He destroyed many early poems in a purge Dixon described as a “massacre,”19 and let his OCM essay, reviews, and prose romances sink into oblivion.20 He did include one of the interpolated songs (“In Prison”) and four of his five OCM poems in The Defence of Guenevere (1858), selections whose dramatic and allusive style marked a shift from the romantic narratives in quatrains he had written as an undergraduate.21 Perhaps influenced by Rossetti, Morris’s writing for the OCM exhibited a more concise and symbolic style, as Morris refined the musical qualities of his lyrics and dramatic narratives developed through recitation to his friends; and he was apparently encouraged by the results, for he turned next to preparing his first volume of poetry. Morris’s contribution to the OCM ’s first issue and the only poem not included in The Defence, “Winter Weather,” was a revision of “The Midnight Tilt,” an early undergraduate poem that survives only in manuscript.22 The poem’s nocturnal duel derived its ambience in part

17 Morris contributed approximately 30 pages of printed text between January and June, but 101 during the second half of the year when the energies of the other contributors began to wane. He was thus responsible for more than a sixth of the Magazine’s contents. 18 For a parallel discussion of Morris’s five major OCM poems, see Florence Boos, History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris: 1855–1870 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 87–96. 19 Dixon, “Memoir,” 21. 20 May Morris included the romances, Morris’s essay “The Churches of North France:

The Shadows of Amiens,” and his review of Browning’s Men and Women in the Collected Works, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1910–1915). 21 As with the other youthful poems, copies may have survived because his sister Emma Morris had preserved them; for texts and publication information, see “Early Poems,” Lists and Texts, #16, WMA. 22 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, January, 63–64; B. L. MS Add. 45.298A, ff. 36–37.

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from medieval sources Morris had studied at Oxford (Malory, Froissart, and several historians of the Crusades), and its atmospheric details also anticipated their counterparts in the Defence.23 Like Rossetti’s “The Staff and the Scrip” and William Fulford’s “To the English Army Before Sebastopol,” “Winter Weather” dramatizes an armed conflict, although the shift in title represents the poem’s focus on tone and mood rather than the details of combat. For the OCM poem Morris added three stanzas to the earlier draft that delay the action by describing the opponent and his defeat. “Winter Weather” turns on balanced repetitions, and Morris’s revisions refined the poem’s AABCCB rhyme scheme and alternation of lines, words, sounds and colors to vary its diction and remove infelicities.24 For example, stanza 10 of “The Midnight Tilt” had read, rather awkwardly, In the winter weather We rode back together From the broad mead under the hill. And the body of the traitor I laid at the gate there, It lay right stiff and still. (“Midnight Tilt,” st. 10, ll. 55–60)

The OCM version removed the allusion to the enemy’s stiffened body and inserted the more evocative details of a cock’s crow and silenced hound: In the winter weather We rode back together From the broad mead under the hill; And the cock sung his warning As it grew toward morning, But the far-off hound was still. (OCM , st. 12, ll. 67–72)25

23 For a full discussion of Morris’s medieval sources, see Margaret Lourie, ed., The Defence of Guenevere, William Morris Archive, http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/defenc eguenevere.html. 24 Alterations were many and occur in OCM version sts. 4 (expanded), 5 (added), 6, 8, 11, 12 (expanded), 13 (added), and 14. 25 Another instance occurs when st. 4 of “Midnight Tilt,” I heard his mail clinking / The sound my ears drinking / For the night was very still,” becomes in the OCM version, st. 5, “His mail-rings came clinking, They broke on my thinking / For the night was

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The poem’s details are likewise emblematic. The speaker’s colors are the dark blue of truth, his opponent’s the “blood-red” of war, and his horse is “gallant,” unlike the “mighty” steed of his better-equipped opponent. As in “The Staff and the Scrip” the occasion of the battle is romantic rather than patriotic (“A false tale made he / Of my true, true lady”). The speaker is triumphant, unlike most of his later counterparts in “The Defence,” but the imagery remains bleak and cold. After the encounter, the speaker and his seconds ride quietly home: We rode back together In the winter weather From the broad mead under the hill; No cloud did darken The night; we did hearken How the hound bay’d from the hill. (st. 15, ll. 85–90)

The poem’s austere conclusion—devoid of praise and external recognition—was characteristic of Morris’s early poetry, as was its stark minimalism, intensity, and conscious omission of historical or narrative context. Five months later, Morris’s “Riding Together” appeared in the OCM ’s May issue (see Fig. 4.4). Although the poem resembles “Winter Weather” in exploring dramatic conflict and loss in the context of “manly” battle, “Riding Together” shows an advance over the earlier poem in specificity and the use of symbolism. “Riding Together” likewise derived from an earlier draft, entitled “The Captive,” and the new version incorporated revisions to eleven of the poem’s thirteen stanzas.26 Margaret Lourie has observed that its likely source was a passage in Jean de Joinville’s Life of St. Louis, recounting an episode during the seventh Crusade in which de Joinville had been taken prisoner when attempting to defend a bridge

hush’d and still.” Further ambiance is added in OCM expanded st. 4, “So ever together / In the sparkling weather / Moved my banner and lance; / And its laurel trapping, / The steel over-lapping, / The stars saw quiver and dance.” 26 See “Early Poems, Lists and Texts, #55,” WMA. Both the manuscript version, “The Captive,” and “Riding Together” contained 13 stanzas; of these, sts. 1–6, 9, 12 and 13 remained largely intact, but verbal improvements were made to sts. 7, 8, and 10, and 11 was rewritten for clarity.

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Fig. 4.4 William Morris, “Riding Together,” The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (May 1856), The William Morris Archive

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during the Battle of Mansura in Egypt (A. D. 1250).27 Morris’s enactment centered on a violently defended fellowship and the desecration of the peace of nature: Up the sweep of the bridge we dash’d together, It rock’d to the crash of the meeting spears, Down rain’d the buds of the dear spring weather, The elm-tree flowers fell like tears. (OCM , st. 8, ll. 29–32)

Morris’s revisions retain the earlier version’s echoing lines but heighten the poem’s clarity, narrative precision, and psychological drama: The tenth stanza of the early draft had read: I and the slayer met together, O! vainly, vainly reined he back, As he caught my eye in the clear, bright weather, Shout, for his fixed eyes, and hold so slack. (“The Captive,” st. 11, ll. 41–44)

In “Riding Together” this becomes, more dramatically: I and the slayer met together, He waited the death-stroke there in his place, With thoughts of death, in the lovely weather, Gapingly mazed at my madden’d face. (OCM , st. 10, ll. 37–40)

Even the opponent’s death has a poignance, as the latter foresees his doom “in the lovely weather.” Morris deleted a stanza referring to these enemies as “turbaned,” and added another to explain the fate of these crusading “brothers,” who like de Joinville’s men, had drowned in the river beneath and near the bridge28 : 27 Richard of Devizes, ed., Chronicles of the Crusades (London, 1848). 28 The deleted stanza had read, “Shout, for the crash as we met together! / Shout, for

the splinering of the spears! / For the swords leaping up in the bright, bight weather! / For the turban that the strait-sword tears[.]” Stanza 7 is another instance of improvement: “The Captive”’s “Our spears sank down in rest together— / For thick we saw the Pagans ride, / I saw his face in the clear, clear weather, / He rode that last time by my side,” becomes in the OCM version, “Down sank our three-score spears together, / As thick we saw the pagans ride; / His eager face in the clear fresh weather, / shone out that last time by my side.” The revised version thus gives some sense of the valiant character of the protagonist’s slain friend.

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Madly I fought as we fought together; In vain: the little Christian band The pagans drown’d, as in stormy weather, The river drowns low-lying land.

The poem ends sadly as the survivor mourns lost fellowship and unending imprisonment: “My dungeon bars are thick and strong, / I take no heed of any weather, / The sweet saints grant I live not long.” “Riding Together” is Morris’s sole OCM poem lacking romantic or erotic overtones, but it captures well his consistent themes of struggle, loss, imprisonment, and aborted human ties. By contrast, the August poem “The Chapel in Lyoness” moves from retrospective lyric to the poetic dramatization of multiple voices. Morris’s most carefully crafted contribution to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, it may have been the first composed of the four Malorian poems which later opened The Defence. Spoken in three voices and poised between lyric and narrative, “The Chapel”’s dramatic construction also prefigured the legendary settings and multiple speakers of Morris’s later poems, such as “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” and “The Lovers of Gudrun.” Morris based “The Chapel” on Malory’s tribute to the death of a faithful knight who had devoted his life to a search for the Holy Grail, and the decorated chapel of Malory’s Lyoness, a mythical realm, since inundated by the sea, provides a fit setting for the lonely knight’s death. In Morris’s poem, Ozana, whom Malory had portrayed as a brave but undistinguished knight, lies disoriented and fatally wounded, and his two monologues are his last before death.29 The poem’s three knightly personae—Ozana, Bors and Galahad—each speak twice, but never directly to each other. As in Morris’s later Defence poem, “The Blue Closet,” the effect resembles that of a pageant in which performers address an audience rather than each other, evoking an eerie, surreal realm where the characters exist only

29 Morris was attracted to the theme of the second-tier knight, one of the lesser-knowns of history, as in his discarded Defence draft, “Palomydes Quest.”

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in a shared psychological intimacy.30 In the poem’s iconographic resonances, Ozana’s fidelity to his fellows, the Grail quest, and a “golden tress” (presumably given him by a woman he has rescued) help him overcome the pain and confusion of his imminent death: Sometimes strange thoughts pass through my head; Not like a tomb is this my bed, Yet oft I think that I am dead; That round my tomb is writ, “Ozana of the hardy heart, Knight of the Table Round, Pray for his soul, Lords, of your part; A true knight he was found.” Ah! Me, I cannot fathom it. (He sleeps.) (sts. 7, 8, ll. 25–33)

At this point Galahad abruptly speaks. He has, it seems, been watching by his friend all along, and moreover has been singing a song Ozana cannot hear: “All my singing moved him not” (st. 10). Realizing that death is impending, Galahad leaves the chapel, bathes his face in a nearby purifying stream, and returns with a wild rose and water to place on his friend’s face. At these signs of love and cleansing, Ozana then reveals his inmost desires: “He smiled, turn’d round toward the south, / Held up a golden tress” (st. 13). Ozana’s last gesture is not prayer, then, as Galahad recognizes: “Against his heart that hair he prest; / Death him soon will bless” (st. 14). At this point, Bors enters to pay his respects to the dying knight and touches him affectionately (“I laid my chin upon his head” [and] felt him smile; my eyes did swim, / I was so glad he was not dead”) (st. 16). Soon thereafter when Galahad kisses his brow, Ozana experiences relief (“I shiver with delight”), addresses his love: (“God move me to thee, dear, to-night!”) (st. 18), and expresses gratitude that he no longer sees through a glass, darkly: 30 Morris prepared revisions to the poem but decided after all to keep the original

version. May Morris prints these emendations in the Collected Works, 1, 12–13. The unused altered version seems more polished and heightens Ozana’s character as a visionary, but Morris may have wanted to retain the unsophisticated, naïve quality of the original. See also Curtis Dahl, “Morris’s ‘The Chapel in Lyoness’: An Interpretation,” Studies in Philology 5 (1954): 482–491.

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My life went wrong; I see it writ, “Ozana of the hardy heart, King of the Table Round, Pray for his soul, lords, on your part; A good knight he was found.” Now I begin to fathom it. (He dies.) (sts. 18–19, ll. 74–79)

As he witnesses this, Bors looks at Galahad (not Ozana) and asks with genuine wonderment, “What strange things may his eyes see[?]” As in “Winter Weather” and “Riding Together,” in “The Chapel of Lyoness” ties of “brotherhood” are basic to identity, and the shrouded mystery of a protagonist’s life—in this case an ennobling but frustrated romantic attachment—is revealed at the threshold of death. Victorians admired this poem when Morris reprinted it in The Defence of Guenevere.31 Modern critics have preferred the intricate anguish of Guenevere and Lancelot in “The Defence” and “King Arthur’s Tomb,” but “The Chapel in Lyoness” remains an evocative work in its surreal iconography, gentle sublimation, and otherworldly allusiveness. Morris also published two shorter poems, “Hands” in July and “Pray But One Prayer for Me” in October, both of which, like “The Chapel in Lyoness,” record a protagonist’s attempts to reach an idealized beloved beyond death. Though Morris’s poems are quite different from Rossetti’s in tone and emphasis, this was also the situation dramatized in Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel,” published shortly afterward in November. In Morris’s July poem, the title “Hands” rather oddly represents a depersonalized speaker: “My rough hands so strangely made, / Folded Golden Guendolyn.”32 The mythic loved one had represented natural beauty devoid of rank: “Gold or gems she did not wear, / But her yellow rippled hair, / Like a veil, hid Guendolyn.” The poem’s chivalric context— “hands used to grip the sword-hilt hard”—suggests that the speaker

31 Richard Garnett, Literary Gazette, 6 March 1858, 227; Anonymous, Tablet, April 1858, xix, 266. “Sir Galahad” was also a favorite; see The Ecclesiastic and Theologian, March 1858, 160. 32 “Hands” became the untitled song that concludes “Rapunzel” in The Defence of Guenevere; again the associations are allusive rather than literal, as the newly liberated“Rapunzel” is renamed “Guendolyn” and the fairytale’s happy ending is undercut by the song’s anticipation of her death.

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has rescued her from a dire fate, but their moment of intense intimacy—“Tears fell down from Guendolen”—has preluded her death, and “Guendolyn now speaks no word.” Deprived of love, the speaker returns to his embattled life, “Hands fold round about the sword”; only in the poem’s final stanza can he regain control of his own selfhood (“my,” “me”), though now faced with the limits of his connection with the past: Only ‘twixt the light and shade, Floating memories of my maid Make me pray for Guendolen. (st. 6, ll. 16–18)

Morris’s October lyric, “Pray But One Prayer for Me,” is similarly suggestive, and the ambiguity of the speaker’s relationship with the object of his love paradoxically intensifies the poem’s emotions of blended frustration, pain, and fulfillment33 : Pray but one prayer for me ’twixt thy closed lips, Think but one thought of me up in the stars [….] The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dim; Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn, Round the lone house in the midst of the corn. Speak but one word to me over the corn, Over the tender, bow’d locks of the corn. (ll. 1–2, 10–13)

The speaker’s beloved simultaneously inhabits a remote afterlife (“up in the stars”) and yet suffuses his natural surroundings; moreover, she is imagined as capable of speaking “one word” to him “over the tender, bow’d locks of the corn,” that is, amid the fertility of harvest. At once angelic and human, forever lost yet a source of fulfillment, she remains both a physical and loved human being and a mythic force within a pantheistically experienced nature. It is possible to fault this poem on several logical and syntactical grounds, but its echoing musical cadences exactly convey the elegiac emotions of its speaker and, indeed, of many of Morris’s early love-lorn but paradoxically fulfilled narrators. 33 “Pray But One Prayer for Me” was printed in The Defence of Guenevere under the

title “Summer Dawn”; the only verbal change was the substitution of “dun” in the Defence version for the OCM ’s “dim” in line 10. Margaret Lourie notes that the poem might be related to the Provencal alba, usually a daybreak dialogue between two lovers in which each stanzas ends with the word ‘alba,’ which means “dawn.” Note that in the original version Morris ends lines 5 and 11 with ‘dawn.’”

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Morris’s final contributions to the Magazine were mostly prose tales, perhaps as other contributors fell away and more text was desired. Nonetheless two of the prose tales contained interpolated songs; and an untitled lyric (“Wearily, drearily / Half the day long,” later titled “In Prison”) sung by the protagonist’s unresponsive love interest in “Frank’s Sealed Letter” later became the last poem in The Defence. Prisoners’ laments appeared from time to time in medieval literature34 ; and Morris’s lyric, like the Defence’s “Riding Together,” “The Tune of Seven Towers,” and “Spell-Bound,” seems an imaginative response to accounts of the sufferings of Crusaders.35 Many of Morris’s early poems return to themes of entrapment, and even in song, the poet catches literal details of the prison’s tiny window, fetters, and macabre graffiti: While, all alone, Watching the loophole’s spark, Lie I, with life all dark, Feet tether’d, hands fetter’d Fast to the stone, The grim walls, square lettr’d With prison’d men’s groan. (st. 2, ll. 9–14)

The second interpolated poem appears in the prose tale “The Hollow Land,” as the protagonist Florian and his brother Arnauld enter the castle of a rival queen stealthily by night in order to kill her. As the assassins creep through a darkened castle, they hear fragments of an eerie refrain evoking blood-red injury as well as comfort: Ships sail through the Heaven With red banners dress’d, Carrying the planets seven To see the white breast Mariae Virginis. (ll. 5–9)

In this audacious faux medieval carol the heavens bend to see, not the infant Jesus, but Mary’s white breast, the child born in a manger already 34 Lourie, 255–256. She cites a prisoner’s complaint in the Liber de Antiquis Legibus at the London Guildhall. 35 What may be Morris’s first known poem, “The Mosque Rising in the Place of the Temple of Solomon,” had featured the Crusaders’ violence on entering Jerusalem. See “Early Poems,” WMA, #10.

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wears a crown, and sea and ocean collapse as ships sail through the heavens. Viewed as a tribute to a medieval nativity scene, however, the carol makes sense: the participants are crowned in vivid colors of the season, and the seven planets form an aureole around Mary’s head. The October installment of “The Hollow Land” concluded the tale with Florian’s long atonement for his past crimes and anticipated union with his beloved Margaret, who guides him to a land of daisy-like flowers and sings of their future: Christ keep the Hollow Land All the summer tide; Still we cannot understand Where the waters glide Only dimly seeing them Coldly slipping through Many green-lipped cavern mouths Where the hills are blue. (ll. 1–8)

Here the seasons and elements have dissolved to their mirror opposites: winter to summer, gold and red to green and blue, and the brilliance of stars to the soft iridescence of flowers. Caverns and water evoke shelter and origins, and their “green-lipped” qualities render them natural and benign. In total Morris’s eight formally varied poetic contributions to the OCM evoke intense emotion through displacing their speakers into symbolically rendered, historically specific, and often painful situations. With the possible exception of Ozana, Morris’s dramatized characters are denied the hope of extraterrestrial union central to Rossetti’s early poems. Instead such solace as exists is found in ethical action (“Winter Weather,” “Riding Together,” “The Chapel in Lyonesse,” “In Prison”); male brotherhood (“Riding Together,” “The Chapel in Lyonesse”); idealized romantic love (“Hands,” “Pray But One Prayer for Me”); accepted loss (“The Chapel in Lyoness,” “Riding Together”); and a sense of spiritualized mystery infusing all of nature: “Still we cannot understand / Where the waters glide. / Only dimly seeing them…” (“The Hollow Land,” ll. 1–2). One might argue that Morris’s more secularized and fatalistic poetic world marks a partial break with the earlier forms of Pre-Raphaelitism embodied in The Germ, but it also anticipates the more chastened and tragic impasses of later poetic works such as Rossetti’s “The Superscription” and “The One Hope” or Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung.

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William Fulford (1831–1897) Although his poetry lacks the symbolic and dramatic qualities which made Rossetti’s and Morris’s poems so memorable, William Fulford’s passion for contemporary poetry, egalitarian educational views, and energetic editorial work for the OCM helped shape the magazine’s tone and extend its life.36 R. W. Dixon’s “Memoir” of the period described Fulford as a major force in the original ‘band of brothers’ and recalled his practice of reading aloud, shared with other members of “the set”: We immediately fell upon poetry: and he read me a poem, “In youth I died,” which afterward appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine [….] Fulford had great critical power, and extraordinary power of conversation. His literary principles were early fixed. He was absolutely devoured with admiration of Tennyson. Shakespeare he knew and could speak of as few could. Keats the same. Shelley the same.37

Georgiana Burne-Jones also remembered him fondly in her Memorials : We little girls liked and admired him very much […] He had an endless interest in expounding the poets and […] fed us with Longfellow first of all […] before introducing us to the works of his prime hero Tennyson.38

Fulford took a B. A. degree in 1854, taught briefly in a boy’s school, helped tutor Morris for his final examinations in 1855, and joined Morris and Burne-Jones on a walking tour of France in the summer of 1855.39 Georgiana remarked that he had been “hesitating about taking orders” in 1855, and Morris’s alleged need for a tutor and payment of £100 for Fulford’s service as the Magazine’s editor in 1856 may in part have been an attempt to help out a friend. In keeping with a long tradition of men

36 Recently Patrick Fleming’s claim that the OCM furthered others’ careers but left Morris and Fulford with “the drudgeries of publication” does overdue justice to the talents of one of the ‘Brotherhood’’s more ardent spirit¯ us rectores. See his “William Fulford, ‘The Set,’ and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 3 (2012): [301–319], 313. 37 R. W. Dixon, “Memoir of William Morris,” ed. Florence Boos, William Morris Society Newsletter-US, January 2008, 19–20. 38 Memorials, vol. 1, 67. 39 Ibid., 1, 117–118.

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of little means with no desire to read law or enlist in the military, Fulford assumed the obligations of a deaconate in 1864 and became an Anglican minister later that year.40 Roger Simpson has observed that the breaking off of an engagement between Fulford and Georgiana Burne-Jones’s younger sister Alice Macdonald may explain his relative erasure from later accounts of the Brotherhood.41 Whatever the course of his partial estrangement(s) from his former friends, in the next decade Fulford published four volumes of verse—Sonnets (1859)42 ; Songs of Life (1859); Saul; A Dramatic Poem; Elizabeth, an Historical Ode; and Other Poems (1862), in which Simpson discerns “a substantial indebtedness to Morris’s verse”; and Lancelot, with Sonnets and Other Poems (1865), in which Fulford (like Morris) critiqued Arthur as a harsh patriarch and celebrated Lancelot as the hero of the cycle.43 Fulford had contributed four short stories to the Magazine, among them “Cavalay,” a tripartite quasi-autobiographical account of a sensitive and self-doubting Oxford student who loves Tennyson; and “Found Yet Lost,” a striking tale of an embittered fisherman’s wife and murderess who scorns the commonplaces of pious Christian remorse. He also wrote

40 See Roger Simpson, “William Fulford: An Arthurian Reclaimed,” Quondam et Futurus 1, no. 1 (1991): 69, and Simpson, “In Defence of William Fulford: A Minor PreRaphaelite Poet,” Journal of the Pre-Raphaelite Society 21, 22. Without doubting Fulford’s sincere piety, it should be noted that the two members of the Oxford Brotherhood who became ministers may also have lacked other immediate prospects. 41 Memorials, vol. 1, 189, 193. Georgiana describes the engagement as having been “over for some time” by 1858, but Simpson lists the date of the breach as 1859. 42 Fulford’s 12-sonnet sequence received a prize for the Shakespeare’s anniversary contest and was published as England’s Bards, 1864, London: Day and Son, 1864. 43 Simpson, “William Fulford: An Arthurian Reclaimed,” 59. Simpson notes parallels between Fulford’s “The Slain Knight” and Morris’s “The Little Tower,” and between Fulford’s “The Lament of Sir Palomides” and Morris’s unfinished fragment on Sir Palomydes (60–61). “The Parting of Lancelot and Guenevere” (following Morris’s spelling) also parallels “King Arthur’s Tomb.” In Lancelot, Fulford’s fullest treatment of the Arthurian cycle, Arthur is presented as actively seeking Guenevere’s death, and the omission of details of Arthur’s campaigns and of the Grail quest removes from Lancelot a dishonorable contrast with Arthur’s successes (66–69). Other poems of the volume, “Hector and Andromache,” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and “Dante to Beatrice,” suggest unpublished poems by Morris (“Scenes from the Fall of Troy” and “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice”) and by Rossetti (“Dante at Verona”).

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appreciative studies of works by Alexander Smith, Tennyson, and Shakespeare, among others. Dixon described his principal poetic model during this period: […] Fulford was absorbed in Tennyson. He had a very fine deep voice, and was a splendid reader of poetry. I have listened entranced to his reading of “In Memoriam.” He was also writing much at this time; and would often read his pieces to us. No doubt many of them had a Tennysonian ring.44

He must indeed have been persuasive, for Tennyson is cited in OCM essays by Burne-Jones and the two Lushingtons as well as Lewis Campbell, the author of an OCM essay on “Prometheus.”45 The general faith in Tennyson as the greatest living poet doubtless affected Morris as well, although Dixon described the latter’s response to Tennyson’s poetry as “defiant admiration”: [H]e perceived the rowdy or bullying element that runs through much of Tennyson’s work […].”46 Morris’s favorite Tennyson poem in this period was “Oriana,” and his OCM and Defence of Guenevere poems show the influence of Tennyson’s quasi-medieval pictorialism and strongly repetitive rhythms.47 Many of Fulford’s OCM poems may have been written prior to 1856, and thus Tennyson, rather than Rossetti or Morris, served as the model for these early efforts. These OCM poems employed couplets, ballad quatrains, In Memoriam stanzas, and unrhymed quasi-free verse. His “Remembrance” abounded with Tennysonian echoes (“phantoms,” “Nature’s voice,” “Love will not die”): Thus we recall the dead, when time Has soften’d anguish to regret: They seem forgotten; but ’twere crime ’Gainst love to say that we forget. (231, st. 9, ll. 33–36)

44 Dixon, “Memoir,” 20. 45 Tennyson is also quoted in Edward Burne-Jones’s “The Newcomes ” (January),

“Ruskin and the Quarterly,” (June), and “A Story of the North” (February), as well as in Vernon Lushington’s “Oxford” (April). 46 Dixon, “Memoir,” 20–21. 47 For a discussion of Morris’s indebtedness to Tennyson, see Chap. 3 of Boos, History

and Poetics.

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Fulford’s “To the English Army Before Sebastopol,” the OCM poem which most directly addresses a contemporary event, celebrates a battle which had taken place the preceding September. Unlike Rossetti’s “The Staff and the Scrip” and Morris’s “Riding Together,” the poem does not dramatize the emotions of participants in a distant or mythic battle but instead elevates the fortitude of present-day soldiers as an exemplum for imitation after the manner of Tennyson’s 1854 “The Charge of the Light Brigade”: Vain too the frost, the winter rain, The labour in the trenches vain; In vain the nightly cannonade; Vain all,–they could not be dismay’d. Sick, starved, unfed, all martial show Stript off, left bare in naked woe; With elements, sea, land and sky. (451, ll. 9–15)

then sounded the plangent C-major chord of patriotic encomium: And foes in one conspiracy, They stood unshaken, till the fire Has tried them […] yet we doubt not sure With honour ever to endure. (451, ll. 16–20),

and the tremulous counterpoint of vicarious emulation: Would I were faithful, brave as you! [….] Would I could conquer love of ease, And, no more seeking self to please, Could hear the order, that alone, And straightway, though to death, march on! (452, ll. 42, 44–48)

Fulford was not alone among OCM contributors in his support of the Crimean War from a distance. In 1880 Morris recalled that at the time he had mistakenly believed that British intervention in the Crimea was justified but had since come to oppose all such imperial casus belli.48 Burne-Jones applied unsuccessfully for an army commission during a 48 May Morris, ed., William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 2, 484.

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period of depression and uncertainty in 1855, and wrote later that (like the hero of “Maud”) “I wanted to go and get killed.”49 Perhaps more traditional in his politics than his peers, R. W. Dixon wrote two OCM essays in which he suggested ways in which the British government might maintain its implantation in the Crimea,50 and Vernon Lushington—who in later life became a firmly committed anti-imperialist—had already published a pamphlet maintaining Britain’s right to go to war “in defense of others.”51 Despite the fact that it is hard to assimilate “To the English Army Before Sebastopol” to the more avant-garde, symbolic, and dramatic poetry for which Morris and Rossetti are noted, Fulford’s poems also track the themes of love, generalized aspiration, and ethical commitment that informed the OCM ’s other selections. Although the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates held generally idealistic views on sexuality and romantic love, the currently debated issue of women’s equality receives mention only in the OCM ’s prose essays. Several contributors expressed the view that denial of education to women was unnatural as well as unjust, but Fulford deserves recognition as the member of the group most concerned with the topic of women’s higher education. His essay “Woman, her Duties, Education, and Position” was written in support of two lectures in which Anna Jameson called for the establishment of women’s colleges on the pattern of Working Men’s Colleges, and his essays and stories conveyed a real warmth and goodwill toward women as friends and persons of intellectual substance.52 As 49 Memorials, 1, 109–110. 50 These were “The Barrier Kingdoms” (February) and “The Prospects of Peace”

(March). 51 David Taylor, “Vernon Lushington: Practising Positivism.” Diss. University of Roehampton, 2010, Chapter 4, 112–115. It should be noted that many largely symbolic battles occurred in the OCM ’s prose tales, among them “The Story of the Unknown Church,” “A Story of the North,” “Gertha’s Lovers,” “The Druid and the Maiden,” “A Dream,” “Svend and His Brethren,” “Golden Wings,” and “The Hollow Land”—though their struggles and armed conflicts were displaced into history or dream vision. 52 OCM , August, 462–477. Fulford’s essay notes: “Indeed women such as “Mrs. Chisholm, Miss Carpenter and Miss Nightingale [had already] “overcome difficulties to which men had proved unequal (464). Commending establishments such as Kaiserwerth (where Florence Nightingale was trained as a nurse), and any woman who “[…] grounds her Rights upon the performance of her duties,” he predicted that such women “will not lack for champions out of her own sex; [for] men will rise up who will count it an honour to join in exalting those who are raising and ennobling their common humanity” (472).

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a Tennysonian, he found a model for the educated woman of the future in Princess Ida and in “In Memoriam”’s “earnest of what all may yet become”: “an ideal of woman, as woman was created, as she may yet be in the time of ‘the world’s great bridal’—the half ‘of that great race which is to be’” (OCM , 17). That Fulford responded to the more progressive rather than reactionary attitudes of his most revered model is also shown in his brief 1859 poem, “To a Young Lady, with a Copy of Tennyson’s ‘Princess,” which begins: This book sums up a poet’s thoughts Of Woman’s work and Woman’s rights, With glimpses of that far off time, The age of ‘equal Rights and Mights.’53

Although Fulford was a much less original poet than either Rossetti or Morris, in his devotion to feminist causes he anticipated important poetic themes of the mid- and late Victorian period, including the insights embedded in the works of several women poets.

Georgiana MacDonald (1840–1920) Georgiana MacDonald was the fifth of eleven children born to a Methodist minister and his wife, and during adolescence she helped care for two younger brothers and three younger sisters. The most artistically inclined of her family, Georgiana had studied drawing at the Government School of Design in South Kensington; and though she claimed to have “had no precise idea of what the profession of an artist meant,” she had “felt it was well to be amongst those who painted pictures and wrote poetry.”54 She was only fifteen years old when the twenty-three year old Burne-Jones proposed to her in 1856; the day after she accepted his suit Burne-Jones brought her his volumes of Ruskin to read, and William Morris presented his friend’s new fiancée with an inscribed copy of J. M. W. Turner’s Rivers of France.

53 Simpson, “An Arthurian Reclaimed,” 58–59. 54 MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 68.

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Georgina Macdonald’s poem in the December OCM , “The Porch of Life,” was thus the work of a gifted sixteen-year old.55 Lacking the university education of other OCM contributors and their relative familiarity with the more recent poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, Georgiana’s only known poetic effort contrasts with the Tennysonian and/or medieval poems of Fulford, Morris, and Rossetti. In this sole blank verse contribution to the magazine, the poet developed a tripartite variant of Wordsworth’s meditation on the fall from childhood innocence. “Who knows their inner life?” the speaker asks, Who feels their beauty is the gift of God, And, midst their shrinking bashfulness, reveres (E’en as the distant carols of the lark, Scarce seen amidst the blue ethereal haze) Their hidden charm of perfect innocence [….] (776, ll. 28–31)

The poet argues, as had Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” that we must “become again as little children” if we wish to understand transcendence and “loyalty of heart”: When first I saw that loveliest sight of all, A child at prayer, some faint and glimm’ring thought Of God’s great purpose in creating man Flash’d first across me, […] the love that He must have For pure and willing childhood, and for those His full-arm’d soldiers in a conquer’d town, Who, in their Captain’s absence, had maintain’d Their early discipline and loyalty of heart. (776, ll. 35–43)

The military metaphor here startles. In later life Georgiana Burne-Jones became an opponent of all forms of British imperialism, and would likely have avoided the assimilation of dutiful children to “full-armed” members of a children’s crusade.56 As we have seen, such military allusions seemed omnipresent in 1856, as in Bernard Cracroft’s heartfelt praise in the June issue for Crimean nurses, “who, through evil report and good report, in spite of sneers and fears, […] left the comforts of an English home to bear 55 She had turned 16 on July 21, 1856. 56 MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 350, 513.

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consolation […] and care to our wounded beneath an eastern sun—[…] in the true spirit of Jane Eyre” (329). In later life Georgiana was an active suffragist and feminist, and Fiona MacCarthy describes her as “a woman who broke out of her own doll’s house and became a respected and hard-working Parish Councillor in the Sussex village of Rottingdean.”57 As Stephen Williams has also demonstrated in two recent articles, Georgiana was not only “hard-working” but effective in helping establish a local nursing service later integrated into the National Health system.58 Georgiana was not an ethereal “Princess Ida,” perhaps. But she was, in William Fulford’s words, clear “earnest of what [women] may yet become.”

Conclusion What resulted from the collaborative poetic relationships fostered by the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and their aftermath? Arguably all the poetic “brothers” contributed to and benefited from the OCM ’s brief fellowship. Interestingly, also, each of the male poets responded to the public discourse surrounding the Crimean War with sublimated and distanced representations of “manly” violence in the service of assumed just causes. At least seven of their poems fit this category, and six of these feature Crusaders or chivalric knights (“The Staff and Scrip,” “Winter Weather,” “Riding Together,” “The Chapel in Lyoness,” “Hands,” and “In Prison”), suggesting Burne-Jones’s previously quoted description of OCM contributors as present-day crusaders. Fulford’s zeal for the poetry of Tennyson—conceived as a progressive thinker—influenced the taste of his fellow contributors, and his later, more dramatic and psychologically complex poetry showed the influence of Morris and to a lesser degree Rossetti. Rossetti—inspired in part by the respect of his newfound companions—brought three of his best-known poems into near-final form, and his OCM versions of “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Staff and Scrip” and “The Burden of Nineveh” reflected as well as influenced the Magazine’s distinctive combination of 57 Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, xxii–xxiii. 58 Stephen Williams, “Making Daily Life ‘as Useful and Beautiful as Possible’: Georgiana

Burne-Jones and Rottingdean, 1880–1904,” JWMS 20, no. 3 (2013): 47–65, and “‘A Clear Flame-Like Spirit’ Georgiana Burne-Jones and Rottingdean, 1904–1920,” JWMS 20, no. 4 (2014): 79–90.

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romantic medievalism, dramatically heightened language, and resistance to conventional norms in art and politics. Under Rossetti’s encouragement Morris acquired greater skill in the use of strong rhythms, visual images, and the portrayal of erotic emotions, often projected into medieval settings, and over the course of the year developed the complex synthesis of eros and thanatos which characterize his 1858 Defence of Guenevere. Many aspects of Morris’s later interests are adumbrated in the wider concerns of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and his first experience with the practical aspects of publication as editor, contributor, and sustainer proved useful when nearly thirty years later he assumed the editorship of Commonweal (1884–1889), the Socialist League newspaper, and shortly thereafter co-founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891. One might even interpret Morris’s last poetic epic, The Pilgrims of Hope (1885–1886), expressly written for Commonweal, as a reprise in more direct and contemporary language of the motifs of idealistic struggle and romantic loss which had characterized his poems for the OCM . And although the fourth poetic contributor, Georgiana Macdonald Burne-Jones, was destined to become neither artist nor poet, her memories of the “Oxford Brotherhood” and their friends, as recorded in her Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones and her son-in-law J. W. Mackail’s The Life of William Morris, helped interpret their efforts for posterity. The OCM attracted only a few reviews, although it gained the favorable attention of Ruskin, Browning, Carlyle, and Tennyson.59 Moreover the social and intellectual interchanges which accompanied the OCM ’s existence inspired the later “jovial campaign” at Oxford, the collaborative decoration of Red House, the foundation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co., and several lifelong friendships and collaborations. An equally important legacy of the OCM , however, may have been its energizing role in helping shape the further development of Pre-Raphaelite poetry during the 1850s and thereafter in accord with its anti-establishmentarian social and aesthetic ideals.

59 For the reception of the OCM see Paola Spinozzi and Eliza Bizzotto, The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 194–195. The OCM was reviewed by the Press, the Guardian, John Bull, the Athenaeum, the Saturday Review, and The Spectator.

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References Anonymous. Tablet. April 1858. Boos, Florence. The Poetry of Dante G. Rossetti. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Boos, Florence. “‘A Holy Warfare Against the Age’: The Essays and Tales of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 3 (2014): 344–368. Boos, Florence. History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris: 1855–1870. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1904. “Early Poems, Lists and Texts, #10”, William Morris Archive. http://morrisedi tion.lib.uiowa.edu/index.html. “Early Poems, Lists and Texts, #16”, William Morris Archive. http://morrisedi tion.lib.uiowa.edu/index.html. “Early Poems, Lists and Texts, #55”, William Morris Archive. http://morrisedi tion.lib.uiowa.edu/index.html. Dahl, Curtis. “Morris’s ‘The Chapel in Lyoness’: An Interpretation.” Studies in Philology 5 (1954): 482–491. Dixon, R. W. “Memoir of William Morris.” Edited by Florence Boos. William Morris Society Newsletter-US (January 2008): 19–20. Fleming, Patrick. “William Fulford, ‘The Set,’ and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 3 (2012): 301–319. Garnett, Richard. Literary Gazette. 6 March 1858. MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris: A Life for Our Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris. London: Longmans, 1899. Margaret Lourie, ed. The Defence of Guenevere, William Morris Archive. http:// morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/defenceguenevere.html. Morris, May. Collected Works, vol. 1. London: Longmans, 1910–1915. Morris, May, ed. William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936). Prinsep, Val. Magazine of Art, 1904. Richard of Devizes, ed. Chronicles of the Crusades. London, 1848. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Allingham. Edited by George Hill. T. F. Unwin, 1897. Simpson, Roger. “William Fulford: An Arthurian Reclaimed.” Quondam et Futurus 1, no. 1 (1991): 56–72. Simpson, Roger. “In Defence of William Fulford: A Minor Pre-Raphaelite Poet.” Journal of the Pre-Raphaelite Society 2 (1993): 21–27.

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Spinozzi, Paola and Eliza Bizzotto. The Germ: Origins and Progenies of PreRaphaelite Interart Aesthetics. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Stauffer, Andrew. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’: Further Excavations.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 16 (Spring 2007): 45–58. Taylor, David. “Vernon Lushington: Practising Positivism.” Diss. University of Roehampton, 2010. Williams, Stephen. “Making Daily Life ‘as Useful and Beautiful as Possible’: Georgiana Burne-Jones and Rottingdean, 1880–1904.” Journal of the William Morris Society 20, no. 3 (2013): 47–65. Williams, Stephen. “‘A Clear Flame-Like Spirit’: Georgiana Burne-Jones and Rottingdean, 1904–1920.” Journal of the William Morris Society 20, no. 4 (2014): 79–90.

CHAPTER 5

“Of Chivalry and Deeds of Might”: Reviving F. G. Stephens’s “Lost” Arthurian Poem Robert Wilkes

In 1849, Frederic George Stephens attempted to write a narrative poem, “Arthur,” inspired by the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. At the same time, he worked on his first serious oil painting illustrating Tennyson’s 1842 poem “Morte d’Arthur.”1 Stephens’s “Arthur” poem was long thought to have been lost, and scholars could only speculate about its connections with his unfinished painting, which does survive and is now titled Morte d’Arthur.2 However, I have discovered several manuscripts of the poem in an unlikely location:

1 Alfred Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur,” in Poems, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1842), 2:4–18. 2 Frederic George Stephens, Morte d’Arthur, 1849, oil on panel, unfinished, 59.5 × 74 cm, Tate, London.

R. Wilkes (B) Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_5

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the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum in Tenterden, Kent.3 The text is published here for the first time (see Appendix). Both poem and painting show that Stephens was the first member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to formulate a visual and literary response to both the Arthurian legends and the poetry of Tennyson. He can therefore be claimed as one of the originators of the Pre-Raphaelites’ well-documented interest in the legends of King Arthur and his knights.4 This chapter will address the ways in which Stephens’s poem expresses its narrative and style in Pre-Raphaelite terms: the former because of its medievalism, the latter because of its adherence to detail which seems analogous to the finely worked paintings of the PRB (see Fig. 5.1). While scholars have correctly assumed that Stephens’s Morte d’Arthur painting was an illustration of Tennyson’s poem, a direct comparison between the picture and his own “Arthur” poem has not been possible until now. William E. Fredeman speculated that it was “perhaps a poem to accompany [Stephens’s] Arthurian picture.”5 Deborah N. Mancoff presumed that the poem had been lost, concluding that the “[t]he extent to which Stephens’s unfinished painting illustrates his lost poem cannot be judged.”6 In addition, Alison Inglis and Cecilia O’Brien recognized that Morte d’Arthur is the first Pre-Raphaelite picture to illustrate Tennyson, but they did not fully commit to this proposition because of the work’s incompleteness and the fact that its relationship to the “lost” poem could

3 I made the discovery during my PhD research into Stephens’s life and work in 2016, thanks to a chance email to the Museum. I am grateful to the proprietors of the Museum, particularly Bob Clifford, Brian Janes, and Philip Shaw, for assisting my research and for their permission to publish the manuscripts. My PhD thesis will inform my projected book about Stephens. 4 Much has already been written about the depiction of Arthurian legends in PreRaphaelite art and literature. Some examples are Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer, The Return of King Arthur (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983); Joanna Banham and Jennifer Harris, William Morris and the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Deborah N. Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art (New York: Garland, 1990); Christine Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Inga Bryden, Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 5 William E. Fredeman, ed., The PRB Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1849–1853 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 195. 6 Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival, 142–143.

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Fig. 5.1 Frederic George Stephens, Morte d’Arthur, 1849, oil on panel, unfinished, 59.5 × 74 cm, Tate, London

not be confidently determined.7 The earliest designs by William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais illustrating Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and “Mariana,” respectively, were not produced until 1850, a year after Stephens’s painting.8 Moreover, D. G. Rossetti’s watercolor Arthur’s Tomb, the first of many Arthurian images by him, was not

7 Alison Inglis and Cecilia O’Brien, “‘The Breaking of the Web’: William Holman Hunt’s two early versions of The Lady of Shalott,” Art Bulletin of Victoria 32, 18 June 2014, note 8, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-breaking-of-the-web-williamholman-hunts-two-early-versions-of-the-lady-of-shallot/. 8 William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1850, black chalk, pen and ink, 23.5 × 14.2 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; John Everett Millais, Mariana in the Moated Grange, 1850, pen and ink on paper, 21.5 × 12.9 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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created until 1855.9 Both Stephens’s “Arthur” poem and Morte d’Arthur painting communicate a type of masculinity which is already familiar in Pre-Raphaelite studies: the virtuous knight.10 In both creative works, Stephens promotes the brotherhood of knights as an ideal model for male homosocial activity and masculine virtue. As a founding member of the PRB, Stephens was aware of the parallels this would have with his immediate environment. Previously, only two poems by Stephens were known to have survived: short lyrics, which have not been formally analyzed, and are preserved in the South African National Gallery Library, Cape Town.11 The manuscripts which have come to light in the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum are part of a large collection of Stephens family papers, previously unknown to scholars. The collection contains the correspondence between Stephens and his family, and incoming letters from a wide range of Victorian artists, authors, and editors.12 There are also family photographs, newspaper cuttings, and other paraphernalia relating to the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Among these papers are four fragments of the “Arthur” poem, three of which are drafts of the same narrative episode; together with several other poems by Stephens which require further research.13 An additional fifth fragment of “Arthur” is among

9 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur’s Tomb, 1855, watercolour on paper, 24 × 38.2 cm, British Museum, London. Rossetti would already have been aware of the Arthurian legends through the story of Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s Inferno. The earliest depiction of this subject by Rossetti was a drawing of ca. 1846–1848, now in Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton (NT1287116). 10 See Joseph A. Kestern, Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995); Dinah Roe, “‘Me, Who Ride Alone’: Male Chastity in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Art,” in Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian Art and Literature, eds. Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 151–168. 11 “Two Poems by F. G. Stephens,” The Rossetti Archive, ed. Jerome McGann, http:// www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/stephens003.raw.html. The lyrics, which McGann dates to 1849, are entitled “A Burial place for me” and “Oh! weary falls the lapsing time,” and are both signed “F. G. S.”; however, the handwriting is not recognisably Stephens’s and may be that of William Michael Rossetti. 12 Bob Clifford, the Museum’s Archivist, has estimated that there are at least 1000 letters in the collection (correspondence with the author, 31 March 2017). 13 For full transcriptions of these poems see Robert Wilkes, “The Hidden PreRaphaelite: The Art and Writings of Frederic George Stephens from 1848–70” (PhD diss., Oxford Brookes University, 2019, Appendix 3).

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the Stephens Papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.14 The version of the poem presented in the Appendix of this book uses three of the five surviving fragments. The reconstructed text tells of an unnamed male narrator from the Victorian present who falls asleep and is transported back into the Middle Ages in a dream, wherein he meets King Arthur and Sir Gawain and accompanies them on a journey. I have proposed a narrative structure based on internal evidence within the text, which I will explain in due course. The primary sources give some insights into the poem’s development. According to William Michael Rossetti’s PRB Journal , himself, D. G. Rossetti, Hunt, and James Collinson “read over Stephens’s poem of Arthur” during a meeting at Stephens’s home in Lambeth on July 26, 1849.15 How long Stephens had been writing the poem, or what state it was in when the other PRB members saw it, is impossible to determine. The Journal does not record what his friends thought of it, but evidence of its reception can be found in the correspondence of Thomas Woolner, another PRB member. Stephens visited Woolner separately and showed him the poem, after which Woolner wrote in a letter: “Go on with your King Arthur, what you read me was stunning old boy.”16 These are the only direct references to the poem in contemporary sources, but they are useful. Not only were the verses known to the Brotherhood, but they were praised using typical Pre-Raphaelite slang (“stunning”).17 Woolner’s letter demonstrates that the poem was read aloud by its author—an important incident in the development of a literary text. Poetry readings were a common activity of the Pre-Raphaelites, often resulting in critical discussions. For example, during the same meeting on 26 July, after Stephens had shown “Arthur” to Hunt, Collinson, and the Rossettis, the young men “went carefully thro’ Keats’s ‘Isabella’ to

14 The Bodleian acquired the Stephen Papers in 1957. 15 Fredeman, PRB Journal, 10. The Stephens family lived at 59 Walcot Place at this

time. 16 Woolner to Stephens, undated (July 1849?), F. G. Stephens Papers, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (hereafter cited as Bodleian), MS. Don. e. 80, fol. 2. 17 D. G. Rossetti included a comic skit, “Miching Malecho – It Means Mischief,” in a letter to William Allingham in August 1854. Stephens, who appears as a character, reacts with the word “stunning” five times throughout one scene, suggesting it was a favorite term of his; William E. Fredeman, ed., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 10 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–15), 1:370–372.

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discuss every fault of detail or expression any of us might find, when we agreed on 24.”18 Stephens’s poem was therefore scrutinized at virtually the same moment as a work by one of the Pre-Raphaelites’ most revered “Immortals.”19 Keats’s “Isabella” had recently inspired Millais’s painting of the same title that was exhibited at the Royal Academy earlier that year; signed with the initials “PRB,” it was a defining image of the Brotherhood’s aesthetic ambitions.20 That their literary idol was no more above criticism than one of their own members demonstrates the democratic nature of the Brotherhood: each writer was afforded the same critical treatment, and each poem had the potential for “fault of detail or expression.” The performance of a literary text—the poem being “read over” by Hunt, Collinson, and the Rossettis, then read aloud by Stephens to Woolner—thus played a key role in its ongoing development, with Woolner encouraging Stephens to “go on” with it. At the same meeting on July 26, 1849, Stephens informed his friends that he was hoping to send a picture he had been painting, “the King Arthur,” to the annual art exhibition of the Liverpool Academy, and he had written to one of the superintendents for information about submitting it.21 Stephens depicts Sir Bedivere, having followed the dying Arthur’s instructions to cast Excalibur into the lake, in the act of lifting up the king in order to bear him to the shore, where the boat to Avalon awaits. Mancoff has already identified the specific passage from Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” which Stephens was illustrating.22 Her observations are confirmed by a sheet of paper in the Railway Museum on which Stephens copied out four extracts from the Tennyson poem, including the relevant lines:

18 Fredeman, PRB Journal, 10. 19 Keats was on the PRB’s list of “Immortals” with two stars beside his name. See

Julie F. Codell, “Painting Keats: Pre-Raphaelite Artists Between Social Transgressions and Painterly Conventions,” Victorian Poetry 33, nos. 3/4 (Autumn–Winter 1995): 341–370, for a discussion of PRB’s extensive engagement with Keats’s poetry. 20 John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–1849, oil on canvas, 103 × 142.8 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 21 Fredeman, PRB Journal, 9. A copy of Stephens’s letter to James Buchanan, the Secretary of the Exhibition of the Liverpool Academy, written on 23 July 1849, survives; Bodleian, MS. Don. e. 58, fol. 23. 22 Mancoff, Arthurian Revival, 143.

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[…] Him [Arthur] Sir Bedievere Remorsefully regarded thro’ his tears, And would have spoken, but he found not words, Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee, O’er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, And rising bore him thro’ the place of tombs.23

The human figures are the most complete components of Stephens’s painting, and the artist struggled to fully realize the outdoor winter setting required by Tennyson’s text. There are close visual parallels with Hunt’s painting Rienzi of 1848–1849, particularly the detailed suits of armor and the pose of Arthur which mirrors that of the kneeling knight on the far right of Rienzi in vertical reversal.24 Stephens apparently voiced his frustrations with his picture to D. G. Rossetti, who wrote encouragingly to him in June 1849: “I do not believe that King Arthur is gone to the Devil. Merlin would not permit of it. One of these days he will most certainly call up your spirits from the vasty deep, and you will find yourself on your Pegasus without knowing how.”25 Despite Stephens’s efforts, the painting, like his poem, was never finished. Nevertheless, he signed it with his monogram and the initials “PRB,” so he clearly hoped it would be grouped with the paintings which Millais, Hunt, Rossetti, and Collinson had exhibited with the Brotherhood’s acronym earlier that year. Aside from reading Tennyson, Stephens researched the corpus of medieval literature relating to King Arthur and his knights, known historically as the Matter of Britain, together with English poetry from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the same sheet of paper on which he wrote the extracts from Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” he made a list of “Authorities relative to King Arthur” (see Fig. 5.2):

23 Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent (hereafter cited as Railway Museum), 2015.47.96.8. Stephens copied out ll. 23–24, 29–33, 52–58 and 170–175 from Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur.” On the reverse of this sheet Stephens drafted a section of his “Arthur” poem. 24 William Holman Hunt, Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain During a Skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini Factions, 1848–1849, oil on canvas, 83 × 117 cm, The Capricorn Foundation. 25 Rossetti to Stephens, undated (early June 1849), in Fredeman, Correspondence, 1:86.

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Fig. 5.2 Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. 2015.47.96.8 [1] Geoffrey of Monmouth Chronicle [2] [Thomas] Warton, History of English Poetry [3] Romance of Le Morte Arthur one of the first Books printed in England, Caxton 1485 [4] Mallet Northern Antiquities [5] A Manuscript of the Romance of “Le Morte Arthur” exists in the Harlian MSS No. 2252 §49 Also another in the Cottonian Library “Syr Launful,” Caligula A. 2 [illegible] 33 of the original in old French in the Harleian MSS No. 978, section 112 Lanval [6] Gawan and [Gologras], a metrical romance, printed in Edinburgh 1508 8vo. [7] [Charles] Burney’s History of Music [8] [Michael] Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, [John] Selden’s Notes [9] The Seven Champions of Christendom by Richard Johnson about 1592 to 1612 [10] The Romance of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

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[11] The Romance of “Le Morte Arthur” [illegible] reprinted since the Caxton [12] Milton’s History of England [1670] [13] [Warton] Poetical Works26

This inventory, which certainly dates from the same period in 1849, presents a rich accumulation of textual sources. Some were original medieval manuscripts then in the British Museum, while most others were available as printed books. Item 3 is already a familiar text in Pre-Raphaelite studies: Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, first published by William Caxton in 1485 and a source of inspiration for many Victorian artists and writers.27 Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” and his later epic cycle Idylls of the King (1859–1885) reworked episodes from Malory’s collection of Arthurian legends. Item 11 in Stephens’s list might refer to the 1817 reprint edition by Robert Southey, which was discovered by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones six years later in 1855.28 Christine Poulson has observed that Morris and Burne-Jones’s response to Malory was “intensely personal,” and that the book served as “an antidote to what Burne-Jones and Morris perceived as the mechanistic spirit of the age”—a point to which I will return.29 Stephens’s inventory demonstrates that the Arthurian legends were not a casual interest but a project which he approached with passion. His love of medieval history was fostered as a teenager in the 1840s, when he spent time exploring churches and making brass rubbings of tomb monuments. His role as the scholar of the PRB was later recognized by W. M. Rossetti: “Stephens had a great liking for the early schools of art, Italian and other. Possibly his knowledge of them exceeded that of any other PRB.”30 This “knowledge” is demonstrated by Stephens’s first essay for The Germ in

26 See Footnote 23. 27 Poulson, The Quest for the Grail, 3–8, 74–104. 28 Sir Thomas Malory, “The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur,” in Introduction

and Notes by Robert Southey, ed. William Upcott (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817). See Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1906), 1:116–117. 29 Poulson, Quest for the Grail, 77–78. 30 William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters with a Memoir,

2 vols. (London: Ellis, 1895), 1:132.

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1850, “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” which showcases his art historical research and use of antiquarian publications.31 He began writing this article in September 1849, only a few months after he composed “Arthur.”32 Such scholarly tendencies might not seem to have much bearing on poetics. Yet Stephens’s list of Arthurian “Authorities,” rather like the PRB’s list of “Immortals” from 1848, demonstrates the range of literary influences on which he would draw for his creative work. That he did read some of these historical sources is substantiated by textual evidence within the poem. For example, in the opening section, which will be properly discussed below, the narrator recites an old legend: “Stonehenge had just been placed, Merlin late / From Ireland brought the mass, and placed stones round / In circles great” (Appendix, Fragment 1, ll. 35–37). This story was first recounted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (ca. 1136), the first item on Stephens’s list of “Authorities.” A revised edition of Aaron Thompson’s 1718 translation of Monmouth’s Latin text had been published in 1842. It gives the legend: “[Aurelius Ambrosius] ordered Merlin to set up the stones brought over from Ireland, about the sepulchre: which he accordingly did, and placed them in the same manner as they had been in the mountain Killaraus.”33 Stephens appears to have adapted this for his own composition: Stonehenge is similarly “placed” in his poem, using stones “[f]rom Ireland brought.” Historical prose sources were therefore synthesized into modern poetics, in a manner not dissimilar to the early pictures of the PRB in the late 1840s, which derived inspiration from the early Italian art that had been made available through reproduced engravings.34

31 Frederic George Stephens (as John Seward), “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” The Germ 1, no. 2 (February 1850): [58–64] 62, the footnote which cites Jean Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt’s Histoire de l’art par les monumens (1828), Giovanni Rosini’s Storia della Pittura Italiana (1839–1847), and William Young Ottley’s The Italian School of Design (1823). 32 The earliest mention of “Stephens’s paper on early art” is on 27 September 1849;

Rossetti, PRB Journal, 17. 33 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth, trans. A. Thompson, ed. J. A. Giles (London: J. Bohn, 1842), 160. 34 See Gail S. Weinberg, “‘Looking backward’: Opportunities for the Pre-Raphaelites to see ‘pre-Raphaelite’ art,” in Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: The Anglo-American Enchantment, ed. Margaretta Frederick Watson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 51–64. A founding

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Stephens’s accumulated knowledge of the Matter of Britain may have impacted the later productions of his fellow Pre-Raphaelites. I have already mentioned D. G. Rossetti’s first Arthurian image, his 1855 watercolor Arthur’s Tomb. There is a connection between Stephens and this picture. Scholars have recognized that Rossetti did not rigidly adhere to the account of the last meeting of the adulterous lovers Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenevere given in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.35 Rather, the artist conflated the description of Arthur’s Tomb at Glastonbury (Book XXI, Chapter 7) with the incident of Launcelot’s visit to Almesbury Abbey, where Guenevere went to become a penitent nun, and his attempts to kiss her a final time (XXI, Chapters 9 and 10). Rossetti thus invented a new dramatic scene which cannot be found in Malory’s book, a fact which Stephens later recognized in his 1895 monograph on the artist: “While the catalogues refer to the Morte Arthur as the authority for the subject [of Arthur’s Tomb], I have not, although the first to describe the incident to Rossetti, been able to find anything about it in that wilderness of romance.”36 His claim that he had introduced Rossetti to the subject should be taken with caution, as he was reminiscing forty years after the picture’s creation. However, as we have seen, he extensively researched Arthurian material and was familiar with a range of historical writers including Malory. Rossetti, meanwhile, read Stephens’s “Arthur” poem in July 1849 and encouraged him to persevere with his Arthurian painting at the same time. It is fair to speculate that the two men enjoyed discussing the legends of King Arthur and exchanged their ideas about them, and that such exchanges made an impression on Rossetti. In 1864, when George Rae purchased six medieval-style watercolors by Rossetti from the 1850s, the artist declared that he had been “full of” Malory’s

moment of Pre-Raphaelitism was the much-vaunted “discovery” of Carlo Lasinio’s book of engravings reproducing the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa in September 1848. 35 Parris, Pre-Raphaelites, 277; Poulson, Quest for the Grail, 81–82; Julian Treuherz, Elizabeth Prettejohn and Edwin Becker, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 175. 36 Frederic George Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Seeley & Co., 1894), 40, note 2. Stephens wrote a glowing appraisal of Arthur’s Tomb not long after Rossetti painted it; Stephens, “The Two Pre-Raphaelitisms, Article Fourth,” Crayon 4, no. 10 (October 1857): [298–302] 300.

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book when he painted them.37 In 1857, he enlisted Morris and BurneJones to help him paint the new debating chamber of the Oxford Union with large murals illustrating scenes from Malory’s book. The following year, Morris published The Defence of Guenevere, which included a lengthy poem, “King Arthur’s Tomb,” inspired by Rossetti’s Arthur’s Tomb. A genealogy of Arthuriana therefore links Stephens to Morris by way of Rossetti. Having provided background information about the origins of the “Arthur” poem and Stephens’s interest in the Arthurian legends, I will now address its narrative content. The first section is entitled “Arthur, a dream” (See Appendix, Fragment 1).38 Written from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, it begins: At noon, full, perfect, burning noon, I lay at foot of a druid column, tall, In a quiet county far away; The shadow of pillar o’er me thrown By the Sun’s bright radiance cast, To me appeared as song, tale or lay Of warlike times long past, Dreamy, and dim and purple-grey: Before me that long shadow lay And moved on from my feet: I call’d up song, recounted tale And Love’s sweet lay renewed, Of Chivalry, and deeds of might, Of Mercy, and Love that shuns the right And many others mo’. (Appendix, Fragment 1, ll. 1–15)

The first-person perspective was probably influenced by the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. But while Browning’s monologues are inherently realistic and do not contain fantastic elements, this first section of Stephens’s “Arthur” vividly describes the process of slipping into a dreamlike state. The monolith functions like the gnomon of a sundial, tracing a shadow across the ground at a liminal time of day that is neither morning nor afternoon; the narrator is standing so still that he can actually watch its slow movement. At the end of the section, the narrator 37 Rossetti to George Rae, March 1864, in Fredeman, Correspondence, 3:131. 38 Railway Museum, 2015.47.96.7; Appendix, fragment 1.

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describes the column transforming into a tree as he is carried farther back in time in his dream. This suspension between two states—dreaming and waking, past and present—is heightened by the clash of vivid colors; the “sun’s bright radiance” from the real world is filtered into the “purplegrey” of the narrator’s visions. Stephens’s descriptive language is generally uncomplicated, his adjectives short and direct. A few lines ahead in the manuscript he tries out variations of a phrase to see which sounds best rhythmically and visually. He describes a “pennon, flag, and cloth of gold” that could alternatively be “Out-flaring in the sun” or the less elegant “Out-spread in the broad sun”; while for the next line he puzzles between “The knights and steeds of old” and “The proud-horsed knights of old.” Neither possibility is crossed out; he wished to return to them later with a fresh eye. In each instance, too, the adjectives are more functional than flamboyant, deploying the low register of old English ballads. Stephens continues to describe the dreaming process in a way which calls attention to the contrast between present and past: I doz’d, and sank, and soon had fallen asleep, And back two thousand years had passed away, I heard no more the steam-car’s warning scream Before it plunged in night, nor ever came Deep vibrant rumblings from the earth beneath. (Appendix, Fragment 1, ll. 27–31)

The reference to a “steam-car’s warning scream” not only reveals the temporal location of the narrator in the then-present day but presents modern mechanization as a negative force from which he is able to retreat in his dream. The poem can therefore be located within the tradition of the dream vision, a device in medieval European literature in which a protagonist undergoes a transformative journey within the framework of an allegorical dream.39 This device was popular among Middle English writers such as Chaucer, whose work Stephens knew well at this time.40 In his essay for The Germ in 1850, “Modern Giants,” he praised

39 See Kathryn L. Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 40 A new edition of Chaucer’s works had been published in 1842; The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt (London: Edward Moxon, 1842). Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, House of Fame, Book of the Duchess, and Parliament of Fowls

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Chaucer’s “faithfulness to truth.”41 Stephens applies the medieval trope to a situation from his own time, which was a common strategy of the Pre-Raphaelites. The type of the Victorian dreamer transported into the Middle Ages through their imagination, away from the fearsome industrial present, was taken up some years later by followers of the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Burne-Jones and Morris. In a letter to his family in January 1854, Burne-Jones, then a student at Oxford, described a walk along the riverbank from the ruined Godstow priory during which he experienced powerful hallucinations of knights and ladies beside the water, “and all the pageantry of the golden age.” Stephens’s poem had described “the steam-car’s warning scream / Before it plunged in night.” Burne-Jones echoed this industrial imagery when he wrote about “the wreathing of steam upon the trees where the railway runs,” which shatters his waking dream and pulls him unwillingly back to reality.42 A similar sentiment recurs in Morris’s prologue for The Earthly Paradise (1868): “Forget six counties overhung with smoke / Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, / Forget the spreading of the hideous town; / Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, / And dream of London, small, and white, and clean.”43 For Stephens in 1849, and Burne-Jones and Morris in the 1850s and 1860s, the phenomena of steam and noisy engines—“steam-car’s warning scream,” “wreathing of steam,” “snorting steam”—epitomized the obtrusive industrialized present which they inhabited, and contrasted with the ideal medieval past of their dreams. Of course, it is impossible that Burne-Jones and Morris could have seen Stephens’s unpublished manuscript. Nevertheless, the three men shared the same disillusionment with present-day advancements. But is this apparent negativity toward industrialization a definitive reflection of Stephens’s opinions? In his use the dream vision device. In 1848 Stephens began a large drawing, Dethe and the Riotours, illustrating “The Pardoner’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, and in 1850– 1851 he made a painting depicting the Marquis proposing to Griselda from “The Clerk’s Tale”; Frederic George Stephens, Dethe and the Riotours, 1848–1853/1854, pen and ink on paper, 29.5 × 44.6 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The Proposal ( The Marquis and Griselda), 1850–1851, oil on canvas, 80.6 × 64.8 cm, Tate. 41 Frederic George Stephens (as Laura Savage), “Modern Giants,” The Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850): [169–173] 172. 42 Quoted in Burne-Jones, Memorials, 1:97–98. 43 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise: A Poem (London: F. S. Ellis, 1868), p. 3, ll.

1–3.

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second essay for The Germ in 1850, “Modern Giants,” he famously called for artists and writers to take note of “the poetry of the things about us; our railways, factories, mines, roaring cities, steam vessels, and the endless novelties produced every day.”44 The next portion of Stephens’s narrative exists in three draft states. The first appears on the back of the aforementioned sheet of “Authorities relative to King Arthur.”45 The second is entitled “Arthur.”46 The third, which is also entitled “Arthur,” is the longest draft at 110 lines and is therefore the text used in the Appendix of this book.47 All three fragments tell the same series of events, which appear to immediately follow the previous dream section. The narrator hides in a thicket beside a stream at the bottom of a valley, observing two knights who are wandering aimlessly and calling to one another. One of the knights is dressed in white and addresses the other knight as “Gawaine.” The white knight’s hound then sniffs out the narrator in the bushes, compelling him to step out and show himself. He tells the knights that he is “a Breton, a minstrel, a singer,” who is traveling to the ships that will take him back to France. He particularly wishes to travel with King Arthur, of whom he has heard great things. This section is linked to the previous one by the narrator’s comment that he had fallen asleep at the foot of a tree and was awoken by the sound of footsteps and the knights’ calls; as mentioned, the “druid column” beneath which he fell asleep in the present day was changed into a tree in his dream. The white knight then reveals himself to be King Arthur and asks the narrator to show him and Gawaine the way to the coast. The narrator agrees and the three men set off. A few hours into the journey, Gawaine asks the minstrel if he knows a place where they can rest and hear one of his songs. The narrator leads the knights into a cave where a “fallen Runic King” was buried long before. The king is

44 Stephens, “Modern Giants,” 170. 45 Railway Museum, 2015.47.96.8 (verso). Stray lines of verse are also legible: “Asleep,

in grass deep couched, in a forest’s bosom”; “as when the soul has fled / Into the Wondrous world of Sleep”; “Marching at night by [?]”; “Bright swords on bascinets Bite/light.” 46 Railway Museum, 2015.47.96.6. 47 Railway Museum, 2015.47.96.5; Appendix, fragment 2.

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entombed beneath a stone which is inscribed with “a Rhyme / Rude of Death, and his High fame.”48 Here the poem breaks off again. The last section, now in the Bodleian Library, is scrawled on the back of Stephens’s letter to the superintendent of the Liverpool Exhibition from July 1849.49 It is awkwardly written and does not scan well, and, despite its brevity, it presents a confusing mass of images and events. The narrative apparently cuts forward to King Arthur’s voyage across the Channel to Brittany, where he and his knights travel to Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. The passage bears the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Bridal of Triermain (1813), from which Stephens derived the names of some obscure knights, Sirs Banier and Bore—an additional indicator of the sources he was reading.50 What he intended to happen after this cannot be ascertained, as no additional fragments of the poem have survived. Stylistically, “Arthur” exhibits a preference for pictorial detail which acts as a textual equivalent to the mimetic precision of contemporary PreRaphaelite paintings. A notable example is from the second section of the poem, when the narrator describes the approach of King Arthur through the bushes: […] and soon An armêd foot upon the stones, Crashing and breaking o’er the twigs, Gave token of the wearer’s presence. Stretching an arm before him To force an oak’s low branches back, Full on my view the warrior came Clad all in mail and over that a white Garment, White, without a blazon, all unstained, And yet he seemed a king, a King, in form And haughty presence, all his face was bare, Free o’er his shoulders fell his cowl of mail, 48 A fifth fragment in the Railway Museum, which begins “In the cave underground / My troops are found,” may relate to this part of the narrative, and could either be the epitaph on the king’s tomb or the “Song of War” which the narrator sings to Arthur and Gawain; Railway Museum, 2015.47.96.4. 49 Bodleian, MS. Don. e. 58, fol. 23 (verso); see Footnote 22. Appendix, fragment 3. 50 Sir Walter Scott, “The Bridal of Triermain,” in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott,

12 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1861), 11:62, canto II, stanza XIII: “Why should I tell of numbers more? / Sir Cay, Sir Banier, and Sir Bore.”

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From off the Bascinet thrown, Straight Brows he had, and little space between, And “undernethe ther glowen eyês twey” Quick, sad and little stern, yet in the lips A firmness sat, was not to be cast down, […] From his chin, broad, down fell his beard, Short, curled, dark brown. (Appendix, Fragment 2, ll. 4–23)

The emphasis on naturalistic details in this passage shows that Stephens was working in a similar mode to his Morte d’Arthur painting. In the picture, the accoutrements of knightly valor and comradeship—the knights’ armor and interlocking hands—are highly detailed to the point of being visual records of objects and human models which actually existed. Passages such as the chain mail sleeve of Bedivere’s right arm slipping down as he raises his hand, and the reflection of Arthur’s red tunic in Bedivere’s polished shin guard, demonstrate Stephens’s commitment to recording naturalistic effects of light and human action carefully studied from nature, favoring a particularized representation of people and objects. Visual Pre-Raphaelitism inspired new methods of close looking, which Stephens defined in the Germ as a “system of study” which “requires a somewhat longer and more devoted course of observation than any other.”51 Minute natural detail, a defining characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite painting in the late 1840s and 1850s, was also a quality which Stephens admired in poetry. As mentioned, he copied out four extracts from Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” (see Fig. 5.2), including the lines which his Arthurian painting illustrates. His attention was caught by Tennyson’s description of Sir Bedivere preparing to cast Arthur’s sword into the lake: There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, And o’er him, drawing it, the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt: For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth work Of subtlest jewellery.52

51 Stephens, “Early Italian Art,” 58. 52 Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur,” ll. 52–58.

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Bedievere becomes distracted from his grave task—“He gazed so long / That both his eyes were dazzled,” the poem continues—and he engages, like the poet, in an act of close looking, noticing even the frost sparkling on the hilt. Stephens’s fragmented “Arthur” poem never achieves the same depths of dazzling detail, but it is clearly a literary device that interested him, as he later explained in an essay written in the winter of 1856–1857, and published in the American journal The Crayon in 1859.53 Although the article is devoted to visual art, Stephens uses a quotation from Robert Browning’s 1835 poem Paracelsus in order to demonstrate successful artistic “finish.” He argued that, as The Crayon lacked reproductive engravings, the Browning quotation (“as perfect a piece of painting as Hunt or Millais have ever executed”) would sufficiently illustrate his argument.54 For Stephens, a speech by Paracelsus elaborately describing an old stone wall and its insect inhabitants “paints us a whole world; you see the colour of the wall itself, […] the sheen of the moss, and of this the fact, that the fancy could play about it like summer lightning or sunlight upon rippling water.”55 Literary detail, then, had transformative properties, in that the written word could take on painterly qualities. The attention to detail in Stephens’s “Arthur” poem is also painterly, as it takes time to describe with words the elements which a painter is naturally able to present to the viewer. Was it necessary, in the passage describing Arthur’s approach quoted earlier, to mention that he was “Stretching an arm before him / To force an oak’s low branches back” (ll. 8–9)? These lines are present in all three drafts of this section, so Stephens always intended to include them. He could just as easily have removed them, skipping from “Gave token of the wearer’s presence” (l. 7) to “Full on my view the warrior came,” (l. 10) without impacting the poem’s flow. However, when read closely the lines offer as much visual information as a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The immediacy of Arthur’s gesture as he pushes back the branch is achieved by placing the dynamic verb 53 Stephens to John Durand, 20 January 1857: “I trust you have received a contribution

(for the February no. [of The Crayon]) from me entitled ‘An Essay on Finish’.” John Durand Papers, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library, MssCol 866, box 4, folder 3. 54 F. G. S. [Frederic George Stephens], “On Finish in Art,” The Crayon 6, no. 7 (July 1859): 197. 55 Ibid., 198, quoting from Part 1 of Browning’s Paracelsus.

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“stretching” at the start of the line. Julie F. Codell has observed that PreRaphaelite artists sought “empirical observations of what humans actually looked like in common, undramatic activities.”56 Stephens’s painting The Proposal (1850–1851), illustrating Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale,” itself pivots around a mundane action, as the marquis Walter turns on his seat and grasps Griselda’s hand as she passes toward the door, in order to make his proposal of marriage. Stephens’s focus on a commonplace human gesture in his poem participates in this trend. Arthur’s gesture is forceful but unremarkable; he is simply pushing back a tree branch that obstructs his path. This tree introduces an additional natural detail, in that it is specifically described as an oak. Specificity is a hallmark of early Pre-Raphaelitism, but where a painter can simply show an oak, a writer is compelled to name it. Stephens’s oak not only indicates the poem’s English setting, but also functions, like Arthur himself, as an emblem of Englishness generally. As in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, then, there are symbolic details which can be closely examined. The description of Arthur’s physical appearance in the above extract also reads like a particularized Pre-Raphaelite portrait. Stephens sketches the king’s facial features, noting even the characteristics of his beard, “short,” “curled,” and “dark brown.” He also lists the particular articles of Arthur’s suit of armor—the chain mail, tunic, cowl, and bascinet— and these assume a symbolic significance. The garment over the chain mail is white and “without a blazon” (a coat of arms) and is suggestively “unstained.” The garment’s “unstained” whiteness implies Arthur’s “unstained” personal character, and perhaps even his unblemished sexuality or chasteness. Of course, Arthur was not chaste: he was married, and the medieval sources introduce various offspring, such as his illegitimate son Mordred.57 However, his calm demeanor and the betrayal of his close friend, the sensual Sir Launcelot who has an affair with Guenevere, establish him as a symbol of strong yet vulnerable masculinity. Bonnie Wheeler notes that the version of Arthur presented in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur “blends traditional feminine with masculine gender roles” by replacing “individual warrior heroism with Round Table brotherhood and

56 Julie F. Codell, “Expression over Beauty: Facial Expression, Body Language, and Circumstantiality in the Paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” Victorian Studies 29, no. 2 (Winter 1986): [255–290] 266. 57 Some accounts describe Mordred as Arthur’s nephew.

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collaboration.”58 The same can be said of Stephens’s portrayal of Arthur. Dinah Roe has argued that the figure of the virginal knight as a surrogate for the young male artist was attractive for the PRB, and for Stephens in particular. His article on early Italian art for The Germ includes a quotation from Tennyson’s 1834 poem “Sir Galahad”—“My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure”—in order to pitch the truthfulness and purity of Pre-Raphaelite painting above the “sensuality” and “degradation” of contemporary art.59 He also remarks: “Truth in every particular ought to be the aim of the artist. Admit no untruth: let the priest’s garments be clean.”60 In effect, an artist must be faithful to nature—Stephens calls it the “simple chastity of nature”—in the same way that a priest commits to a life of chastity, lest they sink into “false sentiment” and “voluptuousness.” The image of the clean garment is an echo of King Arthur’s “unstained” tunic. It can definitively be concluded that Stephens’s poem and his Morte d’Arthur painting differ from one another in terms of their narrative content. They do not depict the same episode from the history of King Arthur, and Stephens invented his own story for the poem, using legends and characters drawn from his research into the Matter of Britain. Despite these variances, there are thematic parallels between the two works which help to explain why Stephens was so fascinated with the Arthurian ideal at this time. The PRB had been formed in September the previous year, and the fraternal bonds inherent in its organization influenced the productions of the group. Elizabeth Prettejohn has called the Brotherhood in its early days “a male homosocial community […] a group of men whose relationships combine the mutual furtherance of professional interests with strong bonds of affection.”61 Paintings such as Hunt’s Rienzi and Stephens’s Morte d’Arthur depict closeness between men, both physical and emotional, at moments of crisis, in the aftermath of a conflict. A brotherhood, by its very definition, excludes the presence of women, although as many recent scholars have demonstrated, women did play an 58 Bonnie Wheeler, “The Masculinity of King Arthur: From Gildas to the Nuclear Age,” Quondam et Futurus 2, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 14. 59 Roe, “‘Me, Who Ride Alone,’” 154–155; Stephens, “Early Italian Art,” 63, quoting Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Sir Galahad,” ll. 3–4. 60 Stephens, “Early Italian Art,” 61. 61 Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 2nd edn. (London: Tate

Publishing, 2007), 38.

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active role in the Pre-Raphaelite circle as artists, writers, and models.62 The close-knit fraternal structure of the PRB, comprising seven young men united by a single creative endeavor, must have influenced Stephens’s decision to locate his “Arthur” poem within a wholly masculine environment. There is a reference in its opening section to “Love’s sweet lay,” which hints vaguely at courtly love and the heterosexual pairings which are the dramatic force behind so many Arthurian romances: Guenevere and Launcelot, Tristram and Iseult, Merlin and Vivien, to name a few. Yet this single reference is inconsequential, and women are as absent from the poem as they were from the Brotherhood’s regular meetings, which were an exercise in male homosocial bonding. Even taking into account the poem’s fragmentary state, it is difficult to imagine how Stephens would have introduced female characters into his tale, if indeed he ever wished to. As in his Arthurian painting, male friendship is integral to the “Arthur” poem. Bonds are forged between men across different social boundaries, so that a humble minstrel is able to befriend the king of Britain. Indeed, Arthur seeks the help of his inferior: “Guide us unto Sandwich, and thou shalt As a minstrel go with me […], One of mine own Household, for I am Arthur, He of whom thou spakest.” Awed by the name, I bowed, and passed before. (Appendix, fragment 2, ll. 72–76)

This moment signifies the forming of a brotherhood, or rather the expansion of one; Arthur is inviting the minstrel to become a member of his “Household,” just as Stephens had been enlisted by Hunt to join the PRB several months earlier. It is a fraternity that concerns itself with poetry. Several lines later, during a pause in their journey, Sir Gawain addresses the narrator: “Canst thou not tell us of some Castle or a Hall Where we might rest awhile, And hear thy voice[,] for well we love 62 Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (London: Virago Press, 1989); Jan Marsh et al., Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2019).

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The Song of War, or the light virelai, Or canst thou not the way relieve With Legends of this mystic land So Rich in Fable, Tale, or High Romance. (Appendix, fragment 2, ll. 80– 86)

The phrase “High Romance” on line 86 is surely lifted from one of Keats’s sonnets, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” which had recently been published in 1848: “When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, / Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.”63 The anachronism of Keats being quoted by a medieval knight establishes a direct analogy between the Arthurian brotherhood and the modern PRB, who, as we have seen, regularly enlivened their meetings by reading poetry, including Keats’s work. As mentioned, Stephens read his manuscript to Woolner and the poem was “read over” by his fellow PRB members. Is the narrator a kind of self-portrait of Stephens himself, a sensitive young man with a vivid imagination who finds a new sense of direction or vocation when he joins a male homosocial group? Although we should take care with such autobiographical readings, the image of the Arthurian brotherhood was evoked by the other Pre-Raphaelites.64 D. G. Rossetti declared to his sister Christina in 1853, on the day that Millais was elected an associate of the Royal Academy and after Woolner had departed for Australia: “So now the whole Round Table is dissolved.”65 Coincidentally, Rossetti was quoting from Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” thereby forming a convenient link with Stephens’s painting. Stephens shared his friend’s disappointment; W. M. Rossetti later remarked that he and Stephens were the two members who “most sincerely regretted” the mounting indifference of their fellow brethren for maintaining the official “PRB” grouping.66 D. G. Rossetti’s direct use of the Round Table fraternity as an analogy for the Brotherhood continues the camaraderie 63 John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, 2 vols, ed. Richard Monckton Milnes (London: Edward Moxon, 1848), 2:293, ll. 5–6. 64 They were, of course, not the only Victorians to invoke Arthurian references; see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 65 Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Christina Rossetti, 8 November 1853, in Fredeman, Correspondence, 1:294. 66 Rossetti, Family-Letters, 1:137.

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of Stephens’s “Arthur,” with its depiction of men bonding over gentle, literary pursuits. This chapter has only been able to provide an introductory examination of Stephens’s “Arthur,” and the publication of the poem itself will hopefully encourage further scholarly analysis. The poem manuscripts were never circulated outside the immediate circle of the Brotherhood and the Morte d’Arthur painting remained in Stephens’s possession until his death in 1907. It is impossible to know for certain whether the painting or the poem was conceived first. Stephens’s creative project in 1849, in the double field of picture-making and verse-writing, constituted the earliest Pre-Raphaelite response to the Arthurian legends that would go on to dominate the work of his fellow artists and writers later in the 1850s. As an example of early Pre-Raphaelite poetics from 1849, Stephens’s “Arthur” assists our understanding of descriptive detail as a textual equivalent to the detailed and particularized style of PreRaphaelite painting. The poem looks backward to the medieval past, but also forward by writing about an archaic subject with immediacy and realism.

References Banham, Joanna and Jennifer Harris. William Morris and the Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. Bryden, Inga. Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1906. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt. London: Edward Moxon, 1842. Codell, Julie F. “Expression over Beauty: Facial Expression, Body Language, and Circumstantiality in the Paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” Victorian Studies 29, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 255–290. Codell, Julie F. “Painting Keats: Pre-Raphaelite Artists Between Social Transgressions and Painterly Conventions.” Victorian Poetry 33, nos. 3/4 (Autumn– Winter 1995): 341–370. F. G. S. [Frederic George Stephens]. “On Finish in Art.” The Crayon 6, no. 7 (July 1859): 197. F. G. Stephens Papers, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Don. e. 58, fol. 23.

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Fredeman, William E. ed., The PRB Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1849–1853. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Fredeman, William E. ed. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 10 vols. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–2015. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Trans. A. Thompson. Edited by J. A. Giles. London: J. Bohn, 1842. Holman Hunt, William. Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain During a Skirmish Between the Colonna and Orsini Factions, 1848–9, oil on canvas, 83 x 117 cm, The Capricorn Foundation. Holman Hunt, William. The Lady of Shalott, 1850, black chalk, pen and ink, 23.5 x 14.2 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Inglis, Alison and Cecilia O’Brien. “‘The Breaking of the Web’: William Holman Hunt’s two early versions of The Lady of Shalott.” Art Bulletin of Victoria 32 (18 June 2014) note 8. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-breakingof-the-web-william-holman-hunts-two-early-versions-of-the-lady-of-shallot/. John Durand Papers, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library, MssCol 866, box 4, folder 3. Kestern, Joseph A. Masculinities in Victorian Painting. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995. Lynch, Kathryn L. The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Malory, Sir Thomas. The Byrth, Lyf, and Actes of Kyng Arthur. Edited by William Upcott, introduction and notes by Robert Southey. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817. Mancoff, Deborah N. The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art. New York: Garland, 1990. Marsh, Jan and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. London: Virago Press, 1989. Marsh, Jan, et al. Pre-Raphaelite Sisters. London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2019. Millais, John Everett. Isabella, 1848–9, oil on canvas, 103 x 142.8 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Millais, John Everett. Mariana in the Moated Grange, 1850, pen and ink on paper, 21.5 x 12.9 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Milnes, Richard Monckton, ed. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1848. Morris, William. The Earthly Paradise: A Poem. London: F. S. Ellis, 1868. Poulson, Christine. The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840–1920. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 2nd edn. London: Tate Publishing, 2007.

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Roe, Dinah. “‘Me, Who Ride Alone’: Male Chastity in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Art.” In Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian Art and Literature, Edited by Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. 151–168. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Arthur’s Tomb, 1855, watercolour on paper, 24 x 38.2 cm, British Museum, London. Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters with a Memoir, 2 vols. London: Ellis, 1895. Scott, Sir Walter. “The Bridal of Triermain.” In The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, 12 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1861. Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. 2015.47.96.4. Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. 2015.47.96.5. Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. 2015.47.96.6. Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. 2015.47.96.7. Stephens Papers, Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent. 2015.47.96.8. Stephens, Frederic George (as John Seward). “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art.” The Germ 1, no. 2 (February 1850): 58–64. Stephens, Frederic George (as Laura Savage) “Modern Giants.” The Germ 1, no. 4 (May 1850): 169–173. Stephens, Frederic George. “The Two Pre-Raphaelitisms, Article Fourth.” The Crayon 4, no. 10 (October 1857): 298–302. Stephens, Frederic George. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Seeley & Co., 1894. Stephens, Frederic George. Dethe and the Riotours, 1848–53/1854, pen and ink on paper, 29.5 x 44.6 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Stephens, Frederic George. Morte d’Arthur, 1849, oil on panel, unfinished, 59.5 x 74 cm, Tate, London. Stephens, Frederic George. The Proposal (The Marquis and Griselda), 1850–1, oil on canvas, 80.6 x 64.8 cm, Tate. Taylor, Beverly and Elisabeth Brewer, The Return of King Arthur. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983. Tennyson, Alfred. “Morte d’Arthur.” In Poems, 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1842. Treuherz, Julian, Elizabeth Prettejohn and Edwin Becker. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Thames and Hudson, 2003. “Two Poems by F. G. Stephens.” The Rossetti Archive, Edited by Jerome McGann. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/stephens003.raw.html.

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Weinberg, Gail S. “‘Looking backward’: Opportunities for the Pre-Raphaelites to see ‘pre-Raphaelite’ art.” In Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: The AngloAmerican Enchantment, Edited by Margaretta Frederick Watson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997, 51–64. Wheeler, Bonnie. “The Masculinity of King Arthur: From Gildas to the Nuclear Age.” Quondam et Futurus 2, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 14. Wilkes, Robert. “The Hidden Pre-Raphaelite: The Art and Writings of Frederic George Stephens from 1848–70” (PhD diss., Oxford Brookes University, 2019). Woolner, Thomas to Stephens, undated (July 1849?). F. G. Stephens Papers, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Don. e. 80, fol. 2.

CHAPTER 6

Musico-Literary Pre-Raphaelite Poetry Mary Arseneau

It is readily acknowledged that, from its inception, Pre-Raphaelitism embraced the visual and literary arts; but often overlooked is the reality that, as early as the 1860s, Pre-Raphaelitism had migrated into another inter-medial and collaborative field of artistic expression, one that combined word and music. There is a substantial corpus of musical interpretations of Pre-Raphaelite poems that actively extends the range of Pre-Raphaelite poetics into the field of music and calls out for serious critical attention. As we shall see, music as an art form plays a significant role in the development, dissemination, interpretation, and enduring popularity and reputation of Pre-Raphaelite poetry; furthermore, the ongoing activity of making a Pre-Raphaelite poem new by remediating it as song is a creative act of collaborative poiesis that continues up to the present day, continuing the tradition of Pre-Raphaelite creation beyond the time, locale, and individual artists of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. This chapter will attempt to bring this large topic into focus by exploring the PreRaphaelite movement’s connections with the Victorian musical scene, by discussing examples of musical settings from three representative PreRaphaelite poets—William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina

M. Arseneau (B) University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_6

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Rossetti—and examining examples of musical settings of two iconic Pre-Raphaelite poems, “The Blessed Damozel” and “Goblin Market.” Examination of melo-poetic, text-music hybrids is an emergent area of Pre-Raphaelite studies, and it requires an interdisciplinary critical lens through which to view Pre-Raphaelite poetry by bringing attention to the transforming context of music, a context within which audiences worldwide in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries encounter and interpret Pre-Raphaelite poems.1 Musical settings are by their nature collaborative works in which a composer typically takes an independent poetic text and sets it to music, an act that calls for both literary sensibility and musical creativity. Although incorporated into a new entity, the poem nevertheless maintains its identity; however, the poem’s meaning within the setting is now supplemented, shaped, or even distorted by musical meanings. Within the new composition, text and music enact a contest over meaning; and as musical gestures reinforce or resist textual meanings, the reading of the poem is altered. Historically, the emergence of the cultural and aesthetic role of music in relation to Pre-Raphaelite poetry aligns with the movement’s shift from John Ruskin’s to Walter Pater’s respective underlying principles for PreRaphaelite aesthetics, as the movement’s original twin focus on visual and verbal art expanded to include music more explicitly and prominently in a variety of ways: visually, poetically, conceptually, theoretically, and in actual musical collaboration and performance. Pater—who famously wrote that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”—saw art’s aim as neither representational accuracy nor moral instruction, but rather the intensity of the experience of the art itself.2 In this new rhetoric of the intense and emotionally powerful experience of art, to the exclusion of meaningful content or instruction, an abstract art form—music— would find a prominent place; however, as we shall see, the musical aspect of Pre-Raphaelitism is not exclusively in the aesthetic realm of “art for 1 There is exciting work being done on music and the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Michael Craske’s ongoing research on Swinburne, transgressive poetics, music, and aesthetics is available on his website (see Michael Craske, https://verseandmusic.com/) and on the Sounding Victorian website founded by Phyllis Weliver (see Phyllis Weliver, http://www.soundingvictorian.org/). See also Elizabeth Helsinger’s “Swinburne’s Expansive Poetics,” in Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, which illuminates many mutual influences among poetry, art, and music in Swinburne’s writing. 2 Walter Pater, “School of Giorgione,” in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1913), 140.

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art’s sake”; for through music, the Pre-Raphaelites also interacted with important social, artistic, and political developments. Although Pre-Raphaelitism was always a counter-cultural movement, resistant to the mainstream industrial and utilitarian Victorian culture, three central Pre-Raphaelite poets go on to develop this countercultural stance along different trajectories in the later evolutions of Pre-Raphaelitism, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti moved in the direction of aestheticism, William Morris into socialism, and Christina Rossetti into a devotional mode. Music played an important role in expressing these distinct values along each of these trajectories. Significantly, some examples of musical settings of poems by both Morris and Christina Rossetti suggest an opposition to the aesthetic stance of “art for art’s sake” which urged the separation of art from morality: both Morris’s socialist chants and the hymns and sacred music based on Christina Rossetti’s poems bespeak a most sincere engagement of music and poetry with high social or spiritual purpose. Merged with music, Pre-Raphaelite poetry would reach new audiences, as it was heard in parlours and salons, in concert halls and festivals, at school performances and professional recitals, in parish churches and cathedrals, at political meetings and openair demonstrations. Since 1860 musical interpretations have been added to Pre-Raphaelite poems, thereby supplementing the meaning and experiential impact of Pre-Raphaelite poetry; and just as the Pre-Raphaelites were always aware of the ways that visual art could interpret and extend the meaning of a literary work, they also became alert to the potential of music to participate collaboratively in the generation of poetic meaning, as Pre-Raphaelite poiesis extended outward to include musicians and composers outside the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

Pre-Raphaelites and the Victorian Musical Scene As Phyllis Weliver’s recent scholarship recovers, music became an integral part of Victorian sociability, and music had a more consistent presence in the Pre-Raphaelite circle than has yet been sufficiently highlighted and examined. The Pre-Raphaelite movement overlaps with important nineteenth-century changes in music’s cultural presence and status, with exponential growth in demand for popular, recreational song for a middle-class market (the drawing-room ballads or parlour songs

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performed by amateur musicians and in a domestic setting), and many early examples of Pre-Raphaelite music were in this tradition.3 Second, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s and continuing into the twentieth century, song took on new prominence as a significant art form, and Pre-Raphaelite verse enjoyed continued serious attention as English songwriting underwent a renaissance. There was a very fortunate synergy between the popularity of Pre-Raphaelite poetics and the English Musical Renaissance, for this late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century movement in English music particularly elevated the art of song-writing and also identified the goal of seeing excellent English poetry set to music by native composers. Pre-Raphaelite poetry—and Christina Rossetti’s poetry in particular—enjoyed serious and continued attention, participating in this wave of musical development. Significant composers, and some who played leading roles in the English Musical Renaissance, composed art songs based on Pre-Raphaelite poems, music which is still performed regularly and internationally today: a sampling of such composers would include Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Alexander Macfarren, Sir Frederic H. Cowen, Sir Granville Bantock, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Sir Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Sir Edward Elgar, Julius Harrison, Benjamin Britten, and others. In the category of more serious song or art song, to be performed by trained musicians as concert repertoire, literary sensibility was valued highly. If we review the history of Pre-Raphaelite poetry against the background of Victorian musical developments, new and important artistic interactions become newly focalized. The thousands of text-music hybrid works inspired by and including Pre-Raphaelite poetry invite the kind of critical conversation that is belatedly taking shape. Earlier neglect is explicable given the disciplinary silos that separate text and music criticism and their respective vocabularies and methodologies, but this neglect can also be traced back to the original Rossetti family and Pre-Raphaelite records, neither of which brings

3 See Joanna Swafford, Songs of the Victorians (University of Virginia, 2013), (http://

www.songsofthevictorians.com/). Accessed 23 May 2013; Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1989). Joanna Swafford and Derek B. Scott both argue for the significance of bourgeois, domestic music, and Swafford observes that such songs function as readings of the poems they set.

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music clearly into focus as a consistent point of interest. Admittedly, the Pre-Raphaelite poets were generally not musically creative themselves; but a nuanced assessment of their views on music is necessary, for they were certainly interested in the potential of sound and music and of text-music collaborative works. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s biographers have noted that his comments sometimes suggest an actual aversion to music as “noise,”4 and that William Holman Hunt commented that music was “positively offensive” to him5 ; however, as Karen Yuen has demonstrated, such comments must be taken with a grain of salt in light of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s representations of music and his complicated relationship with music.6 Christina Rossetti made no claim to musical abilities, but her remarks generally suggest an appreciation for what composers bring to her poems; meanwhile Morris disliked the Victorian musical culture, but he did cultivate an interest in early music, and he wrote poems purposely to be set to existing tunes. Overall, as scholarship works to include musical culture, it is necessary to reconsider the claims of the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, for in fact, the Pre-Raphaelite circle had many interactions with music. No scholarly research has yet been published that thoroughly examines the primary documents with a specific focus on music, but such an investigation would surely illuminate many interactions with music, musicians, and the musical scene in general, and such investigation would also reveal some explanation of the fairly recent development of musical topics of inquiry in Pre-Raphaelite studies. A preliminary closer examination reveals that William Michael Rossetti’s records—scholars’ most complete and reliable resource for Pre-Raphaelite history—are overall incomplete and sometimes unreliable when it comes to the topic of music.7 For

4 Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 44. 5 William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, vol. 1 (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), 412. 6 Karen Yuen, “Bound by Sound: Music, Victorian Masculinity, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” in ed. Graeme Smart and Amelia Yeates, special issue on “Victorian Masculinities,” Critical Survey 20, no. 3 (2008): [79–96] 85–87. Yuen’s article usefully highlights Dante Gabriel’s visual representations of music and musical instruments as well as music’s relationship to Victorian concepts of masculinity. 7 In Some Reminiscences, William Michael Rossetti states that, “having other occupations which absorbed my time and attention, I have never learned anything about musical art

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instance, one set of exchanges is illustrative of the Rossetti family’s interactions with the musical world and how these stories may have been lost. Andrea L. Traventi—a Neopolitan composer, who had set Rossetti patriarch Gabriele Rossetti’s patriotic lyric “Sei pur bella,” and who would go on to set Christina Rossetti’s “A Birthday” and “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”)—showed an early interest in setting Christina’s poetry, being the seventh of many hundreds of composers to set her verse, and this interest is likely to have emerged from the family association. William Michael Rossetti records that Traventi visited Christina at home on November 21, 1866 to ask her to make some verbal alterations to “A Birthday” “to make it more intelligible when set to music; she consented.”8 Traventi would use his Rossetti family connections again: on December 26, 1866, William Michael Rossetti’s diary records, “Wrote to W. Taylor,9 as to a critique Traventi wishes to obtain upon his setting of ‘When I am dead, my dearest.’”10 William Michael Rossetti included in Rossetti Papers George Warington Taylor’s responding letter of a few days later, which sheds interesting light on both the Victorian musical world and William Michael’s lack of attention when it comes to matters concerning music. Although the epistolary inquiry and response could have been clearly connected by simply consulting his own diary, William Michael Rossetti declares in his headnote in Rossetti Papers: “I appear to have been solicited by some person—but I don’t now in the least recollect by whom—to introduce the words of some song to the notice of a musical critic.”11 In addition, William Michael Rossetti appears to be mistaken in assuming that Traventi was looking for a critical review of the words of the song (his diary entry mentions Traventi’s setting rather than the text). Indeed, Traventi would have had no occasion to doubt the suitability of the words: “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”) would go on to become Christina Rossetti’s most frequently set poem. In his in detail.” See William Michael Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 191. 8 Diary of William Michael Rossetti, 11 November 1866, Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia, box 15, folder 5. 9 George Warington Taylor was manager of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company from March 1865 until his death in February 1870. 10 Diary of W. M. R. 26 December 1866, ADC, box 15, folder 1. 11 William Michael Rossetti Papers, 1862–1870; A compilation by William Michael

Rossetti (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 219.

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replying letter Taylor declares that critics “do not signify two-pence for single ballads. The great thing is to get it sung half a dozen times at large concerts by a really popular singer.” Taylor notes that Traventi’s setting “is sung by Miss Pyne—excellent—better person could not be to make a song.”12 Interestingly, Pyne would also be one of the three soloists at the February 18, 1869 première at St James’s Hall of Macfarren’s cantata setting of Christina Rossetti’s “Songs in a Cornfield.”13 Music was an integral part of Victorian sociability, and this is reflected in the Pre-Raphaelite circle as well.14 For instance, there were regular parties hosted by Ford Madox Brown at his Fitzroy Square home, “brilliant parties”15 that were held “fortnightly from 1866 for about eight years”16 and were regularly attended by the core group of the PreRaphaelite circle including (according to Ford Madox Ford) “Rossetti, Burne Jones, Holman Hunt, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne and Theodore Watts-Dunton, Christina and William Rossetti,” and many more. In addition, Madox Brown and his wife Emma often gave vocal performances. Ford goes on to say that “Music was represented by Theo. Marzials and Dr. Hueffer, who championed the music of the future in those past days.”17 Marzials was a poet, composer, and singer; and Dr. Hueffer was an important link between the Pre-Raphaelite circle and the music world: he was William Michael Rossetti’s brother-in-law, a musicologist, composer, librettist, music critic for The Times from 1878 to 1889, an early and vocal proponent of the English Musical Renaissance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s neighbor in Cheyne Walk, and the editor of the Tauchnitz edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry. Both Hueffer and Marzials set multiple Christina Rossetti poems to music, and we know that Hueffer and his wife sometimes performed his settings of Christina’s poems at 12 Ibid., 220. 13 Karen Yuen, “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Songs in a Cornfield’

and George Alexander Macfarren’s Songs in a Cornfield.” Unpublished, 25. 14 Recent scholarship by Phyllis Weliver does much to recover this aspect of Victorian social life. 15 Angela Thirlwell, William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 98. 16 Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991), 146. 17 Ford Madox Ford, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green, 1896), 241.

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private gatherings.18 There was also a planned but abandoned collaboration between Hueffer and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—“The Doom of the Sirens: A Lyrical Tragedy” (1869)—for which Dante Gabriel composed a prose sketch outlining the dramatic events for the libretto.19 William Michael and Lucy Rossetti themselves regularly attended concerts and operas, and Angela Thirlwell confirms that their tastes were “classical and highbrow.”20 But William Michael Rossetti’s diary does not focus on musical matters except when they intersect with his other interests: his passion for Shelley and his involvement in the Shelley Society often motivate comments on music, as for instance in diary entries regarding a setting of Shelley’s Hellas by William Christian Sellé and a long entry on a musical soirée put on by the Shelley Society with “various songs from S[helley] set by various composers.”21 A similar Shelleyan interest motivates an important musical event: on July 6, 1887 there was a concert of music based on Shelley’s poetry, hosted in William Michael Rossetti’s home, organized by his wife Lucy and her friend, composer and professional musician Mary Grant Carmichael (who also set poems by Christina Rossetti), and featuring an instrumental ensemble under the direction of Sir Hubert Parry, a leading composer and later head of the Royal College of Music. Parry also set poetry by Christina Rossetti. William Michael Rossetti records in his diary that roughly 110 people attended to hear Parry conduct his own Prometheus music which “is thus (as I understand it) given for the first time.”22 William Michael Rossetti was, in fact, mistaken in thinking the Prometheus music was performed for the first time at this private concert. Indeed, this work’s première in 1880 had been reviewed by Hueffer in The Times. Moreover, Hueffer’s successor as music critic for The Times, John Alexander Fuller-Maitland, singled out the September 1, 1880 première of Parry’s Prometheus Unbound (a work in which Shelley, music, and political circles and ideals coalesced in fascinating ways, as 18 For example: 15 December 1870, William Michael Rossetti, The Diary of W. M. Rossetti: 1870–1873, ed. Odette Bornand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 36; 1 January 1880 in Diary of W. M. R., ADC, box 15, folder 3. 19 Alison Chapman and Joanna Meacock, A Rossetti Family Chronology (Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 235. 20 Thirlwell, 239. 21 Diary of W. M. R., 24 October 1886 and 11 May 1887, ADC, box 15, folder 5. 22 Diary of W. M. R., 6 July 1887, ADC, box 15, folder 5.

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Weliver has recently demonstrated)23 as the inaugural moment of the English Musical Renaissance.24 The Pre-Raphaelites had a number of associations with significant figures in the contemporary developments in music and to musical events that were formative in the development of poetic reputations. The composition and première performance of Macfarren’s cantata Songs in a Cornfield is a fine example. The cantata was published in 1868 and must have been composed not long after the original publication of the poem in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, which had appeared in June of 1866; and so, Macfarren’s selection of it for musical interpretation is a significant and early event in the reception history of this volume, as Yuen convincingly demonstrates.25 Macfarren was already an established and well-respected British composer (he would later become Principal of the Royal Academy of Music and Professor of Music at Cambridge, and was eventually knighted in 1883), so this musical adaptation would have raised the prestige of Christina Rossetti and of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Furthermore, Yuen persuasively paints the February 18, 1869 début as a significant cultural event: it premièred in St. James’s Hall, London’s principal concert hall and one of London’s largest performance venues; the conductor Henry Leslie was a renowned musician and conductor; and the female soloists included “two of the leading female vocalists of their generation.”26 The Musical World’s review of the première performance opens with the statement that this cantata is “the first of its kind having any pretensions of musical importance,” and ends with the claim that Macfarren has “greatly idealized and extended the limits of this poem.”27 23 Phyllis Weliver, “The Parrys and Prometheus Unbound: Actualising Liberalism,” in Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, ed. Sarah Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019), 151–179. 24 Jürgen Schaarwächter, “Chasing a Myth and a Legend: ‘The British Musical Renaissance’ in a ‘Land without music,’” The Musical Times 149 (2008): [53–60], 54. Although the work’s status as originator of a movement is later questioned by Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, an assortment of historians of English music repeat this claim that the English Musical Renaissance follows from this setting of Shelley’s revolutionary text. See Hughes and Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd ed. (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2001), 219–220. 25 Yuen, “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism,” 7–8. 26 Yuen, “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism,” 24–25. The soloists were Emma Charlier,

Louisa Pyne, and Charlotte Dolby. 27 “Songs in a Cornfield,” The Musical World 47, no. 7 (1869): 106–107.

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Although William Michael Rossetti mentions Macfarren’s setting in his note on the poem in Poetical Works, he underestimates the cantata’s success, saying, “To me the music appeared truly beautiful; but I believe it did not take much with the public.”28 This assessment appears inconsistent with the evidence: two of the cantata’s songs were also published separately in 1869; the complete cantata was republished in 1870 in an ottavo edition along with illustrious company (Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Handel’s Acis and Galatea); there was also an 1881 republication in a tonic sol-fa edition,29 another 1885 Novello edition, and evidence that it remained in print in 1894.30 Yuen also records that the cantata was incorporated into the Victorian music educational system and was regularly performed by singing schools,31 and the journal Musical News reported that the cantata was still being performed in 1899.32 Scholarship such as Yuen’s illustrates the degree to which music was instrumental in bringing Pre-Raphaelite poetry to broader audiences, and it also leads to her conjecture that settings such as Macfarren’s cantata illustrate the influence of Pre-Raphaelite poetry on musical style and on new developments in musical composition. There are other poet–musician interactions that are overlooked in Pre-Raphaelite histories: for example, an unpublished 1885 letter from composer Emanuel Aguilar which documents Christina Rossetti’s ongoing relationship with him following their collaboration on his 1880 cantata, Goblin Market.33 This letter records Aguilar’s efforts to use the Rossetti family’s connections in the music world to arrange a performance of his Goblin Market by the St. Cecilia Vocal and Orchestral Society. As a final example, I have also yet to discover in the Pre-Raphaelite record any

28 Christina Georgina Rossetti, The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti: With Memoir

and Notes &c by William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), 484–485. 29 Tonic sol-fa is a system of musical notation based on the relationship between the tones of a key, in which notes are indicated by letters rather than by notes on a staff. 30 Maura Ives, Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2011), 258. 31 Yuen lists reviews in The Musical Times of five different performances from 1881– 1893. Yuen, “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism,” 36, n. 11. 32 “London Concerts,” Musical News (15 April 1899): 396, qtd. in Ives, 258. 33 Emanuel Aguilar, 20 June 1885, ADC, box 19, folder 1. I am grateful to Anna

MacDonald for her assistance in accessing this letter.

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mention of the première performance of a setting of Christina Rossetti’s “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”), composed by Malcolm Lawson (Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s next-door neighbor) which took place at “a large artistic, literary, and musical conversazione held at our neighbour Mr. W.B. Scott’s house in Cheyne Walk.”34 Lawson notes that Christina, Dante Gabriel, and William Michael Rossetti were all in attendance, names many others from the Pre-Raphaelite circle who were also present, and recounts the brief conversation he had with Christina Rossetti regarding his composition. There was clearly interaction and cooperation between the musical world and the Pre-Raphaelite literary circle, investigation of which would shed new light on Pre-Raphaelite poiesis. As long ago as 1984 Susan Parsons made the case that the PreRaphaelite influence on music is “widespread” and “considerably underestimated.”35 Parsons extends her analysis beyond direct connections and known musical settings to embrace the Pre-Raphaelite movement’s more pervasive stylistic and thematic influence on turn-of-the-century musical compositions, noting that in their use of key Pre-Raphaelite themes and preoccupations, such as medievalism, the idealization of women, sensual love, nature, the representations of inner experience, and the use of legend (Arthurian, Celtic, and Norse), leading British composers often evoked a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic.36 Yuen meanwhile urges an exploration of the ways that musical settings “reinforced and modified the conceptual boundaries of Pre-Raphaelitism as articulated in Pre-Raphaelite poetry” and suggests that there is a Pre-Raphaelite style of music recognizable even in the absence of a Pre-Raphaelite text.37 Yuen notes the PreRaphaelite elements in Macfarren’s Songs in a Cornfield, which selects a pre-industrial narrative and setting and revives harmonic features found

34 Malcolm Lawson, “Music to Song of Christina Rossetti,” Notes and Queries 64 (1917), 214. 35 Susan Parsons, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Music,” British Music Society Journal 6 (1984): [1–18] 14. 36 Ibid. 37 Yuen, “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism,” 3.

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in old folk tunes.38 Such cross-fertilization between music and PreRaphaelitism is extensive, and further trans-disciplinary study of it would surely be illuminating.39

William Morris Although significant contemporary and later composers (including Edward Dannreuther, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Harrison, Arnold Bax, and Elgar) set Morris’s poems, Morris did not take a personal interest in the popular Victorian musical developments; but he certainly had direct, meaningful, and influential interactions with music that are distinctly aligned with his overall aesthetic and political project. Morris has often been said to dislike music, but this is a misleading conclusion: more accurately, Morris disliked the musical culture and productions of Victorian society, but he was interested in, moved by, and motivated to promote music from an earlier period.40 The earliest known musical setting of a Pre-Raphaelite poem is a Christmas carol, “Masters in this Hall,” with text written by Morris to accord to an old French dance tune discovered and shared with him by Edmund Sedding, a musician and architect interested in Gothic architecture with whom Morris had come in contact through his apprenticeship at the office of architect George Edmund Street. Sedding arranged Morris’s carol for a four-part chorus and included it in A Collection of Antient Christmas Carols (1860).41 In this early song, Morris aligns his interest in early music with his political agenda, for the song celebrates Christmas as a leveling of class distinction, with a chorus concluding, “God to-day hath poor folk raised / And cast a-down the proud.”42 Swinburne admired the carol greatly; it was

38 Yuen, “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism,” 18 39 For instance, the introduction of Wagner to English audiences (which Hueffer

vigorously supported) was contemporary with Pre-Raphaelitism, and there is much commonality in their interest in medievalism and legend (Parsons, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Music,” 3). 40 Andrew Heywood, “William Morris and Music: Craftsman’s Art?” The Musical Times 139, no. 1864 (1998): 33–38. 41 For a discussion of this carol and Morris’s political chants, see Elizabeth Helsinger, “Poem into Song,” New Literary History 46, no. 4 (2015): [669–690] 684–687. 42 “Masters in This Hall.” Text by William Morris, musical arrangement by Edmund Sedding. A Collection of Antient Christmas Carols (London: Novello, 1860).

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subsequently arranged by multiple composers; in 1916, Holst published his own arrangement of “Masters in this Hall,” incorporating it into his work Three Carols.43 Morris’s connection to Holst is another significant link between Pre-Raphaelitism and music, for, as Andrew Heywood recounts, Holst read Morris, became acquainted with socialism, “joined the Hammersmith Socialist club and listened to George Bernard Shaw’s lectures at Kelmscott House.”44 In 1897 Holst “accepted an invitation to conduct the Socialist Choir”45 ; and Heywood argues that Holst remained a supporter of Morris and his ideology, and that this had an impact on his later life and musical composition.46 Through the lens of music we see the interconnectedness of Morris’s own poetry, politics, aesthetics, and cultural critique—the continuities connecting the reverence for the medieval world order expressed in Morris’s poetry, his Arts and Crafts endeavors, and his interest in early music. Morris loved true popular music, and had a disdain for contemporary culture in which music had become “the plaything of the leisured classes,” a matter of fashion, and a capitalist commercial commodity.47 Moreover, Morris wrote text for many songs that were central to socialist activities and were included in socialist songbooks; in fact, Morris would become the most frequently represented poet in these song anthologies.48 In short, in Morris’s attitude to music we can find yet another expression of his consistent promotion of medieval aesthetics and his critique of Victorian capitalist industrialized social organization.

43 Gustav Holst, Three Carols (London: J. Curwen, 1916). Holst also composed the famous setting of Christina Rossetti’s “A Christmas Carol” (“In the bleak mid-winter”). Recently, Peter Lawson has brought the Rossetti and Morris carols together in a song cycle called “Four Holst Carols” (Gustav Holst, Four Holst Carols [Tewkesbury: Goodmusic, 2012]). 44 Andrew Heywood, “Gustav Holst, William Morris and the Socialist Movement,” The Journal of William Morris Society 11, no. 4 (1996): [39–47] 39–40. 45 Heywood, “Gustav Holst, William Morris and the Socialist Movement,” 40. 46 Ibid. Also, Ian T. Wallace’s thesis convincingly develops further this line of argument

and evidence—see Ian T. Wallace, Socialist Music in Britain: The Influence of William Morris on Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams (Pennsylvania State University, MA thesis, 2014). 47 Editorials, “Music and Socialism.” The Musical Herald (May 1910): 144–145. 48 Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 110.

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In her article “‘A Vestibule of Song’: Morris and Burne-Jones in Chicago,” Elizabeth Helsinger provides a detailed sketch of musical influences on Morris’s aesthetic formation, noting his grandfather’s and uncles’ involvement in church music, and Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s interest in early music and involvement in the Oxford Plain Song Society.49 She observes that music played a prominent role in the circle around Morris, Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and that Morris and Burne-Jones shared an abiding interest in both sacred and secular music of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.50 Burne-Jones’s future wife, Georgiana Macdonald, was a gifted musician, and once Morris and Burne-Jones had moved to London, there were regular social gatherings at which Georgiana played and sang early English and French music. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on music can be seen in Morris’s acknowledged role in the early music revival generally. Dillon Bustin argues that “Victorian conventions of dissent, particularly the medievalism of William Morris” were formative influences on the English folk revival,51 while Heywood suggests that Morris influenced the revival of “early music” through his interest in music of earlier periods realized in “historically authentic performance styles and on the appropriate instruments of the time.”52 Meanwhile, Bernard Shaw, in his role as music critic and promoter of early music, disputes any assumption that Morris was unmusical: [A]s a matter of fact he had a perfect ear, a most musical singing voice, and so fine a sense of beauty in sound (as in everything else) that he could not endure the clatter of the piano forte or the squalling and shouting of the average singer […]; and the viol concerts of M. Dolmetsch pleased him greatly. Indeed, once, during his illness, when M. Dolmetsch played

49 Elizabeth Helsinger, “‘A Vestibule of Song’: Morris and Burne-Jones in Chicago,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 21, no. 1 (2014): [49–69], 51–52; J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. (London: Longman Green, 1899) 1: 3–4. 50 Helsinger, “A Vestibule of Song,” 54–55, 51. 51 Dillon Bustin, “‘The Morrow’s Uprising’: William Morris and the English Folk

Revival,” Folklore Forum 15, no. 1 (1982): [17–38], 17. The English folk revival would go on to have an important influence on the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams. 52 Andrew Heywood, “Morris and Early Music: The Shaw/Dolmetsch Connection,” The Journal of William Morris Society 10, no. 4 (1994): [13–19], 13.

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him some really beautiful music on a really beautiful instrument, he was quite overcome by it.53

Heywood presents a convincing case for Morris’s indirect but significant influence on music through Arnold Dolmetsch, a leading figure in the revival. In collaboration with Burne-Jones and Dolmetsch, Morris planned a Kelmscott Press edition—ultimately unrealized—of Henry VIII’s music book.54 Morris’s influence as mediated through music had an even broader impact internationally and historically through his socialist chants which were frequently performed and anthologized.55 Morris did not compose original music for these chants, but he wrote original text deliberately to fit to well-known pre-existing tunes. J. R. Raynes argues that history and song develop in parallel in the socialist movement,56 while John Bruce Glasier emphasizes the central place that singing was given in the socialist movement: “Almost all its meetings, public and private, begin and end with song.” Glasier also affirms that “it is to William Morris that the Movement owes its richest dower of song.”57 From its earliest beginnings, Morris’s political activity found expression in the poetic texts he wrote for socialist songs. These texts are variously called

53 Aymer Vallance, The Life and Work of William Morris (London: Studio Editions, 1986), 429. 54 Heywood, “Morris and Early Music,” 18. 55 Recent scholarship by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has shown how the reach of Morris’s

chants extended to embrace the Socialist movement’s connections to the Paris Commune (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, “Liberation Ecologies, circa 1871,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 21, no. 4 (2016): [8–16], 12); and Caroline Levine’s NAVSA plenary address “Forms of Sociability: Novels, Numbers, and Other Collectives” has highlighted how Morris’s chants for Socialists can harness through the power of poetry the collective will (Tara MacDonald, “Caroline Levine’s NAVSA Plenary, or What Can the Victorians Teach Us?” Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies Blog [2016]. http://victorianreview.org/?p=1455). 56 J. R. Raynes, “Socialist songs,” The English Review, 1908–1937 5 (1927): [573– 579], 573. https://search-proquest-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/docview/2430774?accoun tid=14701. Accessed June 19, 2019. See also Waters, “Music and the Construction of Socialist Culture,” in British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914, 97–130. 57 John Bruce Glasier, Socialism in Song: An Appreciation of William Morris’s ‘Chants for Socialists’, Together with an Introductory Essay on Poetry and Politics (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920), 2, 4.

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“songs” and “chants,” and Bennett Zon and other sources attest that they were “intended to be recited, rather than sung, and accompanied by the harp or lute—much in the tradition of the medieval minstrel or troubadour,” while anecdotal accounts suggest that they were often sung as well.58 Morris’s songs and chants were often and generously represented in anthologies. Helsinger also points out that these songs made a mark across the Atlantic: Charles Kerr edited and published a collection of socialist and union songs,59 a collection that included five of Morris’s socialist chants and that was reissued many times: “Kerr’s collection, in which no other writer of political lyrics is as well represented as Morris, was widely used as a song-book at both union and socialist events in the US well into the twentieth century; a lesser-known side of Morris’s presence in America.”60 Arthur Davis attributes the awakening of Morris’s interest in political and social questions to the repercussions of the RussoTurkish war (1877–1878) and prints the text of a song which Morris wrote for a public meeting of the Eastern Question Association. “Wake, London Lads!” is Morris’s first political poem (and his only non-Socialist political verse); it was written at the outset of his political activism, and preparations were specifically made to allow it to be sung collectively by the large assembly at a public meeting.61 E. P. Thompson recounts details of the important demonstration in Exeter Hall on the evening of January 16, 1878, an event that is indicative of Morris’s experience with both political activism and music. An organist and choir prepared the audience to sing the song: “There were five verses to the song, and a copy was at every place.” Thompson recounts that “When the great assembly rose to their feet and thundered it out together, people as different in their backgrounds as Henry Broadhurst and Georgie Burne-Jones were deeply moved.”62 As Morris describes the events of the previous evening, he 58 Bennett Zon, “‘Loathsome London’: Ruskin, Morris, and Henry Davey’s History of English Music (1895),” Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): [359–375], 359. 59 Charles H. Kerr, ed. Socialist Songs with Music (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co, 1901). 60 Helsinger, “A Vestibule of Song,” 61. 61 Arthur Davis, “William Morris and the Eastern Question, with a fugitive political

poem by Morris,” in Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf (Charlottesville: Columbia UP, 1941), 28–47. 62 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 219.

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notes, “You will have seen about our music: wasn’t it a good idea?,” and says, I “felt rather excited when I heard them begin to tune up. They stopped at the end of each verse and cheered lustily.”63 Morris’s chants clearly aimed at harnessing the emotional, inspirational, didactic, and political potential of music. In William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, Glasier recounts a socialist meeting in Glasgow: “As Morris returned to his hotel after the meeting, he was accompanied by local socialists, ‘chorusing along the streets his own “March of the Workers” and feeling almost persuaded we were destined to foregather some not far distant day at the barricades.’”64 The collective singing that Morris’s chants fostered transforms the power of the individual will into a communal will, the exact communal stance that is required for the social change Morris envisions. As Helsinger rightly argues, “song played a crucial role in the transformational political work of Morris’s writing throughout the 1880s and 1890s”; Morris mobilized the potential of song “as an active politics,” and the meter, rhyme, language, and syntax of his socialist lyrics are all shaped by this intent to instrumentalize the power of music in the achievement of socialist goals. Helsinger compellingly illustrates how Morris poetically, and particularly rhythmically, constructs his participatory political chants to invoke the political collective action he seeks to inspire. When a crowd marches and chants “The March of the Workers,” (sung to the tune also familiar as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), “such movement is the action of the song: a living fellowship of voices and bodies acting together with concerted will.”65 Morris’s words, deliberately written to be sung to a pre-selected tune, work in a particular way when accompanied by these authorially intended musical gestures. But these poems can also be reinvented through music: while Helsinger accurately describes the effect of “The March of the Workers” when sung to Morris’s original selection of a strident and energizing marching song, this same Morris text more

63 Quoted in J. W. Mackail, 1: 361. 64 John Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement:

Being Reminiscences of Morris’ Work as a Propagandist, and Observations on His Character and Genius, With Some Account of the Persons and Circumstances of the Early Socialist Agitation; Together with a Series of Letters Addressed by Morris to the Author (London et al.: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1921), 40–41. 65 Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 149, 150, 153.

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recently takes on a contemplative, comforting, inspiring, and sometimes mournful interpretation in the hands of a modern composer. The poems themselves are updated and resituated in a current cultural milieu through the interpretive collaborative act of new musical adaptations, demonstrating the ability of Morris’s chants to reach audiences and raise political consciousness up to this day: such updated interpretation is evident in singer/songwriter Darren Hayman’s Chants for Socialists, a 2015 album which features original indie folk rock settings of ten political chants by Morris, recorded at the William Morris Gallery, Kelmscott House, and Kelmscott Manor, and in true socialist sympathy distributed as a free download or as “pay what you want.”66 Finally, Morris’s Christmas carol and his political chants provide instances of Pre-Raphaelite poems in which the text is actively shaped in its original conception and iteration by the song which it will eventually help constitute; but Morris’s words live on with novel and open-ended potentialities, and with new creative musical intervention in new historical moments, new interpretations and meanings emerge.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti In contrast to Morris’s dedication to early music and his purposeful harnessing of music’s power to motivate political commitment, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s musical interest remained in the realms of the poetic, the visual, and the aesthetic, and there has been valuable scholarship on the representation of music conceptually and visually in his literature and art.67 Meanwhile, there have certainly been important musical settings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems, such as Vaughan Williams’s first song cycle, which was based on a selection of sonnets from The House of Life, settings which place Dante Gabriel’s texts at an important nexus in discussions of music history, cultural renewal, the English Musical Renaissance, 66 Darren Hayman, Chants for Socialists. Released 2 February 2015. WIAIWYA Records, vinyl LP and CD, https://darrenhayman.bandcamp.com/album/chants-for-socialists. 67 See for example: Alan Davison, “Woven Songs and Musical Mirrors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Symbolic Physiognomy’ of Music,” The British Art Journal 13, no. 3 (2012): 85–90; Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Dianne Sachko Macleod, “Rossetti’s Two Ligeias: Their Relationship to Visual Art, Music and Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 20, nos. 3–4 (1982): 89–201; Phyllis Weliver, “The Silent Song in D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The House of Life,’” in The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Phyllis Weliver (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 194–212.

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and national musical identity.68 In this section I will focus on one of the most significant settings of “The Blessed Damozel”—Debussy’s 1887– 1888 composition La Damoiselle Élue, a work that marks an important intersection of developing artistry and reputation for both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Debussy and exemplifies the textual and interpretive significance and power that a musical setting can have, for, in spite of the poem’s prior existence and importance, the history of Debussy’s influential composition demonstrates how text and music can exert influence over each other. “The Blessed Damozel” is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s most important literary work: it was first written in 1847, revised throughout his life, and depicted pictorially in the 1870s. Meanwhile, La Damoiselle Élue is an early event in the growing appreciation for the Pre-Raphaelites in France,69 and it marks Debussy’s emergence as “the most significant young French composer of his day.”70 Gabriel Sarrazin’s 1885 book on modern English poets and his translations of select poems increased Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s reputation and influence in France and directly inspired Debussy. The relationships among original text, translation, and composition are not simple. Of course, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem exists in multiple variant forms, and the successive revisions shed light on his evolving aesthetic. Sarrazin’s translation of “The Blessed Damozel” is based on the version published in the 1873 Tauchnitz edition, edited by Hueffer. But Sarrazin’s translation itself exists also in two variant forms: the first, titled “La Damoiselle bénie,” consists of 18 stanzas and was published in Poètes modernes de l’Angleterre in 1885; and the second, “La Damoiselle élue,” translates the complete poem and appeared in La Revue contemporaine in March of the same year. As David Grayson has shown, Debussy customized the text for his cantata, using a “cut and edited conflation” of the two translations.71 Debussy’s musical choices are

68 See Ceri Owen, “Making an English Voice: Performing National Identity During the English Musical Renaissance,” Twentieth-Century Music 13, no. 1 (2016): 77–107. 69 Richard Langham Smith, “Debussy and the Pre-Raphaelites,” 19th-Century Music 5,

no. 2 (1981): [95–109], 96. 70 Mark DeVoto, Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on His Music (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2004), 68. 71 David Grayson, “Claude Debussy Addresses the English-Speaking World: Two Interviews, an Article, and The Blessed Damozel,” Cahiers Debussy 16 (1992): [23–47], 36.

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also interesting: for example, all the voices in Debussy’s heaven are female: a soprano solo Damoiselle, a four-part female chorus; and more surprisingly, a mezzo-soprano female narrator. The music in Debussy’s score climaxes as the Damozel imagines the future moment when, rejoined with her lover in heaven, she will meet Christ and ask Him to allow her and her lover to live eternally as they once did on earth “Dans l’Amour […] Ensemble, moi et lui.”72 Julie McQuinn notes that Debussy’s musical gestures unite “prayer, erotic union and complete faith in God,” and that by musically intensifying the religious-erotic connections in the poem, Debussy’s setting effectively makes sex sacred.73 Significantly, in Debussy’s sensuous and dreamy composition, his 14stanza text omits entirely the viewpoint of the earthly lover, one of the critical cruxes in interpreting Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem.74 This erasure of key sections of the text spoken from the earthbound lover’s perspective constitutes a strong reading of the poem, and one deliberately chosen by Debussy as he pieced together his libretto from Sarrazin’s two translations, only one of which included the earthly lover’s perspective. Stripped of the lover’s viewpoint, Debussy’s cantata removes any framing elements that suggest that this is a dream vision originating in the mind of the bereaved lover, thereby eliminating the earthly lover as a center of feeling or vantage point and immersing the listener directly into a dream vision of the “ange-femme.” With the male lover textually removed from La Damoiselle Élue, it is as if we lose the painting’s predella. Debussy’s text and music focus solely and directly on the upper frame, on the imparadised yet erotic damozel. The effect of the composition is to present “The Blessed Damozel” as a straightforward elevation of human desire to

72 Claude Debussy, La Damoiselle Élue: Poème lyrique d’après D. G. Rossetti. Pour Voix de Femmes, Solo, Choeur et Orchestre, trans. Gabriel Sarrazin (Paris: A. Durand & Fils, 1902), 60–64. 73 Julie McQuinn, “Exploring the Erotic in Debussy’s Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), [124–125] 117–136. 74 For instance, Paul Lauter suggests that Dante Gabriel Rossetti is following Edgar Allan Poe in not only poetically contemplating the death of a beautiful woman but also in making the true subject of his poem the mental state of the bereaved lover, whose disintegrating rationality is charted through the parenthetical comments made by the earthly lover. Read this way, the entire vision should be understood as the “grieving and lonely lover’s projection” (Paul Lauter, “The Narrator of ‘The Blessed Damozel,’” Modern Language Notes 73, no. 5 (1958): [344–348], 346).

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the eternal realm; moreover, Debussy’s interpretation has made a lasting impression on the way the poem continues to be interpreted musically. Debussy’s setting is considered a masterpiece in its musical innovation and its “discreet but unfailing support of the text.”75 But this text is of course a translated and abridged text, and the power relations between text and music become increasingly complicated. In addition to raising Pre-Raphaelitism’s profile in France, Debussy’s masterful setting was so successful that there was also a market for the Dubussy score with an English text. Given that this would require merely a restoration of the poem’s original language, this would seem relatively straightforward. Multiple attempts, however, have proven that this is not the case. Interestingly, as Grayson has discovered, the first of these English adaptations was by Debussy himself. For this 1908 English-language version, Debussy again demonstrated his literary sensibility by radically transforming his vocal melody in places in response to the new text. However, for his retranslated text, Debussy inexplicably had turned to the 1850 Germ version rather than the 1873 Tauchnitz edition that Sarrazin had translated. Further, Debussy’s poor grasp of English resulted in a libretto filled with errors—for example, “blessed,” “being,” “listened” are all given only one syllable, while “gro-ves,” “pea-ce,” “va-gue” are given two. Debussy’s botched attempt was withdrawn by the publisher, and an anonymously adapted English score was issued in its place. But Debussy’s influence on this poem continues to be felt. Parsons says of some later settings, “it is difficult to determine whether they are the direct result of Pre-Raphaelitism or of the influence of Debussy.”76 There have been at least five separate attempts to restore an English text to Debussy’s score—by Debussy, an anonymous translator, Frank Damrosch, Humphrey Procter-Gregg, and Ivor Atkins—and in each of these, meanings continue to be negotiated. Beginning with Rossetti’s own revisions to his poem, there are many textual variations on “The Blessed Damozel”: for instance, the newly rejoined lovers call each other by “virginal chaste names” in The Germ of 1850 and the Poems edition of 1870, “rapturous new names” in an 1872 autograph manuscript, and “heart-remembered names” in Poems of 1881. Debussy uses Sarrazin’s translation “Leurs nouveaux noms d’extase”; but in later

75 DeVoto, p. 93. 76 Parsons, p. 2.

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English adaptations of Debussy’s score Damrosch chooses “virginal chaste names,”77 Procter-Gregg “heav’n-accorded name,”78 and Atkins “heartremembered names.”79 Interestingly, in Atkins’ English adaptation of Debussy’s score, the lover’s perspective that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had placed in parentheses in the original poem and in the predella in his painting, and that Debussy had deleted from his libretto, makes its way back into the score, not as sung text, but as a comment—“I heard her tears”—presumably interpreting the musical meaning of an instrumental passage in the orchestral score.80 Meanwhile, Procter-Gregg comments that he set his new English text “as one might hope to guess Rossetti would have done if he had a feeling for Debussy’s score.”81 Words in the English text are changed to make it possible to sing the score either using “the original French” or the “near ‘original’ English”: for Debussy’s influential score, the musico-literary power structure has clearly been inverted, and now it is the poem that must be accommodated to the music. Finally, I would argue that Debussy’s and other musical settings become part of the history of “The Blessed Damozel.” In this poem’s transmission first poetically, then pictorially, and finally as a musico-literary collaboration, we can trace the decades-long trajectory of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism, from the realistic and spiritualized naturalism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to a “symbolic vagueness” and “musical evocation”82 more aligned with aestheticism. Thus, collaborative musical works evince and interpret the evolution of

77 Claude Debussy, The Blessed Damozel (La Demoiselle élue.), Adapted to the original poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Frank Damrosch (New York: Schirmer, 1908), 9. 78 Claude Debussy, La Damoiselle Elue (The Blessed Damozel): After the text by D. G. Rossetti, English adaptation by Humphrey Procter-Gregg (New York: International Music Company, 1960), 9. 79 Claude Debussy, The Blessed Damozel, adapted to the original poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Ivor Atkins (London and Paris: United Music Publishers, 1948), 9. 80 Debussy and Atkins, p. 27. 81 Debussy and Procter-Gregg, p. 2. 82 Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, “The Synergies

of Mind and Muse: Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Thought and a Comparative Analysis of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poem and Painting The Blessed Damozel and Claude Debussy’s La Damoiselle Elue,” in The Orchestration of the Arts—A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers: The Vibrating Interplay of Sound, Color, Image, Gesture, Movement, Rhythm, Fragrance, Word, Touch, ed. Marlies Kronegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), [113–133], 118.

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Pre-Raphaelite poetics, both during the Pre-Raphaelite movement and through its enduring legacy.

Christina Rossetti Of all the Pre-Raphaelite poets, Christina Rossetti is by far the most popular with composers. Her poems partake of a sensibility, vocabulary, meter, and stanzaic form that make many of them recognizably nascent songs, a quality that is clearly signaled in their titles (a significant number of which include the word “song,” “carol,” “anthem,” “hymn,” “dirge,” or some other musical term). Composers’ interest began very soon after the publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, and her poems continue to be set frequently,—right up to the present day—resulting in roughly 2000 compositions that have been vital in transporting Christina Rossetti’s poetry outward beyond British national boundaries and forward into the twenty-first century.83 These works bring her poetry to new audiences, for musical settings often involve translations into other languages, including French, German, Italian, Welsh, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, Russian, Afrikaansche, Chinese, and Japanese. These settings are necessarily readings of the selected text, and they often break new ground interpretively. Christina Rossetti herself welcomed, encouraged, and supported this creative engagement with her work, writing to her publisher Alexander Macmillan, “The more of my things get set to music the better pleased I am.”84 By all accounts, Christina Rossetti was neither particularly musical nor a serious music lover. She does however mention in a letter trying out at home a new musical setting of one of her poems: “Now my mother has played and 83 Incomplete lists of and references to musical settings can be found in J. P. Anderson’s bibliography in Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1898); in WMR’s notes in Christina Georgina Rossetti, The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti: With Memoir and Notes &c by William Michael Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904); in Bryan N. S. Gooch and David S. Thatcher, Musical Settings of Early and Mid-Victorian Literature: A Catalogue (New York: Garland, 1979); and in Chapman and Meacock and Ives. Musical settings are now being identified, gathered, and catalogued in an open-access online research archive Christina Rossetti in Music: See Christina Rossetti in Music, University of Ottawa, 2016. https://biblio. uottawa.ca/omeka2/christinarossettiinmusic/. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous funding for this project. 84 Christina Rossetti, The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. Antony H. Harrison, 4 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997–2004), 1: 211.

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I (after a fashion) sung it, and I am able not only to return thanks for honour done me but to say how truly I like the air.”85 This tableau of Frances at the piano and Christina Rossetti singing is not an image familiar to us. Later, Christina Rossetti remained aware of developments in the field of music, demonstrated in a November 25, 1886 letter to William Michael Rossetti that shows she was conversant in musical vocabulary including tonic sol-fa notation, “crochets,” “minims,” “treble stave,” and “major key of b flat.”86 Christina Rossetti felt authorial pride both in her remarkable popularity with composers and in what Caroline Gemmer called the “musicability” of her verse, and in the booming Victorian market for parlour music and art songs, certain verses were set repeatedly.87 In Sensibility and English Song, Banfield lists the era’s 22 most frequently set poems, and two of these are by Christina Rossetti: “A Birthday” and “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”). According to Banfield, only Shelley and Tennyson had more poems of such popularity with composers.88 Maura Ives notes that “Song” alone was set at least 40 times before 1900,89 and there are over a hundred additional settings since 1900 already catalogued in the Christina Rossetti in Music archive.90 Christina Rossetti’s delight in this aspect of her fame is clear in an 1890 letter to William Michael Rossetti, in which she remarks on a composer’s asking her publisher whether “When I am dead” had ever been set to music: “It seems ‘Macmillan’ knew not: fancy not knowing whether ‘When–’ has ever been set!!! (Authorial conceit.)”91 The interest in setting these two poems and their evolving cultural resonance is compelling: the singing of “When I am dead” figures as part of the plot in at least three late-Victorian fictional works92 ; and

85 Letters, 1: 300–301. 86 Letters, 3: 349–350. 87 Letters, 2: 217. 88 Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th

Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 1: 9. 89 Ives, 15. 90 See Christina Rossetti in Music, University of Ottawa, 2016. https://biblio.uottawa.

ca/omeka2/christinarossettiinmusic/. 91 Letters, vol. 4, p. 176. 92 See Marianne Van Remoortel, Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by

the Press (Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 84–85.

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to date there are at least 113 settings of “A Birthday,” the lyric that Virginia Woolf quotes when remembering luncheon parties before the War and their “humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves.”93 For Woolf, this poem articulated an illusion of love that was lost after the Great War; nevertheless, “A Birthday” has continued to be taken up by composers since then, and occasionally with interpretive swerves that substantially influence its meaning, as for instance when it is set as a hymn or as a feminist anthem.94 In addition, since the 1860s Christina Rossetti’s poetry also often reached audiences through the context of Christian worship, specifically, as text for congregational singing. Holst’s setting for “A Christmas Carol” (“In the bleak mid-winter”)—now arguably her most well-known poetic text due to its musical settings—was commissioned by musical editor Vaughan Williams for The English Hymnal (1906), a culturally significant and enduring collection.95 “In the bleak mid-winter” is only one example of her many poems that have been remediated as hymn and incorporated into worship in a wide variety of Christian denominations and religious contexts. Specifically, Christina Rossetti’s employment of the Tractarian principle of Reserve liberates her hymns from the strict confines of Anglican worship. Reserve is a fundamental principle of Tractarian poetics, and it calls for a deliberate reticence in communicating religious truth. Such understatement of religious ideas enables the adoption of Christina Rossetti’s texts in hymnals for a wide range of Protestant denominations (helpfully profiled on Hymnary.org), a significant topic

93 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), 15. 94 Ruth Byrchmore’s setting of “A Birthday” was winner of the Liturgical Category in

the 2005 British Composer Awards (Ruth Byrchmore, “A Birthday,” Text by Christina Rossetti. [London: Novello, 2004]). Rhiannon Randle’s setting was commissioned by BBC radio 3 in 2015 for International Women’s Day (Rhiannon Randle, “Like a Singing Bird,” in Echoes from Willow Wood [London: Stainer & Bell, 2015]). I am grateful to Sarah Pennington for her research on settings of “A Birthday” for the Christina Rossetti in Music digital archive and website. 95 Benjamin Britten’s original setting of “In the Bleak Mid-winter” would also be incorporated into song cycle A Boy was Born (1934). Thus, this one poem connects Christina Rossetti with Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Britten, three leading composers of their era. I am grateful to Emily McConkey for her research on settings of “A Christmas Carol” (“In the bleak mid-winter”) for the Christina Rossetti in Music digital archive and website.

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that invites further study.96 Reserve also enables musical settings of Christina Rossetti’s religious poems to cross over from sacred to secular musical repertories, as the many commercial recordings of “In the Bleak Mid-winter” demonstrate. Christina Rossetti herself likely recognized that music was valuable as a vehicle that would increase her profile and bring her poetry to a wider audience. As the piano became a fixture in Victorian middle-class parlours, the demand for popular music steadily and exponentially increased; but Christina Rossetti’s verse also seems important in the musical history of the Victorian development from parlour ballad to art song and of the emergence of female composers. While the vast productivity of the Victorian song market has been criticized for its “mindless facility” and “musical complacency,”97 these broad strokes do not paint the whole picture. First, there was an important division in the nineteenth-century song repertory. There was a very large category of popular, recreational song for a mass middle-class market; but there was also a smaller category of more serious song or art song. Interestingly, from the outset, Christina’s verse was sought out by composers who would play significant roles in the development of serious music composition in England, including Hueffer, Macfarren, Mackenzie, Cowen, and Somervell, and by the principal women composers of the day, including Caroline Reinagle, Virginia Gabriel, Alice Mary Smith, Agnes Zimmerman, Mary Carmichael, and Maude Valérie White. The connections among these composers are likely to be interesting and worth investigating. For instance, the all-important first Christina Rossetti musical setting was of “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”), composed by Alice Mary Smith, who had written to Macmillan to request permission to set this poem.98 This setting was published, and although no score has yet been recovered, it was still known in 1917, as a note by John B. Wainewright in Notes and Queries attests.99 Although the 1860s were still dominated by overly sentimental and musically unambitious parlour ballads, it seems that within the history of musical settings of Christina Rossetti’s poems 96 Harry Plantinga, Hymnary.org, Calvin University, 2007. https://hymnary.org/. Accessed 19 June 2019. 97 Banfield, 1: 3–4. 98 Letters, 1: 211. 99 John B. Wainewright, “Music to Song of Christina Rossetti,” Notes and Queries 63 (1917): 192.

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there is also a history of musical development, for Smith was a serious and successful composer, likely the first British woman to compose and have publicly performed a full symphony.100 Furthermore, Smith may have shared her musical discovery of Christina Rossetti’s poems with Macfarren, with whom she studied and whose cantata setting of “Songs in a Cornfield” was also a significant development in British vocal music and in the reception history of Christina Rossetti. It seems that the Rossettis increasingly recognized the purpose as well as aesthetic value of seeing their writing converge collaboratively with music. They were aware of the distinctions between popular music, on the one hand, and art song or serious music. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s comments on hearing of a setting of “Goblin Market” register this distinction: I was glad to hear of some venturous mortal having set Goblin Market to music, though I cannot exactly see the aim and end of the act unless he has a public performance in view and at command. It would hardly do for a five or ten minutes’ brilliant trifling at the evening piano.101

The setting to which he refers—Aguilar’s Goblin Market: Cantata—is remarkable in a number of ways. It is the only nineteenth-century setting of this celebrated poem, as Christina Rossetti granted Aguilar exclusive rights. Even more significantly, this is a rare example of a direct collaboration between Christina Rossetti and a composer, for Christina worked with Aguilar in adapting and abridging her poem for the cantata, resulting in an authorially approved variant text of her most important poem.102 The changes to the text are pervasive, with the narrative now being primarily related in the first person by Lizzie, Laura, and the chorus of goblins. As Ives rightly observes, the revisions also “contradict aspects of the poem that have been influential in contemporary readings of it” by emphasizing the distinctions between the two sisters and by changing 100 Ian Graham-Jones, The Life and Music of Alice Mary Smith (1839–1884), A Woman Composer of the Victorian Era: A Critical Assessment of Her Achievement, with a foreword by Roger Parker (Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), vii. 101 Quoted in Letters, 2: 215n. 102 The transcribed libretto is available on the Christina Rossetti in Music website.

See Christina Rossetti in Music, University of Ottawa, 2016. https://biblio.uottawa.ca/ omeka2/christinarossettiinmusic/exhibits/show/aguilar-goblin-market/libretto-adaptedpoem.

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the ending so that Laura is never depicted regaining her voice or being reintegrated into society.103 The adapted text moralizes about resisting temptation, but this is never depicted as sexual or erotic. Lizzie relates Jeanie’s tale as a warning that accepting goblin fruits leads to decline and untimely death, but there is no mention that Jeanie “should have been a bride,” or that it was “for joys brides hope to have” that Jeanie “Fell sick and died.”104 Lizzie’s physical assault and symbolic rape at the hands of the goblins has been toned down to an “interview with the goblins.”105 In the cantata, on Lizzie’s return home Laura exclaims: Lizzie, Lizzie, Have you tasted For my sake the bitter sweetness? Must your life like mine be wasted, Maim’d and marr’d before completeness?106

The change is significant: gone is the unmistakable sexual connotation of “fruit forbidden” that leads to “undoing” and “ruin,” vocabulary in the poem that suggests a sexual fall. Also omitted in the cantata is the line “Eat me, drink me, love me” with its Eucharistic, carnal, and lesbian overtones.107 While the poem “Goblin Market” had originally been aimed at an adult audience, the new cantata was intended to be sung by younger performers, as is indicated in the subtitle “Cantata, for treble voices”— “treble” customarily referring to young female and unchanged male voices. In the revised text, neither soloists nor chorus would sing lines suggesting sexual knowledge unbefitting a Victorian adolescent. This surmise regarding the cantata’s intended school-age performers is borne out in its second printing in a series of “Cantatas for schools and 103 Ives, 16–17. The Rossettis attended a modest performance of Aguilar’s composition at the composer’s home on 10 January 1880 (Diary of WMR, ADC box 15, folder 3). 104 Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” in Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems, text by R. W. Crump, Notes and Introduction by Betty S. Flowers (London: Penguin, 2001), [5–20], 13, ll. 313–315. 105 Emanuel Abraham Aguilar, Goblin Market: Cantata, for Treble Voices, Text by Christina Rossetti, adapted by Emanuel Aguilar and Christina Rossetti (London: Hutchings & Romer, 1880), 33. 106 Aguilar and Rossetti, p. 46. 107 Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market,” 17, ll. 479, 482, 483, and 471.

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classes.”108 Like the later verbal–visual hybrids in illustrated versions of “Goblin Market” that redirect the text from an adult to a juvenile audience, Aguilar’s cantata—with Christina Rossetti’s explicit approval— revises, remediates, and interprets Christina’s masterpiece poem. The cantata then adds a new genre and an earlier and authorially approved instance to Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s discussion of “Goblin Market” as a cross-audienced poem, for this 1880 cantata pre-dates the conversion of “Goblin Market” to the juvenile illustrated book market that Kooistra chronicles.109 Other important settings of “Goblin Market” take the poem to new audiences, eras, and cultural settings, and into a new language and new interpretive approaches. Aguilar’s exclusive rights expired at the end of the century, and in 1901 Vittorio Ricci—an Italian composer based in Florence—published his Goblin Market (Der Gnomen Markt).110 With a libretto in both English and in German (translated by Willy Alexander Kastner) and published in London, New York, and Leipzig, Ricci’s setting clearly had an international audience as its target. The next new setting comes over half a century after Ricci’s, and it is a harbinger of the critical recuperation of “Goblin Market” by feminist literary critics. English composer Ruth Gipps is the first female composer to write a setting of this complex poem, and her 1954 cantata is a strong reading in that it takes a decidedly female musical perspective and breaks new interpretive ground that anticipates the feminist readings that began their significant emergence in literary critical history in the 1970s.111 Biographer Jill Halstead remarks that Goblin Market is the culmination of a series of Gipps compositions that traced “experiences from a female perspective” and explored themes of sexuality, the female body, pleasure, and punishment.112 While other later settings—for example, those by Aaron Jay Kernis and Polly 108 Ives, 265. 109 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration (Athens: Ohio UP,

2002), 195. 110 Vittorio Ricci, Goblin Market (Der Gnomen Markt). Text by Christina Rossetti,

adapted by M. C. Gillington, trans. Willy Alexander Kastner (London: Joseph Williams; New York: Edw. Schuberth; Leipzig: Breitkopf & Haertel, 1901). 111 Ruth Gipps, Goblin Market: Cantata for Two Soprano Soloists, S.S.A. Chorus and String Orchestra (or Piano). Text by Christina Rossetti (London: Novello, 1954). 112 Jill Halstead, Ruth Gipps: Anti-Modernism, Nationalism and Difference in English Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 126–127.

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Pen—musically depict Laura’s feast as a hectic, frenzied abandonment, Gipps emphasizes the sensual pleasures of it.113 Gipps’s focus throughout remains on the sisters’ subjective experience, to the exclusion of concerns with external social judgment and threat of punishment, a reading that is in part achieved through the omission of all lines referring to Jeanie, the moral exemplum that charts the fate of the fallen woman. Gipps also omits the poem’s coda in which the mature and rehabilitated Laura— now a wife and mother—gathers the sisters’ “little ones” around her to teach them the lessons learned through her experience. This textual redaction makes the cantata’s satisfying final message the simple fact of Laura’s recovery itself—rather than Laura’s moral interpretation of her experience or her social recovery. Having removed the poem’s internal child audience, Gipps’s libretto lets the main narrative remain directly addressed to its adult listening audience and removes any limiting or prescriptive moral overlay. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis’s 1995 setting is an impressive major work in which each syllable of the unaltered and unabridged narrated poem is placed exactly within the musical score and precisely notated rhythmically: probably the most detailed and sustained interpretation of the poem’s irregular meter to date, and an interesting use of the idiom of musical notation in prosodic analysis. Significantly, Kernis also takes his interpretation into a darker direction: “I thought that such a dark story warranted a similarly gloomy musical language,” referring to the work’s often dissonant and densely textured sound.114 His composition also presents an intersection of inter-art influences, for Kernis traces his inspiration to a particular illustrated version of “Goblin Market”: “the Dover reprint … (with piquant illustrations by Laurence Housman),” an edition that presented a more grotesque and sexualized vision of Christina Rossetti’s poem.115 Thus, in Kernis’s setting textual, visual, and musical channels of interpretation intersect in complex and

113 Aaron Jay Kernis, Goblin Market. Text by Christina Rossetti (New York: Associated

Music Publishers, 1995); Pen, Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon, Goblin Market: By Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon; Music by Polly Pen, Adapted from the poem by Christina Rossetti (Dramatists Play Service, 1985). 114 Quoted in Leta E. Miller, Aaron Jay Kernis (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 79. 115 Kernis, “A Note on Goblin Market,” quoted in Kooistra, 56–57, 85–90.

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fascinating ways, as new meanings are extracted from the poem and influence flows through Housman’s visual realization of it, to Kernis’s musical interpretation of the text, and to the work’s 1995 staging as mime, an example of what Kooistra calls “a new form of illustration operating live in three dimensions.”116 Other twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations of “Goblin Market” bring new interpretations to the poem and breathe new artistic life into it. These recent musical interpretations present a stunning array of genres and approaches, including a ballet, an experimental structural and psychological study of the poem, choral settings, a chamber opera/ballet, operatic settings, a one-woman show, music theatre interpretations, and one circus theatre production.117 Moreover, these new adaptations make significant creative additions by adding narrative frames and psychological perspectives, by bringing “Goblin Market” into intertextual dialogue with other Rossetti poems, and by updating the poem’s sexual mores. Composers continue to innovate and experiment as they respond to Christina Rossetti’s accessible diction, her emotional resonance, the suggestiveness that conveys complex meanings veiled beneath a simple surface, and her characteristic focus on eternal questions that pre-occupy humans across cultures and through historical eras. Overall, Pre-Raphaelite poetry’s relevance and appeal today cannot be doubted in light of both the impressive Pre-Raphaelite presence in the music repertory and the number of musical compositions based on Pre-Raphaelite poems that have been created continuously since the nineteenth century. As Helsinger has commented, “when a poem, set to a tune, is widely sung, it enters a new life as song”; and as Helsinger adds, this is sometimes “a much wider life” for a poem.118 Musical composition is an energizing force that gives new life to Pre-Raphaelite poems; it is an ongoing active creative collaborative engagement that extends and makes contemporary the legacy and activity of Pre-Raphaelite poiesis.

116 Kooistra, 270. 117 See Christina Rossetti in Music. 118 Helsinger, “Poem into Song,” 669, 671.

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Parsons, Susan. “The Pre-Raphaelites and Music.” British Music Society Journal 6 (1984): 1–18. Pater, Walter. “School of Giorgione.” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1913. Pen, Polly and Peggy Harmon. Goblin Market: By Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon. Music by Polly Pen. Adapted from the Poem by Christina Rossetti. Dramatists Play Service, 1985. Plantinga, Harry. Hymnary.org. Calvin University, 2007. Accessed 19 June 2019. https://hymnary.org/. Randle, Rhiannon. “Like a Singing Bird.” In Echoes from Willow Wood. London: Stainer & Bell, 2015. Raynes, J. R. “Socialist Songs.” The English Review, 1908–1937 , 5 (1927): 573–579. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://search-proquest-com.proxy.bib. uottawa.ca/docview/2430774?accountid=14701. Ricci, Vittorio. Goblin Market (Der Gnomen Markt). Text by Christina Rossetti, adapted by M.C. Gillington, trans. Willy Alexander Kastner. London: Joseph Williams; New York: Edw. Schuberth; Leipzig: Breitkopf & Haertel, 1901. Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market. In Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Text by R.W. Crump, Notes and Introduction by Betty S. Flowers. London: Penguin, 2001. Rossetti, Christina. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Edited by Antony H. Harrison. 4 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997–2004. Rossetti, Christina Georgina. The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti: With Memoir and Notes &c by William Michael Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1904. Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti. Vol. 1. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895. Rossetti, William Michael. Diary of William Michael Rossetti. Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia, box 15, folder 5. Rossetti, William Michael. Rossetti Papers, 1862–1870. A Compilation by William Michael Rossetti. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1903. Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Rossetti, William Michael. The Diary of W.M. Rossetti: 1870–1873. Edited by Odette Bornand. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Schaarwächter, Jürgen. “Chasing a Myth and a Legend: ‘The British Musical Renaissance’ in a ‘Land Without Music.’” The Musical Times 149 (2008): 53–60. Scott, Derek B. The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989. “Songs in a Cornfield.” The Musical World 47, no. 7 (1869): 106–107. Smith, Richard Langham. “Debussy and the Pre-Raphaelites.” 19th-Century Music 5, no. 2 (1981): 95–109.

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Swafford, Joanna. Songs of the Victorians. University of Virginia, 2013. Accessed 23 May 2013. http://www.songsofthevictorians.com/. Thirlwell, Angela. William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2003. Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Vallance, Aymer. The Life and Work of William Morris. London: Studio Editions, 1986. Van Remoortel, Marianne. Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press. Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Wainewright, John B. “Music to Song of Christina Rossetti.” Notes and Queries 63 (1917): 192. Wallace, Ian T. Socialist Music in Britain: The Influence of William Morris on Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Pennsylvania State University, MA thesis, 2014. Waters, Chris. British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. Weliver, Phyllis. “The Parrys and Prometheus Unbound: Actualising Liberalism.” In Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject. Edited by Sarah Collins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Weliver, Phyllis. “The Silent Song in D. G. Rossetti’s ‘The House of Life.’” In The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Edited by Phyllis Weliver. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005: 194–212. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas. Edited by Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992. Yuen, Karen. “Bound by Sound: Music, Victorian Masculinity, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Edited by Graeme Smart and Amelia Yeates. Special Issue on “Victorian Masculinities.” Critical Survey 20, no. 3 (2008): 79–96. Yuen, Karen. “Music and Pre-Raphaelitism: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Songs in a Cornfield’ and George Alexander Macfarren’s Songs in a Cornfield.” Unpublished. Zon, Bennett. “‘Loathsome London’: Ruskin, Morris, and Henry Davey’s History of English Music (1895).” Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 359–375.

CHAPTER 7

Christina Rossetti’s Emblematic Poetics Heather McAlpine

Childlike and playful, suggestive and strange, Christina Rossetti’s first major long poem, “Goblin Market,” has received astoundingly varied criticism from Rossetti’s own time to the present. Just as the profusion of ripe goblin fruits overwhelms Laura’s judgment, the poem’s abundance of sensuous imagery and intertextual allusions can also overwhelm its readers’ interpretive skill, reducing them to the most basic of critical questions: how am I to read this? The poem has been interpreted as a sexual fantasy, either lesbian or heterosexual,1 a critique of advertising and

1 Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (New York: Viking, 1994), 232–235; Nancy Welter, “Women Alone: Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” in Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006), 138–148.

H. McAlpine (B) University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_7

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consumer culture,2 a feminist manifesto,3 a theological meditation,4 and, in the biographical mode, as evidence that Rossetti was sexually abused.5 Despite what this might suggest about the polysemous openness of the poem, “right reading” is a central concern of nearly all Rossetti’s work, the fundamental assumption of which, as Mary Arseneau has shown, is a “theologically based belief that the created world is capable of communicating moral and spiritual meaning,” if we are prepared to receive it.6 David Kent and P. G. Stanwood explain that “by what she described as the supernaturalizing of the reader’s eyes, [Rossetti…] hoped to help them read the text of everyday life to be filled with […] ‘spiritual lessons’ and ‘heavenly meanings.’”7 In Rossetti’s commitment to moral didacticism and her interest in illustration, several critics have discerned an indebtedness to the tradition of the emblem, a verbal–visual hybrid genre of literature that first emerged in the Renaissance. Gisela Hönnighausen has examined Rossetti’s use of floral emblem imagery; Mary Arseneau and D. M. R. Bentley note meaningful parallels between Peter Parley’s popular Victorian emblem book about plants and Rossetti’s own Called to Be Saints 8 ; and by demonstrating that her brother was exposed to Anglo-Dutch emblems, Bentley’s 2 Krista Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2008); Victor Roman Mendoza, “‘Come Buy’: The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’” ELH 73, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 913–947, https://www.jstor.org/stable/300 30043. 3 Janet Galligani Casey, “The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’” Victorian Poetry 29 (Spring 1991): 63–78; Eileen Fauset and Elizabeth Russell, “Christina Rossetti: Contemporary Feminist,” BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 6 (1995): 143–155. 4 Linda E. Marshall, “‘Transfigured to His Likeness’: Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’” University of Toronto Quarterly 63, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 429–450; Marylu Hill, “‘Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: Eucharist and the Erotic Body in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’” Victorian Poetry 43, no. 3 (Winter 2005), 455–472. 5 Marsh, CR: A Writer’s Life, 258–264. 6 Mary Arseneau, “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford

Movement, and ‘Goblin Market,’” Victorian Poetry 31, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 79. 7 David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood, eds. Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 12. 8 Mary Arseneau and D. M. R. Bentley, “Peter Parley and the Rossettis,” English Language Notes 31, no. 1 (September 1993): 56–60.

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work on Dante Gabriel has hinted at Rossetti’s familiarity with that tradition.9 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s studies, particularly “The Dialogue of Image and Text in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song,” and Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History, go further than any other in identifying Christina’s compositional method as emblematic. As Kooistra demonstrates, Christina pursued visual–verbal hybridity throughout her career, hand-illustrating personal copies of her own writings and books by authors she admired, seeking illustrated publication, and conceiving several of her own books as illustrated volumes.10 While her interest in illustration may have been due, in part, to marketing savvy, Kooistra argues that it was also a way of “introducing a nonlinguistic form and a hermeneutic framework” that would extend the meaning of her poetry.11 This approach to poetic practice, intended to call attention to the meanings encoded in the natural world and encourage exegetical skill in readers, is a central feature of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, though applied in different ways by its members. By placing image and text together on the page, Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites taught their audience to find figural correspondences in the world by fostering a “hermeneutic habit of interpreting all material signs for their symbolic significance.”12 Viewing the Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) volume as a book belonging to the emblem tradition yields significant insights into the title poem, that poem’s relationship to the other poems in the collection, the coherence of the volume as a whole, and the extent to which Rossetti’s moral-didactic poetics relies on emblematic strategies.13 I want to argue that Goblin Market and Other Poems is in fact an extended “naked” or unillustrated emblem: the title poem plays the role of an emblematic picture while the poems in the “Devotional Pieces” section act as an elaborate explication, reprising and moralizing the imagery of “Goblin 9 D. M. R. Bentley, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Anglo-Dutch Emblem Tradition,” Victorian Newsletter 108 (Fall 2005): 6–13. 10 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2002), 3. 11 Ibid., 6. 12 Ibid., 44. 13 All quotations from the Goblin Market volume in this essay use the text from the R. W. Crump and Betty Flowers edition of The Complete Poems: Christina Rossetti (London: Penguin, 2001).

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Market” through direct references to scripture. The whole volume is an emblematic performance, asserting and demonstrating the importance of cultivating one’s ability to “read” the world correctly and act accordingly in the presence of temptation. As I have argued elsewhere, the representational strategies that characterize English emblem books play a more central role in Pre-Raphaelite poetics than has been acknowledged, and reading Pre-Raphaelite works with an awareness of this connection offers a new framework for understanding the movement’s engagements with questions of ontology and representation.14 Despite pursuing divergent artistic paths, Pre-Raphaelite artists and authors consistently sought to integrate morality with aesthetics and reaffirm the connections between signs and things in a period when that relationship seemed especially strained. The emblem, a verbal–visual language which proposes to establish a system of signs with necessary and therefore stable meanings by presenting natural objects as markers of higher truth, was a crucial part of this project. While the emblem promises “truth to nature” in art, its self-reflexivity also brings attention to the operations of signs themselves, making their reliability (or unreliability) an object of concern.

Defining the Emblem But what, exactly, is an emblem? We might begin by describing it as a genre of literature, arising in the Renaissance, that combines an allegorical picture (pictura) with a verse explication of that picture (explicatio) and a pithy motto (or lemma) on a page. This tripartite configuration of picture, text, and motto represents the most normative model, but emblems evolved beyond this type. For example, each page in English emblematist George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moderne (1635) (see Fig. 7.1) displays an illustration ringed by a motto, under which an explication of the “lesson” or “moral” of the emblem is given in verse.15 In Andrew Willet’s Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una (1592) (see Fig. 7.2), on the other hand, the self-described “emblems”

14 Heather McAlpine, “‘Thoughts Towards Nature’: Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in The Germ,” JPRS 20 (Fall 2011): 5–24. 15 Emblem III, Book 1 of George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moderne (1635).

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Fig. 7.1 George Wither, Emblem III, Book 1 in A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moderne, quickened with metricall illustrations, both Moral and divine, 1635

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Fig. 7.2 Andrew Willet, Emblem 3, Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una, 1592

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consist only of text, which either discusses an absent picture or typographically creates an image in the manner of ancient Greek pattern poetry.16 Willet’s own name for this variation, a “naked emblem,” is still applied in criticism to unillustrated emblematic works. But while Willet’s text calls itself emblematic, it does not resemble Wither’s. And even Willet’s naked emblems come closer to fitting the normative definition than some other texts identified as emblematic. My approach to the emblem follows that developed by German emblem scholars Albrecht Schöne17 and Walter Jöns18 and espoused by American emblem scholar Daniel Russell, all of whom argue that the emblem is better understood as a discursive process rather than as the arrangement of specific verbal and visual components together on a page. This approach recognizes the emblematic structures at work in unillustrated and otherwise non-normatively emblematic texts. Jöns’s characterization of the emblem as a mode of thought (Denkform) is particularly helpful in this regard: it defines the emblem’s central feature as its analogical view of natural objects and historical events as signifying ideas beyond themselves, “independent[ly] of the subjectivity of the writer or artist, observer or reader,”19 necessarily rather than arbitrarily. Emblems present an object they subsequently explicate as exemplifying a moral or religious lesson, a process that assumes a set of correspondences between the visible world and invisible truths. For example, Emblem XX, Book 3 of George Wither’s Emblemes (1635)20 (see Fig. 7.3) explicates the image of a pelican plucking its breast and feeding its blood to its young—behavior believed natural to pelicans—as a divinely authored reminder of Christ’s sacrifice.21 The emblem is thus tied to theories of language: the devotional emblem tradition sees those correspondences as ordained by God and therefore intrinsic, while other varieties, like the 16 Emblem 3 of Andrew Willet, Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una (1592). 17 Albrecht Schöne, Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock (C. H. Beck,

1964). 18 Walter Jöns. Das ‘Sinnen-Bild’. Studien zur allegorischen Bildlichkeit bei Andreas Gryphius (J. B. Metzlersche, 1966). 19 Peter Daly and Mary V. Silcox, The Modern Critical Reception of the Emblem (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1991), 13. 20 Emblem XX, Book 3, George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) 21 Daly, “Pelican,” 85.

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Fig. 7.3 George Wither, Emblem XX, Book 3 in A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moderne, quickened with metricall illustrations, both Moral and divine, 1635

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rhetorical emblem tradition, view them as associated by convention but prior to the emblem-maker’s intervention. Both Schöne and Russell characterize the emblem as a literary genre that is based on and teaches a hermeneutic habit. Emblems seek to convey particular truths, but they also (and more importantly) model interpretation itself: by learning to read emblems, it was thought one could also learn to “read” the world outside the text for higher meaning.

Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics Emblematic practices of reading and writing shaped the Pre-Raphaelites’ moral aesthetic by offering an approach to the representation of natural imagery that promised “truth to Nature,” the affirmation of the reliability of signs, and the reintegration of moral and religious sensibilities in art and poetry. Emblematic strategies facilitated the Pre-Raphaelite movement’s figural representation of nature at a moment of particular cohesiveness for the group (in such text-image constructions in The Germ as “The Child Jesus: A Record Typical of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries,” for instance), and were subsequently deployed by individual members in ways that correspond to differences and shifts in these writers’ approaches, aims, and beliefs.22 Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins, both of whom saw the natural world as a system of signs pointing to God, use emblems as a sacramental strategy in their poetry. Dante Gabriel Rossetti clings to emblems for stability against ontological doubt, but as his revisions to earlier works like “A Last Confession” show, he exchanges devotional emblem imagery for imagery from secular and erotic emblems. Charles Algernon Swinburne’s invocation of emblems to treat the sublime reveals his nostalgia for the faith they represent, but his works expose the emblem’s limitations as a strategy for representing higher truths, as well as the impossibility of higher truths themselves. And, though they often resemble normative emblem texts, William Morris’s works register anxiety over the question of interpretation. His designs for domestic interiors, on the other hand, work emblematically to convey a political message. The emblem’s representational practices thus influence the development of Pre-Raphaelite poetics in a wide range of its manifestations.

22 Heather McAlpine, Emblematic Strategies in Pre-Raphaelite Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

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Disciplinary boundaries in scholarship and the fluidity of emblem discourse itself are major reasons the influence of emblems on Victorian culture and the Pre-Raphaelites’ moral aesthetic have been overlooked or underappreciated, but another is—ironically—the prominence of existing scholarship on other figural strategies of representation.23 In particular, George Landow’s and Herbert Sussman’s valuable work on Biblical typology has highlighted the extent of Biblical allusion in Victorian works but ignores the emblematic forms this can take. Typology is a method of Biblical interpretation in which persons and events in the Old Testament (“types”) are read as prefiguring the persons and events of the New (“antitypes”). Erich Auerbach explains that typological hermeneutics understands type and antitype as connected “vertically” in time through divine providence, which is “alone able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding.”24 When we more clearly distinguish the signifying practices that derive from the emblem tradition from those that descend from typology, it becomes apparent that typology and emblematics are distinct, if related, practices. In Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (1980), for instance, Landow traces the image of the “smitten rock” through several Victorian works. This image is a reference to Moses’ smiting of the rock in the wilderness, which miraculously poured forth water, saving the Israelites from thirst. Read typologically, this event is a prefiguration of the Crucifixion, in which Christ’s body, like the rock, is pierced, and the water and blood that flow from the wounds save mankind from spiritual death. The image is thus a typological reference because it points to an historical “type-antitype” narrative unit, but its presentation in the work of art is emblematic because it collapses type and antitype into a single object. The two historical poles have merged in an image that signifies Christ’s redeeming power due to its origins in the biblical text. But while the original typological narrative unit is alluded to, its dehistoricization in the single image transforms it into an emblem. Typology is indeed an important structural feature of Victorian literature, 23 Adding to the confusion is the fact that what constituted an emblem evolved over time as emblems were adapted for different ends, so synchronic statements are seldom useful. Daniel Russell, among others, doubts modern emblem theorists will ever find a “general definition of the emblem which will provide an acceptable description of all emblem books, wherever they were composed, and at whatever time in the history of the emblematic forms” (16). 24 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953), 73.

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as Landow and Sussman affirm, but distinguishing between types and emblems permits a clearer understanding of the unique role of emblematics in the development of Pre-Raphaelite poetics. This distinction is particularly helpful when we approach the work of Christina Rossetti, whose methods of composition were shaped by the emblematic strategies she encountered in her early devotional reading.

Rossetti’s Emblem Background Records of books the Rossetti family owned, including the family commonplace book, reveal that emblem literature figured prominently in the Rossetti children’s reading.25 The family owned several new emblem books produced during the revival of the genre’s popularity in the early nineteenth century, including the Iconologia (1821), a book of “coloured allegorical designs” based on Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593) authored by family friend Filippo Pistrucci (1777–1857),26 and Tales About Plants (1839) by Peter Parley (Samuel Griswold Goodrich), a book of moralized botany for children.27 This latter book may have helped form Christina’s linked moral and aesthetic goals, as Arseneau and Bentley demonstrate: through close examinations of plants, Parley attempts to convince the child reader that God’s goodness and wisdom can be read “‘in the great book of nature’”28 ; in Called to Be Saints , Rossetti embeds her descriptions of plant species in a sacramental context that explicates them as “preach[ing] to us.”29 Similarities between Goodrich’s book and Rossetti’s own suggest Parley provided an example of how image and text might be productively merged in a naturalistic, yet explicitly sacramental and didactic context. Evidence that the Rossettis were familiar with Anglo-Dutch emblem books (such as Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes [1586] or Francis Quarles’ Emblemes [1635]) before 1847 is scant, but as Bentley argues, 25 Kooistra, C. R. and Illustration, 4. 26 W. M. Rossetti, “Memoir,” D. G. R. Works, 62. 27 Arseneau and Bentley, “Peter Parley and the Rossettis,” 56; W. M. Rossetti, Some

Reminiscences, vol. 1 (London: Scribner, 1906), 31. 28 Peter Parley, Tales About Plants (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), vii, qtd. in Arseneau and Bentley, 57. 29 Christina Rossetti, Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (London: SPCK, 1881), 241.

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given the “religious tone of the Rossetti household and the various inexpensive editions of Quarles that were published in the eighteen twenties, ‘thirties and ‘forties it would be surprising if [they] were not.”30 Kooistra lists the emblematist without reservation as an author whose books the family owned in Christina’s childhood.31 Certainly, as Bentley argues, Dante Gabriel’s review comparing Thomas Gordon Hake’s Madeline, with Other Poems (1871) and Parables and Tales (1872) to Quarles’ emblems in their “extreme homeliness” demonstrates his awareness of this tradition in at least the 1870s, but his explication of allegorical Christian works in France and Belgium in 1849 may signal his having read Quarles as part of his education at home.32 And, as Lothar Hönnighausen, Karl Josef Höltgen, Bentley, and Kooistra have noted, Dante Gabriel’s illustrations for his poem “A sonnet is a moment’s monument” (1880), which include such typical emblematic images as a winged hourglass, a figure labeled “Anima,” and an ouroboros, suggest that he and Christina’s “shared interest in interrelating image and text was founded on a common knowledge of the emblem tradition.”33 Some of the imagery in Dante Gabriel’s illustrations for Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress is similar enough to Quarles’ Emblemes to “raise the likelihood of specific indebtedness.”34 More than this, however, Kooistra has argued that the placement of Dante Gabriel’s illustrations inside Christina’s books and the superimposition of lines from Christina’s text directly onto Dante Gabriel’s illustrations transforms the volumes themselves into “modified emblem books for a Victorian audience accustomed to symbolic interpretation.”35 This conjunction of text and image is consistent with Dante Gabriel’s practice of combining his paintings and poetry into “complete work[s] of art.” In works such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848– 1849) and “A sonnet is a moment’s monument,” moreover, the appended 30 Bentley, “Anglo-Dutch,” 7. 31 Kooistra, C. R. and Illustration, 4. 32 Bentley, “Anglo-Dutch,” 7. 33 Kooistra, C. R. and Illustration, 64; see also Bentley, “Anglo-Dutch,” 12; Lothar

Hönnighausen, The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of Pre-Raphaelitism and Fin de Siècle, trans. Gisela Hönnighausen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 57; Karl Josef Höltgen, Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition and the European Context (Edition Reichenberger, 1986), 176. 34 Bentley, “Anglo-Dutch,” 8; see also Kooistra, C. R. and Illustration, 79. 35 Kooistra, C. R. and Illustration, 66.

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poem interprets the most important pieces of visual imagery in exactly the way an emblematic explicatio decodes a pictura. Christina hand-illustrated eight books: her copies of John Keble’s The Christian Year, Isaac Williams’ The Altar, her father’s L’Arpa Evangelica (1852) and her sister’s A Shadow of Dante (1871); the other four works she illustrated, Verses (Dedicated to My Mother) (1847), Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), Sing-Song (1870; in manuscript), and Seek and Find (1879; also in manuscript) were her own. As Kooistra has observed, “illustration had, for [Rossetti], not only an aesthetic and interpretive function, but also a deeply spiritual significance, for it was by this material means that the invisible could be made visible.”36 Rossetti sought to publish her own work with illustrations and exerted a considerable degree of control over the appearance of her books, requesting certain illustrators and directing their work.37 The centrality of the visual to Rossetti’s devotionally focused writing and publishing career and the emblematic character of that visual stress are signs that she drew on the emblem tradition, but looking beyond surface similarities and indebtedness to specific emblems, these visual cues and Rossetti’s moral-didactic focus are an indication that emblems are at work in the verbal component of her poetry. As my discussion here will show, Rossetti was not only aware of the emblem tradition, but also interested in deploying emblematic discourse in her predominantly verbal texts. Rossetti claimed that “the nearest approach to a method” of composition she had was “a distinct aim at conciseness.”38 This led, Antony Harrison argues, to an “allusive” thematic structure in her poetry which “generate[s] meaning by manipulating allusions to Plato, the Bible, Saint Augustine, Dante [Alighieri], Petrarch, Herbert” and others.39 Jerome McGann asserts that criticism of Rossetti’s poetry should also take into account its elaborate intratextuality: the stability of her sacramental beliefs and her emphasis on the importance of interpretation means that her poems “formulate interpretive keys that can and should be applied

36 Kooistra, C. R. and Illustration, 29. 37 Kooistra, “The Dialogue of Image and Text in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song,”

Victorian Poetry, 37, no. 4 (Winter 1999), 466; C. R. and Illustration, 9, 11–12. 38 Antony Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 10. 39 Ibid., 10.

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either to themselves or to other poems in her corpus,” a fundamentally emblematic technique.40 Rossetti draws correspondences between the poems in her volumes, strengthening intertextual associations with intratextual allusion by arranging them in meaningful patterns: contrary to her brother William Michael’s characterization of her compositional habits as “spontaneous and without revision,” Rossetti’s deliberate artistry is visible in her careful sequencing of her poems into patterns that reveal “deeper logical coherence.”41 She arranged Goblin Market ’s sixty-one poems, for example, written between 1849 and 1860, “according to a plan that [would] best do justice to her intentions.”42 The collection opens with the title poem, followed by forty-four miscellaneous poems, and ends with sixteen “Devotional Pieces.” Dolores Rosenblum argues in terms similar to McGann’s that Rossetti’s deliberate sequencing within separate volumes sets up a variety of echoes and cross-references that encourage us to read individual poems as commentary on one another, and the religious poems as a whole as commentary on or elaboration of the secular poems, and vice versa.43

This combination of allusiveness, explication, and order in Rossetti’s poetry is fully emblematic in its production of meaning through both inter- and intratextual references: in the Goblin Market volume, images and themes introduced in “Goblin Market” reappear in the “Devotional Pieces” alongside biblical teachings that moralize these elements, effectively transforming the volume into a naked emblem book that addresses temptation, the deceptiveness of earthly pleasures, and the importance of correctly reading the natural world.

40 Jerome McGann, “Introduction,” in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987), 1. 41 Dolores Rosenblum, “Christina Rossetti and Poetic Sequence,” in The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David. A. Kent, 132–158. 42 Ibid., 133, 134. 43 Ibid., 155.

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“Goblin Market” The importance of the theme of interpretation to both “Goblin Market” and the Goblin Market volume as a whole is another indication of Rossetti’s participation in the emblem tradition. Whatever its lesson, a devotional emblem always models sacramental reading: its primary objective is to train the reader in the hermeneutic practice of discerning divine “truths” in the material world. Thus, although its immediate lessons pertain to resisting temptation and practicing self-postponement, a central message of “Goblin Market” is the importance of interpreting things and events correctly; “giving things a right moral reading.”44 Arseneau’s argument that the acts of reading represented in “Goblin Market” turn that poem into a “paradigm of the kind of interpretation which [Rossetti] wanted her readers to engage” is equally applicable to my argument about Rossetti’s emblematic methods.45 The paradigm for correct interpretation is presented in Lizzie, who reads the goblin men and their seductive fruit as harmful: “No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no; Their offers should not charm us, Their evil gifts would harm us.” She thrust a dimpled finger In each ear, shut eyes and ran […]. (ll. 64–68)

Here Lizzie uses her interpretive skills to deduce that the goblins’ wares invite her to stray from the straight path and closes her eyes and ears to prevent temptation, correctly judging the fruit as morally dangerous. Laura, by contrast, is unable to read beyond this outward show: as Arseneau points out, she misinterprets the goblins when she describes their voices as sounding like the “voice of doves” (l. 77) and “kind and full of loves” (l. 79).46 After Lizzie’s “wise upbraidings” (l. 142) about the dangers of “loiter[ing] in the glen” (l. 145) prove unconvincing to her sister, she emblematically performs an interpretation of the lessons encoded in past events and natural objects. She reminds Laura about “Jeanie” (l. 147), who also ate goblin fruit, then 44 Arseneau, “Incarnation,” 84. 45 Ibid., 79. 46 Ibid., 85.

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[…] pined and pined away; Sought them by night and day, Found them no more but dwindled and grew grey; Then fell with the first snow, While to this day no grass will grow Where she lies low: I planted daisies there a year ago That never blow. You should not loiter so. (ll. 154–162)

Arseneau claims that Lizzie’s reminder presents Laura with a “typological prefigurement of what might happen to her,” but Lizzie’s description and explication of Jeanie’s fate and her grave is also emblematic.47 Lizzie offers the image of Jeanie’s attenuated physicality alongside the dead grass and daisies as a pictura, the moral of which she interprets as a warning that “You”—Laura—“should not loiter so.” Not only can she discern the moral or spiritual significance of these things, but she also demonstrates a commitment to improving Laura’s hermeneutic skill by explicating the signs for her sister; her hermeneutic skill is thus expressly identified as emblematic. Further, her attempt to sharpen Laura’s emblematic skill mirrors Rossetti’s encouragement of the reader’s spiritual perception through the emblematic threads that link “Goblin Market” and the volume’s “Devotional Pieces.”

“Devotional Pieces” as Explicatio By deferring a disclosure of the lessons we are meant to draw from “Goblin Market” to the “Devotional Pieces,” Rossetti imparts moral principles while encouraging readers to interpret emblematically. Dinah Roe has noted that the layout of the Goblin Market and Prince’s Progress volumes encourages readers to draw connections between the general and devotional poems.48 I would build on Roe’s claim by arguing that the “Devotional Pieces” act as an extended series of explicationes to the pictura of “Goblin Market,” glossing the poem’s fairy-tale imagery by introducing it into explicitly moralized contexts. The first of the 47 Arseneau, “Incarnation,” 88; my emphasis. 48 Dinah Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose

(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 96.

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“Devotional Pieces,” for example, “‘The Love of Christ Which Passeth Knowledge,’” is written from the perspective of the suffering Christ, but its monologue could also be spoken by Lizzie, who “braved” a traumatic encounter with goblins for her sister and offers herself as a saving feast. Compare, for example, the lines Who else had dared for thee what I have dared? I plunged the depth most deep from bliss above; I not My flesh, I not My spirit spared: Give thou Me love for love. (“‘The Love of Christ Which Passeth Knowledge’” ll. 5–8)

with Lizzie’s speech on her triumphant return from her ordeal at the hands of the goblins: Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices […..] For your sake I have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men. (ll. 466–468; 473–474)

Parallels in the language and the actions (“dar[ing]” and “brav[ing]), motivations (“for thee;” “for your sake”), and desires (“Give thou Me love;” “Hug me, kiss me”) described here amplify the Christological implications of Lizzie’s self-sacrifice by aligning her with Christ. Similarly, the voice pleading for salvation in “A Better Resurrection” echoes Laura in her decline: Laura “kept watch in vain / In sullen silence of exceeding pain” while her “tree of life dropped from the root,” saying “not one word in her heart’s sore ache.”49 The speaker of “A Better Resurrection” likewise has “no wit, no words, no tears;” My heart within me like a stone Is numbed too much for hopes and fears; […..] I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief No everlasting hills I see; My life is in the falling leaf: O Jesus, quicken me. (ll. 1–8) 49 Roe, Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination, ll. 260–261, 270–271.

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In both cases, despondency leads to a failure of language and is figured in the image of a failing plant. The heart numbed “like a stone” also recalls the barren “kernel-stone” (l. 138) Laura saves from her goblin feast, and moralizes that object as an emblem of spiritual collapse. References to Christ as “sweeter than honey” in “The Love of Christ Which Passeth Knowledge” and “Advent” similarly read the goblin fruit, misleadingly advertised as “sweet to tongue” (l. 30) and “honey to the throat” (but “poison in the blood”) (ll. 554–555), as an emblem of temptation, deception, and idolatry. Even more comprehensively, the Devotional Pieces “Sweet Death,” “‘Consider the Lilies of the Field,’” “One Certainty,” and “The World” foreground the spiritual implications of imagery and themes introduced in “Goblin Market.” “Sweet Death,” first published in The Germ, reappears in this volume as an exercise in emblematic reading and a reminder that all earthly things are ephemeral. “Sweet Death” moves emblematically from images of the plants on a grave to explications of the moral lessons they teach, thereby identifying them as signs authored by God while demonstrating the habit of reading necessary to discover that fact for oneself. The speaker notes similarities between the flowers, which “[s]hed their fresh leaves in showers” (l. 6), “die, fall and nourish the rich earth” (10), and the cycle of human life, stressing that the spiritual lesson of this decay is the importance of seeking eternal realities: Better than beauty and than youth Are Saints and Angels, a glad company; And Thou, O Lord, our Rest and Ease Art better far than these. (ll. 19–22)

This poem instructs and performs emblematic perception in its gradual revelation that the physical world is a “stepping-stone” to the divine, if correctly interpreted. Its central image of dying flowers on a grave recalls the daisies on Jeanie’s grave, which Lizzie reads as a sign that Laura should not associate with goblins. Here, that image is reprised in a moralized setting that instructs the reader how to read emblematically and shows why doing so is important. Thus, while the reader may not necessarily extrapolate a moral lesson for themselves from Lizzie’s reading of the daisy on Jeanie’s grave in “Goblin Market,” the point-by-point explication of an analogous image in “Sweet Death” shows them how to do that.

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Like “Sweet Death,” “‘Consider the Lilies of the Field’” is an exhortation to read nature for spiritual truth, structured as a series of emblems. The poem’s list of moralized images directs our attention to what each flower has to “preach to us if we will hear” (1): The lilies say: Behold how we Preach without words of purity. The violets whisper from the shade Which their own leaves have made: Men scent our fragrance on the air, Yet take no heed Of humble lessons we would read. (ll. 11–17)

Each flower is presented as a divinely authored text: lilies “preach” the virtue of purity, while violets “read” us a “lesson” in humility. Even the “merest grass” is a sign of God’s love, which is powerful but specific enough to “nourish one small seed” (ll. 19; 24). Here, plant names act as implied picturae, while each plant’s “speech” serves as an explicatio of the lesson it embodies (lilies: purity; violets: humility; grass: the meticulous extent of God’s care). In their deliberateness, these plant emblems preach a lesson about the importance of emblematic reading itself. In “Goblin Market,” Lizzie points out the flowerless daisy and failing grass over Jeanie’s grave as a warning to Laura, but does not explicate it further. “‘Consider the Lilies of the Field,’” on the other hand, moralizes both flowers and grass by placing them in a devotional framework. The dead plants on Jeanie’s grave thus become a sign that Laura’s consumption of the goblin fruit—a figure for her interpretive and moral failure—jeopardizes her physical and spiritual well-being. The devotional reprise of plant imagery in “‘Consider the Lilies,’” where it is read emblematically for lessons on virtue and God’s care, instructs the reader to pay attention to small natural details, which contain “humble” but no less important “lessons” (l. 17) about both the foregoing text and the world outside. Through its allusions to scripture, “One Certainty” further moralizes the grass and plant imagery in “Goblin Market” and clarifies the lesson we are to draw from Laura’s mistake. This poem asserts that humankind, “tossed to and fro by hope and fear” (l. 6) is “Like early dew, or like the sudden breath/Of wind, or like the grass that withereth” (ll. 4–5). The comparison of human life to withering grass is a reference to a favorite Bible verse of Rossetti’s, Isaiah 40:7–8: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people

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is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”50 The use of grass as a figure for temporality in the Bible allows it to stand as an emblem of the same idea. Echoes of the withered daisy and grass on Jeanie’s grave in this explicitly moral context give the plants in “Goblin Market” a sharper point as emblematic reminders that the only lasting thing is God. Laura’s pursuit of the goblin fruits is similarly clarified through its thematic and imagistic echoes with “One Certainty.” Laura draws the wrong conclusions about the goblin fruit because temptation clouds her judgment, causing her to focus on the sensual reality of physical objects and ignore their invisible meanings.51 Her failure as a reader, in other words, brings about her spiritual downfall. As Bentley points out, “One Certainty” offers a warning against exactly the lack of spiritual discernment Laura demonstrates: the second and third lines of the poem quote Ecclesiastes 1:8 to argue that “The eye and ear / Cannot be filled by what they see and hear” (ll. 2–3): earthly objects cannot fulfill our most important desires.52 This biblical verse about the vanity of seeking satisfaction through the senses moralizes Laura’s experience with the goblin fruit in an emblematic way: although she “ate and ate [her] fill, / Yet [her] mouth water[ed] still” (“Goblin Market” ll. 165–166). This feast sets off a “passionate yearning” (l. 266) for more, and she “dream[s] of melons, as a traveller sees / False waves in desert drouth” (ll. 289–290). As the allusion to Ecclesiastes in “One Certainty” suggests, Laura’s goblin feast figures a failure to look beyond the physical, an error that dooms her to a life of “baulked desire” (l. 267). The lesson here is that, just as Lizzie’s self-sacrifice is the only cure for Laura’s desperate craving, so only by seeking Christ can humanity be satisfied. These “Devotional Pieces” suggest that the alluring but deadly fruit in “Goblin Market” is an analogue for the Christian’s three related enemies, “the devil, the world, and the flesh.” The second of these is treated individually in “The World,” a sonnet that conveys the duplicity of that enemy by troping it as a woman who is “soft, exceeding fair” (l. 1) in daytime, but who “changeth” into a menacing creature, “[l]oathsome and foul

50 Noted by R. W. Crump, ed. in Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2001), 904–905. 51 Arseneau, “Incarnation,” 85. 52 Bentley, “The Meretricious and the Meritorious in Goblin Market: A Conjecture and

an Analysis,” 68. In The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent, 57–81.

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with hideous leprosy” (l. 3) at night. This personification so closely parallels the fruit-bearing goblins in “Goblin Market” that it virtually demands their interpretation as emblems of worldly temptation. As Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s title page illustration of Laura surrounded by cajoling animal figures reflects (see Fig. 7.4) the goblins are initially gracious and offer fruits they tout as “sweet to tongue and sound to eye” (l. 30).53 But these fruits cause Laura to “dwindl[e], as the fair full moon doth turn / To swift decay and burn / Her fire away” (ll. 278–280), and the goblins themselves go from “grinning” (l. 371) to “[g]runting and snarling” (l. 393) when Lizzie refuses their demands. Similarly, in “The World,” the title character “woos” the speaker of that poem “to the outer air” in daytime with Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety: But thro’ the night, a beast she grins at me, A very monster void of love and prayer. (ll. 5–8)

Both “The World” and the goblins also resort to violent gestures: the goblins trod and hustled [Lizzie], Elbowed and jostled her, Clawed with their nails, […..] Held her hands and squeezed their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat. (ll. 399–401; 406–407)

“The World” is described in correspondingly animalistic terms as menacing the speaker with its “pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands” (l. 11). Here the malevolence of “The World” recalls the goblins’ own deception, but casts it in more scriptural terms to convey that enemy’s spiritual threat. Laura pays the goblins for their fruit with a lock of hair and a tear “more rare than pearl” (l. 127), pearls being an object that, as Arseneau notes, Rossetti identifies on Biblical authority in Seek and Find as symbolizing “heavenly treasures.”54 Like Laura, the speaker 53 “Buy from us with a golden curl,” title page illustration for Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems. 54 Christina Rossetti, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (London: SPCK, 1879), 279, qtd. in Arseneau, “Incarnation” 90.

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Fig. 7.4 “Buy from us with a golden curl,” title page illustration for Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)

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of “The World” is coerced into “sell[ing]” their “soul” to the monster (ll. 12–14), but identifies the outcome for themselves of such a transaction explicitly as “hell” (l. 14). Parallels between Laura’s symbolic exchange of hair and pearl-like tears for fruit, and this speaker’s more literal selling of their soul clarify the spiritual gravity of Laura’s actions. While emblematic in its own right, this depiction of “The World” as a monstrous woman presents a figure recognizably like the goblins in unambiguously moral terms. By mapping “The World” onto the goblins, it becomes clear that the latter are as much an emblem of dangerous earthly delights as the former. This imagery also bears striking parallels with Emblem VII, Book 1 of Quarles’ Emblemes,55 (see Fig. 7.5) providing further evidence that Goblin Market participates self-consciously in the English devotional emblem tradition.56 The goblins appear “kind and full of loves” (l. 79) when Laura accepts their offer of fruit, but reveal their true nature when Lizzie refuses their demand that she eat; similarly, the “ripe fruits” that Laura initially views as promising “full satiety” (“The World” l. 6) are proven a sham when the kernel-stone she saves will not grow and Laura “gnashe[s] her teeth for baulked desire” (“Goblin Market” l. 267). These incidents illustrate another one of Rossetti’s favorite moral precepts, the notion, set forth in Ecclesiastes 1:2, that “all is vanity.” Some version of that biblical phrase appears several times in the Goblin Market volume. The vanitas theme is treated similarly by Quarles: the motto, drawn from 1 Peter: 58, exhorts its reader to be “sober” and “vigilant” because “your Adversary the Devil as a roaring Lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” While the pictura contains no fruit—rather, it depicts Anima (the soul), threatened by Death (a skeleton aiming an arrow), sitting on an orb in which tortured souls burn in Hell—the fourth stanza of the explicatio introduces fruit as an example of “Earth’s false pleasure.” 55 I discuss the parallel with Quarles because it is close enough to suggest indebtedness on Christina’s part. Another possible parallel, however, is emblem 190 of Pistrucci’s Iconologia, “Il Mondo,” which shows a horned Pan-like creature covered in spotted fur which Pistrucci (quoting Boccaccio) interprets as representing the diversity of the natural world. Also less likely as a direct reference but no less revealing is a possible connection between the climactic scene of “Goblin Market” and the “Pelican-in-her-Piety” emblem motif. The scene in “Goblin Market” where Lizzie offers regenerative juices to Laura, who “suck[s]” them, which has been interpreted as Eucharistic, acquires yet another layer of Christological implication in its similarities with the pelican image. 56 Emblem VII, Book 1, Francis Quarles, Emblemes, Divine and Moral.

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Fig. 7.5 Francis Quarles, Emblem VII, Book 1 in Emblemes, Divine and Moral, 1635

Just as Rossetti’s goblins describe their fruit as “[s]weet to tongue and sound to eye” (“Goblin Market” l. 30), so in Quarles’ emblem the world offers fruit that

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is faire, and pleasing to the sight, But sowre in tast; false, at the putrid Core: Thy flaring glasse is Gemms at her halfe light; She makes thee seeming rich, but truly poore. She boasts a kernell, and bestowes a shell, Performs an inch of her faire promised Ell: Her words protest a Heaven: Her works produce a Hell. (Emblem VII, Book I ll. 30–36)

The world’s “faire” fruits and their “sowre” effects recall the goblin fruits, “like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood” (“Goblin Market” ll. 554–555); the delivered “shell” for the promised “kernell” in Quarles echoes the barren kernel-stone Laura saves; and the goblins’ proffered “Heaven” certainly produces a living “Hell” (Quarles 1:VII, 30) for Laura, who traverses “death” and “life” (“Goblin Market” l. 523) before recovering. Quarles and Rossetti approach the vanitas theme in a similar way by troping the World in imagery of tempting but deceptive fruit. And as the moral point of “Goblin Market” is the importance of discerning spiritual reality, so the message of Quarles’ emblem is the need to remain “vigilant” against “drows[ily]” basking in earthly delights (epigram 7; 31). Contained in a book of religious emblems whose preface prompts the reader to “[l]et not the tender eye check, to see the allusion to our blessed Saviour figured in these Types” (“To the Reader”), the stress on “vigilance” here relates as much to the act of emblematic reading as to any other daily activity. Correspondences between Quarles’ treatment of vanity in this normatively emblematic work and Rossetti’s own in her unillustrated poetry reveal significant similarities in the habit of mind at work in both texts. By drawing on “literary precedents and biblical types”57 and by establishing a complex network of interconnections within her own texts, Rossetti leverages emblematic strategies to produce a morally didactic volume of poetry while developing her readers’ interpretive skill. In Goblin Market, the spiritual significance of the visible world is not only accessible, but actively “preach[ed] to us” by objects, if we will only “hear” it (“‘Consider the Lilies of the Field’” l. 1). Through attention to her sister’s lessons and self-sacrifice, Laura achieves appropriate

57 Kooistra, C. R. and Illustration, 68.

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hermeneutic ability; correspondingly, the reader is presented with “Devotional Pieces” that—if read correctly—unpack the moral lessons in the title poem. As scholars of Pre-Raphaelitism, we must likewise attune our understanding to the presence of emblems in this literature. When we embed “Goblin Market” within its volume and recognize that volume as emblematic, it becomes clear that the title poem is not a departure from Rossetti’s moral-didactic poetics, but is a realization of them. In the same way, acknowledging that the emblem is crucial to the development of Pre-Raphaelite poetics—from the movement’s Ruskininspired inception to its decadent period in the works of Swinburne and Morris—reveals surprising continuities between members and across the movement’s timeline, despite differences and shifts of ontology and aesthetic. And while this attention to emblems highlights the rootedness of Pre-Raphaelitism in older literary movements, it also permits an appreciation of the influence of Pre-Raphaelite poetics on the development of modernist poetics: for instance, the Imagistic depiction of a concrete image (the “direct treatment of the ‘thing’”58 ) to evoke an abstraction recalls the emblematic practice of presenting an object to be decoded for higher meaning. Along these lines, it has been acknowledged that Ezra Pound admired the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti—particularly their use of vivid color and close attention to symbolic detail—but it seems equally possible that Pound, predisposed to emblematic habits of mind by his fascination with pictogrammatic language, was also receptive to the emblem strategies that organize Dante Rossetti’s works.59 Indeed, Pound’s development of the “ideogrammic method” from his understanding of Chinese characters as communicating concepts through images60 is consistent with the early emblematic interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics as vestiges of a perfect, natural language,61 even if in Pound’s approach the author determines rather than discerns the meaning in these signs. By becoming alert to the emblem’s profound and enduring influence on literature and art, we may add much to our understanding of the Pre-Raphaelite movement’s verbal–visual aesthetic, its poetics, its 58 Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (Poetry, March 1913), 200. 59 Keiji Yasukawa, “Ezra Pound and the Pre-Raphaelites: A Reading of Pound’s Early

Works,” Journal of Inquiry and Research 87 (March 2008), 206. 60 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (Berkshire, UK: Cox & Wyman, 1934). 61 Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (New

York: Longman, 1994), 51.

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multiplicity of responses to the nineteenth-century crises of faith and representation, and its continuities with the avant-garde art movements that coalesce in its wake.

References Ardholm, Helena M. The Emblem and the Emblematic Habit of Mind in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999. Arseneau, Mary. “Incarnation and Interpretation: Christina Rossetti, the Oxford Movement, and ‘Goblin Market.’” Victorian Poetry 31, no. 1 (1993): 79–93. Arseneau, Mary and D. M. R. Bentley. “Peter Parley and the Rossettis.” English Language Notes 31, no. 1 (1993): 56–60. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953. Bath, Michael. Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture. New York: Longman, 1994. Bentley, D. M. R. “The Meretricious and the Meritorious in Goblin Market: A Conjecture and an Analysis.” In The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Edited by David A. Kent. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987, 57–81. Bentley, D. M. R. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Anglo-Dutch Emblem Tradition.” Victorian Newsletter 108 (2005): 6–13. Casey, Janet Galligani. “The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” Victorian Poetry 29 (1991): 63–78. Crump, R. W. and Betty Flowers, eds. The Complete Poems: Christina Rossetti. London: Penguin, 2001. Daly, Peter and Mary V. Silcox. The Modern Critical Reception of the Emblem. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1991. Daly, Peter. “The Pelican-in-Her-Piety.” In Emblem Scholarship: Directions and Developments. A Tribute to Gabriel Hornstein. Edited by Peter Daly. Brepols, 2005. 83–109. D’Amico, Diane. “Christina Rossetti’s Christian Year: Comfort for the ‘Weary Heart.’” Victorian Newsletter 72 (1987): 36–42. Fauset, Eileen and Elizabeth Russell. “Christina Rossetti: Contemporary Feminist.” BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 6 (1995): 143–155. Freeman, Rosemary. English Emblem Books. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948. Harrison, Antony. Christina Rossetti in Context. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Hill, Marylu. “‘Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me’: Eucharist and the Erotic Body in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’” Victorian Poetry 43, no. 3 (2005): 455–472.

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Höltgen, Karl Josef. Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition and the European Context. Edition Reichenberger, 1986. Hönnighausen, Gisela. “Emblematic Tendencies in the Works of Christina Rossetti.” Victorian Poetry 10, no. 1 (1972): 1–15. Hönnighausen, Lothar. The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of Pre-Raphaelitism and Fin de Siècle. Trans. Gisela Hönnighausen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Jöns, Walter. Das ‘Sinnen-Bild’. Studien zur allegorischen Bildlichkeit bei Andreas Gryphius. J.B. Metzlersche, 1966. Kent, David A. and P.G. Stanwood, eds. Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2002. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “The Dialogue of Image and Text in Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song.” Victorian Poetry 37, no. 4 (1999): 465–491. Lysack, Krista. Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2008. Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. New York: Viking, 1994. Marshall, Linda E. “‘Transfigured to His Likeness’: Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” University of Toronto Quarterly 63, no. 3 (1994): 429–450. McAlpine, Heather. “‘Thoughts Towards Nature’: Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in The Germ.” JPRS 20 (2011): 5–24. McGann, Jerome. “Introduction.” In The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Edited by David A. Kent. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987. 1–17. Mendoza, Victor Roman. “‘Come Buy’: The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” ELH 73, no. 4 (2006): 913– 947. Parley, Peter (Samuel Griswold Goodrich). Tales About Plants. London: Thomas Tegg, 1839. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. Berkshire: Cox & Wyman, 1934. Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Poetry 1, no. 6 (1913): 200–206. Roe, Dinah. Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Rosenblum, Dolores. “Christina Rossetti and Poetic Sequence.” In The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Edited by David. A. Kent. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987. 132–158. Rossetti, Christina. Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied. London: SPCK, 1881. Rossetti, Christina. Goblin Market and Other Poems. London: Macmillan, 1862. Rossetti, Christina. Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite. London: SPCK, 1879.

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Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti; His Family Letters. 2 vols. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895. Rossetti, William Michael. Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Roberts Brothers, 1887. Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences. London: Scribner, 1906. Russell, Daniel. The Emblem and Device in France. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985. Schöne, Albrecht. Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock. C. H. Beck, 1964. Welter, Nancy. “Women Alone: Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” In Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Edited by Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. 138–148. Yasukawa, Keiji. “Ezra Pound and the Pre-Raphaelites: A Reading of Pound’s Early Works.” Journal of Inquiry and Research 87 (March 2008): 205–213.

CHAPTER 8

Elizabeth Siddall: Pre-Raphaelitism, Poetry, Prosody Serena Trowbridge

I care not for my Ladys soul Though I worship before her smile I care not wheres my Ladys goal When her beauty shall lose its wile. (ll. 1–4)

Elizabeth Siddall’s poem “The Lust of the Eyes” gives voice to male admiration of female beauty, combined with a dismissal of the woman’s personality and future. The title, devised by her brother-in-law, William Michael Rossetti, is taken from 1 John 2:16: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world,” emphasizing the critical tone of the poem. It is often read as Siddall’s condemnation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s treatment of her during their turbulent relationship, constructed as a counterpart to Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio,” which is assumed to refer to her brother’s relationship with his model: “He feeds

S. Trowbridge (B) Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_8

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upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him” (ll. 9–10).1 The potential biographical parallels are obvious: Siddall was, and remains, the most well-known of the Pre-Raphaelite models, existing as the face of Pre-Raphaelitism, and her difficult relationship with Rossetti is well-documented in countless biographies and other works on Rossetti.2 Yet Rossetti was supportive of his wife’s creative desires, tutoring her in painting and possibly encouraging her poetry, despite his infidelities and initial reluctance to marry her. Nonetheless, she is not often considered seriously as a poet. This poem offers much more than a biographical insight, however. Siddall plays with traditional male approaches in poetry, particularly medieval courtly love, employing the patriarchal traditions undercut with an edge of bitterness which gives the poem its piquancy. As David Latham points out, the poem “parodies the rhetoric of a second genre by exposing the crassness of the popular carpe diem love poem, reducing to the most callous sentiment those clever songs that warn young virgins to seize the day for love before their beauty fades away.”3 The use of parody indicates a broad familiarity with earlier works in the masculine love tradition, which is to be expected given the Rossetti family’s interest in the works of Dante and the early Italian poets. It is clear that this is not simplistic, rhymed biographical doggerel, though it draws on Siddall’s personal understanding of the subject matter of a woman who is prized more for her beauty than her soul, as well as her understanding of poetics. Moreover, she successfully ventriloquizes a clearly masculine voice, unmistakably echoing the work of male poets in a historicized context of heterosexual gender binaries, constructing a poem which also reflects her experience of sitting to male artists.

1 For example, Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: André Deutsch, 2004), 61–62. 2 Examples of biographies include J. B. Bullen, Rossetti, Painter and Poet (London: Frances Lincoln, 2011); Hawksley; Violet Hunt, The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death, etc. (London: John Lane, 1932); Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet: A Biography (London: Orion, 1999); Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (London: Quartet Books, 1989); Dinah Roe, The Rossettis in Wonderland (London: Haus Publishing, 2011). 3 David Latham, “A ‘World of Its Own Creation’: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and the New Paradigm for Art,” in Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, ed. Laurence W. Mazzeno (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 127–150, 141.

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In Siddall’s manuscript, the poem contains virtually no punctuation, lending the simplicity that is a hallmark of Siddall’s work. “The Lust of the Eyes” is no imitation, however: the appropriation of the language of courtly love is done ironically, with the male speaker calmly acknowledging his future neglect of his muse. Moreover, the poem subtly undercuts the speaker’s claims: it is, essentially, a poem which destabilizes the supremacy of the male gaze, for though he may vampirically feast upon her beauty, the Lady has “wild eyes” (l. 6) with which to look back at him, and the untamed woman inside the muse peers out from the poem through the imprisoning bars of masculine traditions of art and love. The eyes as the “window to the soul” which give away a character’s traits is a familiar concept, particularly in the visual arts, and it is through her eyes that the Lady can find expression, even though her voice is silenced. In the final stanza the speaker asks, “Then who shall close my Lady’s eyes” (l. 16) after death, and this second reference draws the reader’s attention to her eyes and ability to look for herself, as well as implying that her eyes may remain forever open, even in death. The Lady may be able to escape the speaker’s scrutiny once her beauty has faded, but he can never evade her critical examination. This poem indicates a life below the surface of the Lady, which her silent exterior never betrays; it models a form of doubling which is a keynote of Siddall’s oeuvre. In several of the most well-known paintings of Siddall, she is depicted as dead or dying; Millais’s Ophelia (1851–1852), for example, and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (1864–1870), in which Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, is depicted in a trance-like ecstatic state which anticipates imminent death and refers through symbols to Dante’s Vita Nuova. Rossetti reconstructs the literary association of Dante and Beatrice as a forerunner to his relationship with Siddall throughout his work, creating a new mythology of passionate but ill-fated love. In Beata Beatrix, Rossetti memorializes his dead wife, so that Siddall becomes a vehicle for masculine yearning, which obscures her as a creative figure in her own right and causes readers to relate the Lady of “The Lust of the Eyes” with the poet herself. This poem, then, invites the reader to re-examine Siddall as a poet, a woman, a muse, and an intrinsic cog in the Pre-Raphaelite wheel, participating in

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the work of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, whose “archaizing art placed her at the forefront of Pre-Raphaelitism’s new medievalizing.”4

Siddall’s Poetic World “The Lust of the Eyes” draws on all of these roles played by Siddall and exemplifies the deceptively complex ways in which Siddall’s poetry operates. Admittedly, her poetic output was small (16 poems extant, plus some fragments), and tends to be overlooked in favor of her status as muse. Critics generally agree that writing poetry was “a private activity” for Siddall, shared with few, if any, of her circle (unlike her painting, which was exhibited and available for sale).5 It is a matter for speculation whether Siddall wrote more poems, or if these poems were intended for publication. After her death, her poems were preserved and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by William Michael Rossetti, accompanied by articles and memoirs of Siddall.6 However, the manuscripts of her poems were fragmentary, often illegible, and undated: as editor, William Michael Rossetti pieced together the poems, adding titles, moving stanzas, adding punctuation, changing words, and excising lines or sections; the only poem Siddall titled herself was “True Love”.7 These versions of her work have become the accepted and familiar versions, though they are not presented as Siddall wrote them; in this essay, Siddall’s manuscript versions will be used throughout. Her poetry is still largely overlooked in serious critical works on Victorian and PreRaphaelite poets. The most substantial critical discussions are Constance

4 Deborah Cherry, “Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall,” in The Cambridge Companion to the PreRaphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 127–150, 185. 5 Jan Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal 1829–1862: Pre-Raphaelite Artist (Sheffield: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of the Guild of St George/Sheffield Arts Department, 1991), 30. 6 These were: Dante Gabriel Rossetti His Family-Letters with a Memoir (1895); Ruskin, Rossetti, Pre Raphaelitism (1895); ‘Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal,’ The Burlington Magazine; Some Reminiscences (1903). 7 However, I use the commonly used titles in this chapter to minimize confusion. All references to Siddall’s poetry are taken from Serena Trowbridge, ed., My Ladys Soul: The Poetry of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2018). Errors of punctuation in the quotations are taken from the MSS.

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Hassett’s article in Victorian Poetry, and the final chapter of Jan Marsh’s The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal.8 Siddall’s life, body, and work are, then as now, thoroughly entangled with Pre-Raphaelitism. There is no doubt that her work as model and artist, as well as her marriage to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, provided opportunities that she would not otherwise have experienced, though the impetus to work creatively seems to have been her own: as Marsh indicates, it “is remarkable that she asserted her claim to a creative role from which her gender, class and occupation tended to exclude her.”9 Though there are apocryphal tales of Siddall’s poetic epiphany on reading a poem by Tennyson in newspaper wrapped around a pat of butter, the opportunity to read widely in poetry from Shakespeare through the Romantics and her contemporaries, an education made possible by her connection with the PRB, clearly shaped her poetic voice. Siddall’s three roles—as muse, artist, and poet—are inextricably linked, then, as her output indicates; her poetry and painting share some concerns and approaches, and her awareness of the role of the woman in traditionally male-produced work, along with the common silencing of women’s voices, are issues she repeatedly addresses in a process of re-making and re-viewing creative work inspired by literary antecedents shared with the circle of writers and artists. As Margaret Homans points out, although “sexual identity by itself does not determine the nature of a poet’s work,” a gendered approach to writing forms through cultural entrenchment and learned behavior.10 Homans discusses Hélène Cixous’ article “Sorties” (1975) with its deconstruction of the female voice as passive and embodied, and at a cursory examination, Siddall’s poems may seem to fit this mold, reacting to male definitions and focusing on the woman’s body rather than her voice. However, my argument in this essay is that Siddall’s poems provide a much more resistant site, subtly pushing against the boundaries of contemporary cultural feminine constructions. An “explicitly feminine point of view,”11 such as that of Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is manifested from a marginalized cultural position that argues 8 More attention has been paid to her artistic work than to her poetry; Marsh’s work on this is listed in the bibliography. 9 Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 35. 10 Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily

Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3. 11 Homans, Women Writers, 7.

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with the dominant masculine voice of their poetic inheritance. As with the poems of Christina Rossetti, to map Siddall’s poetic work onto PreRaphaelitism is not the only relevant approach. Siddall’s work can and should be read in the broader context of nineteenth-century women poets, including Christina Rossetti, but also the Brontës, L.E.L., Caroline Norton, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others. Like these other “Poetesses,” Siddall writes within her milieu (of Pre-Raphaelitism, in her case) but also with an awareness of her cultural situation more broadly, as a creator of art and poetry, and one who is conscious of, but not confined by, her gender. As this essay will discuss, Siddall leaves traces of her feminine approach in her poetry while simultaneously vanishing beneath a deliberate obscurity. In her work, Pre-Raphaelitism intersects with the culture of the Poetess, with aesthetic concerns and with social and cultural preoccupations of the period, suggesting the ways in which Pre-Raphaelitism as a literary movement developed not in a vacuum, nor in response only to historical impetus, but in the hothouse atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century culture.

Pre-Raphaelite Poetics This poetic mode is less cohesive than the label might suggest, yet it is possible to trace preoccupations with subject matter, hyper-realist approaches, symbolism, color, construction, and medievalism through both painting and poetry. Lionel Stevenson wrote of Pre-Raphaelite “diversity” in poetry, indicating the difficulties of considering these poets as a “school;” yet shared interests and characteristics are noted, such as “frankness in writing about sex” and “their preoccupation with foreign literatures.”12 Dinah Roe suggests that the fleshly nature of the work, of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was accused by Robert Buchanan, is a significant aspect, in which the “dreamy and nostalgic” sense of Bohemian poetry was quite undermined by hyper-realism and a tendency to “record

12 Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (New York: Norton, 1974), 4, 5.

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[…] supposedly sacred events in repulsive detail.”13 Moreover, the PreRaphaelites were interested in “transgressive hybridity”: across nations, across art forms, across genres and styles, the Pre-Raphaelites were no respecters of traditional boundaries, and this enterprising melting-pot approach to their work is apparent in Siddall’s poetry with its diverse sources.14 Siddall’s work experiments with different approaches and voices, from the balladic “Shepherd Turned Sailor” and “True Love” to the occult flavor of “At Last” and the better-known poems of lost love, “A Silent Wood” and “Dead Love.” Some poems are in a masculine voice, while others speak with the mournful tone of the “Poetess” tradition; throughout her oeuvre she experiments with form, voices, tone, and subject matter, as if trying on different personas. Moreover, Siddall’s poems construct an imaginative, illusory world full of detail, while remaining, below it, double, deceitful, and open to an interpretation which invites the reader to explore the feminine voice of the poet, not restricted or afraid, not bound to masculine concepts and language, but able to free herself through her “wild eyes,” through a “willow wand,” through a “shadow,” or even simply through trees. “Dead Love” provides an example of this poetics of hybridity and PreRaphaelite preoccupations, as well as an example of the collaborative work of the Pre-Raphaelite poets. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wanted to include six of Siddall’s poems in Christina Rossetti’s 1866 book The Prince’s Progress, including this one, but Christina’s response was appreciative but uncertain: “she wrote, ‘How full of beauty they are, but how painful!’ She thought them ‘almost too hopelessly sad for publication en masse.’”15 The poem’s tone is bitter and ironic, contrasting eros and agape. Earthly love is subject to change, depicted by vivid colors, “brightest red” and “blue” (l. 4), and beauty is no guarantee against infidelity. The poem is easily attributed to the muse, whose “bonny face” (l. 7) cannot protect her from eventual abandonment, and, because the transient love is based on appearance, it is the mortality of the body, with love “born to an early 13 Dinah Roe, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites from Rossetti to Ruskin (London: Penguin

Books, 2010), xviii. 14 Isobel Armstrong, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–31, 18. 15 William Michael Rossetti, “Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 1, no. 3 (1903): [273–295] 292.

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death” (l. 5) which situates this poem as reluctantly “fleshly” (an effect heightened by the original, excised phrasing of “bonny mouth” rather than “face” in the MS). “Sacred” events of love are undermined here by their juxtaposition with death—death of love, and ultimately death of the body. Yet the poem is framed as advice, given woman to woman: Sweet, never weep for what cannot be For this God has not given, If the merest dream of love were true Then, sweet, we should be in Heaven And this is only earth my dear Where true love is not given. (ll. 13–18)

Perhaps the poem can offer strength through sisterhood, providing platonic love as a source of support, indicated through the use of endearments in this stanza. Yet the previous stanza concludes: “And you will stand alone my dear, / When wintry winds draw nigh” (ll. 11–12). Platonic friendship gives solace, but ultimately, the poem implies, we are all alone in facing the storms of life. There is an emotional realism in this poem’s approach which ironically undercuts the aesthetic realism of Pre-Raphaelitism. The poem’s conclusion is resigned, urging the listener to accept that this is a divine decision, and that consequently only Heaven can supply the constant and faithful love for which she longs; unlike her sister-in-law, Siddall stops short of offering spiritual love as a consolation, but the implication is that expectations of human love cannot be met in a corrupted world. The slightly formal language and occasional archaisms of “Dead Love,” mingling courtly love and ballad form with a covertly protofeminist approach, indicate the “transgressive hybridity” which Armstrong notes, in its refusal to conform to one form, tone or historical approach. “The Passing of Love” takes a similarly pessimistic view of earthly love, but with a rather different approach. The poem follows a trajectory that traces the pains and pleasures of earthly love, moving from anguish at the speaker’s naiveté in placing her hopes in human relationships, through the joys of love. The poem consists of five four-line stanzas; in William Michael Rossetti’s published version the last two are transposed, which concludes the poem by returning the speaker to misery and completing a circular journey, while Siddall’s draft ends with a reflection on the joys of love and its ability to protect the lover from evil, a positive note which

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all but undermines the unhappiness that may result from love. The poem creates an illusory poetics in which the recalled happiness is gone, yet doubled in the present time of the poem to offer a world in which that joy in love is still alive. Hassett argues that: Siddal creates a lover who is less diffident, one who celebrates before she mourns in “The Passing of Love”. As she tells of how “Love” lightheartedly “floated on the mists of morn, / And rested on the sunset’s rays,” Siddal subdues the middle stresses to lighten the rhythm as well. Against this delicate buoyancy, time and tempo work their dire effects and disillusionment sets in with emphatic lines that alliterate their transitive verbs.16

The poem is fashioned with a conspicuous regularity in rhythm, a heartbeat of iambic tetrameter holding the verse steady through wildly fluctuating emotions and demonstrating the poetic skill and seriousness with which she worked. The rhymes are also broadly regular, despite the occasional slant rhyme. The effect of this is of a speaker who is both affected by wild passions and sustained by her recollections of earthly love and her faith in the help of God. The opening words of each stanza emphasize this aspect, with three beginning “Love” and focusing on the transporting joys of love, and the others “O God” and “O Heaven;” these two stanzas offer pleas for relief from the resultant anguish. These observations indicate the tightly-knit web which Siddall creates in her poetry, with each stanza constructing its own distinct argument which forms one whole. The language of each stanza is subtly varied: stanzas 1 and 4 use biblical language, of “passion” and “blood,” “idol” and “shrine,” while those which refer to earthly love use the natural world to reflect the joy the speaker feels: the “sweet airs in June” (l. 8) and the “mists of morn” (l. 9). The final stanza uses a different register, that of time, indicating both the timelessness and transience of human love.

“Truth to Nature” Roe indicates that Pre-Raphaelite poems “are generally set in rural landscape whose natural details, true to PRB principles, are minutely 16 Constance Hassett, “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions,” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 4 (1997): [443–470] 457–458.

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expressed.” She explains that “The natural world to which it swore fealty was not experienced on a daily basis, but was a landscape remembered, imagined or conjured” and “functions allegorically.”17 This PreRaphaelite allegory, I argue, is heightened through the magnified focus on aspects of the natural world in hyper-real detail. For many nineteenthcentury writers, including the Pre-Raphaelites, the natural world is a conflicted site of beauty and danger. The beauty of nature was also a temptation, which, in a moral Christian construction of the world, can lead one from the path of spiritual duty, as Christina Rossetti indicates in her devotional poems.18 Partaking in this hyper-reality of natural detail, Siddall’s poetry is suffused with tree imagery, with about half of her poems referring to trees, leaves, or woods. In “A Silent Wood” the speaker enters a wood searching for solace, yet what she finds are memories and inescapable hints of past events. The “voices from the trees” (l. 3) seem to offer some kind of solace, and she pleads for a return to past happiness in the closing lines. The liminal space of a wood, perhaps haunted or enchanted, is a common literary setting, but here, the ecosystem of the forest is conjured through owls and ferns, which represent nature and also call on a wider Victorian natural symbolism, with ferns representing love and sincerity, with ironic implications for the betrayed speaker of the poem. This poem tends be read as biographical, perhaps due to Violet Hunt’s comment that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had always made a habit of “lying about” in woods, and that he may have proposed to Siddall in a wood near Hastings.19 The consistent and heavy rhythm and rhyme of the poem add weight to the monochromatic image, though the rhythm is frequently disrupted, grabbing the reader’s attention; the quatrains are in iambic tetrameter, overall, but with substitutions throughout. The poem is usually published in William Michael Rossetti’s form, with the fourth stanza omitted, which creates a sonnet (with rhyming couplets rather than the more common interlacing rhyme). The fourth verse and concluding couplet appear on the back of the MS document, and appear incomplete:

17 Roe, Pre-Raphaelite Poetry, xxi, xxii. 18 I explore this further in “‘Truth to Nature’: The Pleasures and Dangers of the Envi-

ronment in Christina Rossetti’s Poetry,” in Victorians and the Environment, ed. Ronald D. Morris and Lawrence Mazzeno (Farnham: Ashgate, 2017), 63–78. 19 Hunt, Wife of Rossetti, 111.

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Poor spell bound lips that uttered not a word O frozen heart that never heard the sound Of thy loves pleading voice Until his limbs were bound Can God bring back the day when we two stood Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood.

The gray owl provides the only (muted) color; unlike many PreRaphaelite works, color in “A Silent Wood” is monochrome. The description of the natural world is meticulous, however; the image of the ferns and the trees suggest that the speaker is in harmony with nature, finding protection and solace (l. 7). Her misery is unspecific: as with many of Christina Rossetti’s poems, abstract melancholy allows the reader to associate more closely with the poem’s emotions by taking the place of the speaker. Christina Rossetti’s poem “Repining,” which begins with waiting (echoing Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”), also refers to a “listening wood” to which “strange secrets” can be told (l. 216), offering a similar sense that this wood with its crowding, talking trees provides a natural habitat for the grieving. Siddall is influenced by her own experiences, the nature and the art of nature she encountered in her social circle, and possibly the folksongs and ballads she may have encountered. In “A Year and a Day” the speaker tells how “the green leaves touch me on the cheek” (l. 3), and there is a sense of their sympathy, though, as the speaker explains, they seem instead to heighten her anguish. There is a sense of progression in the speaker’s relationship with the leaves; in the first stanza they seem simply to brush her cheek sympathetically, but by the second stanza she is wishing she could weep to hide the leaves from her sight, as if the sight of their beauty makes her pain worse. In stanza 3 the leaves seem to obscure from view the face she longs to see, while in the final verse the leaves are missing: no trees appear here, only the remorseless river and the doom-laden birds. The speaker of the poem allies herself with the natural world in order to protect herself from misery, a common trope of Siddall’s poetry: the “tall green grass” (l. 19) is conjured as if for its restorative effects. The leaves stand in for the trees, mute bystanders, so that nature provides a space for sadness and a coming to terms with emotion, and the implication is that it is the mere expectation of a solution from the trees which relieves pain. It is also worth considering Homans’ argument that the identification of women with “Mother Nature,” evident in poets from Milton to

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Wordsworth, can be a damaging concept for the woman poet, aligning femininity with a cultural trope which is “prolific biologically, not linguistically,” and “as destructive as she is creative.”20 In many of her poems, Siddall’s speakers turn to nature, but find it ultimately useless, silently reflecting emotions back to the speaker, which implies that Siddall rejects the concept of feminized Nature as aligned with the “natural” female, in contrast with the association of women and, specifically, female sexuality with flora and fauna apparent in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings and poems. The repeated green leaves, which appear in several of Siddall’s poems, are a trope of ballads and folk songs; in the former, contrasted with misery and human willfulness, as well as suggesting a rural setting. This can be seen in ballads such as “Barbara Allen,” “The Keeper,” in which the chorus contrasts “the leaves so green-o” with the destruction of the “merry little doe,” while in “Bold Sir Rylas” the violent action takes place “Down in the grove where the wild flowers grow / And the green leaves fall all around.” Siddall is here drawing on a tradition which is conflicted about nature as witness to human acts and emotions, thus utilizing PreRaphaelite depiction of nature to provide a quite different effect, and providing an indication of one of the many ways in which Pre-Raphaelite tropes are perhaps less fixed than we might expect, open to appropriation and interpretation. Both “A Silent Wood” and “A Year and a Day” indicate a mourning of the dead (or lost). The phrasing is reminiscent of traditional ballads, and without using archaic language, the poem is constructed in an apparently simple, faux-medieval style. Yet the speaker takes up a complex position by once again creating an illusory world, as Stefania Arcara writes: In a very similar manner to Christina Rossetti, Siddal creates a poetic mood of forgetting and disenchantment. She refuses the conventional role of woman as love-victim by strategically taking refuge in a remote space of resistance and isolation, that of sleep, in the liminality between life and death.21

20 Homans, Women Writers, 13. 21 Stefania Arcara, “Sleep and Liberation: The Opiate World of Elizabeth Siddal,” in

Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth, ed. Béatrice Laurent (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 95–120, 117.

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This liminal space is that of the pastoral in the majority of Siddall’s poems, despite the range of emotions and approaches they deploy; to enter the wood is to become part of its ecosystem, and to be supported by nature, both physically and emotionally. Sadness is not left behind but instead is absorbed and transformed. The trees sometimes indicate a pathetic fallacy: in “Autumnal Leaves” the tree appears to weep dead leaves onto the grave of the unnamed woman. The quatrain deploys Siddall’s familiar trope of depicting a scene in which nature is sympathetic to human life and death, here with the leaves dropping like tears while the grass swaddles the grave. Similarly, in “True Love,” the leaves blowing across the grave echo the tears of the mourning woman beside it. The trees are scene-setting at the opening of “Speechless,” Many a mile over land and sea Unsummoned my love returned to me I remember not the words he said But only the trees moaning over head. (ll. 1–4)

creating a Gothic sense of a visitation by a ghostly lover, perhaps. Later in the poem the leaves provide a welcome distraction: and I looked away from my lovers face to watch the dead leaves that were running apace.

This interweaving of unfaithful lovers, the natural world, and a Gothic or folkloric sense of story-telling owes much to Pre-Raphaelitism (and aspects of these are very apparent in Christina Rossetti’s work), but they owe their origins to other sources too. Siddall’s interest in ballads is known from her reading of Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1830), which Siddall owned and annotated, and which inspired drawings including “Clerk Saunders,” “The Gay Goshawk” and “The Maid of Lockroyan.” “Speechless” seems to owe more to Gottfried Bürger’s poem “Lenore” (1773), however, which was certainly well-known by the Rossetti family. The trope of the ghostly lover returning to claim his living bride appears throughout Romantic and Victorian poetry.

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Pre-Raphaelite Poetics and Women’s Writing “Speechless” invites critical attention, particularly because of its cryptic narrative. It is only through inference that one concludes the “lover” is returning from death “over land and sea” (l. 1); perhaps it is the word “unsummoned” which sends a chill down the reader’s spine. Yet what is his purpose? The second stanza tells us that “he came ready to take and bear / The cross I had carried for many a year,” (ll. 5–6) as if to return to an unknown land with a ghostly lover would offer a welcome relief from the burdens of life, yet the speaker is frozen with fear, and the description we are given of the lover’s motives suggest a Christ-like figure. The narrative clarity of “The Hour and the Ghost” is replaced here with the chill of the grave which benumbs the senses; however, the penultimate stanza embodies the fear in a graphic description of the grave: I felt the wind strike chill and cold and vapours rise from the red brown mould I felt the spell that held my breath Bending me down to a living death. (ll. 17–21)

In this Gothic, loosely folkloric chronicle of a woman’s fear of (re)union with a faceless other, we again see “repulsive detail,” this time in the sensation and odor of a visitation from a corpse. Eugenie DeLaMotte writes that “Two fears dominate this Gothic world: the fear of terrible separateness, and the fear of unity with some terrible Other.”22 The Other, who is the familiar transformed by death into an uncanny abstraction, is both clearly defined and yet visually unimaginable in Siddall’s poem; the realism of this imminent, terrifying union transmutes the delight of reunion in Heaven with a beloved into something much more sinister, putrefied and full of unknowable horrors. In women’s writing, this male figure is more than a belle dame sans merci equivalent; this is a threat to more than one’s life: it is a menace to faith, to virtue, to future happiness, which can be read as an expression of the traumas of restricted womanhood and the threat of the all-powerful male. In the gendered nineteenth-century context of a woman’s life which is situated in these cultural mores, union with an Other must somehow be deserved, and the 22 Eugenia C. DeLaMotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 22.

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woman to blame. Yet Siddall’s speaker feels no guilt, and her impulse is not to speak to defend herself, but instead to freeze. Being “frozen” is repeated in the poem; there is “chill” and “cold,” her brain and her lips are frozen. This is a woman whose protection is frostiness. And yet, is this lover really the fearsome monster of Gothic nightmares? He comes “with a love so strong” (l. 12) and the poem’s indications are that his intentions—whether he is Death or something else—are kindly. The stanzas alternate between fear and a sense of relief, as the speaker begins to thaw; the final lines of the poem indicate a softening, in a stanza deleted by William Michael Rossetti, which removes the final optimism of the poem and closes, instead, with terror. Siddall’s final stanza contains two illegible words, but the overall sense is of relief: As if hope lie bruised when he had come who knew my sorrows one by one and until comfort and pity [two illegible words] and give me the help of his own right hand. (ll. 21–24)

The “right hand” seems to stretch out from the final line of the poem, offering help from beyond the grave, which—we imagine—the speaker will accept. These final lines cast a slightly different light onto the poem, recalling Keats’s “This Living Hand,” “with its trompe-l’oeil gesture across the boundaries of life and death, writing and reading.”23 We wonder, then, if the “lover” is indeed ghostly, or Christ-like, or alive but long absent; Siddall, as in so many of her poems, refuses to provide an answer, instead leaving the reader to conjecture. The poet is, of course, writing within a poetic culture, aware of Keats and Christina Rossetti among others, but she is writing for herself: publication might have been intended in the future, but at this stage it is possible to see Siddall’s work as freed from the constraints of potential publication, and from its associated publicity. There was no need, then, to consider reputation, or to pin down meaning; the “poetess” label is not attached to Siddall, offering a liberation from expectation. As Tricia Lootens discusses, the public role of “poetess” in the nineteenth century was demanding:

23 Marjorie B. Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (London: Methuen, 1987), xv.

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Poetess performers do not pretend to speak even with the voices of “women,” much less of individuals. Rather, they step forward to “sing” as Woman, enacting a naturalized art performed as if flowing through them, most often without great effort and at points almost without volition.24

Preserving this aura of femininity which produces poetry without effort was important to William Michael Rossetti, who commented on how Christina Rossetti’s “habits of composition were entirely of the casual and spontaneous kind,” if something came into her head which she found suggestive of verse, she put it into verse. It came to her (I take it) very easily, without her meditating a possible subject, and without her making any great difference in her first from latest the latest form of the verses which embodied it.25

In fact, from letters, manuscripts and other accounts of Christina Rossetti’s writing, this account of her spontaneity and easy channeling of the female voice is untrue. William Michael Rossetti’s comments are less precise concerning Siddal, but he describes her poetry as “scanty” and “scrappily jotted down,” which suggests careless working practices rather than effort.26 Yet the manuscripts demonstrate careful thought—while they are indeed fragmentary, there are numerous verses of some poems, not all of which were published by her brother-in-law; there are crossingsout, rewording, and rewriting, providing evidence that Siddall, too, did not simply channel a muse and produce feminine, conformist poetry, instead she drew on her awareness of traditions in poetry in order to remake the old into the new. If the successful “Poetess” “markets herself at once as erotic commodity and sanctifying, antiworldly aesthetic object,” Siddall does so only in the most knowing, ironic way, in, for example, “The Lust of the Eyes” and “Gone.”27

24 Tricia Lootens, The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race and the Legacy of Separate Spheres (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 4. 25 William Michael Rossetti, The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with Memoir and Notes (London: Macmillan, 1903), lxix. 26 Rossetti, William Michael, “Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 1, no. 3 (1903): [273–295] 292. 27 Lootens, Political Poetess, 4.

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In “Gone,” the speaker is again male, while the female beloved is apparent only by her absence and traces she leaves. There is more than a hint of pique here, with a note of “you’ll be sorry when I’ve gone,” but the poem provides a sophisticated paradigm in which only the woman’s hand appears (“To touch the glove upon her tender hand,” l. 1), and even that is remembered, shrouded in a glove. The glove and the ring stand in for the embodied woman in the first stanza, accessories which mean nothing except through association with a vanished love object, and which imply an index to the physical objectification of women and, most significantly, the woman’s ability to evade that objectification, if only through death. These adornments are not the woman herself, and yet they are able to inspire joy in the speaker’s heart, permitting him to expose the triviality of his affection. The second stanza indicates that the woman is at a further remove, however; this time, it is her shadow which represents her physical presence, and this moves the speaker to “trembling and tears” (l. 7) as he stands in silence in a wood (recalling the “silent wood” where a female speaker mourns the loss of love; this is one of many curious intertextual references in her compact oeuvre). The shadow is repeated in the third stanza, where “shadows gather round my heart” (l. 9) and augurs the increasing sense of loss the speaker experiences as the woman’s figure recedes, or escapes, from him. The third and final stanza offers no glimpse of the beloved; now, she is “Gone gone forever” (l. 11) and will never return. We assume she is dead, though she may have deserted him—but the details seem irrelevant: though this is easily read as a poem of mourning, in the wider context of Siddall’s work, the vanishing woman seems aware of the space she leaves, walking out of the picture and leaving an absence which the masculine voice bewails. However, early death is treated somewhat differently in “He and She and Angels Three,” in which “Ruthless hands have torn her / from one that loved her well” (ll. 1–2). The circumstances which caused her death are ambiguous, rejecting balladic narrativity (whose “Ruthless hands” are they? God’s? A murderer?) but the dead woman is taken up to heaven, where she can share her grief and sing God’s praises until she is reunited with her lover. The conventional biblical understanding of Heaven as a place of worship and joy (as well as the more theologically uncertain concept of reunion in Heaven with loved ones) is portrayed in the final stanza; however, the manuscript has a number 4 at the end, indicating an intention to write another verse. At the top of the manuscript page is another fragment:

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Autumnal leaves are falling about her new made grave Where the tall grass bends to listen To the murmur of the wave.

The rhythm, topic, and tone of this stanza seem to fit with “He and She and Angels Three,” so it is possible that this was intended to be a part of the same poem, perhaps as an opening verse, though it is not numbered; but the status of the manuscripts as drafts, and Siddall’s uncertain approach toward numbering, makes this not unlikely. “Autumnal Leaves” is sometimes published with a second stanza, different in rhythm and rhyme scheme: Laden autumn, here I stand With my sheaves in either hand; Speak the word that sets me free, Naught but rest seems good to me.

The second stanza first appeared in Violet Hunt’s The Wife of Rossetti,28 but, in fact, it is the work of William Morris, since a version of it appears in his Poems by the Way (1891) with “Verses for Pictures,” along with stanzas for the other three seasons.

Siddall’s Hybrid Poetic Voice The female poetic voice is constructed in a variety of ways throughout Siddall’s oeuvre, as she experiments with writing. This concept of a female poetics is a slippery one, explored by Isobel Armstrong, who, like Lootens, outlines how women’s poetry might consist of “poems of protest” against social restrictions which confine women, but also that we cannot and should not read women’s poetry so that “all poems become poems about women’s oppression. In this way the nature of the particular language and form of individual poems becomes obliterated by the concentration on a single theme.”29 This approach is one which enables scholars to explore poetry by women as poetry, rather than as women’s 28 Hunt, Wife of Rossetti, 283. 29 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (Abingdon: Routledge,

1993), 319.

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poetry, the work of the performative (and fictive) “Poetess.” Armstrong argues that “women wrote with a sense of belonging to a particular group defined by their sexuality, and […] this sense comprehends political differences and very different kinds of poetic language.”30 Moreover, there is a “doubleness” to women’s poetry, from an affective mode, often simple, often pious, often conventional. But these conventions are subjected to investigation, questioned, or used for unexpected purposes. The simpler the surface of the poem, the more likely it is that a second and more difficult poem will exist beneath it.31

One of Siddall’s superficially simple poems, “At Last,” constructs a female monologue with just such a second poem under the surface. This is an 8-stanza poem in ballad form; each quatrain alternates 3- and 4-stress lines, though with some disruptive substitutions, and with a simple ABAB rhyming pattern. Hassett suggests “Clerk Saunders” (which Siddall also illustrated) as an inspiration for the poem, as well as containing thematic links to other ballads.32 Yet although it may appear to be a narrative in the style of traditional ballads, in fact it does not construct the balladic story: it is apparent that this is a monologue in the voice of a dying woman, which ostensibly draws on folklore and superstition, but there are many questions to be asked, and the poem leaves too much open to question for this to be entirely conventional, inviting a reading of “doubleness” in the shadows of the text. The poem begins with the fading of the light, as the dying woman looks out upon the hills and her “thoughts begin to swim” (l. 4). What follows, then, is an account of her last wishes, which are spoken to her mother. The poem explores a paradigmatic relationship between women: And mother dear take my young son since I was born of thee. (ll. 5–6)

Here the young mother is drawing on the bonds of female relationships as a form of protection against the world: it is not death the speaker fears, but social judgment and harsh treatment of her son. In accepting the care 30 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 323. 31 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 324. 32 Hassett, “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry,” 452.

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of “sweet Robert” (l. 23), the speaker’s mother becomes complicit in a circle of protection for the young. Other requests are made, too: these are often ritualistic, such as to “wash my pale pale hands” (l. 9), a traditional symbol which echoes baptism and the washing away of sins, and, more curiously, to take a sapling twig and green grass newly mown, and lay it on my empty bed that my sorrow be not known. (ll. 13–16)

The folklorist Christina Hole suggests that “green turf” might be laid by the bed of the deceased to prevent evil spirits (similar to the more common dish of salt), but there is more to this than meets the eye: what “sorrow” must be hidden? One is reminded of Christina Rossetti’s Jeanie, in “Goblin Market,” on whose grave “no grass will grow” (ll. 158).33 Jeanie is a girl Who should have been a bride; But who for joys brides hope to have Fell sick and died. (ll. 313–315)

and she serves as a warning to Lizzie and Laura. Does the grass not grow because of her shame? The “joys brides hope to have” seems unequivocal about the perils of extramarital sexual activity. Is Siddall’s speaker dying as a result of childbirth out of wedlock? Moreover, she is afraid that her “spirit” may “walk” (l. 20), as if a restless ghost, returning to her orphaned son and the scene of her unhappiness, is somehow inevitable for her situation. To prevent this, she urges her mother to burn “three berries red” (l. 17), perhaps rowan or holly, which were considered to offer protection against ghosts and witchcraft. The final superstitious reference is to a “willow wand” (l. 21) which will provide divination for her son that her “souls in heaven” (l. 24). The tone of the poem is very much one of witchcraft and rural superstition, then, with natural objects and plants imbued with power stronger than prayer; the poem contravenes the traditional deathbed scene of hope for resurrection and reunion, offering something more matriarchal, female, and occult. Yet the superstitions and 33 Christina Hole, English Folklore (London: Batsford, 1940), 50.

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traditions of the poem are difficult to link to specific folk beliefs. Hassett points out that they are in large part invented, and yet: Not only do they work brilliantly to create the atmosphere of lykewake superstition and fear, their unfamiliarity is consistent with the lost origin or culturally forgotten “meaning” of many ballad details.34

This is significant: Siddall has constructed a world in which nothing is quite as it seems. Is the speaker a dutiful doomed woman, widowed perhaps, whose body will be buried in the “pale kirk grass” (l. 30), or is she a witch, protecting her mother and son from the judgment of the world, if they knew of her shame? If she is respectable, why are these precautions needed? And why would her mother need to bury her secretly at night? And mother dear when the sun has set and the pale kirk grass waves Then carry me through the dim twilight and hide among the graves. (ll. 29–32)

This is not the simple poem it seems because of its acute awareness of its cultural heritage. It closely parodies a ballad, yet without the clarity of narrative; however, there are also echoes of Ophelia in the broken willow wand (Hamlet IV.iii), of “Goblin Market” in the grass on the grave but also the twilight, which is, of course, “not good for maidens” (l. 144). The speaker shows neither fear nor remorse: “my dying heart was gay” (l. 28), she asserts, while acknowledging her son will one day grieve for her. In the context of the poem, this seems more than stoic Christian belief in Heaven; it seems that her “sorrow” will soon be past, and, as a woman, she must take freedom from social judgment where she can find it: in death. The poetic woman, in Siddall’s work, is akin to nature just because she is beyond the grasp of the masculine, no matter how she may be used by men. The speaker of “At Last” eludes us because, like Siddall’s other women, she leaves only an imprint of herself behind as she vanishes from our view.

34 Hassett, “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry,” 453.

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References Arcara, Stefania. “Sleep and Liberation: The Opiate World of Elizabeth Siddal.” In Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth, Edited by Béatrice Laurent. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. 95–120. Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. Abingdon: Routledge, 1993. Armstrong, Isobel. “The Pre-Raphaelites and Literature.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, Edited by Elizabeth Prettejohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 15–31. Bullen, J. B. Rossetti, Painter and Poet. London: Frances Lincoln, 2011. DeLaMotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of NineteenthCentury Gothic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Garber, Marjorie B. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. London: Methuen, 1987. Hassett, Constance. “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions.” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 4 (1997): 443–470. Hawksley. Lucinda. Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel. London: André Deutsch, 2004. Hole, Christina. English Folklore. London: Batsford, 1940. Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson. Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1980. Hunt, Violet. The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death, etc. London: John Lane, 1932. Latham, David. “A ‘World of Its Own Creation’: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and the New Paradigm for Art.” In Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, Edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 127–150. Lootens, Tricia. The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race and the Legacy of Separate Spheres. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. Marsh, Jan. The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal. London: Quartet Books, 1989. Marsh, Jan. Elizabeth Siddal 1829–1862: Pre-Raphaelite Artist. Sheffield: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of the Guild of St George/Sheffield Arts Department, 1991. Marsh, Jan Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Marsh, Jan. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet: A Biography. London: Orion, 1999. Roe, Dinah, ed. The Pre-Raphaelites from Rossetti to Ruskin. London: Penguin, 2010. Roe, Dinah. The Rossettis in Wonderland. London: Haus Publishing, 2011.

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Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His Family-Letters with a Memoir. 2 vols. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1895. Rossetti, William Michael. Ruskin, Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism. London: Allen Lane, 1895. Rossetti, William Michael, ed. The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, with Memoir and Notes. London: Macmillan, 1903. Rossetti, William Michael. “Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 1, no. 3 (1903): 273–295. Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences. 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1906. Stevenson, Lionel. The Pre-Raphaelite Poets. New York: Norton, 1974. Trowbridge, Serena, ed. My Ladys Soul: The Poetry of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2018. Trowbridge, Serena. “‘Truth to Nature’: The Pleasures and Dangers of the Environment in Christina Rossetti’s Poetry.” In Victorians and the Environment, Edited by Ronald D. Morris and Lawrence Mazzeno. Farnham: Ashgate, 2017. 63–78.

CHAPTER 9

Swinburne’s Expansive Poetics Elizabeth Helsinger

Algernon Charles Swinburne was very much a part of the social and professional circles surrounding Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the late 1850s and the 1860s. In 1872 his poetry was denounced by Robert Buchanan as part of the same “fleshly school” as Rossetti’s.1 But Swinburne’s poetry, with its sustained and insistent beating, elaborate rhyming across long distances, and intentionally diffuse imagery, might seem to have little in common with the brilliant but small-scale, highly detailed, and sharply focused drawings, paintings, and watercolors of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (especially Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais), or the early lyrics of Rossetti, William Morris, or George Meredith (all poets whose work was identified by contemporaries as Pre-Raphaelite). In many respects, however, Swinburne shared both the ambitions and the strategies of his Pre-Raphaelite friends. Pre-Raphaelite poetics went 1 Buchanan, Fleshly School, esp. 16–32. Buchanan expanded his original review of Rossetti’s Poems (which appeared in the Contemporary Review, 1871) into a pamphlet with a substantial section on Swinburne when he republished it in 1872. Buchanan had already damningly reviewed Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in the Athenaeum (4 August 1866) when it first appeared.

E. Helsinger (B) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_9

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back in order to move forward, disrupting contemporary expectations in order to make English art and poetry new. Swinburne too used formal means to unsettle conventions of realist representation by going back to the apparent simplicities of earlier art and literature. He, too, borrowed freely across historical, linguistic, and media boundaries. And like them, he also elaborated the surface patterning of his poems. Yet Swinburne’s poetry does not look, sound, or read much like the Pre-Raphaelite work of his friends. We can best see how Swinburne’s poetry participates in a poetics we might call Pre-Raphaelite by attending to similarities of formal aims and practices applied on a wholly different scale. Both prosodically and philosophically, Swinburne is interested in scales of time and space far more expansive than those invoked by his Pre-Raphaelite friends. The second chorus of Atalanta in Calydon (1865) abruptly announces this expanded scale: it begins “Before the beginning of years.”2 The sweeping rhythms, elemental landscapes, and attention to the “bleak beauty of little words” repeated in endlessly shifting combinations across a long poem (to which John D. Rosenberg drew modern critical attention fifty years ago) are evident in several poems from Swinburne’s most famous volume, Poems and Ballads (1866) and magnificently exemplified in later poems from “A Forsaken Garden” (1876, 1878), “By the North Sea” (1880), and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), to The Tale of Balen (1896).3 They were first explored in Swinburne’s Greek tragedy, Atalanta. There he invokes the inhuman—a more than human—scale of both time and space that is his distinctive development of the formal and thematic strangeness of poetic Pre-Raphaelitism, especially its return to archaic settings, vocabularies, and poetic forms to depict the psychological strains of clearly modern sexual, social, or religious life. In Atalanta, Swinburne tested the possibilities of a large-scale Pre-Raphaelite poetics of wind, water, and light by extending Pre-Raphaelite interest in almost abstract patterns of color and sound. Where they compressed and focused much into small, tightly

2 Swinburne, “Atalanta in Calydon,” Major Poems, 3–67, l.314. Subsequent quotations from this edition given by line numbers in the text. See also the opening line of Swinburne’s “Hymn of Man” (Songs Before Sunrise, composed 1869 –1870): “In the grey beginning of years, in the twilight of things that began.” 3 Rosenberg, “Swinburne,” 132. My own essay might be read as an expansion of Rosenberg’s opening observation (131), that Swinburne’s poetry moves between painting (specifically Turner) and music.

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worked poems and pictures, creating jarring juxtapositions of near and far, then and now elaborated into repeating patterns, Swinburne invented methods of expanding such patterns while sustaining energy across broad expanses of moving verse. To do so, he absorbed influences both from the traditional songs and ballads of Northumbria and from poets including Walt Whitman and William Blake. He also borrowed from the theories of composer Richard Wagner and the paintings of J. M. W. Turner. These multi-medial influences first came together for Swinburne in 1863–1864 when he conceived and wrote Atalanta. There the dramatic is shaped by long lyric passages that borrow their methods from visual and musical as well as poetic arts. They help to make a work that Swinburne described as at once “purely Greek” and modern, one where the laws of prosody and those of fate are made to converge.4 In what follows I look more closely at the inspirations that produced Atalanta, paying particular attention to the important but understudied role of Turner as his work shaped Swinburne’s perceptions of sky and sea and—through the mediation of Charles Baudelaire and Wagner— suggested the prosodic “scheme of movement and modulation” across extended reaches of verse that constitutes Swinburne’s distinctive transformation of a Pre-Raphaelite poetics.5 I turn briefly, in conclusion, to twentieth-century musical translations of Atalanta and other Swinburne poems as they confirm the Pre-Raphaelite affiliations of his expansive poetics. “This poetry,” Swinburne wrote of William Blake’s prophetic books, “has the huge various monotonies, the fervent and fluent colours, the vast limits, the fresh sonorous strength, the certain confusion and tumultuous intense refraction of shadow or light, the crowded life and inanimate intricacy, the patience and the passion of the sea.”6 The description could just as well be applied to Swinburne’s own verses. As indeed can Swinburne’s comparison of Blake with Whitman: A sound as of a sweeping wind; a prospect as over dawning continents at the fiery instant of a sudden sunrise; a splendour now of stars and now of storms; an expanse and exultation of wing across strange spaces of air

4 Swinburne, Letters 1.115 (To Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, March 15, 1865). 5 Swinburne, Letters 2:73, 74. 6 Swinburne, Essay on Blake, 187.

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and above shoreless stretches of sea […] a power, intense and infallible, of pictorial concentration and absorption, most rare when combined with the sense and the enjoyment of the widest and the highest things […] these are qualities common to the work of either.7

The shoreless stretches of sea, the huge but various monotonies, the fervid and fluent colors: Swinburne finds in Blake and Whitman not only his own favorite natural setting, the seam between land and sea, but that scene as painted by Turner. Swinburne’s Turnerian accounts of Blake’s and Whitman’s poetry are part of the long Essay on Blake (1868) on which he was working in 1863, when he spent almost six months on the Isle of Wight, first with his family at their home, Bonchurch, near East Dene (where his favorite sister, Edith, died of tuberculosis that fall), and then after her death and his family’s departure for Europe, with his beloved cousin, Mary Gordon, at her nearby family home, Northcourt. During these months, he worked on the Blake essay while daily riding the downs, swimming in the sea, and helping Mary with her Greek. He also shared with her parts of his novel-in-progress, Lesbia Brandon (1952), with its fictionalized account of their childhood companionship during summer vacations at his grandfather Swinburne’s Northumberland estate, Capheaton.8 Swinburne had composed for that novel a striking series of imitation Northumberland songs and ballads, where the winds and waves of a harshly unforgiving country and the fatalism of its inhabitants are translated into the deliberately rough and broken rhythms of verse.9 And Swinburne also began Atalanta, composing its great closing chorus, as he wrote from Northcourt to another sister, while listening ecstatically to Mary playing Handel choruses on the organ: I can hardly behave for delight at some of the choruses […] [The music] crams and crowds me with old and new verses, half-remembered and halfmade, which new ones will hardly come straight afterwards: but under their

7 Ibid., 302. 8 Lesbia Brandon was still incomplete at Swinburne’s death. It was first published in an

edition edited by Randolph Hughes in 1952. 9 On Swinburne’s imitation Northumbrian songs in Lesbia Brandon, see Helsinger, “Taking Back the Ballad.”

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influence I have done some more of my Atalanta which will be among my great doings if it keeps up with its last scenes throughout.10

The surging rhythms of the music become indistinguishable in Swinburne’s fertile, receptive hearing from the lines of poetry, “halfremembered and half-made,” that will make up the great closing kommos of Atalanta. That Turner’s land- and sea-scapes should have been present to Swinburne’s imagination in these months spent by the sea with Mary Gordon is hardly surprising. Bonchurch and Northcourt in 1863 held many evidences of the Swinburnes’ and Gordons’ close ties with the painter, including parts of the two families’ collections of his paintings, watercolors, and engravings.11 Turner and his paintings of light, air, and water provided a shared language of reference for Swinburne and his mother and sisters when writing to one another of the sea, as Swinburne’s correspondence makes clear.12 Swinburne considered Turner his favorite painter and was proud of his Northumberland grandfather not only for his French birth, Jacobite heritage, liberal politics, and reputation for hard riding, but also for his early art collecting and friendship with the painter.13 Both Sir John Swinburne and his brother Edward, an 10 Swinburne, Letters, 1.93 (To Alice Swinburne, from Northcourt, December 31

[1863]). 11 Some of the family’s Turner materials may have been transferred from Capheaton on Swinburne’s grandfather’s death in September 1860, after which Swinburne never again visited that second much-loved landscape of moors and a distant sea. Swinburne evidently had engravings by Turner in his rooms in London when Ruskin visited him in 1865; see Swinburne, Letters, 6.151n. The family also owned several copies of Turner’s Liber Studiorum and a number of Turner watercolors (five of these are now in the British Museum). Julia Swinburne, Swinburne’s aunt (1795–1893), who also drew and painted, inherited some of these watercolors and a copy of the Liber Studiorum from her uncle Edward when he died in 1855; she seems to have sold them by 1887. 12 See, for example, Swinburne, Letters, 5.216 (To Alice Swinburne, from 2, The Terrace, Lancing-on-sea, November 3, 1887), 5.254 (To Lady Jane Henrietta Swinburne, from 2, The Terrace, Lancing-on-Sea, October 25 [sic for 26?], 1888), and 5.258 (To Lady Jane Henrietta Swinburne, from The Pines, Christmas Day, 1888). 13 Swinburne, Letters, 3. 11 (To E. C. Stedman, February 20, 1875). See also 6.118

(To T. J. Wise, November 2, 1896: “I need not tell you how the admirable vignette of the sea—worthy of Turner, had he been a writer—appeals to my sympathy.” In a passage from E. T. Cook’s diary recording a visit to Swinburne at Putney in July, 1901, Cook reports Swinburne as saying: “The only time that he [Ruskin] came to rooms of mine he was delighted at seeing those engravings of Turner, for Rossetti and Ned Jones did not

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amateur watercolorist, were early patrons. Sir John’s wife, Emma Bennet, and her sister Julia Bennet, later Lady Gordon (Mary Gordon’s grandmother) took lessons from Turner. He painted for Lady Gordon and her husband a view from the terrace of their Isle of Wight home, Niton, looking out toward the sea, based on Lady Gordon’s sketches—a painting that by 1863 hung, flanked by two other Turners, at Northcourt.14 In 1827, the year after Turner completed his picture of Niton, visiting the Isle of Wight for the first time since the 1790s, he made the first of many oil sketches of the sea, a sea empty of human incident, stretching to the horizon on every side, with nothing to be seen but what Swinburne would describe as the “varied monotonies” of water moving under a sky of fluent color—remarkably close to the seascape Swinburne distilled from memories of Turner and his own love of the sea, nurtured on the Isle of Wight and brought back to him when he encountered the poetry of Blake and Whitman.15 It is no accident, then, that there are memorable passages of Turnerian description in Atalanta, from the opening invocation by the Chief Huntsman to Artemis […] let earth Laugh, and the long sea fiery from thy feet Through all the roar and ripple of streaming springs And foam in reddening flakes and flying flowers. (ll. 25–28)

and the first chorus’ lines on the spring dawn (“For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers, / Round the feet of the day and the feet of care much about Turner, but I was brought up on him (he used to visit my family) and simply revel in everything of his.” Letters 6.152n. This must have been the long evening Ruskin spent at Swinburne’s on December 7, 1865, when Swinburne read aloud to him a great part of Poems and Ballads. 14 J. M. W. Turner, View from the Terrace of a Villa at Niton, Isle of Wight, from a Sketch by a Lady, exh. 1826, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Accession no 1993.46. The painting has the same dimensions as Turner’s Mercury and Herse, perhaps at the request of Lady Gordon, since Mercury and Herse was an early purchase of Sir John Swinburne’s and she would have known it well; it hung at Capheaton until it was sold after Sir John’s death. 15 J. M. W. Turner, Study of Sea and Sky, Isle of Wight, c. 1827, Tate N02001. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-study-of-sea-and-sky-isle-ofwight-n02001. For Swinburne’s description of the sea’s “varied monotonies,” see footnote 6, above.

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the night” [ll. 79–80]) to the chorus’ later evocation of the bitter, stormy sea that, in Swinburne’s account, accompanied the birth of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love: And under thee newly arisen Loud shoals and shipwrecking reefs, Fierce air and violent light; Sail rent and sundering oar, Darkness, and noises of night; Clashing of streams in the sea, Wave against wave as a sword, Clamour of currents, and foam; Rains making ruin on earth, Winds that wax ravenous and roam As wolves in a wolfish horde. (ll. 812–822)

Advancing and receding lines translate into poetic form a surging and retreating sea, like that of Turner’s early depiction of Dunstanborough Castle, near Capheaton, of which Edward Swinburne made a watercolor copy, or like Turner’s later return to the same subject in Wreckers off the Coast of Northumberland (first sketched in 1797, on his initial trip into Northumberland, when he probably made acquaintance with Sir John) (see Fig. 9.1).16 But what is most interesting about these passages in Atalanta is not their Turnerian imagery, but how Swinburne achieves in verse effects analogous to those of the painter. In the passage above, for example, a torrent of diverse images—light, waves, swords, winds, ravenous wolves— sweeps by so quickly, borne along by the short trimeter lines, the rapidly returning beat of their trochaic first feet, and the scattered quickening of anapests, that the visualizing imagination cannot comprehend them. But Swinburne (like his fellow PRB, but for different reasons) rewards a 16 J. M. W. Turner, Wreckers —Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, c. 1833–1834, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.15. There is an accomplished copy by Edward Swinburne (the poet’s uncle) of a watercolor of Dunstanborough Castle of about 1800 (now in the Laing Gallery, Newcastle) in the Yale Center for British Art (B1980.38.3). Edward’s watercolor is also very close to two oils by Turner of the same subject, c. 1799, now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery; both the oils and the watercolor are based on sketches in Turner’s 1797 sketchbook.

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Fig. 9.1 Turner, J. M. W. Wreckers —Coast of Northumberland, with a SteamBoat Assisting a Ship off Shore, c. 1833–1834, oil on canvas, 90.5 × 120.8 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven

second and closer reading. In this passage, sound (alliterating and assonantal linking) carries and unifies an only apparently senseless barrage of imagery. Those clanging a’s and hard c’s in the “clamour of currents” and “clashing of streams,” or the liquid and wandering w’s of waves, winds, swords, and “wolves in a wolfish horde,” move us along so rapidly that it is only in rereading that one discovers the justness of the imagery. Swinburne uses sound—an abstraction of phonemes always in the process of detaching themselves from particular objects—to form a moving aural atmosphere that is also one of feeling, and that nonetheless, like Turner’s vortical swirls of air as light and color, resolves on closer inspection into the material realities (struggling ships and stormy seas) from which it is taken. For both poet and painter, each in his own medium, one might say that the sensations of storm and sea are sublimed (in the chemical sense) into the moving materials of sound or paint. That is a very Keatsian

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understanding of poetry’s aim: to achieve a material sublime, distilling sensations rooted in the real (its sight and sound, but also taste and touch) into another, perhaps higher or at least more lasting but no less material form: the sensory qualities of paint on canvas or of poetry in the ear and mouth and on the page.17 As Swinburne’s praise of Blake insists, “there are laws, strange as it must sound, by which the work is done and against which it never sins.”18 That concept of poetic “laws”—a system or method by which the work is done—caught Swinburne’s attention in another text he was reading in 1863: Baudelaire’s essay on Wagner, which in 1863 he sent to Swinburne in thanks for Swinburne’s favorable review of Les Fleurs du Mal the year before.19 Baudelaire’s essay stresses, again and again, Wagner’s “method,” his “système mnémonique.”20 Jerome McGann convincingly argues that Swinburne adapted Wagner’s mnemonic method to his poetry, creating what the poet called, with reference to another poem begun in the fall of 1863 (“Anactoria,” part of which, McGann points out, was written on a page of the manuscript of Atalanta), “my own scheme of movement and modulation […] which I consider original in structure and combination.”21 Wagner’s melodic transformations of key motifs become Swinburne’s repeating words and phonemes, echoing and transforming—“modulating”—as they rhyme or alliterate with sonically similar terms across a passage or an entire poem. Quoting Franz Liszt, Baudelaire had pointed to the way that Wagner “by means of numerous principal phrases, has tied a melodic knot that constitutes his whole drama,” where

17 As Marion Thain has recently argued (in The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism), a related understanding of material sublimity can be found in the fixed-form poetry of the next generation at the close of the century, itself much influenced by Swinburne’s work of the 1860s. Contrast Ora Polten, who in her recent and insightful article, “Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon,” takes “sublimation” to be a process of moving away from the material, and thus reads Atalanta’s sublime as a move from music’s inarticulate materiality (Handel’s choruses that can’t be put into words) into an articulation of the irrational (the source of darkness but also of inspiration in Swinburne’s writing) that is nevertheless riddled with absence or lack—a substitution for the real. On Keats’s material sublime and the chemical and alchemical metaphors underlying it, see Stuart M. Sperry, Jr., “Keats and the Chemistry of Poetic Creation,” PMLA 85, no. 2 (March 1970): 268−277. 18 Swinburne, Essay on Blake, 187–188. 19 See McGann, “Wagner, Baudelaire, Swinburne,” 622. 20 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, 1215, 1219, 1230–1231. 21 McGann, “Wagner, Baudelaire, Swinburne,” 629–630; Swinburne, Letters, 2:73, 74.

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the continued transformation of each still recognizable musical phrase accommodates varying “intentions and nuances that the work encloses that one cannot immediately grasp.”22 By the “systematic persistence” of melodic motif, “joined to an art of distribution,” Liszt continues in Baudelaire’s text, Wagner “melodically designates both the character of his protagonists and their principal passions […] his melodies are in a certain sense the personifications of ideas.”23 Swinburne was no less ambitious, building an intellectual architecture for his poetry from repeating and perpetually modulating sounds and images of words ordered into verse. Ever in the process of separating from the particular things or actions they normally designate, these recurring, shifting words work as prosodic no less than semantic chains binding together in constantly varying monotonies the shoreless seas of verse. Atalanta is held together by just such perpetually modulating chains of sounds and sights, words and images that gradually come to embody the hard decrees of hostile gods in Swinburne’s modern, pessimistic version of Greek fatalism. These chains come together in the closing kommos of characters and chorus. The pursuing “hounds” of the first chorus’ opening line (“When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces” l. 65) are first transformed, at the end of that choral song, into “The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies” (ll. 118–120) of a procession of Bacchic Maenads. Althaea, the mother of the hero Meleager, wary of the virgin huntress Atalanta with whom, she rightly fears, Meleager will fall in love with disastrous results, replies to the chorus by turning their image of the fawn pursued by wolves into something still darker and more violent. “Night,” Althaea answers, “a black hound, follows the white fawn day, / Swifter than dreams the white flown feet of sleep […]” (ll. 125–126). Her bitter transformation not only looks back to the chorus’ imagery of hounds hunting down winter, while picking up and transforming key consonants and modulating vowels (the procession of f’s and the repeated shift from “ound” to “awn” to “own” in the recurring association of hounds, wolves, and fawns following and flown). It also foreshadows the violent conclusion of the boar-hunt for which Atalanta has come. The chorus in turn pick up Althaea’s words, which become “Night, the shadow of light, / And life, the shadow of death,” (ll. 324–325) where the last syllable of

22 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, 1230. 23 Ibid., 1231.

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shadow continues the modulation of hound to fawn flown into darkness and death. It is with these that the gods hunt down mortals, an echoing motif that returns a final time at the end of the kommos, when the chorus grimly concludes: The gods guard over us With sword and with rod; Weaving shadow to cover us, Heaping the sod, That law may fulfil herself wholly, to darken man’s face before God. (ll. 2177–2181)

A second chain of modulating motifs begins with Althaea’s foreboding naming of “Love, a thwart sea-wind full of rain and foam,” which the chorus echoes in its account of the birth of Aphrodite: “For an evil blossom was born / Of sea-foam and the frothing of blood” and then extends in the lines quoted earlier: Clamour of currents, and foam; Rains making ruin on earth, Winds that wax ravenous and roam As wolves in a wolfish horde. (ll. 819–822)

The two chains—the ravenous hunting wolves and “sea-foam and the frothing of blood”—first come together here, as they will again in the kommos when Meleager longs for the cool foam of a sea-death when he is consumed by fire after his mother has thrust the brand that controls his life back into the flames from which she snatched it when he was born: “Cold girdles and crowns of the sea-gods, cool blossoms of water and foam!” (l. 2156). Ah, better to be What the flower of the foam is In fields of the sea, That the sea-waves might be as my raiment, the gulf-stream a garment for me. (ll. 2133–2136)

Once more linking the bloody foam to the devouring, hound- or wolflike gods, the chorus asks if he really prefers death to life: “Thy blood to the water, thy soul to the gods who divide and devour?” (l. 2171).

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The “laws” of verse—its prosodic methods and the weight of ideas that prosody might carry—were for Swinburne, as for Baudelaire, suggested by the method of Wagner’s music as both Baudelaire and Liszt described it. But they were also suggested by both poets’ intellectual and aesthetic engagements with the work and the methods of painters. In Baudelaire’s case, the painter whose methods he described in his art criticism was Eugene Delacroix, and the system one of color, derived, as Baudelaire learned in conversation with the artist, from the chemist M. E. Chevreul’s practical studies in the effects of one color on another. Following Chevreul, Delacroix juxtaposed complementaries, particularly red and green, so as to intensify each color—an effect, Baudelaire explained, that depended on a viewer’s distance from the picture.24 It was the intervening air (and even the varnish on the painting), Baudelaire suggested, that formed a material medium in which colors, abstracted from objects, could meet and influence one another, carrying the emotional and intellectual content of the painting. Turner’s paintings, one might say, make this medium visible: he painted the interaction of light and color in air. Baudelaire’s Wagner essay, to which Swinburne strongly responded, evokes the effects of the composer’s music in visual terms that Swinburne will echo in his Turnerian descriptions of the effects of light and vast space suggested to him by Blake’s and Whitman’s poetry. “No other musician,” Baudelaire wrote, “excels like Wagner at painting material and spiritual space and depth” (Baudelaire’s emphasis). His music recalls “something infinitely grand and infinitely beautiful; an intense light that rejoices the eyes and soul to the point of fainting […] the sensation of space extended to the last conceivable limits.”25 Baudelaire supported his visual language for describing the work of Wagnerian melody by quoting from his own poem about synesthetic exchange, “Correspondances:” Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,

24 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, 883. Future references given in the text. On Delacroix’s constant research into the relationships of color, see also Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, 1118–1819; on Chevreul, see Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, 89, 93, 104, 106. 25 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, 1214. Translations here and below are my own.

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Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.26

[Like distant echos that combine In a shadowy and profound unity, Vast as night and light, Perfumes, colors, and sounds correspond.]

Sensations combine when they leave the objects that stimulate them, abstracted into a correspondence of scents with colors and sounds that itself forms a unified atmosphere or feeling “vast as night and light.” Indeed, Baudelaire writes, “what would be truly surprising would be that sound could not suggest color, that colors could not give the idea of a melody, and that sound and color were improper to translate ideas; things being always expressed by a reciprocal analogy, since the day when God offered the world as a complex and undivided totality.”27 Baudelaire too derives a prosodic method by analogy with Delacroix’s system of color and Wagner’s continuous melodic transformations of motifs that can personify ideas. His poem “Harmonie du Soir” (“Evening Harmony”) provides the practical example for which “Correspondances” articulates the theory. “Harmonie du Soir” is a pantoum: the rhyming second and fourth lines of every stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza, so that there are only two rhyme sounds dancing round each other to form a knot of sound that holds the poem together—the prosodic equivalent of both Wagner’s method and the painters’ use of the thick medium of air to form a moving color field. Repeating lines of verse weave together prosodically the sounds and perfumes that “turn in the evening air,” exhaled from flowers and vibrating from the strings of a violin, creating a “melancholy waltz,” a “languorous, dizzying whirl” that catches up in turn the deepening colors of the evening sky, the feelings of a tender heart, and memories of a lost love glowing in a luminous past.28 As I have already suggested, Baudelaire’s, Delacroix’s, and Turner’s abstractions of color to form an ordering architecture had also been Rossetti’s method in the strange, medievalizing watercolors he produced 26 Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, 1213. 27 Ibid. 28 “Harmonie du Soir,” Oeuvres Complètes, 45.

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in the late 1850s, when Swinburne first became an enthusiastic member of his circle.29 In The Tune of Seven Towers and The Blue Closet, for example, the drawings’ figures are upstaged by the brilliantly colored and patterned objects that surround them, backgrounds overriding the claims of figural foregrounds to become the most striking elements in the compositions. Color co-opts the strange, expressionless and un-dramatic human protagonists into each picture’s ordering design. Rossetti’s watercolors, however, operate on a small-scale; his scenes take place in tightly confined spaces, inducing a kind of claustrophobia that his poems repeat—from “The Blessed Damozel” and “Sister Helen” to the short, fixed-form sonnets of “The House of Life.” Concentration produces the emotional and aesthetic intensities of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite poetics. In the lyric poems of his first volume, Morris similarly intensifies by repeating and concentrating combined colors and feelings. His “Tune of Seven Towers” and (especially) “The Blue Closet” take as subject confinement and endless repetition, themselves forming strikingly beautiful patterns in verse that are far more important than any hinted narrative. Where Rossetti and Morris compress visual and verbal detail into patterns in order to intensify feeling, Swinburne, learning from Turner, Wagner, Blake, and Whitman, will expand and extend them. Swinburne’s transformation of what had been a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics of compression into his own “scheme of modulation and movement” on an extended scale was also assisted by conversations between Swinburne, Rossetti, and the painter J. M. Whistler. Whistler and Swinburne met in July 1862, about the time Whistler met Rossetti. For at least the next year, the three—with Whistler and Swinburne as occasional inhabitants and frequent guests at Rossetti’s house in Chelsea—were together absorbed in exploring the autonomous “laws” of art that Swinburne was to defend so eloquently in his essay on Blake. In Whistler’s painting The Little White Girl (1865; in 1887 retitled as Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl ), the girl in her white dress becomes part of an arrangement of flat, semi-abstracted shapes and colors not unlike what Rossetti had achieved with his much earlier painting, Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850). Whistler, however, as Kathleen Pyne argues, by

29 See Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song, 77–107, and Poetry and the PreRaphaelite Arts, 6–9 and 82–86 for fuller discussions of Rossetti’s and Morris’s methods in these watercolors and poems.

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both his title and his composition “insisted that the picture be apprehended in terms of its artifice, as rhythms of line, color, and mass.”30 “Before the Mirror,” the poem that Swinburne wrote about this painting, reflects the three friends’ shared exploration of works of art and poems as at once representations of consciousness (“Deep in the gleaming glass / She sees all past things pass” [ll. 47–48]) and disciplined compositions of semi-abstract shapes, colors, or sounds: White rose in red rose-garden Is not so white; Snowdrops that plead for pardon And pine for fright Because the hard East blows Over their maiden rows Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright. (ll. 1–7)31

Swinburne attended closely to these Pre-Raphaelite strategies of abstracting color and pattern, but beginning in the critical year 1863, his own poetry, as we have seen, began to adapt such abstracting methods to the more extended scale practiced by his other masters: the transformations of color and melodic motif that he found in Baudelaire’s Wagner and in Turner and in the extended landscapes of movement and sound he found in Whitman and the prophetic books of Blake. Swinburne was haunted by the long lines and giant shapes of Blake’s mythic imagination as he peopled the sweeping land- and time-scapes of his semimetrical verse, and by Whitman’s freely rhythmic poetry with its extended 30 Pyne, Art and the Higher Life, 96. As Pyne describes the painting: “Flattened and rigidly controlled by the geometry of the room’s architecture, the white figure is pushed up to the surface, so that it is almost in relief. With the figure now splayed out to conform with the rationalized scheme of the canvas, the ordering system becomes one of brightly colored shapes that lie on the surface.” 31 Sections 1 and 2 of the poem as published in Poems and Ballads (1866) were added to the original verses in 1865, making both picture and poem more clearly a study in white on white, intensified by the imagined contrast with red. The verses Whistler exhibited with the painting (Section 3 of the poem as published) focus on an equation between the blurred image in the mirror and the imagined stream of disconnected, inarticulate images flowing through her mind: “She sees by formless gleams, / She hears across cold streams, / Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh” (ll. 54–56). The poem’s prosody is markedly song-like, and Swinburne makes ample use of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme to make his verses a material equivalent to the stream of imagery he imagines passing through her mind.

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crescendos of sound and feeling, especially in Swinburne’s favorites, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”32 Systematic transformation of verbal motifs does not alone explain the distinctiveness of Swinburne’s prosody, however; there is also the necessary “force” and “fire” he valued in poetry like Blake’s and Whitman’s, poetry that “sings.”33 Laura McCormick Kilbride’s recent study of the prosody of Atalanta draws attention to what she finely describes as the sense it gives “of enormous cumulative rhythmic power,” “the sense of an ineluctable force, coursing through the words of the play, which gradually overcomes each of the speakers—so much so that Swinburne’s rhythm comes to figure, on reflection, as a kind of fate.”34 Kilbride locates the source of Atalanta’s cumulative force—where prosody carries the play’s message of the crushing power of a fate hostile to human hopes—in the gradual subsumption of the blank verse that the protagonists speak into the song-like, strongly beating measures of the chorus’ long set pieces. In a fine-grained analysis, Kilbride points to the opening of the third choral ode as a critical point in the accumulating tension between two possible prosodies. There the chorus appears to use iambic pentameter for its opening lines, but the lines are so written that they can also be read as a line of three beats and a silent beat, allowing us to sense the pressure of always already implicit song measures even in the blank verse passages, until at last they completely overtake the pentameters of speech for the rest of the choral ode. The final kommos is an extended choral song constructed from an exchange between chorus and characters (the dying Meleager and the grieving Atalanta and Oeneus, Meleager’s father) where all accept the “laws” of song prosody no less than those of the gods. The kommos is conducted entirely in song measures, in which two shortened lines (two-beats and a felt pause) are followed by a long line of hexameter, like the slap of an engulfing wave sounding the repeated

32 On Swinburne and Whitman, see Helsinger, “Word, Music, and Translation:

Whitman—Swinburne—Delius,” in Song Beyond the Nation, ed. Philip Bullock and Laura Tunbridge. 33 Swinburne insisted that ideas alone were not enough to make poetry “sing”: “the thing more necessary […] than these is the pulse, the fire, the passion of music – the quality of a singer, not of a solitary philosopher or a patriotic orator,” Letters, 3.9. 34 Laura McCormick Kilbride, “A Renouveau of English Prosody,” 27.

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note of an always-fated death. It is a singing-together—song as a collective achievement of chorus and characters—but in Swinburne’s pessimistic version of that, such song enacts the will of cruel gods, hounding brief human lives to their inevitable deaths. Atalanta’s closing kommos realizes and extends what had already attracted Rossetti and Morris to forms of song and ballad, the liberating impersonality of song, but does so to far bleaker ends.35 But this was not Swinburne’s final view of the force of prosody. Later poems, like Atalanta, also make use of what Richard Cureton calls the powers of prolongation, where prosodic movement is conceived not in terms of the line alone, or even of the stanza or the verse paragraph, but is orchestrated in much longer rhythmic crescendos of sound and sense.36 Simon Jarvis draws attention to long-distance rhyming in “Anactoria” and, especially, “Tristram of Lyonesse” (1882).37 In those poems, however, as in “On the Cliffs” (1880; Swinburne’s autobiographical and mythic reworking of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”), acceptance of the grim laws of a harsh fate that prosody seems to embody in Atalanta is overturned. With a poet as the protagonist (Sappho, Tristram, Swinburne himself), prosody embodies what is only barely implicit in the more pessimistic Atalanta, that song itself may outlast human lives, thus defying a fated mortality.38 Similarly, both rhyme and repetition accumulate energy across the long lyric “By the North Sea”—where, as in Tristram, the scales of time and space represented are vast and the setting 35 Marion Thain argues that Swinburne’s merging of individual with collective lyric voicing is more broadly characteristic of his re-invention of the lyric; see Lyric Poem and Aestheticism, esp. 195–206. Swinburne’s poetics thus expands not only spatially and temporally but also from a single to a collective subjectivity: he speaks in and for a multi-voiced lyric. 36 Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing, 124, 146. 37 Jarvis, “Swinburne,” 525. Jarvis amends McGann (in “Swinburne, Baudelaire,

Wagner”) by insisting that Swinburne’s modulating verbal repetitions and rhymes are a mode of thinking, not simply a personification of poetry in the condition of music. That is certainly true in Atalanta. See also Kilbride, “A Renouveau,” for a similar argument. 38 Again, I differ here from Polten, who believes that Atalanta too celebrates the triumph of song. But Meleager is not a poet, and as she herself notes, the tone of the closing chorus of Meager’s last speech lacks the ecstatic joyfulness of Swinburne’s later, poet-centered sublime. On Meleager’s submission to the hard laws of fate and Swinburne’s sometimes ecstatic masochism as it feeds his participation in a tradition of English poets given poetic gifts in exchange for suffering, see Maxwell, Female Sublime, esp. 182–184 (and more generally, 190–193).

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is Turnerian—to provide a sense of accumulating force, where prosody distils the material sense of winds and waves eating away at the land with its ruined monuments of human lives, but song—produced at the meeting of land and sea under the sun- and song-god, Apollo—at the poem’s close reverses the gods’ sentence of human fate as death.39 ∗ ∗ ∗ Swinburne understood that Blake and Whitman had abandoned rhyme and meter to become singers in a different and larger sense, poets who sang for and with Whitman’s multitudes. Atalanta was the first fruit of Swinburne’s efforts to incorporate the cumulative force and fire of these poets, conceived in vast, multi-voiced prosodic movements, without abandoning meter and rhyme. His strategies, as I have suggested, presume a different and larger way of thinking about the basic units of prosodic form and lyric voicing. In turning to Blake and Whitman, as to Baudelaire’s Wagner and to Turner, Swinburne indeed built on an earlier Pre-Raphaelite poetics of shared pattern and song, where the juxtaposition of old and new produced the possibility of change. But he also transformed it. Swinburne’s expansive poetics, though repudiated by modernists (who nonetheless studied him closely), was not a dead end, as both older and newer re-readings by poets, critics and musicians have repeatedly suggested. I want to conclude by turning to some examples of the modern music that Swinburne’s expansive poetics inspired.40 At the beginning of the twentieth century, critics were urging composers to create a second English musical renaissance by composing music that looked to a forgotten English musical past to renew a once-vibrant 39 For a fuller discussion of “By the North Sea” and of Richard Cureton’s “prolonga-

tion,” see Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song, 187–192. 40 See Mary Arseneau’s essay in this volume, “Musico-literary Pre-Raphaelite Poetry,” for an excellent survey of Pre-Raphaelite poetry set to music in the nineteenth century. Arseneau focuses on the poetry of Morris, D. G. Rossetti, and (especially) Christina Rossetti; Swinburne’s popularity with nineteenth-century composers was not as great, but see the research of Michael Craske, primarily on nineteenth-century settings of Swinburne, in the article cited below (footnote 41), in his blog, https://verseandmusic.com, and on Phyllis Weliver’s Sounding Victorian website, http://www.soundingvictorian.org/2016/ 12/sounding-swinburne_20.html). Major compositions based on Swinburne’s poetry in the twentieth century indicate that here, too, musical settings gave Pre-Raphaelite poetry a significant afterlife.

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musical culture. It was a resonantly Pre-Raphaelite strategy, for those who still remembered the poets and artists of a half-century past. Perhaps for this reason, even when modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound declared Swinburne and his Pre-Raphaelite friends a part of a Victorian past they were hastening to forget, English composers were turning to them for texts.41 Two composers from the first generation of this musical renaissance—Granville Bantock (1868–1946) and a young Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)—and another from the next generation, born in the early 1900s—Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983)—offered distinctive interpretations of how Swinburne’s expansive poetics might move to music. Vaughan Williams was the co-founder of the English Folk Song Society, acknowledged as a leader of young composers hoping to foster a musical renewal in England. His “Garden of Proserpine” (1897–1899), an extended composition for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, was (at twenty-five minutes) his first long work. It is acutely attuned to the poem’s slow languor and hopeless attraction to sleep and death: a recurring melody appears to lift itself with difficulty from the note on which it begins before sinking back to rest. Vaughan Williams uses the full text of Swinburne’s poem, setting its last stanza, sung by the chorus, as a slow chant on a single note that goes on for a long, long twenty-three bars: Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night. (ll. 89–96)

The music responds sensitively to the poet’s slow rhythms as themselves a kind of determinative fate and is alert also to the “bleak beauty” of his small repeating words. But Vaughan Williams—whose optimistic temper 41 As Michael Craske recently pointed out, “Ezra Pound may well have said in 1918 that ‘Swinburne’s art is out of fashion’ in his stinging review of Edmund Gosse’s A Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1917), but in the musical world quite the opposite appears to be the case.” Craske, “Swinburne, Wagner, Eliot,” 555. Unlike the composers, however, Pre-Raphaelites celebrated their cross-cultural borrowing.

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clashed with the poet’s—allows the chorus’ monotonic chant to lend the words a grave ceremoniousness that, together with a final rise and fall into the piece’s opening key, offers a sense of closure both more hopeful and musically (if not semantically) resolved than Swinburne’s poem. Bantock’s remarkable unaccompanied choral setting of large parts of four choruses from Atalanta (1911) is also conceived on a grand scale, as a four-movement symphony for massive, multi-part choirs. The composer, a Scot who passed most of his career in the industrial midlands, wrote and conducted for such choruses, some of them formed from the working classes whose annual competitions he judged. Bantock’s skeptical anti-theism (or neo-paganism) probably attracted him to Swinburne’s anti-theistic Greek tragedy. His setting of the choruses from Atalanta was in multiple senses a reaction against the perceived dominance of German music. Calling on the power of massed voices with frequent expressive crescendos and shifts in dynamics and tempo, the piece also uses staggered openings, deploying its twenty choral parts occasionally in unison (when the voices come together on the word “death,” for example) but more frequently in what are heard as echoing repetitions, sometimes overlapping, that call attention to the rhythmically repeating syntactical structures, the sonically echoing words, and the chiming or singing phonemes of Swinburne’s poetry. Bantock’s experiment translates back into musical form Swinburne’s semi-abstract handling of sound. Lutyens composed her setting for Swinburne’s “Hymn to Man” (1965) much later in her career, when she had successfully integrated modern influences from the Continent—particularly Schoenberg’s serial atonality—to make her own version of an English modern music. Fascinated with the mathematical manipulation of musical cells of a few notes, like Swinburne she abstracted sound, subjecting her basic units to inversions and reversals yet using them to unify a long piece. Attracted to philosophically difficult texts (as in her earlier setting of a text by Wittgenstein for unaccompanied chorus in 1951), Lutyens turned to Swinburne’s poem, with its vast horizons of space and time, to marry his still-difficult, anti-theistic ideas with an equally challenging musical technique that recalls his earlier experiments with disciplined schemes of “modulation and movement.” Poetry, as Swinburne insisted of Blake’s, moves to its own “laws.” His prosody has method, what Baudelaire and Liszt, writing of Wagner’s compositional schemes, described as a mnemonic system. Swinburne studied such methods not only as Wagner developed them musically but

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also as Rossetti and Whistler and Turner put them into practice visually. His own poetry, however, turned away from the exploration of inner consciousness that occupied his Pre-Raphaelite friends in the 1850s and 1860s to question the place of the human in a much broader context, embracing many voices and stretching from “before the beginning of years” to a future when nothing living would remain in a world of elemental forces: sun, wind, earth, and sea. From this greatly-expanded perspective, represented visually for Swinburne in the downs, moors, and seas of the Isle of Wight and Northumbria as painted by Turner, he developed a scheme of prosodic modulation and rhythmic movement adequate to span much larger distances—at once philosophical and spatiotemporal—than the single poetic line or stanza. Swinburne’s poetry, as John Rosenberg long ago suggested, moves between art and music.42

References Attridge, Derek. “Beat.” In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, Edited by Matthew Bevis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 36–55. Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres Complètes. Edited by. Y. G. Dantec and Claude Pichois. Paris: Éditions Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1961. Buchanan, Robert. The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day. London: Strahan, 1872. Craske, Michael. “Swinburne, Wagner, Eliot, and the Musical Legacy of Poems and Ballads.” Journal of Victorian Culture 23, no. 4 (28 September 2018): 542–555. Cureton, Richard D. Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse. London: Longman, 1992. Helsinger, Elizabeth. Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Helsinger, Elizabeth. Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Helsinger, Elizabeth. “Taking Back the Ballad: Swinburne in the 1860s.” Victorian Poetry 54, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 477–496. Helsinger, Elizabeth. “Word, Music, and Translation: Whitman—Swinburne— Delius.” In Song Beyond the Nation, Edited by Philip Bullock and Laura Tunbridge. London: Publications of the British Academy, 2021.

42 Rosenberg, “Swinburne,” 131.

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Jarvis, Simon. “Swinburne: The Insuperable Sea.” In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, Edited by Matthew Bevis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 521–535. Kilbride, Laura McCormick. “’A Renouveau of English Prosody’: Rereading Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon.” Essays in Criticism 68, no. 1 (2018): 25–53. Lafourcade, Georges. La Jeunesse de Swinburne (1837–1867). 2 vols. Paris: Société d’Édition: Les Belles Lettres, 1928. Maxwell, Catherine. The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. McGann, Jerome. “Wagner, Baudelaire, Swinburne: Poetry in the Condition of Music.” Victorian Poetry 47, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 619–632. Polten, Ora. “Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon: Prosody as Sublimation in Victorian ‘Greek’ Tragedy.” Classical Receptions Journal 9, no. 3 (2017): 331–349. Pyne, Kathleen. Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America. Univ of Texas Press, 1996. Rooksby, Rikki. A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life. Aldershot: Ashgate (Scolar Press), 1997. Rosenberg, John D. “Swinburne.” Victorian Studies 11, no. 2 (December 1967): 131–152. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. The Swinburne Letters. Edited by Cecil Y. Lang. 6 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–1962. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. 4 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1904. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. William Blake: A Critical Essay. Edited by Hugh J. Luke. 1868; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Major Poems and Selected Prose. Edited by Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Thain, Marion. The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Turner, J. M. W. View from the Terrace of a Villa at Niton, Isle of Wight, from a Sketch by a Lady, 1826, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 61 cm, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Turner, J. M. W. Study of Sea and Sky, Isle of Wight, c. 1827, oil on canvas, 321 x 502 mm, Tate, London. Turner, J. M. W. Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, c. 1833–34, oil on canvas, 90.5 x 120.8 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven.

CHAPTER 10

“Afar from My Own Self I Seem”: D. H. Lawrence, Persephone, and Pre-Raphaelite Poetics Hannah Comer

In the early twentieth century, the Pre-Raphaelites were still very much of interest, being discussed, written about, their poetry read and re-read, and their artworks used as a point of reference by Modernist writers and artists. W. B. Yeats, in his Autobiographies (1927), retrospectively draws out his early reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s and William Morris’s poetry, particularly The Defence of Guenevere (1858) and The Earthly Paradise (1868), from which “The Man Who Never Laughed Again” seemed “the most wonderful [tale].”1 D. H. Lawrence’s letters, from the time he was writing his first novel The White Peacock (1911), revealed his knowledge of Rossetti’s poetry, particularly “Sister Helen” (1851–1852) and “The Blessed Damozel” (1850). In 1908, he begins a letter to his

1 W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1966), 141.

H. Comer (B) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_10

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friend Blanche Jennings with “Hail, Blessed Damozel, you are genius.”2 In a letter from 1910, Lawrence tells Helen Corke, a fellow schoolteacher in Croydon, that “Somewhere I have got the ballad of Sister Helen – Rossetti’s – beating time” and quotes lines from the poem: “O Mary, Mother Mary, Three days to-day between Hell and Heaven.”3 In a similar fashion, Ford Madox Ford’s poem “On Heaven” (1914) was influenced by “The Blessed Damozel,” expressing Rossettian themes through the speaker’s personal grief, explicitness of desire and seeking of spiritual communion. In each case, this anecdotal information, quotations, and allusions reveal a significant familiarity with Pre-Raphaelite poetics and verse among Modernist authors. In the Pre-Raphaelites, Modernist writers such as Yeats, Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) found direct connections between the arts and literature. The cross-media alliance and unification of the arts was of great significance and each informed the other. There are continuities between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Modernists, which indicate, like Pre-Raphaelitism itself, a dynamic interchange between an artistic and literary past and present. In Pre-Raphaelitism and Modernism, there is a self-conscious return to the past and to inherited traditions or conventions, in order to “make it new.” In both cases, this self-conscious engagement with the past becomes most evident through the use of mythology and legends. As Michael Bell argues, Modernist mythmaking had a liberal and progressive implication which was intrinsic “since its underlying significance was a sense of philosophical responsibility in living in a post-religious, and even in a post-metaphysical, world”; this use of myth projected “a mode of being for the future which the past, not the merely putative past, could serve to define.”4 The use of myth in both Pre-Raphaelitism and Modernism is not merely a nostalgic flight from modernity but acts as a universal way of engaging with the present and

2 D. H. Lawrence, “To Blanche Jennings, 13 May 1908,” in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume 1, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), pp. 51–54 (p. 51). 3 Lawrence slightly misquotes Rossetti’s poem which reads “O Mother, Mary Mother.” D. H. Lawrence, “To Helen Corke, 11 May 1910,” in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume 1, 159–160. 4 Michael Bell, “Introduction,” in Myth and the Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth Century Literature, ed. Michael Bell and Peter Poellner (Amsterdam: Atlanta, 1998), 1–8, 1–2.

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represents among writers and artists of both eras a continuity of concerns. Yeats’s workings with Celtic mythology in his poetry and plays were intrinsic to the Irish Literary Revival; T. S. Eliot noted that Yeats, in the early phase of his career “treated Irish legend in the manner of Rossetti and Morris.”5 Scholars have previously identified a Pre-Raphaelite influence on H. D.’s, Pound’s, and Yeats’s use of mythology, especially from D. G. Rossetti’s later works, Algernon Swinburne’s poetry, and Edward BurneJones’s representations of female mythic figures.6 Yeats’s depictions of mythological female figures, Elizabeth Cullingford argues, follow the heroines of the neoromantic and fin de siècle movements by adopting Rossetti as a model who “embraced a vision of woman as Priestess, Sibyl, or goddess.” Rossetti’s mythic figures, such as in Proserpine (1875) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), are invested with a power and vision of “sinister” femininity.7 This “sinister” beauty is presented as a threatening and alluring power.8 In Yeats’s early poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), Niamh’s appearance is described as “a pearl-pale, high-born lady,” with lips “like sunset,” and “down to her feet a white vesture flowed / And with glimmering crimson glowed / Of many a figured embroidery / As her soft bosom rose and fell.”9 Her appearance is seemingly fashioned from both Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel whose robe is “ungirt from clasp to hem,” as she leans over the bar “her bosom must have made […] warm,” and Gudrun from Morris’s “The Lovers of Gudrun” in The Earthly Paradise, who is described as having “marvellous red lips” which are “the snare of man,” and as being clad in “lordly raiment” with

5 T. S. Eliot, “Yeats,” in T. S. Eliot: On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 252–262, 256. 6 See Sean Pryor, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise (Abingdon: Routledge 2016); Daniel Tiffany, “Kitsching The Cantos,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 2 (2005): [329–337] 333; David Clark, Yeats at Songs and Choruses (London: Colin Smythe, 1983), 97–98; Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (New York: W. N. Norton, 1963); Eileen Gregory, H. D and Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). 7 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 32. 8 Ibid., 30. 9 W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin, in W. B. Yeats: The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright

(London: J. M. Dent, Everyman, 1999), p. 2, ll. 20–30.

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“the hem of such-like hands as deal with silk and gold.”10 Niamh, in a similar way, becomes the embodiment of power and of both mysterious and threatening beauty, by luring Oisin away from his land and mortality. Likewise, Mary Ellis Gibson argues that Pound’s “double goddesses,” such as Aphrodite, Persephone, Astarte, and Helen, and his idealization of the feminine, through “the representation of the beautiful but fatally powerful woman,” owe their particular character to the dual representation of women in Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry.11 In The Cantos (1925–1972), Aphrodite stands with “golden / Girdle and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids / Bearing the golden bough of Argicida.”12 The sultriness of Pound’s depiction of Aphrodite with her “golden girdle,” “breast bands,” and “dark eyelids” is redolent of Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca (her mythical equivalent), which in turn recalls the pose of Botticelli’s Venus. Similarly, in Trilogy (1944–46), H. D. groups together the Greek, Roman, and Syrian names of the goddess, “Venus, Aphrodite, Astarte.”13 The goddess of love is portrayed by the Pre-Raphaelites in her various guises, notably by Rossetti in his paintings and accompanying sonnets, Venus Verticordia (1864–1868) and Astarte Syriaca. Cassandra Laity argues that H. D.’s representations of female figures, like Venus and Lilith in Trilogy, are informed by Swinburne’s and Rossetti’s “PreRaphaelite femme fatales.”14 H. D. is fascinated with the dualities within the goddess figure, particularly their capacity for rebirth in order to “mount higher to love.”15 In Trilogy and Helen in Egypt (1961), H. D. simultaneously uses and challenges Pre-Raphaelite visuals and poetics to reclaim previously marginalized figures from myth, repositioning female

10 D. G. Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel,” in D. G. Rossetti’s Poetical Works (London: Ellis & Elvey, 1903), pp. 232–236 (pp. 232–233), ll. 7 and ll. 45–46. William Morris, “The Lovers of Gudrun,” in The Earthly Paradise, 13th edn. (London: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1910), pp. 276–325, (p. 277), ll. 73–93. 11 Mary Ellis Gibson, Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 183–184. 12 Ezra Pound, The Cantos, in Selected Poems, 1908–1959 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 113–192, (p. 115) Canto 1, ll. 76–78. 13 H. D., Trilogy, Tribute to the Angels in H. D: Collected Poems, 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984), pp. 547–574, (p. 553), stanza 10, ll. 10. 14 Cassandra Laity, H. D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ix. 15 H. D., Trilogy, The Flowering Rod, pp. 577–612, (p. 578), stanza 1, ll. 29–30.

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figures as being central to the narrative. Through their engagement with Pre-Raphaelite works, H. D., Pound, and Yeats simultaneously draw on a cultural inheritance while making new their vision of myth. By contrast, the use of myth in Lawrence’s work lies in the exploration of consciousness and of being in the universe which is related to his ontological and cosmological visions. Lawrence evokes the figure of Persephone across his writings. She is present in his critical works, as he muses on the Sicilian landscape, “the place where Persephone came above-world, bringing back spring,” in his poetry, and in his prose fiction where he uses the myth to explore wider issues relating to nature, society, and personal relationships.16 Keith Sagar, in D. H. Lawrence: A Poet, claims that for Lawrence “every flower acts out the myth of Persephone.”17 Andrew Radford’s The Lost Girls: Demeter,—Persephone, and the Literary Imagination 1850–1930 and Margot. K. Louis’s Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality, have explored Lawrence’s range of sources for the myth, including the influence of Swinburne. They focus primarily on Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl (1920) and how his approach to the Persephone myth adapts the tradition developed by writers like Thomas Hardy and James Frazer. These previous discussions concentrate on Frazer and Hardy as influences for Lawrence’s treatment of Persephone, in exploring the tragedy, life, and fertility inherent in the myth. I propose that Lawrence builds upon and pushes away from Pre-Raphaelite poetic and visual depictions of Persephone; that in his poetic and fictional treatments of the Persephone myth, Lawrence follows Rossetti and Swinburne more than Frazer and Hardy.18 For Frazer, Persephone signifies spring and is a goddess who “can surely be nothing else than a mythical embodiment of the vegetation.”19 For the Pre-Raphaelites, Persephone was associated with death, as an entrapped queen and goddess of Underworld. Rossetti emphasizes Proserpine’s association with death in his summary of the myth:

16 D. H. Lawrence, “Introduction to Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga” (1927) in Selected Critical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 223–233, 231. 17 Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Poet (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks LLP, 2007), 60. 18 In my own use of the name, I use Persephone and follow Rossetti’s, Swinburne’s

and Lawrence’s variations of the name. 19 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 395.

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The figure represents Proserpine as Empress of Hades. After she was conveyed by Pluto to his realm, and became his bride, her mother Ceres importuned Jupiter for her return to earth, and he was prevailed on to consent to this, provided only she had not partaken of any of the fruits of Hades. It was found, however, that she had eaten one grain of a pomegranate, and this enchained her to her new empire and destiny.20

Lawrence associates Persephone with life and death. In his focus on this duality Lawrence turns to, and makes new, the Pre-Raphaelite vision of the myth. Aside from the discussions of The Lost Girl, there has been little consideration of Lawrence’s influence from the Pre-Raphaelites, or writers from the Pre-Raphaelite circle, in his portrayal of Persephone.21 Lawrence’s use of Pre-Raphaelite literature has tended to be overlooked, especially his continued imaginative engagement with Rossetti’s and Swinburne’s poetry, and what the Pre-Raphaelite depictions of these literary and mythological works offered to Lawrence. Consequently, I focus here on Lawrence’s work as a case study of the Pre-Raphaelite influence noted by scholars in the work of his contemporaries. While this preceding scholarship acknowledges the influence of single figures associated with Pre-Raphaelitism, my sustained focus on representations of Persephone as a Pre-Raphaelite legacy for Modernism reveals a rich intertextual connection which has not yet been fully appreciated or expected. By honing in on the figure of Persephone, it brings to light Lawrence’s creative and imaginative dialogue with the Pre-Raphaelites. Rossetti’s painting and poetry and Swinburne’s verse offered Lawrence a cross-media aesthetic, images, and language that he used to pursue his own ideas. Throughout his work, Lawrence demonstrates an awareness of the aesthetic and cultural implications of Pre-Raphaelite art and literature, a tradition with which he had grown up.

20 D. G. Rossetti, “To William Arthur Turner, 1877,” in The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. VII, 1875–1877 , ed. William E. Fredeman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 477. 21 See Jack Stewart, The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression (Southern Illinois University, 1999); Jack Stewart, “Landscape Painting and Pre-Raphaelitism in The White Peacock,” D. H. Lawrence Review 27–28 (1997–1999): 3–25; Karen Z. Sproles, “D. H. Lawrence and the Pre-Raphaelites: Love Among the Ruins,” D. H. Lawrence Review 22 (1990): 299–305.

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Rossetti’s Proserpine and sonnet “Proserpina” (1875) and Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” and “Hymn to Proserpine,” both included in Poems and Ballads (1866), present a mythology that Lawrence continued to draw from as works that he believed his readers would have been familiar with.22 In his vision of Pre-Raphaelite myth, Lawrence goes beyond Rossetti and Swinburne to depict new ways of living and the vitality and fecundity of the myth, portraying more radical notions of gender and sexuality. The following sections focus on Lawrence’s responses to Swinburne and Rossetti. The first section explores Lawrence’s intertextual references to Swinburne’s Proserpine poems in his poem “Autumn Sunshine” (1914–1916) and the three different versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The second section examines how Lawrence’s use of symbolism and treatment of the Persephone myth, in his poems “Pomegranate” (1921) and “Bavarian Gentians” (1929), points to a continuity with Rossetti’s poetics.

Lawrence and Swinburne Throughout his career, Lawrence recurrently returned to and greatly admired Swinburne’s work. His first literary reference occurs in his 1909 play A Collier’s Friday Night , where the protagonist Ernest tells his mother of Swinburne’s death, “fancy! Swinburne’s dead” to which his mother replies “Yes, so I saw. But he was getting on.”23 His other female characters, such as Ursula in The Rainbow (1915), read or are given volumes of Swinburne’s poetry. His poetry is given to Ursula as a leaving present, to which she exclaims, “Oh I shall love them,” and she is told that they were suggested by her friend Maggie Schofield, who is presented as a New Woman.24 In this way, Lawrence’s use of Swinburne in his fiction follows Hardy’s, as Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure also reads Swinburne. It is used similarly in Lawrence’s other novels, as a means of

22 See Howard J. Booth, “‘The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan’s’: Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism,” in Decadence in the Age of Modernism, ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2019), 179–196, 180. In his chapter, Booth discusses Lawrence and Swinburne through their representations of Pan, but this also applies to the Persephone myth. 23 D. H. Lawrence, A Collier’s Friday Night in Three Plays (London: Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 19–79 (pp. 32–33), ll. 175–176. 24 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 393.

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exploring female self-expression, and sexuality. Lawrence portrays female readers of Swinburne’s work, who use his poetry to express their own experiences or their own feminism. Lawrence echoes the Pre-Raphaelites to articulate a form of female emancipation, and through this intertextual mechanism of reference and homage, the myth and figure of Persephone becomes a means of self-expression in his later fiction. In Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I will discuss later in the chapter, Swinburne’s poetry is only read and recited by Connie, Lady Chatterley, herself. Lawrence’s correspondence confirms that he was actively reading and exploring Swinburne’s poetry around 1914–1916. In a letter from 1916, Lawrence asks Barbara Low to “steal” Frieda’s volume of Swinburne’s poetry so that he may “read him in a loud and declamatory voice – it gives me great satisfaction.”25 During his visit to Garsington in 1915, Lady Ottoline Morrell writes in her memoirs that Lawrence would read poems to the guests in the evenings, and they were “generally poems from Swinburne.”26 His writing at this time, especially from Garsington, and as John Worthen notes, has a distinct Swinburnian quality.27 As seen, for example, in his description of the house: “This is a morning which dawns like an iridescence on the wings of sleeping darkness, till the darkness bursts and flies off in glory, dripping with the rose of morning […] Another dawn, another day, another night—another heaven and earth— a resurrection.”28 Here again, the Swinburnian quality of Lawrence’s writing exhibits similar fascinations with the Persephone myth, in terms of dualism and rebirth. Lawrence’s poem “Autumn Sunshine” is clearly indebted to Swinburne in its treatment of the Persephone myth. As shown in his recitals of Swinburne, Lawrence responds to the rhythmic qualities of his verse and his prose style reaffirms the excesses of Swinburne’s prose and verse. He intentionally makes linguistic and thematic connections to

25 D. H. Lawrence, “To Barbara Low, 25th Nov. 1916,” in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume 3, 1916–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 42–43, 42. 26 Lady Ottoline Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington: memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 69. 27 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (London: Allen Lane, 2005),

166. 28 Ibid., 72.

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Swinburne, integrating a Pre-Raphaelite visual and literary heritage into his own poetics. Both Swinburne and Rossetti focus on Proserpine alone as a female deity, and in contrast to their contemporaries Alfred Lord Tennyson and George Meredith, take the focus away from Demeter. Swinburne depicts Proserpine as an elusive and liminal figure, the “Goddess and maiden and queen,” who mainly occupies the world of the dead.29 As in Rossetti’s poem and painting, Swinburne’s Proserpine, in “The Garden of Proserpine,” is depicted as a sensual figure, standing, watching, and sorrowful. The garden is her domain and that of the dead. The pomegranate has been replaced and is interchangeable with poppies and grapevines. The poppies are used as an emblem of sleep and death and resurrection by its innumerable seeds. In Swinburne’s poems, Persephone is increasingly detached from her connection to the earth and the seasons, but Lawrence’s poem continues to connect her presence, and absence, to seasonal change to autumn and the death of spring. In “Autumn Sunshine,” like Swinburne’s Proserpine poems, Persephone is revered as the goddess of death by a persona who is confronting loss and contemplating immortality: The sun sets out the autumn crocuses And fills them up a pouring measure Of death- producing wine, till treasure Runs waste down their chalices. All, all Persephone’s pale cups of mould Are on the board, are over-filled; The portion to the gods is spilled; Now, mortals all, take hold! The time is now, the wine-cup full and full Of lambent heaven, a pledging-cup; Let now all mortal men take up The drink, and a long, strong pull! Out of the hell-queen’s cup, the heaven’s pale wine! Drink then, invisible heroes, drink! 29 Algernon Swinburne, “Hymn to Proserpine,” in The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), pp. 22–28, (p. 22), ll. 2.

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Lips to the vessels, never shrink, Throats to the heavens incline. And take within the wine the god’s great oath By heaven and earth and hellish stream, To break this sick and nauseous dream We writhe and lust in, both. Swear, in the pale wine poured from the cups of the queen Of hell, to wake and be free From this nightmare we writhe in, Break out of this foul has-been.30

Lawrence’s poem displays intertextual references to Swinburne’s poems, primarily to the “pale,” “deadly wine” Proserpine produces for “dead men” in “The Garden of Proserpine.”31 Both Swinburne and Lawrence use the figure of the goddess to explore language, death, Christianity, and pagan myth. In his Proserpine poems, Swinburne focuses on Christianity’s usurpation of Greco-Roman gods, and Proserpine becomes symbolic, with the poem, of the cyclical nature of life and death, and of the historical and religious transition from ancient Rome to Christian Rome. In this way, Swinburne criticizes the Christian teaching of life after death by undermining the desire for immortality through the yearning for death and for oblivion or nothingness. Like Lawrence, Swinburne’s Proserpine represents a nothingness and state of un-being that can only be brought about by death, as the speaker states at the end of “Hymn to Proserpine”: “there is no God found stronger than death; and death is sleep.”32 Lawrence’s persona, like the speakers of Swinburne’s Proserpine poems, yearns for death, “to wake and be free / From this nightmare we writhe in,” and to escape the present world.33 In Lawrence’s poem, while there is a yearning for nothingness, it is not a portrayal of the finality of death nor a complete rejection of life after death. Through the image of Persephone, both Lawrence and Swinburne question the concept of immortality and resurrection from Christian 30 D. H. Lawrence, “Autumn Sunshine,” in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 139–140. 31 Algernon Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine,” in The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, pp. 58–61 (p. 59), ll. 32–33. 32 Swinburne, “Hymn to Proserpine,” p. 22, ll. 114. 33 Lawrence, “Autumn Sunshine,” p. 140, ll. 22–23.

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teaching. It is Persephone who “gathers all things mortal / With cold immortal hands” that has the dominion over life and the other gods, both pagan and Christian, in these poems.34 The relevance of Pagan mythology to Christianity is shown in Lawrence’s and Swinburne’s language, particularly in the imagery of wine. In Swinburne’s poem, like Lawrence’s, Persephone crushes grapes as a drink for the dead, the fruit of the earth which, through the vines, provides a connection to the underworld. In both Greek and Roman myth, the wine, through its association to Persephone and Dionysus, and to Jesus in Christianity, represents life and death. For Swinburne, the wine is an anodyne. For Lawrence, it acts as an anodyne to the nightmare the persona wishes to escape, and as a means of resurrection. To this effect, Lawrence’s use of imagery is associated with ancient mythology and Christianity, and with worship, where Persephone’s “pale cups of mould” are both the “hell-queen’s cup” and “chalices” filled with “heaven’s pale wine.” Lawrence plays with the duality of heaven and hell, mortality and immortality, and with the bodily and divine in the transubstantiation of the wine. As Elizabeth Helsinger argues in Chapter 9 of this volume, Swinburne’s aesthetic develops Pre-Raphaelite poetics to depict the psychological strains of modern sexual, social, or religious life. Through his use of intertextuality, Lawrence appropriates Swinburne’s poetry and imagery to articulate their shared concerns and the different historical situations out of which the texts emerge. The poem is both a response to the First World War and a Modernist perception of the failure of European civilization. While Lawrence responds to the exaggerated and unconstrained quality of Swinburne, his poetry, in this political and cultural climate, rejects Swinburne’s sonorous quality and verse form. Thematically, Lawrence’s “Autumn Sunshine” becomes a framework for Lawrence’s use of the myth in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His fiction is an extension of his poetics, using the thematic qualities of the poem to explore his gender politics and portrayal of sexuality. John Holmes argues in this volume’s Chapter 3 that Rossetti and Swinburne, as artists, seek to apprehend individual lives that transcend binary models of sex, gender, and sexual identity. Again, his prose style in Lady Chatterley’s Lover recalls the Swinburnian excess and the rhythmic qualities of his verse. Across all three versions of the novel, Connie recites Swinburne’s poetry when she

34 Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine,” p. 60, ll. 51–52.

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is collecting flowers outside the gamekeeper’s cottage. In The First Lady Chatterley, at this moment, the gamekeeper Parkin represents her “true Pluto” as opposed to her husband Clifford.35 In her love affair she quotes Swinburne’s chorus, “when the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,” from Atalanta in Calydon (1865). She identifies herself as the “escaping Persephone, Proserpine,” Parkin with Pluto and Clifford with Plato, as “she’d rather be married to Pluto than Plato. She would rather be caught by the wild hound of Pluto than by the speculative spaniel of Plato.”36 Lawrence accentuates the duality of the body and mind, through the opposition of Pluto and Plato. Connie’s relationship with Parkin is one which is life-giving and renewing, corresponding to the changing of the seasons from the Swinburne quote, whereas Clifford, as well as being physically disabled, is also emotionally disconnected from his desires. Pluto does not feature in Swinburne’s or Rossetti’s representations of Proserpine, whereas in Lawrence’s novel the characters’ responses are based on their understanding of the myth as a whole. In contrast to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s poem “Purple Anemones” (1923) depicts a more orthodox representation of Persephone as Pluto’s victim, as the “Husband- snared hell-queen” and the anemones are the “hellhounds” of “the dark, the jealous god, the husband” that “track her down again, white victim.”37 Pluto’s pursuit of Persephone is shown to be the force which drives the cycle of the seasons and marks the end of her freedom. Persephone is linked to rights for women which the persona seemingly supports and mocks at the same time. Margot K. Louis argues that for Lawrence, Persephone represents the modern psyche who must be released from her false Hades (often her legal spouse) by her true Hades, who meets her in secret marriage.38 Connie identifies Parkin, called Mellors in the later text of the novel, with Pluto. She chooses the Underworld because it is sexually satisfying and exhilarating. In this way, through the figure of Proserpine, Lawrence also calls for a regeneration of society and attitudes toward sexual relationships within the novel.

35 Margot. K. Louis, Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 119–120. 36 D. H. Lawrence, The First Lady Chatterley (London: Heinemann, 1972), 80. 37 D. H. Lawrence, “Purple Anemones,” in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence,

pp. 244–246, ll. 19–64. 38 Louis, Persephone Rises, 120.

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Connie sees herself as Persephone, and the image of Persephone is infused with a sense of regenerative energy and an “ecological selfhood.”39 Lawrence’s ecology is linked to his sexual politics and for him, the immanent, physical world is a means of renewal and redemption (related to the underworld), which Connie finds in her relationship with Parkin or Mellors. Their relationship is portrayed as elemental and connected to the natural world, as they regularly meet in the woods of Wragby Hall. The images of Persephone in Lawrence’s poems, as distanced and incorporeal, placed in the realm of death, are displaced to focus on her presence within life and nature. In the later versions of the novel, Persephone is predominantly portrayed as the goddess of spring. The quotations from Swinburne’s poetry are used to explore Connie’s sense of being in relation to her surrounding environment and like The First Lady Chatterley, as a means of self-expression. However, in all three versions of the text, Swinburne’s verse and the representation of Persephone are allied not to a yearning for death but to a yearning for life. In The Second Lady Chatterley, as she gathers the daffodils from Parkin’s cottage, Connie quotes from Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine”—“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean!” For Connie “there was to be a resurrection, the earth, the animals, and men” and a “resurrection of the body” which “even the true Christian creed insisted on.”40 Through quoting Swinburne, Lawrence follows his criticism of the desire for immortality and eternity by the conquering of death. Yet Lawrence also rejects Swinburne’s outright denunciation of Christianity. For Lawrence, resurrection is corporeal and not a purely spiritual rebirth. Correspondingly, in the third Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie quotes from the Apostles Creed when she adds “I believe in the resurrection of the body!”41 Lawrence stresses, as shown here, the sacredness of physical life.

39 Fiona Becket uses this term in her discussion of Lawrence’s work and ecology. Fiona Becket, “D. H. Lawrence, Language and Green Cultural Critique,” in New D. H. Lawrence, ed. Howard Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 148–168, 165. 40 D. H. Lawrence, The Second Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Surrey: Oneworld Classics Ltd., 2007), 77. 41 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 72.

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In the second version, Connie wants “live things, only live things” and “no more engines, no more machines, no more riches and luxury.”42 From an ecofeminist perspective, Connie consciously positions herself with nature and questions the balance between nature and humanity as she claims that the “carrion-bodied” people are dead and will let nothing “remain free, wild and alive. Men would prevent it.”43 Although Lawrence has been dismissed by ecofeminists as a masculinist writer, his writing is more complex in its exploration of a feminine connection to nature and sense of ecological selfhood, and explores a sense of deep connection to the natural world.44 As seen in these quotes from Connie, Lawrence, in keeping with ecofeminism, explores the exploitation of nature, and through Connie, the exploitation of nature and women—parallels that are understood in the context of patriarchy. In this way, Lawrence expresses anxieties over the destruction and subjugation of nature through myth and of Persephone. In the final Lady Chatterley’s Lover, upon walking to Mellor’s cottage, she is reminded of the gamekeeper’s “thin, white body” which she “had forgotten […] in her unspeakable depression. But now something roused…‘Pale beyond porch and portal’…the thing to do was to pass the porches and the portals.”45 Through the quotation from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” Mellors is seemingly identified with Persephone. Yet Connie indirectly identifies herself with the goddess, again, through reciting “Hymn to Proserpine,” “‘The world has grown pale with thy breath.’ But it was the breath of Persephone, this time; she was out of hell on a cold morning.”46 The “pale” in the second quotation has been changed from the original “grey.” Whether this has been misquoted by Lawrence or changed intentionally, the world is no longer infused with the “grey” breath of the Galilean or Christianity, but with the “pale” breath of Persephone present in “pale with the pallor” and “naked white bodies” of the anemones and windflowers or Mellors’s pale white body.47 Standing amidst the flowers

42 Lawrence, The Second Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 77. 43 Ibid., 77. 44 See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993). 45 Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 71. 46 Ibid., 72. 47 Ibid.

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in the woods, Connie’s identification with Persephone evokes her pantheistic presence among nature and her breath with beauty and rebirth, particularly the power to regenerate humanity and the earth. Despite the intertextual references to Swinburne’s poems in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s final treatment of the Persephone myth in the novel is not in alignment with Rossetti’s or Swinburne’s. In this way, Rossetti and Swinburne are key influences but are also literary and artistic precursors to whom Lawrence replies. Lawrence, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, responds by taking the Pre-Raphaelite imagery further, using Swinburne’s poems to examine the relationship between humanity and the natural world. In doing so, he recasts and reimagines the myth of Persephone, which the Pre-Raphaelites cast exclusively in terms of death, in terms of rebirth. Lawrence’s references to Pre-Raphaelite poetry range across various forms, from his early plays, to his poetry and his novels, emphasizing the cross-media alliance. The use of Swinburne’s poetics in Lady Chatterley’s Lover creates a mythical and intertextual network through which Persephone becomes a symbol of renewal and emancipatory potential.

Lawrence and Rossetti According to Andrew Radford, Rossetti’s image of Proserpine is a vital reference point for Lawrence in The White Peacock, as Lettie lacks the emotion and sensuality that Rossetti’s painting flaunts.48 Lettie participates in the iconic qualities associated with Proserpine as she is described “bending over the flowers” and “stooping to the earth like a sable Persephone come into freedom.”49 The Persephone myth also features in the dialogue in the novel between the friends at Lettie’s party, as Will says “couldn’t forget today, Lettie. Wouldn’t have let old Pluto and all the bunch of ‘em keep me away.”50 The casual references here suggest how well-known the attributes of the myth are. Persephone is connected, as Walter Pater remarked in his essay on the myth, “with a delicate, feminine

48 Andrew Radford, The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination 1850–1930 (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 62. 49 D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 277. 50 Ibid., 165.

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motion” of growth which is comparable, in some instances, to Lawrence’s depiction of the myth, as seen here in The White Peacock.51 Rossetti made eight versions of Proserpine and wrote two versions of the sonnet to accompany the painting, one in English and one in Italian, suggesting something of the importance of the painting and its subject to him.52 Rossetti emphasizes the symbolist elements of his painting: She is represented in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her form some inlet suddenly opened, and admitting for a moment the light of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought. The incense-burner stands behind her as the attribute of a goddess. The ivy-branch may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory.53

The ivy-branch is a symbol of “clinging memory” and the incenseburner with the “attributes of a goddess,” signifies her divinity. One of Rossetti’s main symbols and the focal point of the painting is the pomegranate, the richly red “fatal fruit” that matches the color of Proserpine’s lips. The pomegranate’s connection to the underworld and the fleshiness of the matching color of her lips highlight both the spiritual and the corporeal. Rossetti’s depiction of Proserpine with the pomegranate is iconographic, visually rendering what Pater describes as “the partly consumed pomegranate – one morsel gone; the most usual emblem of Persephone being this mystical fruit.”54 The emblematic qualities of Rossetti’s painting, and the symbols of the myth, would have appealed to Lawrence. Lawrence’s poem “Pomegranate” is a poem about love and the history of the pomegranate’s association with love and death. The poem contains no mythological references but mentions three cities—Syracuse, Venice, and San Gervasio—connected to mythology and three pomegranate orchards with

51 Walter Pater, “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone” (1875) in Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1922), 81–151, 98. 52 Rossetti’s interest in the myth has been systematically connected to his relationship with Jane Morris. Although Morris reportedly gave him the idea for the subject and these elements can be read into the picture, it detracts from Rossetti’s working with the mythology itself. 53 Rossetti, “To William Arthur Turner, 1877,” 477. 54 Pater, “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” 150.

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flowering trees. “Pomegranate,” like Rossetti’s symbolism, metamorphizes the fruit and reinforces its prominence in the myths that interested Lawrence: For all that, the setting suns are open. The end cracks open with the beginning: Rosy, tender, glittering with the fissure. Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure? No glittering, compact drops of dawn? Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, Shown ruptured? For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.55

In his use of free form and lack of recurrent rhythm, Lawrence’s poetics differ from the Pre-Raphaelites. Nonetheless, the subject matter and symbolism points to a continuity with Rossetti’s poetics. Lawrence’s description of the fruit matches Rossetti’s visual depiction of the pomegranate, with the fruit fissured and the “glittering” seeds exposed. In this poem and elsewhere, Lawrence uses the pomegranate as an explicit image and symbol of sexuality and sexual relationships. The pomegranate, as it is presented here in Lawrence’s poem, is associated with fertility, abundance, and as a symbol of resurrection, life, and death, as the end of the fruit “cracks open with the beginning.” The person sees the glittering seeds, indicating the beginnings of life, and, here in the ruptured fruit, the final product of growth. The fissure of the fruit depicts the potential of new creation and organic life, including death and decay. Like Rossetti’s depiction of Proserpine holding the broken pomegranate as the goddess of the underworld and death, Lawrence implies a sense of ending and death in the breaking of the fruit and of a relationship, as the persona prefers their “heart to be broken.” Rossetti’s imagery is developed further by Lawrence, to focus on life and fecundity, opening up the various historical, religious, and mythical symbolisms of the fruit that Pater notes; for

55 D. H. Lawrence, “Pomegranate,” in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) (London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 3–4, ll. 20–30.

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the Romans it is a symbol of fecundity, in the medieval era, of the “fruitful earth itself” and then of the “seed sown in the underworld.”56 Both Rossetti and Lawrence, connect the pomegranate, and its significance to Persephone, to female sexuality. In the introduction to the “Fruits” section of the Birds, Beasts and Flowers Collection (1923) (of which “Pomegranate” is the opening poem) Lawrence states that “fruits are all of them female, in them lies the seed. And so when they break and show the seed, then we look into the womb and see its secrets.”57 Again, Lawrence connects the pomegranate to fertility and life and also attempts to represent ontologically the being of a natural object. While Lawrence explicitly links fruits to the female, he both confronts and avoids the issue of female sexuality in the poem. At the very beginning of the poem, the persona asserts that they are not wrong and reprimands any who should tell them so. When the persona questions why there should be “no fissure” and why “it is wrong” to show the pomegranate “ruptured,” the questioning and confrontational tone challenges social ideas and morality behind the representation of the fruit, its implications in relation to women, and its associations with sexuality and the body. In this respect, the poem’s discussion of female sexuality is implied rather than discussed openly. In Rossetti’s painting the combination of Proserpine’s full red lips, her flowing hair and green dress, and her pose with the rosy flesh of the pomegranate, creates a sultry and sensual atmosphere. As she raises the fruit toward her mouth, she holds the wrist of her left hand with her right hand, as if restraining herself from the act that will spell her ruin and seal her fate. The fruit “tasted once,” in Rossetti’s accompanying sonnet, “must thrall me here.”58 In the introduction to the “Fruits” section, Lawrence notes a history of the connection between women and fruit, for the Apple of Eden was “Eve’s fruit” and “It belonged to her and she offered it to the man.”59 The pomegranate, in Christian iconography, is symbolic of resurrection and eternal life, and while Rossetti clearly focuses on its mythological associations as the food of the deceased, there is an undertone in the painting which connotes 56 Pater, “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” 150. 57 D. H. Lawrence, Introduction to “Fruits,” in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (New

Hampshire: Sparrow Black Books, 2008), 1. 58 D. G. Rossetti, “Proserpina,” in D. G. Rossetti’s Poetical Works (London: Ellis & Elvey, 1903), p. 371, ll. 5. 59 Lawrence, Introduction to “Fruits,” 1.

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immortality and the eternal entrapment of Persephone. In Rossetti’s Proserpine and other paintings such as Venus Verticordia, a goddess who stands holding the golden apple in “her hand for thee” and which she will use to “work her spell,” the fruit is connected to female sexuality and temptation.60 Like Eve, Proserpine tastes the forbidden fruit that will lead to her downfall. Proserpine’s downfall, however, is only her own as she does not tempt anyone else, portraying, as Rossetti paints it, a more inward-turning myth about the experience of female sexuality. For Lawrence, the pomegranate is the “apple of love” and just as the fruit is cracked open in the poem, the persona’s heart is broken.61 Rossetti’s close attention to symbolic detail and his use of emblem, as Heather McAlpine notes of Pound in Chapter 7 of this volume, appealed to Lawrence’s pictographic use of language. Lawrence takes the emblematic qualities of the myth and of Pre-Raphaelitism, developing Rossetti’s symbolism further, to create a more explicit exploration of sexuality and religion. In his poem “Bavarian Gentians,” Lawrence’s treatment of the Persephone myth aligns with Rossetti’s. Rossetti’s visual and literary representations display Proserpine as the Queen of the underworld and the goddess of death. The painting and the accompanying sonnet indicate Proserpine’s plight, as she is described by Rossetti, in his prose note, as being “enchained” and represented in a “gloomy” corridor with the “fatal” fruit, heightening the sense of entrapment where for only “a moment” the “light of the upper world” emerges. In Rossetti’s sonnet “Proserpina,” Proserpine is given a voice, one which is both introspective and melancholic. She is presented by Rossetti as suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead. Rossetti accentuates her unattainability and distance, with the repetition of the word “Afar” throughout the poem. As in the accompanying painting, she is trapped in the underworld, listening for a sound and pining for a presence in her “palace.”62 Similarly, in “Bavarian Gentians,” Lawrence emphasizes Persephone’s physical and spiritual distance, as the dark blue flowers signify, to the persona, the presence of the underworld: Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower 60 D. G. Rossetti, “Venus Verticordia,” in D. G. Rossetti’s Poetical Works, p. 360, ll. 1–10. 61 Lawrence, Introduction to “Fruits,” 1. 62 Rossetti, “Proserpina,” ll. 3.

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down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.63

Lawrence focuses, like Rossetti, on the imagery of light and dark and its duality. Here Lawrence draws out the dualities between the upper world and the underworld, life and death, light and dark, and the secular and divine, in the figure of Persephone herself. For the persona, the underworld and the descent to it, is not merely a terrifying or deathly experience but one that has more positive and vital connotations. The “passion of dense gloom” and “darkness” of the underworld is a place of potency and creativity. Both poems begin with the imagery of light. In Rossetti’s sonnet, Persephone seems to be shrouded in darkness where “afar away the light that brings cold cheer” while the persona of “Bavarian Gentians” asks for a torch in order to descend into the underworld.64 The light offers Rossetti’s Proserpine a momentary glimpse of the outside world and a respite from the darkness for an “instant” and no more.65 For Lawrence’s speaker, the Bavarian Gentians are the torches which act as a guide into “sightless realm” and darkness is “enfolded in the deeper dark.” These flowers give off darkness just as “Demeter’s pale lamps give off light.” Fiona Becket argues that the imagery of “Bavarian Gentians” best represents the “oxymoronic spirit of Lawrence’s language.”66 This is evident in the intensity of Lawrence’s language and, importantly, in the key image of the “torches of darkness, shedding darkness.”67 The intensity of Lawrence’s language is reflected in his use of Swinburnian alliteration. The darkness attains the metaphorical properties of light and 63 D. H. Lawrence, “Bavarian Gentians,” in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), Bavarian Gentians: p. 584, ll. 11–20. 64 Rossetti, “Proserpina,” ll. 1. 65 Ibid., ll. 2. 66 Lawrence, “Bavarian Gentians,” ll. 9. 67 Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press,

1997), 179.

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the repetition of darkness (and variations of the word) creates an impenetrable atmosphere to the poem. The continual repetition of darkness goes beyond the use of visual imagery and has a visual quality, of a spiritual and revelatory journey down “the darker and darker stairs” to where Persephone dwells. As in Rossetti’s painting, the darkness in Lawrence’s poem is blue, coming from the flower’s natural color, and charges the gloom with vitality. This vitality is indicative in the organicity of the Gentian and the seasonal change within the poem, as the persona mentions the month of September twice, connoting the encroaching autumn, when Persephone must return to the underworld. Unlike Lawrence, Rossetti does not use any obvious imagery of darkness in his sonnet; it is implied through the light and its apparent duality. It is a darkness which has none of Lawrence’s vitality and is part of the sense of death and nothingness of Persephone’s fate. In “Bavarian Gentians,” the duality of light and dark implies an underlying theme of life and death, as the speaker seems to be nearing death, while using a flower, symbolic of life. The darkness brings out an aspect of the persona confronting death and the hope of resurrection, as symbolized by Persephone. The darkness is part of Persephone’s distance and her seclusion in Lawrence’s and Rossetti’s poems. The repetition of “darkness” of Lawrence’s poem and of “afar” in Rossetti’s poem, while connoting distance, draws the reader further into the poems. Both poems convey a sense of nothingness but for Lawrence, the darkness captures a sense of creativity and the inspirational power of the mythic underworld in the persona’s search for the “splendour” and “passion” of the gloom. Lawrence’s “Pomegranate” and “Bavarian Gentians” work with Rossetti’s visual and poetic imagery. However, as “Bavarian Gentians” directly deals with the Persephone myth, the poem thematically explores the treatment of Persephone. Lawrence’s and Rossetti’s respective treatment of Persephone explores the sense of selfhood, or rather lack of it, and her conflicting sense of self, split between the upper and under worlds and life and death. In Lawrence’s poem “Persephone herself is but a voice” in the darkness whereas in Rossetti’s poem, Proserpine speaks in her own voice, mourning how “afar from my own self I seem” and waits, listening for a sign that “sounds mine inner sense is fain to bring.”68 This split in Persephone’s selfhood is indicated in the structure of the

68 Rossetti, “Proserpina,” ll. 8–11.

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poem itself, for the sestet marks a shift from Proserpine’s voice and a presence of new one within the poem, who intersects with the exclamation “Woe’s me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!” at the very end of the poem.69 She is looking for a sign that someone misses and mourns her. Catherine Maxwell argues that the sonnet could be a prosopopoeia, a personification which brings the dead to life.70 Although Maxwell argues that the prosopopoeia might be the voices of Elizabeth Siddall, as Rossetti’s deceased wife, Rossetti’s own voice in mourning, or Jane Morris, it is significant to the figure of Persephone herself, living in the land of the dead and as a symbol of eternal life, bringing the dead to life in the afterlife. As such, she is presented by Lawrence and Rossetti as a liminal figure who mediates between these realms but belongs to neither. In both their poems, Persephone becomes a presence-in-absence, a disembodied voice in the darkness. They both explore the qualities that constitute Persephone’s distinct individuality, while simultaneously displaying how these attributes lead to a loss of self. Selfhood is, here, created by visual art and poetics. In this respect, Lawrence’s response to Pre-Raphaelitism draws on preceding imagery in order to “make it new” and put emphasis on his own individual vision. Lawrence’s poetics are shaped by Pre-Raphaelitism in his subject matter and use of symbolism, developing their cross-media aesthetic, images, and language to pursue his own ideas and poetic form. His treatment of myth aligns with Swinburne and Rossetti, exploring female sexuality, the sense of selfhood, and the dualities inherent in the figure of Persephone. His strong literary and artistic dialogue with his PreRaphaelite predecessors demonstrates how the Pre-Raphaelite legacy is implicated in the making of Modernist literature.

References Becket, Fiona. D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997. Becket, Fiona. “D. H. Lawrence, Language and Green Cultural Critique.” In New D. H. Lawrence, Edited by Howard Booth. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. 69 Ibid., ll. 12. 70 Catherine Maxwell, Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian

Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 39.

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Bell, Michael. Myth and the Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth Century Literature. Edited by Michael Bell and Peter Poellner. Amsterdam: Atlanta, 1998. Booth, Howard J. “‘The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan’s’: Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism.” In Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2019. Bush, Douglas. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. New York: W. N. Norton, 1963. Clark, David. Yeats at Songs and Choruses. London: Colin Smythe, 1983. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Eliot, T. S. “Yeats.” In T. S. Eliot: On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. 252–262. Frazer, Sir James. The Golden Bough. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993. Gibson, Mary Ellis. Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1995. Gregory, Eileen. H. D. and Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. H. D. H. D.: Collected Poems, 1912–1944. Edited by Louis L. Martz. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984. Laity, Cassandra. H. D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Lawrence, D. H. The First Lady Chatterley. London: Heinemann, 1972. Lawrence, D. H. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume 1. Edited by James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. 51–54, 51. Lawrence, D. H. The White Peacock. London: Penguin Books, 1982. Lawrence, D. H. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume 3, 1916–1921. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Lawrence, D. H. Three Plays. London: Penguin Books, 1988. Lawrence, D. H. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994. Lawrence, D. H. Selected Critical Writings. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Lawrence, D. H. Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). London: Penguin Books, 1999. Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2007. Lawrence, D. H. Birds, Beasts and Flowers. New Hampshire: Sparrow Black Books, 2008. Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow. London: Penguin Books, 2007. Lawrence, D. H. The Second Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Surrey: Oneworld Classics Ltd., 2007.

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Louis, Margot K. Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Maxwell, Catherine. Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008. Morrell, Lady Ottoline. Ottoline at Garsington: memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918. Edited by Robert Gathorne-Hardy. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Morris, William. The Earthly Paradise. 13th edn. London: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1910. Pater, Walter. “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone” (1875). In Greek Studies: A Series of Essays. London: Macmillan and Co., 1922. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems, 1908–1959. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Pryor, Sean. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Radford, Andrew, The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination 1850–1930. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. D. G. Rossetti’s Poetical Works. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1903. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. VII, 1875–1877 . Edited by William E. Fredeman. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: A Poet. Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks LLP, 2007. Sproles, Karen Z. “D. H. Lawrence and the Pre-Raphaelites: Love Among the Ruins.” D. H. Lawrence Review 22 (1990): 299–305. Stewart, Jack. “Landscape Painting and Pre-Raphaelitism in The White Peacock.” D. H. Lawrence Review 27–28 (1997–1999): 3–25. Stewart, Jack. The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression. Southern Illinois University, 1999. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995. Tiffany, Daniel. “Kitsching The Cantos.” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 2 (2005): 329–337. Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Yeats, W. B. Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1966. 141. Yeats, W. B. W. B. Yeats: The Poems. Edited by Daniel Albright. London: J. M. Dent, Everyman, 1999.

CHAPTER 11

Afterword Dinah Roe

Isobel Armstrong’s keynote speech at 2013 Oxford conference “PreRaphaelitism: Past, Present and Future” began with a list of questions, the most provocative of which was, “Is there such a thing as Pre-Raphaelite poetry?” This book of essays (the first about Pre-Raphaelitism as a poetic movement since Harold Bloom’s Pre-Raphaelite Poets in 1986) not only answers in the affirmative, but makes a case for the recognition of this important nineteenth-century literary school by identifying the crucial role of poetry in Pre-Raphaelite poiesis, or acts of making. A flurry of essays on the poets in Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries (Peter Lang, 2017), Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities (Ashgate, 2015), the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poets (2013) and the Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge, 2012), demonstrates the growing recognition of both the existence and the significance of Pre-Raphaelite poetics in nineteenth-century studies. Recent art exhibitions and their accompanying publications such as “Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites” (National Gallery, October–April 2018), “Illuminating Poetry: Pre-Raphaelite and Beyond” (Keats-Shelley House, Rome, January–April 2018) and

D. Roe (B) Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK © The Author(s) 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2_11

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“Christina Rossetti: Vision and Verse” (Watts Gallery, November 2018– March 2019) have foregrounded the importance of Pre-Raphaelite literary culture. New work by Serena Trowbridge and Robert Wilkes has reframed and rediscovered the neglected poetic voices of Elizabeth Siddall and F. G. Stephens, respectively, while digital platforms such as COVE https://editions.covecollective.org/ (Central Online Victorian Educator) and Christina Rossetti in Music (https://biblio.uottawa. ca/omeka2/christinarossettiinmusic/) encourage readers, viewers, and listeners to discover the cross-media contexts of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Much has recently been made of the Pre-Raphaelite painters’ avantgarde credentials; this volume detects the Pre-Raphaelite experimental spirit in its poets as well. Pre-Raphaelite poetry has often been seen as a bridge between Romanticism and Aestheticism; this volume suggests that its reach extends much further. In their concern with conveying the instability of lived experience through art and language, Pre-Raphaelite poets might even be considered proto-Modernist. Although the essays in this collection are diverse in the sense that they identify and approach different aspects of Pre-Raphaelite poetics, they share a common vocabulary. Isobel Armstrong has given us a most useful term, which is “transgressive hybridity,” and it features prominently in this collection. Terms describing Pre-Raphaelite practice that unite most chapters are: “transgressive,” “collaborative,” “hybrid,” “between.” The most common prefixes are: “multi,” “trans,” and “inter.” Attention to this shared vocabulary proposes the distinguishing features of this literary movement, hinting at an organizing principle, or perhaps spirit, that might connect Pre-Raphaelite poetry’s diverse practitioners. They were, as Serena Trowbridge pithily comments, “no respecters of traditional boundaries” (215). As the essays demonstrate, Pre-Raphaelite poems inhabit not only the border zones between poetry and almost any other art form (painting, music, design), but also the finer, more abstract boundaries between word and image, page and canvas, margin and center, sound and sense. Pre-Raphaelite poetry invites us to navigate these in-between spaces, which are by turns dangerous, liberating, beautiful, ugly, erotic, ascetic, frustrating, and revelatory. The poets’ exploration of threshold spaces and states, such as those between social identities, genders, states of consciousness, geographies, and time-periods, challenges the utilitarian values of the Victorian age by authorizing and celebrating uncertainty, disorder, and ambiguity.

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This same fascination with thresholds, borders, and contingent states is not for most writers an evasion of contemporary life, as Pre-Raphaelitism’s critics too often argue, but exhibits a profound involvement with transitional Victorian society and culture. Orthodox social hierarchies, moral codes, and temporal rules are frequently suspended or inverted in the liminal zones Pre-Raphaelite poetry inhabits, facilitating an unfettered, and even at times subversive, exploration of literal and aesthetic worlds in flux. Pre-Raphaelite poetics are shaped by a Blakean passion for contraries and a resistance to binaries. As we can see, for example, in John Holmes’s essay about “investigations of sexuality and gender identity,” Pre-Raphaelites are more interested in deconstructing opposites than in choosing sides. Developed through collaboration, contradiction, and contingency, their poetics resist neat resolution, whether ideological or formal. Theirs is, as Holmes nicely puts it, a “poetics of inquiry” (21). Nor is this limited to the written word. Genre hybridity is repeatedly identified as a key distinguishing feature of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. While the connection between Pre-Raphaelite pictures and poems has long been acknowledged, Mary Arseneau demonstrates in her important essay, “a substantial corpus of musical interpretations of Pre-Raphaelite poems […] actively extends the range of Pre-Raphaelite poetics into the field of music” (143). Music is also a focus of Elizabeth Helsinger’s analysis of Swinburne, which notes the ways in which Swinburne’s poetry, “moves between art and music” (253). It is this sense of words in motion that can also be considered a hallmark of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. PreRaphaelite poems are spoken, heard, printed, illuminated, illustrated, set to music, engraved on furniture and picture frames, and probably also have some other sort of multimodal existence which has yet to be fully discovered by scholars. Pre-Raphaelite poetry cheerfully moves, crosses, resonates, and fluctuates across many kinds of literary and literal borders, multiplying the identities of its readers / viewers / performers / listeners / on its way, reminding us that borders are also thresholds. The radical practices that historians of Pre-Raphaelitism’s pictures have labeled avantgarde are evident in its poetry’s innovative and transgressive working of the mobile, expansive qualities of language. That awkward hyphen in the word “Pre-Raphaelite” seems to visually represent the group’s threshold aesthetic. A kind of border punctuation that simultaneously joins what it divides, the hyphen is an unmissable feature in the terms often used to describe Pre-Raphaelite hybridity: “musico-literary,” “painter-poet,” “cross-disciplinary,” “prose-poem.”

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The editors of this volume have identified “plurality” as the “consummate defining quality” of Pre-Raphaelite poetics. This “plurality” is reflected in the poets’ productions, and also in their collaborative practice, which is emphasized here as another of the literary movement’s most significant distinguishing features. While the solitary, isolated figure often features in the poems, the poets themselves are shown to have conceived and produced that work in thriving artistic, religious, social, familial, and publishing networks. Though it valorises individual experience, Pre-Raphaelitism is, at heart, a communal endeavor. As our essayists emphasize, Pre-Raphaelite poems were read, recited, edited, made and remade collaboratively, which only serves to remind us that the lonely wanderers, agonized dramatic monologists and enclosed figures of PreRaphaelite poems should emphatically not be mistaken for their creators. It also is fitting that the poetry’s legacy is collaborative, as Mary Arseneau makes clear with her discovery that Christina Rossetti’s poems are known to have been set to music at least 2000 times, and are still attractive to today’s composers. A recent example is Japanese singer-songwriter Rima Kato’s 2019 interpretation of the nursery rhyme, “A ring upon her finger,” in which her dreamy, hypnotic vocals slow the tempo of Rossetti’s bridal procession, accompanied by a gently thrumming guitar, woodblock, and flute that amplify the understated joy and romance of Rossetti’s words. Other Pre-Raphaelite poems will certainly enjoy twentyfirst century musical settings, and it will be interesting to see how future artists, writers, and musicians interpret their literary work.

Future Directions Many essays hint at future directions for the study of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and the project of trying usefully to define it. Taking my cue from our authors, I have identified a few features and themes that might help us with this ongoing work. This list is neither exhaustive nor prescriptive. 1. Proto-modernism: The connections Hannah Comer identifies between Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s and D. H. Lawrence’s responses to Persephone, and the common strategies McAlpine detects in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s and Pound’s use of the emblem, gesture toward larger trends in current scholarship that interrogate the Victorian / Modernist divide. Are there other ways in which PreRaphaelite poets might be considered proto-Modernist, both in

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form and in practice? For example, The Germ is widely regarded as a prototype of the Modernist “little magazine”1 ; could similar claims be made for The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine or The Dark Blue? To what extent might the scorn of some modernist writers for the work of the Pre-Raphaelites be rooted in self-recognition? Are modernist strategies of making and unmaking influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites’ ambivalent relationship with the traditions of the past? Can the poets’ self-reflexive pessimism both about the future and the role of art in that future be considered proto-Modernist? Recent work by, for example, Joseph Bristow, Kate Flint, Rachel Teukolsky, and Jessica Feldman might help erode the formal and conceptual distinctions between Victorian and Modern.2 2. Periodical Contexts: Pre-Raphaelitism’s popularization of “art for art’s sake” has too often been taken to mean that its poets were oblivious to the world around them. An exploration of periodical contexts would help challenge this commonplace. Florence Boos’s investigation into the previously untold history of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and Robert Wilkes’s recovery of F. G. Stephens should inspire further examinations. By situating the writing of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, William Fulford, and Georgina Macdonald in the context of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Boos’s essay makes convincing claims for the magazine’s importance in terms of shaping the development of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. The publication of Pre-Raphaelite poems in contemporary journals, particularly where their appearance pre-dates volume publication, clearly merits closer attention. Pre-Raphaelite journalism is represented both in Pre-Raphaelite publications and in more mainstream publications such as The Athenaeum, The Critic, and The Spectator. Swinburne’s and William Michael Rossetti’s art and literary criticism is often brought to bear 1 See, for example, Koenraad Claes, The Late-Victorian Little Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and The Germ Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics, eds. Elisa Bizzotto and Paula Spinozzi (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012). 2 See Joseph Bristow, “Whether ‘Victorian’ Poetry: A Genre and Its Period,” Victorian

Poetry 42, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 81–109; Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Kate Flint, “Why ‘Victorian’?: Response,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 230– 239; Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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in discussions of the movement’s contemporary reception, but their work is seldom studied in relation to one another, or compared with that of F. G. Stephens, who, as Wilkes points out, enjoyed a long career as a respected working critic. Where do these three influential writers agree and diverge from one another, and also from other important critics of the movement such as Ruskin and Pater? To what extent does journalism influence Pre-Raphaelite poetics? 3. Music and Oral Culture: Sound emerges as the quality that most powerfully distinguishes Pre-Raphaelite poetry from pictures. As Arseneau and Helsinger show, the long history of setting Christina Rossetti’s, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, Swinburne’s, and Morris’s words to music testifies to the success of the Pre-Raphaelite lyric and to a broader, and even defining, relationship with sound and rhythm. It is important to Pre-Raphaelite poets that the word is heard as well as seen. Many chapters in this collection touch on the practice of reading poems aloud as crucial to their composition and reception; a fuller recovery of this performative oral culture, in addition to further work on relationships between poets and composers, will contribute to our understanding of Pre-Raphaelitism’s collaborative nature. More work should also be done to discover the effects of performance and staging on these poems’ composition and reception. 4. Global Contexts: Tantalizing glimpses of Pre-Raphaelite poetry’s international contexts appear in Arseneau’s discussion of the musical settings of Pre-Raphaelite poems, Helsinger’s illuminating analysis of Swinburne in relation to Baudelaire and Wagner, and Boos’s observations about Pre-Raphaelite literary responses to the Crimean War. Closer critical consideration of the influence of European literature, art, and music on Pre-Raphaelite poetics would surely reap rewards, particularly in a group deeply involved with translation projects from the beginning, who had European roots and spoke and read European languages. Transatlantic contexts are also intriguing. The Crayon introduced readers to Pre-Raphaelite poems as early as the mid-fifties, and American journals seem to have played an often unacknowledged role is disseminating their work; Scribner’s Monthly was the first to publish Christina Rossetti’s “A Christmas Carol” [“In the bleak midwinter”] and recommended Swinburne’s Atalanta In Calydon to its readers. Art historians have recently celebrated the American Pre-Raphaelite painters with a 2019 National

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Gallery of Art exhibition in Washington, DC, but more can be done to track the influence of Pre-Raphaelite poetry on American writers of the period. Is it possible that there are American Pre-Raphaelite poets? The relationship between Pre-Raphaelite literature and empire and colonialism, I think, may be the area’s most neglected topic, despite some work appearing in Tobin’s Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism (2005) and Eleonora Sasso’s The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism (2018). Just as art historians have studied the painters’ vexed relationship with “The Holy Land,” literary scholars might fruitfully examine the poets’ relationship with the Middle East via their literary engagement with, for example, the Bible and The Arabian Nights. 5. Gender: Work on the movement’s writers is increasingly interested in the ways in which Pre-Raphaelitism complicates and resists gender binaries and heteronormativity,3 a critical intervention that this collection welcomes: its editors call for a further exploration of “a spectrum of gender identities alongside each other and in relation with one another” (11). As Holmes argues, Pre-Raphaelitism often seeks “to apprehend individual lives that transcend binary models of sex, gender and sexual identity” (56). It is important, however, not to mistake what the editors call the movement’s “open-mindedness” about gender in their work for gender-progressive politics in practice: the male painters’ treatment of women in their personal and professional lives, as well as the shunning of Simeon Solomon after his arrest comes to mind. Yet, doubtless, we can expect great things from the more nuanced and wide-ranging investigation the editors invite. Rejecting “the language of Brotherhood or Sisterhood,” Witcher and Huseby argue convincingly that the term “Sisterhood” is as

3 See Duc Dao’s excellent “The Song of Songs for Difficult Queers: Simeon Solomon, Neil Bartlett, and A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep,” in Queer Difficulty In Art and Poetry, eds. Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Frederick Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Ingrid Hanson, “William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and the Parameters of Manliness”, Dinah Roe, ‘“Me, Who Ride Alone’: Male Chastity in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Art” and Jay D. Sloan, “‘How Grew This Presence from Man’s Shameful Swarm’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Victorian Masculinity,” in Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014).

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limiting as the outmoded “Brotherhood;” indeed, the term “Sisterhood” not only reinscribes women’s marginal status in relation to the central band of brothers, it also invokes stereotypes of female unity and rivalry that are particularly damaging for the serious consideration and recovery of their work. As the editors also point out, these familial terms segregate the sexes in a way that is contrary to the spirit of the movement as whole. I heartily agree with them on this point, and I think that, along with “muse,” these obsolete terms should only be invoked by future publications and exhibition titles if they are to be critically contextualised and questioned. 6. Form: In making claims for the Pre-Raphaelite painters as avantgarde, art historians have been eager to trace the specific ways in which the artists looked “back” to older forms in order to discover how to be modern. Literary critics are beginning to address this paradoxical stance by focussing more closely on form, as, for example, Heather McAlpine does here. Interpreting Goblin Market and Other Poems as an “emblematic performance,” she argues that Pre-Raphaelite experiments with the emblematic tradition will help us to better “[understand] the movement’s engagements with questions of ontology and representation” (182). The Pre-Raphaelite poets range across a variety of forms, reviving and adapting some (sonnet and sonnet sequence, ballad, dramatic monologue, rondeau, ballade, terza rima, prose poem), and even inventing new ones. Swinburne, for example, creates the roundel, a French-inspired form that Christina Rossetti quickly adopts for her devotional poems. In this collection, Helsinger’s, Trowbridge’s, and McAlpine’s attentive close readings of Swinburne, Siddall, and Christina Rossetti should inspire similarly detailed critical investigations of specific PreRaphaelite poetic practices. Not only do these practices reveal the group’s much-vaunted hybridity, they present the writers at their most innovative. ——————————————— This collection suggests many new directions for the study of PreRaphaelite poetics, opening the literary movement to renewed, productive scrutiny. Pre-Raphaelite poetry is shown to be at its most radical when testing limits: of time, space, identity, and especially artistic media. What becomes clear when reading these diverse essays is that many of the

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obstacles to studying Pre-Raphaelitism as a coherent poetic movement— its involvement with other arts; informal protean membership; uncertain chronology and diverse social, political, and spiritual affiliations—are being refigured as keys to understanding its unique literary contribution. Like this ground-breaking book, the project of defining Pre-Raphaelite poetics must continue to draw on and emulate the communal, collaborative energies of the group that inspired it. Pre-Raphaelite scholarship at its best encourages us to question the boundaries of our own disciplines and to welcome others across.

References Bizzotto, Elisa and Paula Spinozzi, eds. The Germ Origins and Progenies of PreRaphaelite Interart Aesthetics. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Bristow, Joseph. “Whether ‘Victorian’ Poetry: A Genre and Its Period.” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 81–109. Claes, Koenraad. The Late-Victorian Little Magazine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. Dao, Duc. “The Song of Songs for Difficult Queers: Simeon Solomon, Neil Bartlett, and A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.” In Queer Difficulty In Art and Poetry. Edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Feldman, Jessica. Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Flint, Kate. “Why ‘Victorian’?: Response.” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 230–239. Hanson, Ingrid. “William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and the Parameters of Manliness.” In Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Roden, Frederick. Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Roe, Dinah. ‘“Me, Who Ride Alone’: Male Chastity in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Art.” In Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Sloan, Jay D. “‘How Grew This Presence from Man’s Shameful Swarm’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Victorian Masculinity.” In Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Appendix

Arthur A poem by F. G. Stephens The following manuscript fragments have been transcribed by Robert Wilkes from manuscript sources in the Colonel Stephens Railway Museum, Tenterden, Kent (CSRM) and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Fragment 3 was also transcribed in Mary Susan Duval, “An Examination of the Work of F. G. (1827–1907) as Artist and Art Critic” (PhD diss., University of London, 1988), 315, Appendix A, although with a few errors that have been corrected here. Fragment 1 [MS: CSRM, 2015.47.96.7; 1 sheet, 2 sides; entitled “Arthur, a dream”] At noon, full, perfect, burning noon, I lay at foot of a druid column, tall, In a quiet county far away; The shadow of pillar o’er me thrown By the Sun’s bright radiance cast, To me appeared as song, tale or lay Of warlike times long past, © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2

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Dreamy, and dim and purple-grey: Before me that long shadow lay And moved on from my feet: I call’d up song, recounted tale And Love’s sweet lay renewed, Of Chivalry, and deeds of might, Of Mercy, and Love that shuns the right1 And many others mo’ At last, the tale of Merlin old With Arthur’s deeds and warriors bold Came sweeping thro’ my brain As when great acts in memory to hold Processions turn in many a fold With pennon, flag, and cloth of gold Out-flaring in the sun: Out-spread in the broad sun: Forward advanc’d with stately tread The knights and steeds of old The proud-horsed knights of old. I doz’d and sank, and soon had fallen asleep, And back two thousand years had past away, I heard no more the steam-car’s warning scream Before it plunged in night, nor ever came Deep vibrant rumblings from the earth beneath. I slept and past the Druid time, the Danish, And the Roman’s murd’rous faith, for Arthur Was living, all the land was forest thick, Stonehenge had just been placed, Merlin late

From Ireland brought the mass, and placed stones round In circles great,2 and there the avenues pac’d out Dug up the [grass?], deepen’d all the forest And like a secret sin did hide away, as hid all With demoniac service aided.

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1 Perhaps a reference to the adulterous love affairs of the Arthurian romances: Queen Guenevere with Sir Launcelot, Iseult with Tristram. 2 The legend that Merlin created Stonehenge using stones from Mount Killarus in Ireland was first told in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain).

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Then the column I laid down at became a tree, the wild Lone moor was forest; brambles and thick grass Were round, and at my feet a stream-bed, nigh Dry by summer, gaped, and knotted, long

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[Fragment ends here] Fragment 2 [MS: CSRM, 2015.47.96.5; 2 sheets, 4 sides; entitled “Arthur”] A voice, a voice, a large full voice, Among the leaves went spreading far; Far out it spread among the leaves, “Gawaine Fair Coz. Gawaine”3 and soon An armêd foot upon the stones, Crashing and breaking o’er the twigs, Gave token of the wearer’s presence. Stretching an arm before him To force an oak’s low branches back, Full on my view the warrior came Clad all in mail and over that a white Garment, White, without a blazon, all unstained, And yet he seemed a king, a King, in form And haughty presence, all his face was bare, Free o’er his shoulders fell his cowl of mail, From off the Bascinet thrown, Straight Brows he had, and little space between, And “undernethe ther glowen eyês twey”4 Quick, sad and little stern, yet in the lips A firmness sat, was not to be cast down, Kindly lookêd, Gentle seemed, yet in Battle oped. From his chin, broad, down fell his beard, Short, curled, dark brown. Full of thought he seemed, perplexed,

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And then his voice sent forth again, And shouted: another deep in the forest’s bosom Came faint in answer soon, And nearer coming, louder grew So call the hills unto each other Deep-voiced – as poets sware, During a storm – then another knight Bounding and leaping down the watercourse Came on ______________ Stayed before the other seated, Bending slightly as to a good superior, Answered, short-breathed, the rapid question, “Hast thou found a path, Gawaine,” – “My liege, there is none. I, Stretching to the westward trode a mile, And found nought but thickets, and a running stream. If nothing chances, we must follow that, I no farther went for that I feared to lose My prince’s voice – but here is Castor,5 Thy faithful hound” – so in great circles, Running with nose bent down On came a noble hound. “He tracks some footstep,” quoth the King, (For king he was,) in voice low sudden sunk. Syr Gawaine drew his sword, – Slanting along the channel, straight at my covert, Stayed at the bushes, baying stood the Hound. “Come forth if thou art good,” said then the King, “The Dog shall harm thee not.” Then upwards I arose, and forward went, To meet them. – The King unto Syr Gawaine Made a sign, and forth he stepped with greeting fair. “Thou seemst a minstrel, and a singer loud At Tournaments, of Battles; or of Gentle Deeds A fair Recorder – say if thou art such And what thy purpose here and whither bound.” “I am a Breton, a Minstrel and a Singer

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5 King Arthur’s hound was traditionally named Cavall or Cafall in the Matter of Britain. There is a minor knight named Sir Castor in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Book 12, Chapter 4, the nephew of King Pelles. One of the stars in the Gemini constellation is named Castor, after the twin brothers Castor and Pollux who were the sons of Leda.

APPENDIX

Journeying to the Ships that go to Gaul With Arthur, the great King, And all his fair arraie,6 To conquer the olden Realm, newfound, – Knowing the Weald that stretches here athwart the land Having toiled the last day through, Fatigued I slept at the tree’s base,7 Until aroused by footsteps and a voice aloud calling.” “Knowest thou the Forest here?” ______________outspake the King. “Guide us unto Sandwich, and thou shalt As a minstrel go with me into far [Guidance?], One of mine own Household, for I am Arthur, He of whom thou spakest.” Awed by the name, I bowed, and passed before, – Silent until the sun had [chimed?] high Up towards the noon, – we forwards paced. “Thou art a singer” Quoth Syr Gawaine, “Canst thou not tell us of some Castle or a Hall Where we might rest awhile, And hear thy voice for well we love The Song of War, or the light virelai,8 Or canst thou not the way relieve With Legends of this mystic land So Rich in Fable, Tale, or High Romance, Or point some Bower or Arbour near Where we might stay and Hear” — “Here is one for the purpose,” answered I, And stept aside and drew a thicket screen away Showing a Cave’s Entrance. They followed And Both stooping entered. It was a Cave, forgotten long ago, Passed from men’s thoughts Become a Legend gray. It was said a fallen Runic King,

293

65

70

75

80

85

90

95

6 Arraie: archaic spelling of “array.” 7 See Fragment 1, ll. 41–42, in which the druidic monolith beneath which the narrator

falls asleep is transformed into a tree in his dream. 8 Virelai: a form of medieval French verse together with the ballade and rondeau. The line originally read: “The Song of War, or the light lay of Love,” but Stephens crossed out “lay of Love.”

294

APPENDIX

After a battle lost, had halted here, And here been slain by vulgar hands But gentler came soon after and buried him, All in his armour Bronzen, Broken by the blows of his foul slayers, And by him laid the spear, and slew a dog, Laid him at the Cave’s mouth And o’er him Rolled a stone, carvêd a Rhyme Rude, of Death, and his High fame. The Rhyme was worn. The Stone was moved away, Rifled the Tomb and all its Riches gone But still the Harp held it, And told in mournful metre of his grave and Glory By vulgar hands laid low.

100

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110

[Fragment ends here] Fragment 3 [MS: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Don. e. 58, fol. 23; 1 side; written on the reverse of a letter to James Buchanan, 23 July 1849] Now the Month was Gone, and all the succours, Tributary Kings, had join’d the mighty Host. We went into the Barks, and raising Sail Sped over Sea until upon our Brother Land, Brittany. For then did Arthur Hold the great wide realms that stretch part Land and Partly Sea; from Western Mona unto Maine,9 Landing upon the Shore, low land spread out; The King of all the Thousands there that march This Host, to Every Knight his Charge and Rule Did Give, dividing all with Syr Banier.10

5

10

9 Mona: an ancient poetic name for Môn, the island of Anglesey off the north coast of Wales (i.e. in the west of Britain). Maine was one of the historical provinces of France, now part of the departments of Sarthe and Mayenne. 10 Sir Banier appears in Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Bridal of Triermain (1813), Canto 2, Part XIII: “Why should I tell of numbers more? / Sir Cay, Sir Banier, and Sir Bore.” In a footnote to his Poetic Works (1848), vol. 11, p. 63, Scott cites “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,” an English ballad (Child 31) which also mentions Sir Banier.

APPENDIX

Went the van, to Take upon West Gavronne11 His Post. Syr Banier was a Knight train’d Young in War, with Battle Passed to Age Shrewd, Wise and Valiant, Keeping the Sword For Act, not Threat, A Man of Patient thought That [never?] laid down the Shield; He led the Hosts – All through the curthal Land of Gaul Syr Bore12 Did [lead?] a Thousand Bearers of the Mace And axe two-edged that Breaks the Mail and [Strucketh?] off the Limb, – A Thousand Danish Axes. And many more with other Knights Are gone, and Arthur with his peers, The chosen of the House rode on to Paris, There in Notre Dame, the Mother Church To riveran for truth to hold the land He sought to conquer in by a blessing On his arms for love of Christ.

295

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25

[Fragment ends here]

11 Possibly a misspelling of “Garonne,” a river in southwest France. 12 See Scott’s Bridal of Triermain in note 10. Sir Bore is another knight mentioned in

the “Marriage of Sir Gawaine” ballad: “Sir Lancelott and Sir Steven bold / They rode with them that day, / […] Soe did Sir Banier and Sir Bore, Sir Garrett with them soe gay.”

Index

A Aguilar, Emanuel Goblin Market Cantata, 20, 152, 169–173 Art Catholic and Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 93 Arthuriana. See Medievalism

B Baudelaire, Charles as influence, 235, 250, 252, 284 visual language of, 241–247 Blake, William as influence, 8, 235–238, 241, 244, 246–250, 252, 281 Brotherhood. See gender and sexuality; homosociality Brown, Ford Madox, 15–17, 149 Work, 16, 27–33, 52 Browning, Robert, 10, 59–60, 114 dramatic monologues, 128

Paracelsus , 134 “Sordello”, 9 Buchanan, Robert “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti”, 22, 27, 45, 51–52 Burne-Jones, Edward, 16–18, 46–47, 125, 127–131. See also Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The review of Thackeray’s The Newcomes in Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 86 “The Story of the North”, 86 Burne-Jones, Georgiana MacDonald, 12, 18, 84, 106–107, 111– 114, 156. See also Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The Memorials , 106 “The Porch of Life”, 112

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. B. Witcher and A. K. Huseby (eds.), Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51338-2

297

298

INDEX

C Carlyle, Thomas, 28–29, 32, 114 “movable type”, 39 Collaboration, 4, 12–15. See also Pre-Raphaelitism musical, 144, 150, 152 Collinson, James as member of original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 8, 123 as reader for Stephens’s “Arthur”, 121–122 Crayon, The, 134, 284 Crimean War, 18, 84, 108–110, 112–113, 284 and martial metaphors, 90, 108–110, 112–113 Crusades, The. See Medievalism D Debussy, Claude La Damoiselle Élue, 20, 161–165 Deverell, Walter and Tupper, John Lucas, 55–57, 61–62, 67–72 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 12 as critical legacy, 12, 258–259 Helen in Egypt , 258–259 Trilogy, 258–259 E Eliot, T. S. on Yeats’s influence by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, 257 Emblem, 14, 39, 66, 97. See also Rossetti, Christina Georgina defined, 21, 182–187 and Pre-Raphaelitism, 187–189 and Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 180–182, 191–205, 286

and Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 270, 273, 282 and Rossetti family, 189–191 English Folk Song Society, 251. See also Williams, Ralph Vaughan English Musical Renaissance, 146, 149–151, 161, 251

F Fleshly School Controversy. See Buchanan, Robert Ford, Ford Madox “On Heaven”, 256 Form, 4–6, 22–25, 286 gender and sexual identity as, 56– 57, 61, 72–74, 78, 213–217, 226, 262 political work of, 8–11, 34–36, 38–39, 44–52 prosodic, 5, 234–235, 246, 249–250, 271, 276 Fulford, William, 18, 84, 106–111, 113. See also Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The and Burne-Jones, Georgiana MacDonald, 113 as clergy, 107 engagement to MacDonald, Alice, 107 and feminist causes, 110–111 prosody of, 108 “To a Young Lady, with a Copy of Tennyson’s ‘Princess’”, 111 “To the Army at Sebastopol”, 96–110 “Woman, her Duties, Education, and Position”, 110–111

INDEX

G Gender and sexuality. See also PreRaphaelite Brotherhood; sister arts brotherhood as male bonding and homosociality, 102, 120, 135–139 and Brown, Ford Madox, 29–32 changing definitions of, 11–12, 57, 110–111 critiques of, 11–12, 33, 43–47 homosociality, 17–19 intersexuality, 12, 17, 55–79 naming conventions, 7, 11–12, 33, 43–47 and poetics, 34–45 politics of, 15, 32–34 sister arts, 33, 44–51 women’s education, 110–112 women’s rights, 110–111 Germ, The, 3, 13, 17–18, 34, 55–61, 64, 67, 71, 83, 86–89, 105, 125, 129–131, 133, 136, 163, 187, 196, 283 Gipps, Ruth “Goblin Market”, 20 Goblin Market , 171–172 H Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure, 261 Homosociality. See gender and sexuality Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 187 Hunt, Violet and Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 218 The Wife of Rossetti, 226 Hunt, William Holman and 1848 Royal Academy exhibition, 50 association of art with poetry, 48 “The Lady of Shalott”, 49, 119

299

as member of original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 7, 123 and music, 147 as reader for Stephens’s “Arthur”, 121–122 Rienzi, 19, 123, 136 and Stephens, Frederic George, 137 I Industrialization, 19, 130–131, 145, 154–155 Intersexuality. See gender and sexuality K Keats, John as influence, 8, 106, 112, 138, 241 “Isabella”, 121–122 “This Living Hand”, 223 “When I have fears that I may cease to be”, 138 Kernis, Aaron Jay Goblin Market , 172 L Lawrence, D. H., 12, 23–24, 255–276, 282 “Autumn Sunshine”, 261–265 “Bavarian Gentians”, 261, 269–275 A Collier’s Friday Night , 261 as critical legacy, 12, 23–24, 255–276, 282 and Frazer, James, 259 and Hardy, Thomas, 259 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 261–262, 265–269 and Persephone myth, 259–260 “Pomegranate”, 261, 270–273 The Rainbow, 261 and Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 269–276

300

INDEX

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 261–269 The White Peacock, 255, 269 Liverpool Academy Annual Exhibition, 122, 132 London Royal Academy of Arts, 1, 50

M Malory, Thomas Le Morte d’Arthur, 100, 125, 127–128, 135 Maurice, Frederick, 28–32 Medievalism, 18–19 and the Crusades, 84, 96–100, 104, 112–113 and Fulford, William, 107 and Hunt, William Holman, 49 and Malory, Thomas, 100, 125, 128, 135 martial metaphors of, 90, 93, 96–102, 112–113 and Morris, William, 84, 97, 100–105, 128 and Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 120, 128 and Stephens, Frederic George, 117–139 and Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 23, 234, 250 and Tennyson, Alfred, 19, 49, 117–119, 122–125, 133, 136, 138, 219 Melopoetics. See Music Meredith, George, 263 Modern Love, 22 Millais, John Everett and 1848 Royal Academy exhibition, 50 election to Royal Academy, 138 “Isabella”, 8, 122 “Mariana”, 119

meetings of the PRB in his studio, 48 as member of original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 7, 123 Ophelia, 211 Modernism Pre-Raphaelite influence on, 5, 22–24, 44, 204–205, 255–257, 260, 276, 280, 282–283 repudiation of Pre-Raphaelitism as antiquated, 251 shared political values of, 9–11 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co., 114 Morris, William, 17–19, 22–23, 34, 46–47, 84, 87, 93–114, 125, 130, 187, 204, 249, 283. See also Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The “The Blue Closet”, 246 “The Chapel of Lyonesse”, 105, 113 Defence of Guenevere, The, 18, 22, 84–85, 97, 102, 104, 108, 114, 128, 255 Earthly Paradise, The, 19, 130, 255, 257 “Frank’s Sealed Letter”, 104 “Hands”, 103, 105, 113 “In Prison”, 95, 104, 105, 113 “The March of the Workers”, 159–160 “Masters in this Hall”, 154 and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co., 114 and music, 144, 147, 154–160, 284 News from Nowhere, 19 Poems by the Way, 226 political engagement of, 2, 114, 157–160

INDEX

“Pray But One Prayer for Me”, 102–103, 105 Red House, 12, 14, 114 “Riding Together”, 104, 106, 109, 113 “Spell-Bound”, 104 “The Tune of Seven Towers”, 104, 246 “Wake, London Lads!”, 158 “Winter Weather”, 95–100, 105, 113 Music, 14, 19–20, 45–47, 144, 146–147, 281 as embodied performance, 46–47 and English Musical Renaissance, 146, 149–151, 161, 251 as forms of making, 45–46 as melopoetics, 19 settings of literature, 20, 165, 167, 250–252, 282, 284

O Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The, 17–18, 34, 83–114, 283 and Burne-Jones, Georgiana MacDonald, 84, 111–113, 283 and Dixon, Richard Watson, 93 and Heeley, Wilfred, 86, 94 original title The Brotherhood, 86, 94 Oxford Brotherhood, The, 114 Oxford Plain Song Society, 156

P P. R. B. Journal, The, 47, 58, 121. See also Rossetti, William Michael Performance, 87, 284 as emblematic, 182, 193, 196, 286 musical, 144–153, 169–170 of poetess, 224, 227

301

poetic recitation, 46–48, 122, 138, 145, 156–160, 262, 265, 282 political potential of, 156–160 Poetic recitation. See Performance poiesis , 43, 45, 143, 145 as acts of making, 4, 10–11 Pound, Ezra, 9–12, 44, 204–205, 251, 273, 282 Cantos, The, 258 as critical legacy, 9–12 double goddesses of, 258 on myth, 257–259 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 6–12, 7, 22, 57–58, 91, 118, 121–122, 123, 164. See also Burne-Jones, Georgiana MacDonald; Rossetti, Christina Georgina; Siddall, Elizabeth gendered language of, 11, 15, 43, 285–286 influences on, 126 list of Immortals, 122, 126 as male homosocial community, 136–139 meetings of, 12, 47–48, 121–122, 137–138 members of, 8, 18–19, 125 origins of, 1–2, 48 as Round Table, 138 Pre-Raphaelitism as collaborative, 4, 12–15, 83–114, 144, 150, 152, 233–253, 282 commitment to orality, 46–48, 87 defined, 4 evolutionary model of, 4, 6, 8, 45, 47, 164 first wave, 7–9, 34 future directions, 282–287 genre hybridity of, 33 as a poetics of inquiry, 57–61, 72 as poiesis , 11, 45, 143, 153, 173 as political, 32–33

302

INDEX

as precursor to Modernism, 5, 22–24, 44, 204–205, 255–257, 276, 280, 283 plurality of, 4, 43–51 prosody of, 5, 47, 51–52 second wave, 9, 34, 83–114 R Religion. See also Emblem and Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 21, 180–204 Ricci, Vittorio Goblin Market (Der Gnomen Markt), 171 Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 16, 20–21, 33–34, 36–44, 138, 179–205, 213–216, 218–224, 286. See also Emblem “Advent”, 196 “A Better Resurrection”, 196 Called to Be Saints , 180, 189 “A Christmas Carol”, 284 “Consider the Lilies of the Field”, 196–197, 203 “Devotional Pieces”, 192, 282, 284 “Goblin Market”, 20–21, 144, 152, 165, 169–173, 179–205, 228–229 Goblin Market and Other Poems , 14, 20–21, 181–182, 191 “In an Artist’s Studio”, 209 “‘The Love of Christ Which Passeth Knowledge’”, 195 and music, 144–153, 165–173, 282, 284 “One Certainty”, 196–198 Prince’s Progress, The, 190, 194 prosody of, 20–21, 36–42, 51–52 “Repining”, 219 Seek and Find, 191 Sing-Song , 191 “Sweet Death”, 196

“A Triad”, 36–43 “The World”, 196, 198–203 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 10, 13–14, 68. See also Germ, The; Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The and 1848 Royal Academy exhibition, 50 Arthur’s Tomb, 120, 127–128 Astarte Syriaca, 257–258 Beata Beatrix, 211 “The Blessed Damozel”, 18, 84, 86–90, 102, 114, 144, 160–164, 246, 256–258 “The Burden of Nineveh”, 18, 84, 91–93, 114 Death of Breuze Sans Pitié, 25 The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary, 191 “Hand and Soul”, 3, 55–56, 61–67, 71–72 The House of Life, 161, 246 illustrations by, 190 on intersexuality, 12, 16–17 “The Last Confession”, 187 as member of original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 7, 123 and music, 284 Poems , 163 “Proserpina”, 261, 272 Proserpine, 257, 261, 270, 272–273 as reader for Stephens’s “Arthur”, 121–122, 127 revisions to poetry for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine”, 86–93 “Sister Helen”, 246, 255 “A sonnet is a moment’s monument”, 190 “The Staff and the Scrip”, 18, 84, 90–91, 109, 113–114

INDEX

Rossetti, William Michael, 1, 6, 17, 34, 57, 90, 121, 209, 212, 216, 218, 223, 224, 283. See also Germ, The; P. R. B. Journal as member of original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 8 as reader for Stephens’s “Arthur”, 121–122 Some Reminiscences , 35 S Scott, Walter The Bride of Triermain, 132 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 221 and Siddall, Elizabeth, 221 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (P. B.) as influence, 112 Siddall, Elizabeth, 12–13, 21–22, 25, 33–36, 43–44, 51–52, 68, 72, 209–229, 276, 280, 286 “At Last”, 227–229 “Autumnal Leaves”, 221, 226 “Clerk Saunders”, 221 “Dead Love”, 215–216 “The Gay Goshawk”, 221 “Gone”, 225–226 “He and She and Angels Three”, 226 hybrid poetics and doubleness, 225–227 “Lord, may I come?”, 35–36 “The Lust of the Eyes”, 212, 224 “The Maid of Lockroyan”, 221 and Scott, Walter, 21, 221 “A Silent Wood”, 218–221 “Passing Love”, 216–217 as poetess, 213–215, 223–224, 227 prosody of, 16, 21–22, 36, 51–52, 209–229 “Speechless”, 221–223 “True Love”, 212

303

“A Year and a Day”, 219–221 Sister arts. See also gender and sexuality gendered language of, 15, 33, 43–47 gender roles and political ideologies of, 45 multimodality of, 44–51 origin of theory, 44 Socialism, 28 and Morris, William, 114, 157–160 St. Cecilia Vocal and Orchestral Society, 152 Stephens, Frederic George, 12, 18–19, 25, 59–60, 117–139, 280, 284, 289–295 “Arthur”, 18–19, 117–122, 128–139, 289–295 Arthurian Authorities, list of, 123–126 and Hunt, William Holman, 137 as member of original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 8 “Modern Giants”, 60, 129–131 Morte d’Arthur, 136 The Proposal , 135 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 87, 149, 154, 187, 204 “Anactoria”, 34, 241, 249 art and musical influences on, 233–253. See also Baudelaire, Charles; Turner, Joseph Mallord William (J. M. W.); Wagner, Richard “Arthur’s Flogging”, 34 Atalanta in Calydon, 23, 237, 238–243, 248–250, 252, 266, 284 “By the North Sea”, 23, 234 expansive poetics of, 233–253 “A Forsaken Garden”, 23, 234

304

INDEX

“The Garden of Proserpine”, 261 “Hermaphroditus”, 72–78 “Hymn to Proserpine”, 261 on intersexuality, 12, 16–17, 55–57, 72–79 “The Lake of Gaube”, 23, 234 and music, 284 and mythology, 23–24 Poems and Ballads , 23, 234, 261 poetry recitations, 47 as political poet, 9–11, 34, 44 prosody of, 233, 235–244, 246–250 The Tale of Balen, 23, 234 and temporality, 22–23 Tristram of Lyonesse, 23, 234, 249–250 T Tennyson, Alfred, 9, 166, 213, 263 “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, 109 Idylls of the King , 125 as influence, 106, 107–114 In Memoriam, 108, 111 “The Lady of Shalott”, 49, 119, 219 “Mariana”, 119 “Maud”, 110 “Morte d’Arthur”, 19, 117–119, 122–125, 133, 138 “Oriana”, 108 The Princess , 111, 113 “Sir Galahad”, 136 Tupper, John Lucas, 12. See also Germ, The and Deverell, Walter, 55–57, 61–62, 67–72 on intersexuality, 12, 16–17 “The Subject in Art”, 3 Tupper, John Lucas and Deverell, Walter “Viola and Olivia”, 55–57, 61–62, 66–72

Turner, Joseph Mallord William (J. M. W.) as influence, 14, 235–241, 244–247, 250, 253

W Wagner, Richard as influence, 14, 235, 284 melodic transformations, 243–245, 252–253 mnemonic method, 241–242 Walter, Scott and Siddall, Elizabeth, 21 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (J. A. M.) as influence, 246–248, 253 Whitman, Walt as influence, 235–238, 244, 246–250 Williams, Ralph Vaughan, 251–252 The English Hymnal , 167 “The Garden of Proserpine”, 251–252 song cycle for The House of Life, 161 Woolner, Thomas, 138 as member of original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 8 as reader for Stephens’s “Arthur”, 121–122 Wordsworth, William as influence, 112

Y Yeats, William Butler, 9 Autobiographies , 255 as critical legacy, 9, 256–259 on myth, 256–259 The Wanderings of Oisin, 257