The House of Life by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Sonnet-Sequence: A Variorum Edition with Introduction and Notes

THE HOUSE OF LIFE A Sonnet-Sequence by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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Rossetti’s pen-and-ink design for his Sonnet on the Sonnet. S. 258. Private Collection. See p. 38 note 9.

THE HOUSE OF LIFE A Sonnet-Sequence by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Variorum Edition with an Introduction and Notes

by Roger C. Lewis

Boydell & Brewer 2007

Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

ANNAE UXORI For my wife Nancy

Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Edited Text and Apparatus List of Abbreviations and Sigla Introduction Sonnet Texts and Notes [PROEM Sonnet]

x xi xiii xvi 1 27 35

Part I. Youth and Change. Sonnet I. Love Enthroned. Sonnet II. Bridal Birth. Sonnet III. Love’s Testament. Sonnet IV. Lovesight. Sonnet V. Heart’s Hope. Sonnet VI. The Kiss. Sonnet VIa. Nuptial Sleep. Sonnet VII. Supreme Surrender. Sonnet VIII. Love’s Lovers. Sonnet IX. Passion and Worship. Sonnet X. The Portrait. Sonnet XI. The Love-Letter. Sonnet XII. The Lovers’ Walk. Sonnet XIII. Youth’s Antiphony. Sonnet XIV. Youth’s Spring-Tribute. Sonnet XV. The Birth-Bond. Sonnet XVI. A Day of Love. Sonnet XVII. Beauty’s Pageant. Sonnet XVIII. Genius in Beauty. Sonnet XIX. Silent Noon. Sonnet XX. Gracious Moonlight. Sonnet XXI. Love-Sweetness. Sonnet XXII. Heart’s Haven. Sonnet XXIII. Love’s Baubles. Sonnet XXIV. Pride of Youth. Sonnet XXV. Winged Hours. Sonnet XXVI. Mid-Rapture. Sonnet XXVII. Heart’s Compass. Sonnet XXVIII. Soul-Light.

39 39 40 42 44 46 47 48 52 55 56 58 61 63 65 67 68 70 71 72 73 76 78 80 82 83 85 86 87 88

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Sonnet XXIX. The Moonstar. Sonnet XXX. Last Fire. Sonnet XXXI. Her Gifts. Sonnet XXXII. Equal Troth. Sonnet XXXIII. Venus Victrix. Sonnet XXXIV. The Dark Glass. Sonnet XXXV. The Lamp’s Shrine. Sonnet XXXVI. Life-in-Love. Sonnet XXXVII. The Love-Moon. Sonnet XXXVIII. The Morrow’s Message. Sonnet XXXIX. Sleepless Dreams. Sonnet XL. Severed Selves. Sonnet XLI. Through Death to Love. Sonnet XLII. Hope Overtaken. Sonnet XLIII. Love and Hope. Sonnet XLIV. Cloud and Wind. Sonnet XLV. Secret Parting. Sonnet XLVI. Parted Love. Sonnet XLVII. Broken Music. Sonnet XLVIII. Death-in-Love. Sonnets XLIX, L, LI, LII. Willowwood. Sonnet LIII. Without Her. Sonnet LIV. Love’s Fatality. Sonnet LV. Stillborn Love. Sonnets LVI., LVII., LVIII. True Woman. I. Herself. II. Her Love. III. Her Heaven. Sonnet LIX. Love’s Last Gift. End of Part I.

90 91 92 94 96 97 98 100 102 103 104 106 107 109 111 112 113 115 116 117 119 129 130 131 133 133 137 139 142 142

Part II. Change and Fate. Sonnet LX. Transfigured Life. Sonnet LXI. The Song-Throe. Sonnet LXII. The Soul’s Sphere. Sonnet LXIII. Inclusiveness. Sonnet LXIV. Ardour and Memory. Sonnet LXV. Known in Vain. Sonnet LXVI. The Heart of the Night. Sonnet LXVII. The Landmark. Sonnet LXVIII. A Dark Day. Sonnet LXIX. Autumn Idleness. Sonnet LXX. The Hill Summit.

144 144 146 147 149 151 154 155 157 158 161 164

Table of Contents

Sonnets LXXI., LXXII., LXXIII. The Choice. Sonnets LXXIV., LXXV., LXXVI. Old and New Art. I. St. Luke the Painter. II. Not as These. III. The Husbandmen. Sonnet LXXVII. Soul’s Beauty. Sonnet LXXVIII. Body’s Beauty. Sonnet LXXIX. The Monochord. Sonnet LXXX. From Dawn to Noon. Sonnet LXXXI. Memorial Thresholds. Sonnet LXXXII. Hoarded Joy. Sonnet LXXXIII. Barren Spring. Sonnet LXXXIV. Farewell to the Glen. Sonnet LXXXV. Vain Virtues. Sonnet LXXXVI. Lost Days. Sonnet LXXXVII. Death’s Songsters. Sonnet LXXXVIII. Hero’s Lamp. Sonnet LXXXIX. The Trees of the Garden. Sonnet XC. “Retro Me, Sathana!”. Sonnet XCI. Lost on Both Sides. Sonnets XCII., XCIII. The Sun’s Shame. Sonnet XCIV. Michelangelo’s Kiss. Sonnet XCV. The Vase of Life. Sonnet XCVI. Life the Beloved. Sonnet XCVII. A Superscription. Sonnet XCVIII. He and I. Sonnets XCIX., C. Newborn Death. Sonnet CI. The One Hope. End of The House of Life. Appendix One. Dating and Ordonnance Appendix Two. Poems: Proof States Appendix Three. Poems: Chronology 1868–71 Appendix Four. Poems: Bibliographical Summaries Appendix Five. Ballads and Sonnets: Chronology 1879–82 Appendix Six. Ballads and Sonnets: Bibliographical Summaries Appendix Seven. Locations of Sources Appendix Eight. Unpublished and Excluded Sonnets Bibliography of Works Cited or Consulted

ix

167 172 172 174 177 179 181 184 186 187 189 191 193 195 196 197 200 202 204 207 209 212 214 215 216 218 219 223 223 227 247 250 254 261 274 278 288 298

List of Illustrations Frontispiece: Rossetti’s pen-and-ink design for his Sonnet on the Sonnet Plate I: Annotated proofsheet of 25 Apr 81 with Prefatory Note to House of Life Plate II: Self-portrait by Elizabeth Siddal Table: Locations of proofsheets for Ballads and Sonnets

xxii opp. 131 23

Acknowledgements This book began as a proposal for a Ph.D. dissertation more than forty years ago. I cannot now remember the names of everyone who helped me with the research necessary to complete this variorum edition. Many of them, some of those most vividly and fondly remembered, are now beyond thanking, but I must thank them anyway. I shall start by naming my predecessors in undertaking a separate edition of the House: Frederick Page, Paull Baum, Janet Troxell, Kathryn Gordon and Thomas Delsey, whose work I have built on. No one has done more to unearth Rossetti’s manuscripts, letters and scarce printed materials than William E. Fredeman, the godfather of Pre-Raphaelite studies and Editor of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (D. S. Brewer, 10 vols): my book is the first to make extensive use of that monumental edition. Neither has anyone done more to help me personally and professionally with this edition than Dick Fredeman. From July 1975, when my research assistant Gavin Murdock and I descended on his Allison Road home and library, to a few days before his death in July 1999, Dick shared his collection, his letters edition-in-progress, his wisdom, expertise and vast network of contacts to aid my editorial efforts. The generosity and hospitality he offered to fellow-scholars during the Allison Road days were matched by his wife Jane Cowan Fredeman, who continued to extend them both towards me after Dick was gone by acting as my editor on this book. I was assisted in the early stages of this edition by my able and supportive mentors F. E. L. Priestley and Malcolm M. Ross. Other Rossettians who have aided and encouraged my research include Robert N. Keane, Robert S. Fraser, Joseph P. Gardner, Rosalie Glynn Grylls (Lady Mander), Roger W. Peattie, Allan and Page Life, Mark Samuels Lasner and Jerome J. McGann. The co-operation of collectors and family custodians of rare material is essential in work of this kind: it is too late now to thank two of William Rossetti’s granddaughters, Imogen Dennis and Lucy O’Conor, and collectors Simon Nowell-Smith, Sir Paul Getty and Halsted B. Vanderpoel, but without their help this edition would have been badly compromised. Booksellers are vitally important to scholarly editing as well: I must thank Maggs Bros., Ian Hodgkins and Co., Antony Rota, Bernard Quaritch and John Fleming. The list of Librarians and Curators who enabled my research both in person and by other means would fill pages, so I am forced to be

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Acknowledgements

both selective and collective. The staff of every repository mentioned in Appendix Seven (Location of Sources) is here formally thanked, but my greatest demands were made on personnel at the Firestone Library at Princeton, the Fitzwilliam Museum Library at Cambridge, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale and the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington: I was particularly obliged to Rob Fraser at Princeton, Phyllis Giles and P. Woudhuysen at the Fitzwilliam, Marjorie Wynne at Yale and Phyllis Nixon and Rowland Elzea at Delaware Art Museum. Donald Sinclair advised me on using the Symington Collection at Rutgers. George Brandak showed me around the Rossetti family archive at the University of British Columbia. Tim Burnett helped solve my problems in the British Library Department of Manuscripts. Finally, I am grateful to the staff in the Bodleian Library Bibliographic Centre, the Folger Shakespeare Library and Dan Tierney in the New York Public Library for teaching me the mysteries of collating machines. I acknowledge with gratitude and humility the enormous role that my editors played in the creation of this book. Jane Cowan is mentioned above. I thank the editorial staff at Boydell & Brewer, particularly Caroline Palmer. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my tireless and unflappable technical editor, my indispensable wizard of word-processing, Barbara Lange. Chasing Rossetti manuscripts is expensive. My initial searching in England was facilitated by a Queen Elizabeth II Ontario Scholarship and two Canada Council Pre-Doctoral Fellowships. Later research was generously funded through two Research Grants awarded by the Canada Council and its successor the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC); many smaller SSHRCC Grants were made through Acadia University, which also gave me several Reid Summer Study Awards and a generous amount of supported leave. Indeed, Acadia, my academic home, supported my research in countless ways, not least through assigning several student research assistants to me over thirty years. Other support received came from the University of Toronto Research Travel Fund, the British Council, the Nuffield Foundation and the Royal Academy. I had many research assistants but the best of them were Gavin Murdock, Keith Anderson, Joe Kanary and my wife Nancy: this book is dedicated to her.

Note on the Edited Text and Apparatus This is a variorum edition in the sense that it lists all the textual variants, including revisions and trials (both cancelled and uncancelled), in Rossetti’s manuscripts, notebooks, letters, proofsheets and printed texts with authority. No periodical or other separate printing of a House of Life sonnet is considered to have authority unless the copy-text derives directly from the poet or he is known to have seen proofs of the items. It is not the sort of variorum edition that includes a history of scholarship on the poem with representative excerpts or a large and various selection of notes and comments on the text by previous editors and critics. Both my bibliographies, the following list of frequently cited sources and the terminal list (pp. 298–301) of occasionally cited sources, do not therefore aim at completeness or inclusiveness. I have not attempted an exegesis or paraphrase of the poem. Rather, I have striven to present the essential materials needed for such a critical task and to indicate where supporting materials may be found. I have read many critical studies of the sequence and individual sonnets in it, some of which I have cited below because I found them relevant and insightful or helpful in establishing context in the way that Rossetti’s exchanges by post with Swinburne or Caine provide context for some of the sonnets. Not every brilliant article on The House of Life is mentioned in this book, but neither is it crammed with all the dull and superfluous criticism of this poem that has been pouring forth since Robert Buchanan started the tradition in 1871. The reader is left to construct an interpretation of the poem and to choose between good and bad criticism of it. My primary purpose has been to print exactly the text that Rossetti intended the reader to have, in its final form. To that end, I chose as copy-text the first edition of Ballads and Sonnets (1881), the last form of the sequence seen through the press by the poet. Some emendations were adopted from the resetting in 1882 of this text, called the fourth edition, because the poet had identified to his publisher mistakes he wanted corrected in the next edition or because there were obvious mistakes, wrong indents or dropped-out characters, that he would have corrected had he lived to see proofs of the fourth edition. I also accepted William Rossetti’s restoration to

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the sequence of Nuptial Sleep as VIa, although the poet had suppressed it in 1881. Original or early editions of all sources cited or quoted are fully identified. Where an accessible and reliable reprint of a rare original exists, I have noted the fact. The abundant quotes from the Fredeman Correspondence edition follow the Editorial Procedures outlined there on pp. xxxv–xli, Vol. I. Rossetti’s quoted letters follow the MSS exactly and respect his erratic usage. When the letter quoted is in one of the later volumes not yet published, other printed sources follow the WEF identification e.g. the Doughty-Wahl or Bryson collections of letters. In this edition, protocols for abbreviations, dates, insertion of marginal content and documentation in annotations and footnotes are consistent where practicable with the WEF edition so that the two may be used together with a minimum of confusion. For the WEF, Doughty-Wahl, Bryson and Lang (Swinburne) editions of letters, I identify the quote by a letter number. However, in editions like Roger Peattie’s of William Rossetti’s correspondence and William’s own editions of his brother’s and sister’s letters, where there is so much commentary and annotation, I use ‘No.’ for a letter citation: otherwise my numbers refer to pages. Some page references to Doughty-Wahl occur when their notes are being cited because their note numbering is not consecutive (i.e., the same letter could have more than one n1). Conjectural dates for letters are enclosed in square brackets; a prefatory ? before a date in square brackets indicates that it is a guess. Date and place references for composition and publication of each sonnet are followed by source abbreviations. In my Frequently Cited/Consulted Sources I have relied heavily on the records of William Rossetti, William Bell Scott, Ford Madox Brown, Jane Morris, Hall Caine, Thomas Hake, Theodore Watts-Dunton and other contemporaries, not because they were profound scholars or eminent literary authorities, but because they were close friends and eyewitnesses to the poet’s life. Recording revisions and variants is discussed below under ‘Stylistic Conventions and Sigla’. As befits a variorum edition, I have tried to compile complete rather than selective lists of variants, but even with magnifying glasses and infrared photography it is not always possible to decipher a palimpsest, reconstruct a cancelled or erased passage or read an illegible scrawl. While I have aimed at an exact reproduction of the texts of the sonnets, I have not followed the first edition precisely in the matter of accidentals. Line numbers were inserted to help the reader follow often-complex lists of variants. There are no broken-up or spilled-

Note on the Edited Text and Apparatus

xv

over lines. Rossetti’s dashes are all en-dashes with spaces around them. I have not capitalized the first word of each sonnet. The ‘curly’ quotation marks of Ballads and Sonnets are not present because the book is set in Palatino. While following the first edition in using Roman numerals above each sonnet title, in my notes, commentary and tables I have sought to avoid confusion with the Poems (1870) version of the sequence by identifying all 1881 sonnets by their Arabic number and all 1870 sonnets by their Roman number.

List of Abbreviations and Sigla Frequently-recurring names and frequently-cited sources are usually abbreviated in the notes and apparatus; these protocols and others follow as closely as possible those used in W. E. Fredeman’s The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (WEF). Abbreviations for MS and other rare or unique sources appear in Appendix Seven. A bibliography of works cited or consulted occasionally is on pp. 298– 301; throughout the text citations of these works consist of the author’s last name, the year of publication and page or chapter numbers ACS

Algernon Charles Swinburne

CGR

Christina Georgiana Rossetti

DGR

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

EES

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (DGR’s wife)

FLR

Frances Lavinia Rossetti (DGR’s mother)

HC

Thomas Henry Hall Caine

JM

Jane Morris

PR/B

Pre-Raphaelite/Brotherhood

PRISM

Pre-Raphaelitism

TWD

Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton

WBS

William Bell Scott

WMR

William Michael Rossetti

Rossetti’s Printed Works B&S

Ballads and Sonnets (Ellis and White, 1881)

EIP

The Early Italian Poets (Smith, Elder, 1861)

HL

The House of Life (Poems pp. 187–255; B&S pp. 161–263)

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

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Poems

Poems (Ellis, 1870–72 eds 1–6)

Poems: New

Poems: A New Edition (Ellis and White, 1881)

Tauchnitz

Poems (7th ed. Tauchnitz, 1873)

Works; CW

WMR, ed. The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Ellis, 1911. Enlarged from WMR’s Collected Works (CW). 2 vols. London: Ellis and Scrutton, 1886.

Stylistic Conventions and Sigla MS/MSS

Manuscript(s)

Ed./eds

Edition(s)

Vol./vols

Volume(s)

Sig./sigs

Signature(s)

Fol./fols

Folio(s)

n/nn

Note(s)

Date/month/year

15 Oct 81 or 5 Jul: but, months without year or day are spelled out or given in full, as are single and non-nineteenth-century years, e.g. 15 Oct 1781

Ampersands

Used only in abbreviated bibliographical references: ‘WEF 69.258 & nn’ or ‘PML MSS 6081 & 6083’

MSS, Revisions and Variants I have as far as possible listed the MSS in chronological order and given the variants the same order. When an early version of a sonnet differs greatly from the final text I give it in full. When two sources are compared, the earlier one comes first: the readings of the later one are in bold face, the two separated by a virgule (/). Proofsheets and printed texts revised in Rossetti’s hand are treated as MSS: angle brackets enclose a word, phrase, line or passage deleted from a MS. The new reading substituted follows. If further deletions and substitutions occur, they too will be enclosed in

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List of Abbreviations and Sigla

angle brackets following in the order of substitution until the final reading in that MS. double, or triple, angle brackets are used to indicate revisions within revisions; deletions and substitutions within double brackets are thus enclosed within single brackets. [MS breaks off here] square brackets contain editorial insertions: they are also used to identify conjectural dates, speculative readings or references (sometimes preceded by a question mark if the editor is guessing) or to separate editorial comment from the text of revisions and variants. Frequently Cited or Consulted Sources ALC The Ashley Library: A Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts, and Autograph Letters Collected by Thomas J. Wise. 11 vols. London: Printed for Private Circulation, 1922–36. Reissued with a new preface by Simon Nowell-Smith. Folkestone: Dawson’s, 1971. AN

William Minto, ed. Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott and Notices of His Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends 1830–82. 2 vols. London: Osgood, 1892.

Bibliography

WMR. Bibliography of the Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Ellis, 1905; repr. New York: AMS, 1971.

Bryson

John Bryson, ed., with Janet Camp Troxell. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.

Buchanan

Robert Buchanan. The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day. London: Strahan, 1872. Expanded from Buchanan’s pseudonymous attack on DGR in the Contemporary Review (Oct 71): 334–50. Repr. New York: AMS, 1975. For more bibliography and other details of this controversy that precipitated DGR’s breakdown in the summer of 1872 see Appendices 8 & 9 in WEF Vol. V.

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

xix

Caine

Hall Caine. Recollections of Rossetti. London: Stock, 1882; contains many excerpts from DGR’s letters to HC, some misquoted and conflated.

ClassLists

WMR. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Classified Lists of His Writings with the Dates. London: privately printed in 100 copies, 1906.

DGRDW

WMR. Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer. London: Cassell, 1889. Repr. New York: AMS, 1970. Includes sonnet-by-sonnet prose paraphrase of HL pp. 179–262.

Doughty

Oswald Doughty. A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Frederick Muller, 1949. Rev. ed. 1960.

DW

Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, eds. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–67. Vol. I 1835–60 Letters 1–353 pp. 1–385; Vol. II 1861–70 Letters 354–1094 pp. 387–921; Vol. III 1871–76 Letters 1095–1744 pp. 923–1468; Vol. IV 1877–82 Letters 1745–2615 pp. 1469–1953.

FL/FLM

WMR. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir. 2 vols. London: Ellis, 1895. Vol. 1: Memoir (FLM). Vol. 2: Letters (FL); repr. New York: AMS, 1970.

FLCGR

The Family Letters of Christina Georgiana Rossetti, ed. WMR. London: Brown, Langham, 1908.

FR

‘Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets’, Fortnightly Review (March 1869): 266–73.

Grylls

Rosalie Glynn Grylls [see also Rosalie, Lady Mander]. Portrait of Rossetti. London: Macdonald, 1964.

Harrison

The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. Antony H. Harrison. 3 vols. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1997.

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List of Abbreviations and Sigla

HRA

Helen Rossetti Angeli. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies. London: Hamilton, 1949.

Kelvin

Norman Kelvin, ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris. 5 vols. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1984–96.

Lang

Cecil Y. Lang, ed. The Swinburne Letters. 6 vols. New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1959–62.

Lewis

Roger C. Lewis. Thomas J. Wise and the Trial Book Fallacy. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.

Marillier

Henry Currie Marillier. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life. London: Bell, 1899.

MS Diary

MS Diary of WMR in the Angeli-Dennis Papers at UBC, an almost continuous record of literary and artistic events and family activities from early PRB days to the close of WMR’s life in 1919.

Masefield

John Masefield. Thanks Before Going: Notes on Some of the Original Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Heinemann, 1946.

Peattie

Roger W. Peattie, ed. Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania UP, 1990.

PFB 1) 2) 3)

Paull Franklin Baum, ed. 1) Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Analytical List of Manuscripts in the Duke University Library with Hitherto Unpublished Verse and Prose. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1931; 2) The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928; 3) ‘The Bancroft Manuscripts of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Modern Philology (Aug 1941): 47–68.

PRISM

William E. Fredeman. Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1965.

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

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RP

WMR, ed. Rossetti Papers, 1862–70. London: Sands, 1903.

S/Surtees

Virginia Surtees. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. S. followed by a number identifies an entry in the catalogue.

SR

WMR. Some Reminiscences. 2 vols. London: Brown Langham, 1906.

Wahl

John Robert Wahl. The Kelmscott Love Sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Cape Town: A.H. Balkema, 1954.

WA/GBH

George Birkbeck Hill, ed. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham 1854–70. London: Unwin, 1897.

WEF

William E. Fredeman, ed. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 10 vols. Completing Editors: Roger C. Lewis, Jane Cowan, Roger Peattie, Allan Life, Page Life. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002–; Vol. I 1835–54; Vol. II 1855–62; Vol. III 1863–67; Vol. IV 1868–70; Vol. V 1871– 72; Vol. VI 1873–74; Vol. VII to be issued in 2007.

WMRD

Odette Bornand. The Diary of William Michael Rossetti 1870–1873. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.

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Annotated proofsheet for Ballads and Sonnets of 25 Apr 81 with Prefatory Note to The House of Life. Princeton. See p. 34 note 5.

Introduction The Building of The House of Life In 1909, Wilfred S. Blunt, author of the sonnet sequence Esther, asserted to Sir Sydney Cockerell that he considered Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 103-sonnet poem The House of Life ‘the greatest of all the great Victorian poems’. This image of its loftiness has been popular among the poem’s would-be interpreters, who regard it as an unscaled, perhaps unscalable, pinnacle among Victorian peaks. Certainly, its textual complexities are formidable, and it is impossible to attempt an authoritative interpretation of the House without the benefit of a proper critical edition. The final version, which appeared in Ballads and Sonnets (1881), contained sonnets written as early as 1847, before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and as late as 1880. The individual ‘sonnet-stanzas’ of the House were thus composed over a period of thirty-four years, twice the time it took Alfred Tennyson to compose all the individual lyrics of In Memoriam. The sequence itself appeared in three different states: 16 sonnets in 1869, published in the Fortnightly Review with the title ‘Of Life, Love, and Death’; 50 sonnets and 11 lyrics published in Poems (1870) with the title ‘Sonnets and Songs, towards a Work to Be Called The House of Life’; 102 sonnets (including an unnumbered proem-sonnet but no songs) published in Ballads and Sonnets (1881) as The House of Life in a two-part sequence with the subtitles ‘Youth and Change’ (59 sonnets) and ‘Change and Fate’ (42 sonnets). Jerome McGann identifies a fourth state (McGann 2003: 386), the Bodleian Library MSS of 30 sonnets and songs that J. R. Wahl published as The Kelmscott Love Sonnets of D. G. Rossetti, but McGann’s claim that these documents form ‘a relatively coherent’ version of the sequence is difficult to support. They form no entity and have no unity beyond being a collection of fair copies that Rossetti included in letters to Jane Morris. Some of these poems were never part of any version of the House. Nevertheless, McGann’s emphasis on the instability of this long poem is critically sound: it is a house built upon ever-shifting sands. Some poems added to the final House in 1881 originally appeared in the ‘Sonnets for Pictures and Other Sonnets’ section of Poems (1870). To the despair of his printer, Rossetti experimented with a half-dozen different sonnets in the initial position and shifted large

2

Introduction

groups of sonnets within the sequence in the course of his manic composing and revising from 1868 to 1870. He constantly revised individual octaves, sestets and lines as well, introducing these changes at all stages, even on press-proofs. Some of his proofsheets used as printer’s copy contain so much revision and additional material that an editor may be justified in regarding them as MSS. As John Carter remarked in 1972, no publisher today would tolerate this amount of revision at the proof stage from a best-selling novelist, never mind a poet. What does all this textual instability signify, and how should an editor deal with it? Answers to the first question abound among Rossetti critics. Perhaps the most common is that Rossetti was a relentless perfectionist, a ferocious competitor in the struggle to determine the poetic survival of the fittest. His goal was hyperdense, multifaceted significance, to be achieved by what he described to Hall Caine as ‘fundamental brainwork’ (WEF 81.104) and summed up in a phrase from his sonnet on the Sonnet as ‘arduous fulness’, a phrase once parodied by the unsympathetic critic John Addington Symonds as ‘plethoric verbiage’. Rossetti contrasted his compositional methods with those of his more fluent and prolific friends Swinburne and Morris, depicting himself as agonizing upon his couch, the racked and tortured medium through whom the Muse vouchsafed only a few lines at a time. Too much emphasis on biographical explanations of The House of Life, however, obscures Rossetti’s ambition to be regarded as a fine sonneteer. As C. S. Lewis observed, the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamoured of a woman but also to be enamoured of the sonnet. Like that other inveterate reviser, Tennyson, Rossetti was diffident about his poetic gift, determined to publish only work adjudged to be his finest by family and friends and paranoid about criticism from all others. In this matter his painting parallels his poetry to some extent: he was as reluctant to exhibit as he was to publish, and he painted out heads as often as he cancelled stanzas. But there is a very important difference. He thought of his poetry as untainted by commercialism, affirming an integrity and evincing a dedication in his literary art that he felt he had surrendered by painting so many potboilers. He began and ended his career as an artist by writing poetry; it is striking that in the 1880s he was revising poems that he had written in the 1840s. What Johnson said of Pope is true of Rossetti: ‘to make verses was his first labour, and to mend them was his last’.

Introduction

3

I My own belief is that I am a poet ... primarily and that it is my poetic tendencies that chiefly give value to my pictures; only painting being – what poetry is not – a livelihood – I have put my poetry chiefly in that form. On the other hand, the bread-and-cheese question has led to a good deal of my painting being pot-boiling and no more – whereas my verse, being unprofitable has remained … unprostituted. … As with recreated forms in painting, so I should wish to deal in poetry chiefly with personified emotions; and in carrying out my scheme of the House of Life (if ever I do so) shall try to put in action a complete dramatis personae of the soul. D. G. Rossetti to Dr T. G. Hake (WEF 70.110) Written to an enthusiastic admirer upon the publication of Poems (1870), the passage above conveys the sense of inspired poetic vocation that possessed Rossetti for only three short periods of his life: 1849–53, the years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; 1868–71, a time of nearly continuous literary production beginning at Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, and ending at Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire; and 1879–81, an Indian summer of literary creativity that culminated in Poems (1881) and Ballads and Sonnets. On 13 April 1880, Rossetti told Hall Caine, one of his first biographers, that he gave up poetry in favour of painting in 1853 when he was twenty-five, writing ‘extremely little I might almost say nothing except the renovated Jenny in 1858 or 1859’ until he began work on his 1870 Poems (WEF 80.125). He also revealed to Caine that he wrote on a sort of orgiastic principle, working himself into states of manic intensity followed by exhaustion and depression: I wrote the tale [Hand and Soul] ... all in one night in December 1849. ... In such a case a landscape and sky all unsurmised open gradually in the mind – a sort of spiritual ‘Turner’ among whose hills one ranges and in whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty. But I have found this only in nightly work which I have seldom attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state was mine when I described it at the close of the story. (WEF 80.116) But the fact is that Rossetti’s best writing was done this way, when his painting activities dwindled to make way for bursts of imaginative composition sustained often for months at a time. The second period of literary creativity began tentatively in 1868 when he thought his career as a painter threatened by failing eyesight, but in

4

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1870 it had reached a multiple climax of acclaim among the literati and success with the reading public, satisfying the author’s own demanding criteria for poetic excellence. However, the euphoria waned when the writing stopped, giving way in late 1871 to obsession and in 1872 to despair and madness. For eight years Rossetti wrote almost nothing. Then the pattern asserted itself one last time. Slowly at first but eventually attaining all the old mastery, Rossetti enjoyed in 1880–81 a final poetic blossoming, even improving on his triumph of eleven years earlier by bringing out not one but two successful volumes in October-November of 1881. But scarcely more than a month after the publication of Poems (1881) on November 10, he was raving again: from that breakdown, he never recovered.

II Much has been written on the first two creative periods: Rossetti’s ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ youth, and the fascinating circumstances under which Poems (1870) was produced dominated in the popular mind by the Gothic episode of the exhumation in Highgate Cemetery in which his friends recovered the MS poems from his wife’s grave.1 The textual story of the building of Poems (1870) in general and the House in particular is recounted in detail in Appendices One to Six. That Rossetti intended The House of Life to be read as a unified whole is clear from the excerpt quoted above from his letter of 21 April 1870 to Dr Hake. His use of terminology from drama suggests that he was aiming at more than self-expression and prepares us for his eventual omission of the lyrics. It is true that this drama takes place within ‘the soul’, but in The Stealthy School of Criticism, the poet insisted that ‘the motive powers of art reverse the requirement of science, and demand first of all an inner standing point’ (Works 619). From that point, the ‘personified emotions’ may be seen as characters in a drama that is more Jungian than Dantesque. Rossetti’s letters show that the idea of a sonnet sequence evolved gradually and intermittently in his mind. Many sonnets written before 1870 were not composed consciously as part of a larger 1

On Rossetti’s ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ youth see WEF Vols I & II and Gordon H. Fleming, 1967 & 1971. On the context and publication history of Poems (1870), see WEF Vols IV & V, especially Appendices 1–5 & 8–9. See also Lewis Chapter 3 and articles by Robert S. Fraser, Robert N. Keane and Janet Camp Troxell in Fraser 1972, a publication commemorating Princeton’s acquisition of the Troxell Rossetti Collection.

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scheme, although some, such as 69 and 70, were revised in varying degree, both before and after the appearance of Poems (1870), to take their place within the sequence. His experimentation with grouping and positioning can be partially followed in some collections of House MSS: the Fitzwilliam Library sonnets are numbered in pencil on the upper left of each leaf, some having as many as four cancelled numbers while other numbers were never altered. This process is also evident in proofsheets. Much has been made of Rossetti’s declaration to William Bell Scott that his sonnets were ‘occasional’ and his apparent contradiction of that statement in his cancelled preface to the 1881 sequence: ‘These poems are in no sense occasional.’ In August 1871, during the period of the ‘Kelmscott Love Sonnets’, Rossetti wrote to Scott: I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of special momentary emotion; but I think there is another class admissible also – and that is the only other I practise, viz. the class depending on a line or two clearly given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence of ideas. This also is a just raison d’être for a sonnet, and such are all mine when they do not in some sense belong to the ‘occasional’ class. (WEF 71.129) Naive Freudians read Rossetti’s poetry as disguised and distorted autobiography. But there is much evidence that he regarded all intense human experience, including his own, as symbolic of deeper realities. While he never formulated, as Carlyle did, a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic symbols, such a distinction is clear from both his creative and his critical writing. He believed that only trivial poetry could be made from incidents not amounting to events: one way to ensure that an occasion, or incident, amounts to an event, or symbolic experience, is continuous revision. In 1854, including his new sonnet Lost on Both Sides (91) in a letter to William Allingham, he remarked, ‘my sonnets are not generally finished till I see them again after forgetting them, and this is only two days old’ (WEF 54.55). This is an understatement. Sonnet 91 in particular and House sonnets in general underwent so much revision before their final appearance in 1881 that the poet’s use of the word ‘tattoo’ to describe this process aptly characterizes many of his MSS and proofsheets. The depersonalizing, symbolizing tendency of much of this revision cannot be dismissed as mere self-censorship; Rossetti was following that impulse towards an impersonal art that he celebrated in the proem Sonnet and Transfigured Life (60).

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The 1854 letters to Allingham contain the first references discovered to those very important MSS, Rossetti’s vest-pocket notebooks, four of which were acquired by Thomas J. Wise for the Ashley Library. These tiny documents contain poems in process, in nearly every stage of composition from single words or scribbled phrases to final drafts. After agreeing with Allingham that the last lines of Sonnet 91 are ‘certainly foggy’, Rossetti amends them from his vestpocket notebook containing ‘various sonnets and beginnings of sonnets written at crisises (?!) of happy inspiration’. Then he copies for his friend a sonnet ‘which I remember writing in great glory on the top of a hill which I reached one after-sunset in Warwickshire last year’ (WEF 54.57). A study of the development of this poem from its appearance here to its inclusion in the final House as The Hill Summit (70) reveals to what purpose Rossetti could shape what began as the record of an intense moment. In September 1869, he sent his brother a revised version of the sestet with the following question: The symbolism being thus more distinct than before, do you not think this sonnet should properly be transferred to the House of Life section? (WEF 69.156) The only earlier references to the House come in a letter of 30 August to Jane Morris (WEF 69.143) and Proof State 2 of Poems (1870) dated 18 August (see Appendix Two). By the summer of 1869, some overall plan for a sonnet sequence had formed itself in the poet’s mind; he revised The Hill Summit to fit into the pattern he was working out for The House of Life. Many sonnets of the other, non-occasional, sort developed from or drew upon single lines or couplets that he had evidently written in these little notebooks as they were ‘given’ to him. Silent Noon (19), an apparently ‘occasional’ poem and a sonnet often read as an entry in Rossetti’s erotic diary, combined four separate notebook entries made over so long a period of time that all four could not possibly refer to a single experience. Even some of the ‘Kelmscott Love Sonnets’ contain imagery not inspired by that locale: the final two lines of The Lovers’ Walk (12) came out of a notebook, although the first twelve are clearly set at Kelmscott. The point of carrying these books in the vest-pocket was to facilitate easy transcription of passing impressions which might be of use later in the ‘fundamental brainwork’ of composition and revision Rossetti described to Caine. In the following letter of 1876 he explains this matter to his fellow-poet Hake upon presenting him with a notebook:

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7

Let me beg your acceptance of a waistcoat pocket book, such as I always carry. I enclose it with the MS. The waistcoat pocket is the only one of all pockets into which the hand slips willingly whatever be the body’s position whether walking, standing, sitting, lying or squatting. Kneeling you see I exclude. A dive into the trousers pocket is often laborious and coat pockets inaccessible. Thus the best thoughts of the lazy minstrel may doze past his brain unjotted but for the waistcoat pocket book. (WEF 76.44) The concept of a group of sonnets with related themes and images in sequential order appears in letters to several correspondents between December 1868 and August 1871. Rossetti first mentions it to Allingham 23 December 1868, in a letter which also gives eye trouble as the cause of ‘inaction’ in painting and ‘the looking up of ravelled rags of verse’: I have been looking up a few old Sonnets, and writing a few more new ones, to make a little bunch in a coming number of the Fortnightly. (WEF 68.173) These sonnets, the embryonic phase of The House of Life, appeared three months later with the title Of Life, Love and Death: Sixteen Sonnets. Appendix One includes a comparison of this selection with the 1870 and 1881 phases of the sequence: it is apparent from this comparison that the poet intended from the start to end the series with the richly suggestive and paradoxical image of death as a newborn child (Newborn Death, 99 and 100). Rossetti’s letters to his brother William at this time indicate how carefully he was selecting and revising. Despite the fact that in both 1870 and 1881 he worried about the slightness of his volumes, he excluded many sonnets from the House, either discarding them from various proof states or including them in ‘other sonnets’ sections; some sexually explicit ones were suppressed or left unfinished (see Appendix Eight). Early sonnets such as 71–73 and 90 were finally included after heavy revision discussed with William (e.g., WEF 69.130, 137, 139, 144, 146, 154, 156 and 168). What strikes one most about these letters is the precision and thoroughness with which the poet prepared his printer’s copy and revised his proofs. Always he strives for more exact expression, more coherent structure to render the inner logic of an imaginary set of circumstances. Nuptial Sleep (6A) exemplifies this procedure. He thought it one of his best sonnets, having no wish to suppress it in 1870 as he did in 1881 (except en famille). The fact that in 1869 he did remove the sonnet After the French Liberation of

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Italy in the name of decorum indicates that he did not regard Nuptial Sleep as obscene or vulgar (Lewis 137–40). Neither did he regard it sentimentally as the record of some private sexual encounter – his correspondence about it with William and Swinburne shows that he was searching for what Coleridge had defined as the essence of poetry, the best words in the best order. In changing the title from Placatâ Venere to Nuptial Sleep and adding ‘married’ in line 6 to ‘help it stand fire’, he presumably thought that Patmorish marital imagery would be less likely than Swinburnian pagan symbolism to draw on him the abuse that was heaped upon Swinburne after he published his Poems and Ballads (WEF 69.146 and 154). His fears proved only too justified when Buchanan selected Nuptial Sleep as the prime example of Rossetti’s ‘fleshliness’, yet the poet had feared the charge of idolatry more than adultery, for he deleted paganism, not eroticism, from the sonnet. There is no evidence that Jane Morris opposed the publication of Nuptial Sleep in 1870. That she seems to have advised Rossetti against including erotic poetry in his 1881 volume shows her concern for his health – another literary war might have caused madness or death – rather than her fear of personal embarrassment. The exchange of letters with Swinburne during this period was especially stimulating for Rossetti, more often at his best with one who was his literary equal as well as an enthusiastic admirer. Swinburne seems to have grasped at once what Rossetti was attempting in his sonnet sequence which so many, including William, thought obscure. On 26 February 1870, while Swinburne was working on his review of Poems from proofsheets, Rossetti wrote to him as follows: I am delighted to hear that you are battling with the British dragon on the subject of my ‘obscurity’ in the Sonnets. I opine that I am likely when I read your elucidation to see how much better they might have been made by your light, just as I did with the pictures of mine you described. I trust no inconvenience will result to your labours by the fact that I am now slightly transposing that section – but only in masses – putting the love sonnets first – (beginning at Bridal Birth [2] and ending at Stillborn Love [55]) and the other sonnets following these (Inclusiveness [63] to Superscription [97] with a new one for a close [The One Hope, 101]). Two other new ones occur in the love-sonnets. The section then winds up with the songs. This is better I think, as the love-sonnets are the preponderant portion. (WEF 70.35)

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Swinburne wrote back two days later: Thanks for your new sonnet, which is lovely. It will make no difference to my critical work that you have – very rightly I think – re-arranged the cycles of sonnets. (Lang 2: 105) The comments of both poets draw attention to the element of structure. Both ‘masses’ and ‘cycles’ suggest relatedness, as does the inclusion of The One Hope ‘for a close’. Here also appears the concept of a two-part work beginning with ‘love-sonnets’ and ending, after a second group of sonnets, with the songs, for the sake of evidently, balance. As the design worked itself out in the poet’s mind after 1870, the songs, never an integral part of the sequence, got dropped. In fact, a week after receiving Swinburne’s letter, Rossetti removed the lyrics A New Year’s Burden and Even So because ‘they seemed to jar with the other love songs and to make a false climax’ (WEF 70.45). He kept adding and deleting sonnets until he had an even fifty just before press-time; again in 1881, he finally reached an even hundred, numbering The One Hope 101 as if to balance the unnumbered proem Sonnet and thus provide a frame for his ‘century’ of sonnets. Swinburne’s review appeared in the Fortnightly Review for May 1870 (Swinburne 1875). The fulsome praise of his friend embarrassed Rossetti but the critical insight of the essay pleased him. After refuting ‘charges of darkness and difficulty’ in the sonnets, Swinburne proceeds with characteristic exuberance to argue that The House of Life is a unified organic whole which eludes mechanical dissection: But such work as this can be neither unwoven nor recast by any process of analysis. The infinite depth and wealth of life which breathes and plays among these songs and sonnets cannot be parcelled and portioned out for praise or comment. This House of Life has in it so many mansions, so many halls of state and bowers of music, chapels for worship and chambers for festival, that no guest can declare on a first entrance the secret of its scheme. Spirit and sense together, eyesight and hearing and thought, are absorbed in splendour of sounds and glory of colours distinguishable only by delight. But the scheme is solid and harmonious; there is no waste in this luxury of genius: the whole is lovelier than its loveliest part. Again and again one may turn the leaves in search of some one poem or some two which may be chosen for sample and thanksgiving; but there is no choice to be made. (7)

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Swinburne recognizes that the unity of the sequence does not depend on any narrative progression: There seems no story in this sequence of sonnets, yet they hold in them all the action and passion of a spiritual history with tragic stages and elegiac pauses and lyric motions of the living soul. (8) He hails as successful Rossetti’s striving for ‘inclusiveness’ (as sonnet 63 is called), his attempt ‘to put in action a complete dramatis personae of the soul’: Resignation and fruition, forethought and afterthought, have one voice to sing with in many keys of spirit. ... And of all splendid and profound love-poetry, what is there more luminous or more deep in sense and spirit than the marvellous opening cycle of twenty-eight sonnets, which embrace and express all sorrow and all joy of passion in union, of outer love and inner, triumphant or dejected or piteous or at peace? (9) After a detailed paraphrase of this ‘opening cycle’ which remains unsurpassed by the subsequent efforts of William Rossetti (DGRDW), Paull Baum {PFB 2)}, John Masefield and Kathryn Gordon (1968), Swinburne concludes by emphasizing what he sees as the central theme of the sequence: the metaphorical identity of the Lover and the Artist made possible through the worship of his Mistress/Muse: In all the glorious poem built up of all these poems there is no great quality more notable than the sweet and sovereign unity of perfect spirit and sense, of fleshly form and intellectual fire. This Muse is as the woman praised in the divine words of the poet himself: ‘Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought Nor Love her body from her soul.’ (13)2 One of Rossetti’s first critics remains one of his most perceptive. Yet Swinburne’s word ‘fleshly’ was soon to explode in both their faces.

2

Swinburne is quoting the final lines of ‘Love-Lily’, Song 1 in the 1870 House of Life.

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III The story of the two 1881 volumes and the final version of The House of Life begins where the second period of creativity ends, in the summer and fall of 1871. On 12 August, speculation appeared in the literary gossip section of the Athenæum that Rossetti intended to issue a new collection of poems as early as winter 1872. Writing to his friend William Bell Scott on the following day, Rossetti joked about but did not deny the rumour (WEF 71.123). Besides thirty new sonnets for the House, Rossetti had the lyrics ‘Sunset Wings’, ‘The Cloud Confines’ and ‘Down Stream’ ready to print. In September, he finished his long ballad Rose Mary (though not yet the ‘Beryl-songs’ that he later added to it), starting at once on another long poem, The Orchard Pit, all of which, augmented ‘with smaller things, might perhaps make a fair volume again’ (WEF 71.152). However, with the return in October of William Morris from Iceland, he had to vacate Kelmscott for Chelsea. He lamented to Scott: ‘Of course I’m leaving here just as I was getting into the poetic groove, and I know were I to stay I should have a volume ready by the end of another three months. But it may not be’ (WEF 71.159). In the same letter, he remarks that he is evidently ‘the first victim’ of an attack on ‘the Fleshly School of Poetry’. This development, casually dismissed here, was to prove more destructive of Rossetti’s scheme for a new book of poems than his being deprived of the beauties of Kelmscott Manor and its graceful mistress Jane Morris. The pamphlet war known as the Fleshly School Controversy is well documented, as is its cumulative effect on the poet from October 1871 to September 1872. Beginning with Robert Buchanan’s pseudonymous attack on Rossetti and Swinburne, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, in the Contemporary Review for October, it reached a crisis when Buchanan published a signed, expanded and more vengeful assault in pamphlet form on the poet’s birthday, 12 May, precipitating his total breakdown on 2 June (WEF 72.83 & Appendix 8, Vol. V). W. E. Fredeman’s careful, detailed, analysis of Rossetti’s collapse, suicide attempt, near-incarceration in an insane asylum and partial recovery appears in his Prelude to the Last Decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Summer of 1872 (Fredeman 1971: an abridged version of these two articles from BJRL is printed at the end of WEF Vol. V as Appendix 9). Yet we cannot assign all the blame for Rossetti’s desperate condition at this time to Robert Buchanan, Jane Morris and chloral hydrate. For instance, the poetic efflorescence of 1868–71 was not simply ‘snuffed out by an article’ but undermined, partly indeed by the poet’s obsession with confounding enemies both real and imaginary, but

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partly also by the erosion of his many literary friendships, so nourishing to him during the preparation of Poems (1870) and the fruitful summer of 1871. The communal aspect of artistic creation had always been a source of joy to Rossetti. His astounding offer in his last years to publish jointly with his solicitor Watts (a very minor poet) a ‘Miscellany’ of their poems was made in what Rossetti called the ‘Tuscan’ spirit (WEF 78.232 [DW 1975]). This word denotes the standard literary Italian of the Middle Ages: Tuscans such as Dante and Cavalcanti commented on each other’s work and urged one another on to poetic achievement. Rossetti’s exchanges of verse with various friends were attempts to introduce that spirit into his own circle, even though some members of it, such as Scott, Philip Marston and the egregious Theo Marzials, may deserve Tom Stoppard’s epithet, ‘the belles-litter that surrounded Rossetti’.3 Rossetti was forty-four at the height of the Fleshly School Controversy, no longer surrounded by the intense young men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or the ardent aesthetes of the Jovial Campaign who helped him decorate the Oxford Union in the late 1850s. It was the very idea of such brotherhoods that was being attacked: the Saturday Review for 24 February 1872 ran an article, ‘Coterie Glory’, alleging that personal friends of the Fleshly poets wrote all reviews of their work, a practice sneeringly designated as Italian.4 How all this affected Rossetti is eloquently expressed in one of his letters to the painter Frederick Shields: Things go on the same as ever in London. Everyone works, and hardly anyone sees the other’s work more than if many counties lay between them – every man having his own daily groove, and the cross roads being somehow of rare occurrence. ... Goodbye, my dear Shields. I hope our really seeing each other again before we are much older is not quite out of the question. (WEF 71.185) Rossetti’s biographers have recognized that his muse flourished only under certain conditions, but they tend to underestimate the part played by literary friendships in the creation of those conditions. Indeed, Oswald Doughty underestimated the degree to which the

3

4

The British Consul so characterizes the Irish poet William Allingham in Stoppard’s Travesties (London, 1975). Robert Buchanan, The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day (London, 1872; rpt. New York, 1975), Notes, pp. 94–95.

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poet’s friendship with Jane Morris could be described as literary. When he left Kelmscott in 1871, Rossetti had already composed 88 of the 102 sonnets that would form the complete House in Ballads and Sonnets; he did not take it up again until a renewal of warm relations with Jane Morris and his brother William and new literary friendships with Watts and Hall Caine stimulated him near the close of his life. When his publisher F. S. Ellis proposed a new volume of original poetry at the beginning of 1873, Rossetti dithered, fearing that his present material would print up to a mere 150 pages, but resolved to ‘set to work writing new [poems] as soon as possible’ (WEF 73.2 & 3). He didn’t, offering Ellis instead a translation of Michelangelo’s poems that soon grew to an edition with critical introduction, thence into a comparative study of ‘other painterpoets’, coming finally to nothing (WEF 73.20–22). By then, evidently recovered from his breakdown and far behind with his commissions, Rossetti was neither a writer nor a scholar, but once again a painter.

IV The decision to prepare a trade edition of his poetry was precipitated for Rossetti in both 1869 and 1879 by the appearance in print of articles praising his achievement as a poet in terms that pleased him. Contrary to Oswald Doughty and other sources dating back to T. J. Wise, the exhumation of his MS poetry from his wife’s grave in October 1869 was not the occasion of his dropping an earlier plan to print privately. That had already been cancelled by 30 August, when he told Jane Morris that he would ‘rush into publication’ as soon as he had written enough to make up a volume of 300–350 pages (WEF 69.143). In the same letter he makes clear that his confidence was boosted by the appearance in Tinsley’s Magazine for September of the first critique ever published on him as a poet, a laudatory piece by Harry Buxton Forman. Thinking back to his first, ‘Pre-Raphaelite’, poetic flowering, he remarked to his mother that Forman’s article ‘is so far satisfactory that, after twenty years, one stranger has discovered one’s existence’ (WEF 69.138). Ten years later, he wrote again to Jane: I enclose ... an article ... just received from some enthusiast of whom I had already heard as lecturing in my honour. I only hope Caine may manage to spell Able as regards enforcing my poetic claims. The object of the lecture is very good – being evidently to insist on the high tone of feeling in the poems. (WEF 79.114 [Bryson 68&n1])

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Hall Caine, an architect’s clerk with literary ambitions, could not have taken a tack more pleasing to Rossetti than to argue as he did that Poems (1870) contained nothing immoral. Jane Morris was the first among many friends of the poet to be unimpressed by Caine, but Rossetti protested peevishly, ‘I grow more and more into the weakness of being thankful to anyone who will give me a little praise’ (WEF 79.122 [Bryson 71]). He struck this defensive tone about Caine in another letter to Mrs Morris, describing the Liverpudlian’s warm sympathy with his poetry as ‘a thing worth meeting with when one’s old friends care little or nothing whether one lives or dies’ (WEF 80.70 [Bryson 108]). From the summer of 1879, Rossetti’s commitment to poetry grew, displacing and ultimately replacing painting, fed as it had been twice previously by a group of admirer-collaborators, smaller than in 1868– 71 but no less fervent. The old group of Swinburne, Scott and Hake no longer received copies of Gabriel’s latest poems. They had been replaced by Jane Morris, who was now nearly always the first to see any new writing by Rossetti, and Caine, with whom he exchanged a massive literary correspondence (sending 124 letters over the next three years). There were also his brother William and his solicitor Watts. Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton first met Rossetti around 27 December 1872 (WEF 73.7), although he had earlier represented him in the Rovedino (WEF 72.70n2) affair: the two exchanged letters from 24 September 1872. In time, he became factotum and crony to the paranoiac artist, shielding him against the malevolent outside world with a professional expertise never at the command of William Rossetti, who more or less resigned as his brother’s keeper in 1874 to take up his new role as husband and father. Like William and Dr Hake, who introduced him to Rossetti, Watts was an amateur man of letters whose boundless admiration for Gabriel’s genius brought out the best in the moody poet. Others in the new circle included William Sharp, whom Rossetti introduced to Watts in September 1880, and Caine’s Liverpool friend James Ashcroft Noble, whose article in the September (1880) Contemporary Review, ‘The Sonnet in England’, described Rossetti as the leading sonneteer of the age. The delighted poet wrote to Caine: Mr Noble’s article on the Sonnet ... like your lecture, greets me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. ... It is all the more pleasant to me as finding a place in the very Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous attack on my poems and on myself [Buchanan’s ‘Fleshly School’ diatribe]. I am very proud to think that after my small and solitary book has been a good many years published and

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several years out of print, it yet meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men. (WEF 80.303) After the American publisher, Roberts Bros, had imported the few remaining British copies of Poems (1870), it was in fact out of print by early 1879. Responding at last to the demand for a new issue, Rossetti began in October 1879 to overhaul Sister Helen, developing ‘a fresh incident’ of three stanzas which he sent with interpretive commentary to Jane Morris (WEF 80.81 & 94 [Bryson 82 & 83]). As before, his return to poetry proved to be halting, but many circumstances drew him away from painting at this time, particularly hard times among patrons whose wealth depended upon industry and manufacture, and changing fashions in art. Explaining the fluctuations of the economy to his mother, he noted that coal, copper and textiles are ‘vitally wound up with the picture-market’ (WEF 79.194 [DW 2143]). Patrons and agents grew more impatient for delivery of prepaid pictures and less eager to provide further commissions for the somewhat dilatory artist. Some old customers, such as William Graham, could no longer afford to purchase Rossetti’s work. Tastes were changing. Impressionism, which Rossetti hated, gained ground in England: Whistler’s insolence to Ruskin was prophetic. The Daydream, completed by the summer of 1880, seems to have been the last painting that Rossetti worked on with enthusiasm, although he continued to daub away at the semi-travesty La Pia, the foreverunfinished Found, replicas of The Blessed Damozel, which he privately referred to as ‘The Blasted Damdozel’ (WEF 81.21 [DW 2401]), and commissions a decade overdue. His reputation as a painter was on the wane, as William confided to his Diary on 30 September 1880. Whereas Rossetti’s fellow Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt had recently received £10,000 for his new painting The Shadow of Death, Rossetti’s prices were in three digits and falling. Watts told William that buyers objected to ‘the outré points of G’s style in painting – especially the peculiar & almost mulatto form of his mouths, & the tumid elongation of his throats, almost ... goitred in form’ (MS Diary). On the other hand, times seemed right for Rossetti’s poetry. Ballads were enjoying a vogue, and William Rossetti spoke of ‘a veritable sonnet-mania’ breaking out with the publication of David Main’s Treasury of English Sonnets, which included two specimens from the House, ‘Broken Music’ (47) and ‘Lost Days’ (86), in early 1880 (DGRDW 169). In his notes, Main emphasized Rossetti’s greatness as a master of the sonnet. In 1882, Caine brought out his Sonnets of Three Centuries, a project on which Rossetti had been a virtual collaborator; in the same year Samuel Waddington’s English

16

Introduction

Sonnets by Poets of the Past, dedicated, by permission, to Rossetti appeared. Waddington followed in 1884 with English Sonnets by Living Writers and in 1886 with The Sonnets of Europe. During this decade, William Sharp produced American Sonnets and Sonnets of this Century, the latter containing eleven sonnets from the House. All these compilers had been in touch with Rossetti during his lifetime and owed much to his theory, practice and preferences. This was the most purely literary period of his life. Besides the whole range of sonnet literature from the early Italian to the contemporary, he was reading his beloved Romantic poets again, helping Anne Gilchrist with a new edition of her husband Herbert’s Blake biography, assisting Watts with his research into the life and work of Chatterton and writing new poems. To William Davies in Italy he described his state of mind at this time: ‘It is true that my own life is a very uncheered one. Yet I shall not sink, I trust, so long as the poetic life wells up in me at intervals (and with me it was always and by preference intermittent)’ (WEF 81.121 [DW 2435]). At Christmas 1879 Rossetti wrote the first new House sonnet in five years, ‘Ardour and Memory’ (64). In his A Victorian Romantic, Doughty makes much of the poignant sestet, depicting Rossetti as brooding alone in gloomy old Tudor House during the festive season, stupefied with chloral-and-whisky to escape tormenting memories of Jane Morris who no longer cared for him (609–610). The composition of the sonnet at that time is used as an illustration of Doughty’s theory that Rossetti’s poetic faculties were ‘vitalized solely by physical passion’ (60). The facts of the matter make this melodramatic interpretation almost comical. Unknown to the biographer, ‘Ardour and Memory’ had been sent to Jane by the poet soon after he composed it; seeking her opinion of its poetic merit, he noted that ‘it is in a different mood from those of old, yet I have tried to sustain some beauty by natural images’ (WEF 79.217 [Bryson 88]). A week later, receiving no reply, Rossetti inquired anxiously whether Jane had been upset by the sonnet, perhaps thinking it ‘extra dismal’ (WEF 80.5 [Bryson 89]). After further accusations that she had, as once earlier, ‘put some inconceivable construction on that Sonnet I sent you,’ and a refusal to send her any more new sonnets as ‘it might not be safe’ (WEF 80.29 [Bryson 97]), she confessed that she had indeed been depressed by the ‘extremely woeful character’ of the poem: It seemed to me that you must have written it when very ill, so sad was its tone, that I resolved to say nothing about it, there is the truth of the matter. ... Do send me the Songs you speak of for the Rose Mary poem and anything

Introduction

17

else you are doing, you must feel sure how welcome your work always is to me – and there is little pleasure left one in this world. (Bryson 98) Rossetti has the last word: Pardon my reverting one last time to that blessed sonnet. I never dreamed you wd not perceive that the tone adopted was only a contrasting framework for a set of natural images such as one does not put into relishing form if one is very ill! At least I am not at such times a sonneteer. (WEF 80.31 [Bryson 99) At the end of February, evidently satisfied that she could now avoid morbid interpretations, he sent her the Rose Mary ‘Beryl-songs’, his new sonnet on Keats and thereafter all his new poetry as he wrote it. While Rossetti’s correspondence with Jane Morris does not often display the turbulent passions imagined by Doughty and others, it does show that she inspired the artist as much as the man. On 6 November 1880, after Jane has been touched by his latest House sonnet, ‘True Woman: Herself’ (56), for which she was ‘the model’ (WEF 80.352 [Bryson 121]), he sends her an explicit declaration of his love, or rather what that love would have been: I felt deeply the regard so deeply expressed in your last letter. ... The deep-seated basis of feeling as expressed in that sonnet, is as fresh and unchanged in me towards you as ever, though all else is withered and gone. This you wd never believe, but if life and fate had willed to link us together you wd have found true what you cannot think to be truth when – alas! – untried. (WEF 80.361 [Bryson 122]) Immediately after this passage comes the following important news concerning Rossetti’s 1881 poems: ‘Ellis looked me up yesterday to talk of publishing. He thinks the best plan is to put the old and new together, and this is what I think.’ It is no distortion to refer to the autumn of their friendship as decidedly literary. The actual affair between them had been terminated by Jane at Christmas 1875 (WEF vol. 6, Appendix 1, ‘Rossetti’s Relations with the Morrises 1868–75’). Each correspondent, rather inclined to solitude, relies upon the other for discussion of books and pictures, the weather, gossip of mutual friends and detailed reports of the latest malady experienced or remedy discovered. Rather than Cathy and Heathcliff or Tristan and Isolde, these late letters suggest Cyrano and Roxane – he bringing his

18

Introduction

regular ‘gazette’ of happenings at court to amuse his longtime dame lointaine, now secluded in a convent, she enjoying his devotion and expressing sympathy for his suffering from battle wounds, both growing old in the soft light of a romantic past that might have been but never was – except in letters.

V A primary source of information about the volumes of 1881 is William Rossetti’s MS Diary. In December 1879, he resumed regular calls on his brother, after a series of estrangements brought on by chloral-and-whisky abuse, the crudities of Fanny Cornforth during her recurrent sojourns as mistress of Tudor House and Gabriel’s relentless exploitation of his brother’s loyalty and generosity. From now on he stopped in every Monday night. After his visit of 15 December, William wrote in his MS Diary: He read me some stanzas he has lately composed of a moral or axiomatic kind. His vol. of Poems being now out of print, he has some idea of reissuing it, along with all his poems subsequently composed, forming probably at least half as much again. As of old, William became involved in his brother’s current literary projects. Gabriel even prodded him into attempting his own sequence of one hundred sonnets on political subjects, Democratic Sonnets (FL 69–79 passim; SR II: 474–75). He tells his Diary in January that Gabriel has finished ‘Soothsay’, the ‘axiomatic’ poem, and was ‘looking up old sonnets, writing new ones’. February saw the completion of the ballad Rose Mary, which Rossetti wanted to print at once separately, followed closely by the new-old volume. ‘I have’, he told Watts this month, ‘besonneted the Sonnet itself at last’, a reference to the proem Sonnet for the House which he sent, incorporated in a design, to his mother as a gift for her eightieth birthday in April (WEF 80.142 [DW 2246]; see Plate 2). Echoing his letter to Dr Hake quoted above as epigraph, he ‘expressed [to William] a much higher value for his poetical than his pictorial work’ (9 February, MS Diary). The House of Life had begun to assume its final form. As Helen Rossetti Angeli noted in 1949 (253), countering ‘the legend of the drug-sodden and degenerate wretch, bankrupt in character and reputation, who led a ghastly posthumous existence behind closed doors in Cheyne Walk, abandoned by all decentminded people’, Rossetti frequently enjoyed good health, high spirits

Introduction

19

and convivial intercourse with friends new and old during this period. The two volumes of 1881 grew rapidly under his hand during the spring of 1880. ‘Pride of Youth’ (24), ‘The Song-Throe’ (61) and the ‘True Woman’ trio (56–58) were progressing through MS drafts. Rossetti first mentioned expanding the House to Caine in March, proposing to show him both new sonnets and some of his earliest work, offering to send him an ‘MS vol ... of (chiefly) trifles, about which I should like an opinion as to whether any should be included in the future’ (WEF 80.86). This volume, now at Yale, has written on the flyleaf, in Rossetti’s hand, ‘Sonnets and other short pieces, mostly written before 1850’. Caine’s responsive enthusiasm encouraged the poet to revise these often juvenile efforts: ‘I have run the sonnet you like, “St. Luke the Painter”, into a sequence with 2 more not yet printed, and given the 3 a general title of Old and New Art as well as special titles to each. I shall annex them to the House of Life’ [they became 74–76] (WEF 80.334). Caine announced in late summer that he was expanding his lecture on Rossetti’s poetry into an article to be called ‘Ruskin, Keats and Rossetti’ (WEF 80.298). Not unaware that Caine was using him to launch his own literary career but more alarmed by the prospect of inaccurate texts in this article and aghast at having his name linked publicly with Ruskin’s, Rossetti ordered a stop to this project until he had put his literary house in order. It is now that he mentions for the first time his intention that the final version of the House should be a cycle of one hundred sonnets. The poet was reluctant to send House material to Caine, not wanting ‘to ventilate any portion of the series until published’ (WEF 80.183 & 300). After offering Caine the title, ‘A Sonnet Sequence’ for his own forthcoming anthology, in November he claimed it back for the House, having decided to omit the lyrics that had been part of the 1870 House. By mid-December, Rossetti’s major poem was essentially finished with the completion of ‘Michelangelo’s Kiss’ (94): only revision remained ahead of the poet when he sent Jane the last of the ‘True Woman’ sub-sequence: As you were so kind in valuing the Sonnet I last sent, I send two more on the same theme, forming a trio with which I intend to wind up the first part of the House of Life. This series now consists of 100 Sonnets (though I omit several of the M.S. ones) and forms 2 Parts viz: Part I Youth and Change Part II Change and Fate

20

Introduction

I shall have nearly 50 Sonnets besides the House of Life ones. (WEF 80.375 & 386 [Bryson 124 & 125]) He laboured over many other poems in 1880. Embarrassed by the slightness of his output, he pondered, as he had in 1869, including his prose tale Hand and Soul in order to reach the 300-page level. He was also acutely anxious about gossip, warning his correspondents to remain silent about what he was sending them. As in 1869–70, he was writing at a furious pace, ransacking all sources of poetry available to him, and so fearing the label of hack more than sensualist. Between 10 May and 21 June, he did sonnets on Chatterton, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge and his current portrait of Jane Morris, The Daydream. Christina, delighted with The White Ship, wrote in August exhorting her brother to pursue this more impersonal narrative genre. Rossetti blustered over her comment, but he could hardly deny that the ballad form afforded him bulk as well as a sort of anonymity. Highly impressed by Tennyson’s latest book, Ballads and Poems (1880), particularly by Rizpah, he was confident that romantic ballads would appeal more broadly than his other poetry (29 November, MS Diary). By 13 December, he had begun his third new ballad, The King’s Tragedy; thirty-one stanzas were done by mid-February and the whole was completed by 3 March. Two weeks later, he declared to Davies: I have written two historical ballads which will certainly find a much wider field of appreciation than anything I have yet done. Even if I did not paint, I should never be a redundant poet. ... The only man who has husbanded his forces rightly, and whom you can never open at the wrong page, is Tennyson. (WEF 81.121 [DW 2435]) Publication in two volumes instead of the new-old format is mentioned for the first time in William’s Diary. He noted on 10 January 1881 that Gabriel was talking of issuing his new poems as a ‘second series’, perhaps on the model of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878). One reason for the two-volume proposal seems to have been financial. Although Rossetti had always maintained that poetry was unprofitable (as in the epigraph above), the £700 he made from the six editions of Poems (1870) was enough to put a lot of bread and cheese on the table (FLM 373). Duller business minds than Rossetti’s would have readily perceived that two volumes selling at twelve shillings each would earn twice the royalties of one, and in early 1881, with another long ballad well in hand, he had finally accumulated sufficient material. Accordingly,

Introduction

21

Watts was instructed to negotiate terms with Ellis, who eventually agreed to an arrangement similar to the generous contract covering Poems (1870). For Ballads and Sonnets Rossetti would receive a 25 per cent royalty upon publication, regardless of sales; for the reissue of Poems the same royalty was to be paid, but semi-annually, on copies sold (21 & 28 March, MS Diary). The first scheme for the new volume was to print the three recent ballads, but by 21 March Rossetti had decided to transfer the completed House from Poems to augment the ballads, publishing this as yet untitled collection shortly after the reissue of the truncated Poems. A week later, he reversed this plan, now declaring that the new work must precede the reissue of the old and be further augmented by the addition of The Bride’s Prelude, a fragment begun in 1849 that he had printed recently and had been overhauling so that it was now as long as the new ballads (Lewis 156–60). However, he soon thought better of including so old a piece with his freshest productions, describing it to Caine as ‘repellent’ and confessing, ‘I hate long poems’ (WEF 81.268). It appeared, unfinished, in Poems. Still striving for abundance, Rossetti projected further ballads on Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc and Alexander III of Scotland, but by the beginning of April he was satisfied that 300 pages was enough, twenty more than in 1870. He now wrote to Watts: The printers have woke up and done ‘Rose Mary’ and ‘The White Ship’, making 95 pages. ‘The King’s Tragedy’, which I must now send, will bring it to about 150. The volume [Ballads and Sonnets] will clearly be 300 pages without the fragment [‘The Bride’s Prelude’]. This, therefore, I shall put in the other book. What do you think as to title? –

Ballads and Sonnets or Poems: New Series ?(WEF 81.155 &158 [DW 2446 & 2460]) By 3 May, all MSS had been sent to the printer and both volumes moved to the proofing stage. If sonnets, as Rossetti told his sister, meant insomnia for him (WEF 81.28 [DW 2390]), then proofsheets must have given him nightmares. Revision following ‘the ardour of composition’ involves, he maintained, ‘much of the most essential vitality of true poetic work’ (WEF 71.131). His proofs were often revised so extensively as

22

Introduction

to make them de facto MSS. Although not so chaotic as the sixteen discrete proof states which precede the 1870 edition of Poems (see Appendix Two), his 1881 sheets contain far more than the correction of printer’s errors, They occupied him (assisted by his brother, Watts and Hall Caine) for more than two months. The chart on p. 23 schematizes the proofing phase of Ballads and Sonnets according to signature, date pulled, and present location of proofs; since Rossetti demanded at least three revises for each sheet, the tally is incomplete. Much misunderstanding surrounds two questions relating to Ballads and Sonnets. Why, when it was all printed in May, was it not published until 17 October? Secondly, why did Rossetti equivocate so much about the prefatory note to the House (see Plate 1)? Biographers, following Oswald Doughty, tend to answer both questions with the speculation that Jane Morris, fearing scandal that might touch her personally, and perhaps another ‘Fleshly School’ eruption that might destroy Rossetti, made the poet delete or alter anything that might be construed as a reference to their illicit affair. Unappeased by the changes he did make, including the many versions of the prefatory note as well as revisions to individual poems (mainly House sonnets), alteration of descriptions of the beloved to make her resemble Lizzie rather than Janey (Doughty 398–405&nn) and suppression of information regarding dates of composition, she then forced deferral of publication until she was satisfied: this theory is explicit in DW 2482 nn 2&3. However, the annotated passage in this letter of 16 May to Watts – ‘I am wanting your advice about a point connected thus late with the Poems – not the House of Life question’ (WEF 81.224) – is clearly unrelated to Ballads and Sonnets. Moreover, the prefatory note to the House did not come into being now in response to a sudden intervention by Jane Morris but made its first appearance the previous year in one of Rossetti’s vest-pocket notebooks.5 Next it may be seen expanded to three paragraphs on fol. 1 of the Fitzwilliam Museum Library House of Life MSS and then in several proofsheet versions. The anxiety behind this note is a longstanding one of Rossetti’s about whether any poem ‘is included which the author believes to be immature’ (Author’s Note to Poems {1870}, Contents xii). Some of the ‘new’ pieces in Ballads and Sonnets (e.g., House sonnets 75 and 76) were thirty years old.

5

British Library, Dept. of MSS, Ashley 1410, No. 4 (c. 1880).

Introduction Sig.

5

7

April 9 12 13 14 22 23 25 28 3

4

23 5

6

[A] B

Ro Pr

Ha Ro

C

Ha Ha Ro

D E

Pr

Ro

F

Pr

Ro

G

Pr Ro

H

Ro

I

Ha Ro

J

Ro

K

Ro

L

Ro

M N

May 9 10 13 18 19 27 31 Ha Ro

Ha

Ha Pr

Ha

Ba Ba Ro Ba Ba Ba Ro Ba

Ba

Ba

S

Ro Ba Ba Ba Ba Ro Ba Ba Ba Ro Ba Ya Ba Bo Ba Ro Ba Ba Ro

T

Ro

O P Q R

Ba

U

Ro

X

Ro

Y

Ro Ro

Ya

Ba

Ba

Ba Ba Ba

Ba

Ba

Ro

Locations of Proofsheets for Ballads and Sonnets Ba Bancroft Collection, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington (also has proofs of Poems: New) (1881) Ha Widener Collection, Harvard Pr Troxell Collection, Princeton Ro “Rosenbach Proofs” (almost complete set formerly owned by A. S. W. Rosenbach: now in a private collection) Ya Tinker Collection, Yale On 7 June DGR got another proof of Sig. [A] including the title page – it is among the Ros. proofs.

24

Introduction

Doughty’s thesis leads him into several blunders of dating and sequence (he was responsible for volumes 2 and 4 of the DW Rossetti Letters). No. 2507 (WEF 81.253) to Watts is placed with other letters of early July and associated with No. 2511 (WEF 81.279) which dates the sending of proofs to Jane in mid-July, both documents leading up to No. 2522 (WEF 81.285), dated ‘early August’ in which Rossetti postpones his book. The sequence clearly begins with No. 2507: I have again got possessed with the idea that it might be better to omit the second paragraph of the note in front of the House of Life – that is, the disavowal of personality in the sonnets. They were formerly attacked as being personal, and I do not wish to seem to follow the lead of the attack. Of course I put in the paragraph for quite another reason, but is not that sufficiently attained by the treatment the sonnets themselves have received? (WEF 81.253) However one interprets this letter it could not have been written in July 1881. Rossetti wrote Caine around 23 June to say, ‘I have made up my mind to omit 2nd paragraph of note to House of Life’ (WEF 81.277). Four days earlier he had written to Watts, ‘all is now out of my hands’ with Ballads and Sonnets (WEF 81.273 [DW 2502]). Date-stamping on the proofs suggests that WEF 81.253, dated only ‘Sunday’, was written either on 12 or 19 June, and in the sequence should precede WEF 81.273, dated 19 June. The detailed chronology in Appendix Five attempts to clarify these matters. After 19 May, Rossetti wrote on signature [A] of the ‘Rosenbach’ proofs, ‘this is my last change’, but on 25 May William Rossetti, who had been toiling over the proofs for a week with his red pencil, submitted, besides corrections, copious queries and suggestions directed at making the House less ‘fleshly,’ in line with the policy stated in the last sentence of the passage to Watts quoted above. Although he did not accept all his brother’s amendments, Rossetti now made many of the changes often attributed solely to Jane Morris’s influence.6 Then comments by Watts prompted the poet to ‘rewrite 8 or 10 stanzas’ of The King’s Tragedy, delaying press-proofs for signatures K and L until 2 June (WEF 81.240 & 249 [DW 2490 &

6

See Doughty 378–81 and MS Diary for May 1881. Typical changes include replacing ‘love’ with ‘youth’ or ‘lips’ with ‘heart’. William’s redpencilled copy of the proofs of Ballads and Sonnets is in the Bancroft Rossetti Collection at the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.

Introduction

25

2491]). Next came the final dither over the prefatory note. Apparently confident that immediate publication was pending, Rossetti advised Caine on 29 June that ‘the book still hangs fire’; the young writer had received the volume in sheets a week earlier and was ready to send in his review on a signal from Rossetti (WEF 81.277). The sequence of letters relating to Jane Morris begins with the one broaching to publisher David White the deferral of Ballads and Sonnets on 23 June (WEF 81.276 [Princeton]). On 26 June Rossetti tells Watts that Jane has been sent the proofs (WEF 81.279 [DW 2511]). A few days later, a heated but unmailed draft obviously meant for Jane announces the poet’s decision not to publish at this time (WEF 81.285 [DW 2522]). Around the first of July, Rossetti informed Ellis officially of the deferral (WEF 81.288 [DW 2523]). On 4 July both William and Caine learned of this ‘difficulty’ (WEF 81.293; MS Diary). Nevertheless the problem, doubtless an irritating fit of anxiety on Jane’s part, was certainly no calamity. It must be remembered that she had seen all Rossetti’s new poems in MS as they were written, that he evidently did not mail his angry draft letter to her and that the threatened deferral lasted less than two weeks, for by 6 July it was off again: the actual deferral until mid-October was imposed by Ellis and White for business reasons (WEF 81.295 [Texas] & 298 [LC]). Further evidence to support an early July rather than early August dating of the unsent fragment can be found in an endorsement on the verso of WEF 81.285 [DW 2522]: ‘Acre Lane, Brixton. A house with an acre and a half of garden’. On 2 and 4 July, Rossetti, then househunting, wrote to his potential housemate Caine of an offer on ‘a house at Brixton ... with a garden of an acre and a half’, but this offer had been put aside by 13 July (WEF 81.293). Thus, the theory that Jane Morris blocked publication from August to October while revisions were made to The House of Life collapses and several letters misdated by Doughty are seen to have been written during a few days at the end of June and start of July 1881. A Dedication to Watts was in print by 8 August, and by 16 September Rossetti had sent what William describes as ‘a first madeup copy’ of Ballads and Sonnets to his mother and sister (MS Diary). Reviewers had their copies, albeit prematurely, by the end of September, and Watts’s ‘finest review that ever came from critical or friendly man’ appeared in the Athenæum 8 October (WEF 81.433 [DW 2572]). Full publication took place on 17 October, the day the poet returned to London after an unsuccessful holiday with Caine and Fanny in the Lake District. His claim that he was too ill to receive such well-wishers as Ivan Turgenev and Ned Burne-Jones at Tudor House was rather coldly evaluated by his brother:

26

Introduction

He is in much the same state as he was 2 years ago, & from the same cause – overdosing with chloral & its accompaniment whiskey ... this foolish practice has gone on ... from soon after he went into Cumberland. He is much unstrung physically and mentally. (Oct. 24, MS Diary) Before fleeing to Liverpool on a complaint of illness himself, Caine asked some of Rossetti’s old friends to take over from him the care of the poet. William Bell Scott visited on 27–28 October, recognizing at once the similarity between this emergency and Rossetti’s breakdown in the summer of 1872: I found him half dressed, twisted up on the sofa and attended by Fanny ... he seemed emaciated, and worn out, a mere wreck ... He protested he was dying. ... I thought of the former time and feared his mind has gone again. ... This is evidently the result of anxiety and deranged sensibility about the exhibition of his picture at Liverpool [Dante’s Dream] and his volume coming out at the same moment. (Fredeman 1976: 75–76) Poems (1881) appeared on 10 November. Sending his mother her copy, Rossetti wrote, ‘Twelve hundred of the Ballads and Sonnets are already sold – this is a great success. The picture at Liverpool seems equally successful’ (WEF 81.449 [DW 2580]). On 10 March 1882, Watts wrote to say that a new edition of Ballads and Sonnets (the fourth, a resetting) was about to be printed, but Rossetti never saw the proofs: less than a month later he was dead. 7

7

Some of the above material appeared in a shorter and less fullydocumented form in Lewis 1982: 199–216.

TEXT AND NOTES Half-title Leaf [recto]

THE HOUSE OF LIFE: A Sonnet-Sequence. Part I. Youth and Change. Part II. Change and Fate. Date of Publication: 1881, B&S Date of Composition: 1869–70; 1880–81 Letters: (1) DGR to JM, 30 Aug 69 (WEF 69.143): Writing from Penkill Castle in Scotland, where he was setting up his volume of poems, DGR mentions ‘a section called “Songs & Sonnets towards a work to be called The House of Life.” Nearly all these you know.’ In Poems the halftitle reads as follows: SONNETS AND SONGS, Towards a Work to be called ‘THE HOUSE OF LIFE.’ (2) DGR to HC, 10, 21 Nov, 7, 17 Dec 80 (WEF 80.348 & 354 & 369 & 383; excerpted in Caine 244 & 245 & 255): Assisting Caine in assembling and titling his own sonnet anthology (finally called Sonnets of Three Centuries), DGR proposed the following title on 10 Nov:

28

The House of Life

A Sonnet Sequence from Elder to Modern Work: with 50 (?) hitherto unprinted Sonnets by living writers. However, he wrote on 21 Nov to repossess it: ‘Do you think of using the title A Sonnet Sequence? I ask because otherwise I may use it in The House of Life. I’d find you another.’ On 7 Dec, he noted that since Caine proposed placing contemporary sonnets first in his anthology, ‘Sequence’ would be the wrong word, saying ‘I may use the phrase [Sonnet Sequence] if you abandon it to me. What do you think of The English Sonnet-Muse from Elizabeth’s reign to Victoria’s.’ By 17 Dec, he had decided the matter: ‘The House of Life is now a Hundred Sonnets – all lyrics being removed. Besides this series, I have 45 sonnets extra. I think, as you are willing, I shall use the title I sent you – A Sonnet Sequence. I fancy the last I sent wd be briefer & therefore better as Our Sonnet-Muse from Elizabeth to Victoria.’ (3) DGR to JM, 13 Dec 80 (WEF 80.375 [Bryson 124]): ‘This series [HL] now consists of 100 Sonnets (though I omit several of the MS ones) and forms 2 Parts viz: Part I Youth and Change Part II Change and Fate I shall have nearly 50 Sonnets besides The House of Life ones.’ Manuscripts: (1) (2) Fitzwilliam HL fols 1a, 83b (3) Princeton HL fol. 1a (4) Poems Proof States 2, 3, 4, 12, 13 {including variations on the cancelled ‘Preface’ to ‘Poems Privately Printed’ – Princeton} Revisions/Variants: 1. Fitz.(1) lacks the subtitle ‘A SonnetSequence’, directions regarding italics and caps and much of the punctuation of B&S: The House of Life ____________ Part I Youth and Change. ____________ Part II Change and Fate. ____________ 2. Prin. is identical with B&S except for all three subtitles being

underlined and a signature bottom left, ‘D. G. Rossetti’. The half-title leaf [p159–60] is missing from the Ros. Proofs; it was a cancel-leaf in B&S eds 1–3. 3. Fitz.(2) has a cancelled title above MS of Sonnet 47, Broken Music, as follows: ‘Of Life, Love and Death: Sonnets’ This sonnet was composed in 1852; on the recto is a draft of Sonnet 68, A Dark Day, which was sent as new to W. Allingham 23 Jan 55 (WE5.4);

Text and Notes therefore, it may be the first appearance of the first title of HL since it evidently predates the title used for the group of sonnets DGR gathered for the March 1869 issue of FR, ‘Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets’. 4. The first printed version of the title after the FR issue appears in Poems, Proof State 2 (p. 103), as follows: OF LIFE, LOVE, AND DEATH. SONNETS (Towards a work to be called ‘THE HOUSE OF LIFE’) This printed title, preceding 33 sonnets but no songs, is cancelled and revised in MS, on both Prin. copies, as follows: ‘<SONGS AND SONNETS> SONNETS AND SONGS (large caps) Towards a work to be called (italics) THE HOUSE OF LIFE (smaller caps)’ [below text:] ‘In this series headed <Songs and> “Sonnets & Songs”, all the titles of the Songs must be made the same sized type as those of the Sonnets. At present they are larger.’ 5. In Proof State 3 the printed title appears thus: ‘SONNETS AND SONGS, Towards a Work to be called THE HOUSE OF LIFE.’ [below in MS, DGR wrote]: ‘All this one size smaller’ 6. In Proof State 4, DGR reverted to his original title, cancelling the one in 5. above and writing: ‘OF LIFE, LOVE, AND DEATH: SONNETS AND SONGS (Towards a work to be called THE HOUSE OF LIFE.)’ In subsequent Proof States and eds 1–6 of Poems this title appeared as it

29

does in Proof State 3 (5. above); in the Tauchnitz ed. of 1873, THE HOUSE OF LIFE appears with double quotation marks. 7. In Proof State 2, a printed Preface appeared following the title page ‘Poems Privately Printed’; it is there revised in MS as follows: ‘ Most of these poems were written between 1847 and 1853. They are here printed, if not without revision, yet much in their original state. They are some among a good many then written, but of the others I have now no complete copies. <Many of the Sonnets and some of the short pieces are more recent work.> The section under “Sonnets and Songs” is chiefly more recent work.’ [At the bottom right the printed signature ‘D.G.R.’ is followed by the MS date ‘1869’] In Prin. copy 2 of this state, the printed Preface is revised to read as follows: ‘ Most of these poems were written between 1847 and 1853; and are here printed, if not without revision, yet generally much in their original state. They are a few among a good many then written, but of the others I have now no complete copies. The “Sonnets and Songs” are chiefly more recent work. D.G.R. 1869’ 8. In Proof State 13 a new printed version of this prefatory note (lacking heading, signature and date) appears as follows, sometimes before and sometimes after the

30

The House of Life

Dedication page; in Prin. the last sentence is revised in MS to make the note identical with the version which appeared in all subsequent states and eds through 1873. It did not appear in B&S: ‘Many poems in this volume were written between 1847 and 1853. Others are of recent date, and a few belong to the intervening period. It has been thought unnecessary to specify the earlier work, as nothing is included <which the author does not believe to be matured to the measure of his powers.>which the author believes to be immature’. 9. Oswald Doughty (381), W.E. Fredeman (1965: 308–9) Florence Boos (1976: 19 & 95) and other writers on DGR have asserted that the original subtitle for Part I of HL was ‘Love and Change’ rather than ‘Youth and Change’. I have seen no

MS, proofsheet or epistolary evidence to support this claim, but it evidently derives from WMR’s frequent reference to the subtitle of Part I as ‘Love and Change’ and his comment on the relation between main title and subtitles: ‘As the sun is said to be “in the house of Leo”, so (as I construe it) Rossetti indicates “Love, Change and Fate”, as being “in the House of Life”; or, in other words, a Human Life is ruled and pervaded by the triple influences of Love, Change, and Fate’ (DGRDW 182; WMR 1904 2: 231; Works 651; Lewis 1969: 170–77). The argument that ‘Love’ must have preceded ‘Youth’ in the subtitle is supported by the circumstantial evidence that DGR, in MSS and proofs for B&S, replaced ‘Love’ with some other word in the titles of eight sonnets.

Half-title leaf [verso] (The present full series of The House of Life consists of sonnets only. It will be evident that many among those now first added are still the work of earlier years.) Date of Publication: 1870, Poems; 1881, B&S Date of Composition: 1869 (Proof State 13), 1881 Letters: (1) DGR to Joseph Knight, [19 Mar] 70 (WEF 70.60): The contents of this letter show that DGR was working on the MSS of Proof State 15; he had already sent Poems (Proof State 14) to Knight, who was a designated reviewer thereof. ‘I write chiefly to send you the enclosed “Prefatory Note” for your opinion as to insertion or non-insertion. I cannot quite make my mind up. Several friends who have seen it – among them Swinburne & Morris – are dead against it, saying that the matter will right itself without my speaking. What think you? I suppose on the whole I am inclined to leave it out.’

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The ‘Prefatory Note’ enclosed with this letter is not extant. Was it a draft of the following note on xii following the Contents pages? ‘[Many poems in this volume were written between 1847 and 1853. Others are of more recent date, and a few belong to the intervening period. It has been thought unnecessary to specify the earlier work, as nothing is included which the author believes to be immature.]’ Or a draft of this note on the verso of the HL half-title? ‘[The first twenty-eight sonnets and the seven first songs treat of love. These and the others would belong to separate sections of the projected work.]’ (2) DGR to WBS, [between 2–17 Aug 71?] (unpublished fragment, no. 4a in ‘Kelmscott Letters of DGR to William Bell Scott’, Troxell Collection, Princeton): The following appears to be the first of many drafts of a prefatory note to the post-1870 HL consisting of sonnets only. During August 1871 DGR sent WBS several new sonnets from among thirty (the so-called ‘Kelmscott Love Sonnets’) he had written for an expanded HL since Poems had appeared the previous year. Many letters were then exchanged between the two poets in which both generalities and particularities of the art of sonneteering were discussed. Although no reference to this fragment appears in their published correspondence of 1871 or in AN, this note clearly belongs there (see WEF 71.113 & 123 & 129, and AN 2: 127–67, ‘DGR’s Letters from Kelmscott’); it is one of several other indications that DGR was thinking of reissuing Poems, with an expanded HL, not least of which was the announcement in the Athenæum’s ‘Literary Gossip’ on 12 Aug 71, ‘We hear that a second volume of poems by Mr. D. G. Rossetti may be expected next winter’ (see WEF 71.125&n2). ‘In reprinting the fragmentary series of the House of Life, I have thought it a more harmonious arrangement to remove the few lyrics to another part of this volume and retain the sonnets only. Among these will be found inserted some additional sonnets, chiefly of earlier years. These emotional poems are in no sense “occasional”. The “Life” involved is neither my life nor your life, but Life representative, as tripled with Love and Death.’ (3) DGR to F.S. Ellis, 25 Apr 81 (WEF 81.188 [Texas]): ‘The series [HL] is doubled, & I have put in an introductory note in the sheets which the printers have.’ (4) DGR to TWD, 8 May 81 (WEF 81.212 [DW 2475]): ‘I am really much perplexed whether to restore that note in front of The House of Life or not. I have been murdering the beauty of yet another sonnet in the interests of this point. I should like a little talk with you about it if you were near & could come in. I want now to be winding up immediately.’ The word ‘murdering’ was mistranscribed as ‘mending’ by DW; this important emendation by WEF, giving DGR’s statement a meaning opposite

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to the one it has had since 1967, suggests that DGR disliked removing so-called fleshliness from at least some of his sonnets. (5) DGR to TWD, 9 May 81 (WEF 81.216 [DW 2477)]: ‘I am still fidgeting about as to whether that note in front of House of Life is to be or not to be.’ (6) DGR to TWD, [5 Jun 81] (WEF 81.253 [DW 2507]): ‘I have again got possessed with the idea that it might be better to omit the second paragraph of the note in front of The House of Life – that is, the disavowal of personality in the sonnets. They were formerly attacked as being personal, and I do not wish to seem to follow the lead of the attack. Of course I put in the paragraph for quite another reason, but is not that sufficiently attained by the treatment the sonnets themselves have received? I shd really like to know your view as to this before too late. Please write me a line. … I suppose they are going to press.’ (7) DGR to HC, 23 Jun 81 (WEF 81.277): ‘I have made up my mind to omit 2nd paragraph of note to House of Life.’ (8) DGR to HC, 26 Jun 81 (WEF 81.280): Answering HC’s letter of 23 June arguing for the deletion of the entire note that could then be incorporated into TWD’s Athenæum review, DGR responded: ‘I have curtailed the note, leaving only first sentence. It would not do at all to use the wording of the part erased in a review, as it has been seen by some & wd be recognized.’ (9) DGR to TWD, 26 June 81 (WEF 81.279 [DW 2511]): Having decided to send the HL proofs to JM, DGR notifies TWD: ‘I have passed the proofs to send to Hammersmith & hope there may be no adverse view taken. But whatever it is, I must act on it. I put your view as well as my own strongly, to effect that there was nothing objectionable.’ (10) DGR to JM, 29 Jun 81 (WEF 81.285 [DW 2522 – there misdated and misattributed]): An adverse view was taken, as this fragmentary letter shows: ‘Unless you think me quite without feeling, you must know what I feel on reading the first of all your letters that had any bitterness for me. You will let me answer your question. I apprehend nothing whatever from criticism, & Watts who knows the press has all along considered it out of the question. The poems attacked have now taken their place in the language; and the Review which attacked them had quite lately an article in emphatic praise of the Sonnets,

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which were far more open to objection and special application than those now added. However, though I can be certain as to my own mood, it is intolerable to have any uncertainty as to yours, or to think you incensed against me. Every new piece that is not quite colourless will be withdrawn and the book postponed.’ (See Introduction pp. 22–25) (11) WMR MS Diary, 4 Jul 81: A ‘difficulty which has arisen’ with B&S ‘will entail the omission of some sonnets, a considerable amount of reprinting with consequent expense, & the necessary postponement of publication for some little while’. (12) DGR to F.S. Ellis, 17 Jul 81 (WEF 81.305 [Texas]): ‘Another thing needed, as I perceive by the sheets sent to me, is the separate leaf required as title to House of Life between sheets L & M.’ (13) DGR to David White, 17 Jul 81 (WEF 81.306 [Texas]): The poet’s final solution to the problem of revising this prefatory note is to make it a cancel-leaf: ‘There must now, I believe, be a loose title-leaf between sheets L and M. It might be well to print this off last, in case I shd still make any change in it.’ Manuscripts: (1)(2) Poems, Proof States 12 {Princeton}, 16 (3) Letter fragment (2) above {Princeton} (4) Ashley Notebooks 1410 {BL}, No. 4, p. 41 (5) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 2a (6) Princeton HL fol. 2a (7) Princeton proofs of B&S (8) DAM Proofs, Box 46, file 5 (9) Harvard Proofs of B&S, HEW 9.5.3. Revisions/Variants: 1. The earliest version of this note appears in MS on Proof State 12: ‘(The first twenty-six sonnets and the seven first songs treat of love. These and the others would belong to separate sections of the projected work.)’ Some time between Proof State 16 and the first ed., after DGR had added two more sonnets to the sequence, he changed ‘twenty-six sonnets’ to ‘twentyeight sonnets’. Thus revised, this note ran unchanged through all eds of Poems but did not appear in B&S. In 1871, DGR sent WBS the first draft of the note {Letter (2) above} that preceded the final version of the sequence, although this version contemplates only a ‘reprint’ of a still-unfinished but expanded HL. 2. Returning to the question of the prefatory note sometime in 1880, after resolving to issue a full version of HL, DGR wrote in his vest-pocket note book {MS (4) above}: ‘“To the Reader of The House of Life”. It might seem needless to say that these poems are in no sense “occasional”. The “Life”

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involved is neither my life nor your life but Life representative as tripled with Love & Death.’ 3. Fitz. begins as a revision of the note of 1871: ‘‘ ‘To speak in the first person is often to speak most vividly: but these emotional poems are in no sense “occasional”. The “Life” involved is life representative, as associated with love, and death, with aspiration & foreboding, or with ideal art and beauty. Whether the recorded moment exist in the region of fact or of thought is a question indifferent to the Muse, so long only as her touch can quicken it.’ [In pencil at bottom of MS:] ‘The present full series of The House of Life consists of sonnets only <since> . It will be evident that many among those now first added are still the work of earlier years.’ 4. Prin.(6) represents a further stage of this note: ‘(The present full series of The House of Life consists of sonnets only. It will be evident that many among those now first added are still the work of earlier years. To speak in the first person is often to speak most vividly: but these emotional poems are in no sense “occasional”. The “Life” involved is life representative, as associated with love and death, with aspiration and foreboding, or with ideal art and beauty. Whether the recorded moment exist in the region of fact or of thought is a question indifferent to the Muse, so long only as her touch can quicken it.)’ 5. There are several revised proof versions of this note on the back of the single half-title leaf between Sigs L & M. The most complicated one, an undated press-proof at Princeton, is MS (7) above, reproduced as Plate 1. As printed it is identical with the text of 4. above, but the following MS revisions were made by DGR: – the parenthesis after ‘earlier years’ at the end of the first paragraph is removed; – initially DGR deleted everything that followed the first paragraph, but then marked the passage ‘To speak … art and beauty.’ with a ‘stet’ and a note across the bottom of the leaf referring to this passage, ‘retain down to the word “beauty”’. – the final sentence, “Whether … it.” is deleted absolutely. – across the top of the leaf, written in ink and signed ‘D. G. Rossetti’, is this directive to the printer: ‘Should this sheet have already gone to Press, it will be necessary to have a cancel leaf & restore as below.’ 6. A version incorporating the changes noted in 5. above can be seen on the Harvard Proofs of B&S, Sig. L, dated 31 May: on copy b, a post-press-proof, the half-title and prefatory note are pp. [159–60]; on copy b p. [160] is blank.

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7. The DAM Proofs include three unsigned and undated versions of this leaf in Box 46: the first, in file 5.1, bears DGR’s MS note, ‘Note to be on back of above Title as before.’ The printed text of the note here is identical with the Harvard proofsheet of 6. above; the second, in file 5.2, bears DGR’s pencil note below the Prefatory Note, which here consists of only of the first paragraph, stating ‘The Sonnets not appearing in the old vol [Poems] I have marked with an X.’; the third version, in file 5.3, includes the last sentence of the long version, ‘Whether ... it.’, but it is here cancelled in pencil.

[PROEM SONNET]

A Sonnet is a moment’s monument, – Memorial from the Soul’s eternity To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, Whether for lustral rite or dire portent Of its own arduous fulness reverent: Carve it in ivory or in ebony, As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearled and orient. A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul, its converse, to what Power ‘tis due: – Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue, It serve: or, ‘mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath, In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.

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Date of Publication: 1881, B&S Date of Composition: 1880, WEF 80.40 MS Sources: 1. Ashley Notebooks 1410 (BL) Notebook No. 2, p. 32 ‘A sonnet should be a moment’s monument’ [line 1] Notebook No. 3, p. 23 ‘fashioned with intricate infinity’ [line 5]

Notebook No. 3, p. 25 ‘A sonnet is a moment’s monument A medal struck to all eternity For one dead deathless hour’ [lines 1–3] Notebook No. 4, p. 40 ‘Or stamped with the snake’s coil, it be The imperial image of Eternity’

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2. Sonnets and Fragments MSS (Troxell Collection, Box 5 file 6, Princeton) MS 14 ‘ A sonnet is a moment’s monument –

Memorial from the soul’s eternity To one dead deathless hour –’ [lines 1–3] ‘Like a coin – face and obverse – memories connected with the coin etc.’ [lines 9–10ff.]

Letters: (1) DGR to TWD 6 Feb 80 (WEF 80.40 [DW 2187]): ‘I on my part have besonneted The Sonnet itself at last –.’ (2) DGR to HC 16 Feb 80 (WEF 80.50 [Manx]; quoted in Caine 120–1): Encloses sonnet ‘which must be new for I only wrote it the other day’. HC acknowledged it 24 Feb (Angeli-Dennis Papers, UBC): ‘The Sonnet is truly beautiful & in two of its lines magnificent. Criticism from me cannot avail much, but it may be worth while to say that (over & above all affected ways of speech) the last two lines, picturing the dark wharf & the black Styx, thrilled me through and through. I am delighted to possess it. I think it is Walter Pater who says a fine poem in manuscript carries an aroma with it & a sensation of music.’ (3) CGR to DGR 2 Apr 80 (FLCGR 84): DGR had consulted his sister about the final couplet. She meant to give their mother a copy of David Main’s Treasury of English Sonnets for her eightieth birthday, 27 Apr 80; DGR meant to insert into this volume an illustrated MS of his sonnet on The Sonnet. Worried that the sestet’s evocation of death might upset Mrs Rossetti, he had proposed a substitute, perhaps a polished version of the couplet quoted above from Ashley Notebook No. 4. Assuring him that it will give no pain at home, CGR tells him to retain his original version: ‘I still think the FIRST sonnet-conclusion quite admissible, and (with you, so far as I realize the two) poetically superior, despite an “imperial” something in the second which has a stately and splendid sound.’ (4) DGR to FLR 27 Apr 80 (WEF 80.142 [DW 2246]): The poet-painter ornamented this presentation MS with a pen-and-ink design which he thus explained: ‘I have no doubt that your discerning eyes plucked out the heart of the mystery in the little design. In it the Soul is instituting the “memorial to one dead deathless hour,” a ceremony easily effected by placing a winged hour-glass in a rose-bush, at the same time that she touches the fourteen-stringed harp of the Sonnet, hanging round her neck. On the rose-branches trailing over in the opposite corner is seen hanging the Coin, which is the second symbol used for the Sonnet. Its “face” bears the Soul, expressed in the butterfly; its “converse,” the Serpent of Eternity enclosing the Alpha and Omega.’

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(5) FLR’s reply 27 Apr 80 to (4) above (Angeli-Dennis Papers, Box 3 file 17, UBC), thanking DGR for the ‘gift of your own handiwork so complete in delicacy and subtle indication. It and the illustrative sonnet are I know an undying monument of your ever-during love for me.’ Manuscripts: (1) (2) Rosenbach (3) BL, Ashley 3857 (4) Bodleian Eng. poet. d. 44 fol. 1 (5) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 3a (6) Troxell (illustrated MS sent to FLR) (7) Princeton HL fol. 2a. Revisions/Variants: 1. The earliest draft, revised, seems to be Ros.(1). It reads, with revisions: The Sonnet A sonnet is a moment’s monument, Memorial from thy soul’s eternity To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, Whether for lustral rite or dire portent Of its own intricate fulness reverent: Carve it in ivory or ebony, As Day or Night may rule it; and decree Its every flower <silvered>impearled and orient. A sonnet is a coin whose face reveals Thyself; and its reverse to whom ‘tis due – Whether it guerdon Life’s vociferous wheels; Or dower thy <suit>yoke in Love’s sworn retinue; Or, nigh that wharf where spirits shed their sheath, In Charon’s hand it pay the toll to Death

12 /thy service in Love’s 13 <spirits shed their sheath,>/ sinks <each> all labouring breath, 14 / palm

3. Ros.(2)/ Ash. 6 or ebony/ or in ebony 7 claim rule/ prevail 9 coin whose/ coin, whose 10 / Thy soul;_its rear-type, to what Power ‘tis due:– 11–13 Whether it guerdon Life’s august appeals Or dower thy service in Love’s retinue,– Or, nigh that wharf where sinks all labouring breath,/ 11–13 Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue, 2. Ros.(1)/ Ros.(2) It serve; or, ‘mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath, 7 may rule it; and decree/ A series of trial words for claim rule, and let men see ‘labouring’(line 13 in Ros. {2}) 8 <every flower>/ flowering crest appears in the lower left-hand 11 / guerdon corner of Ash.: travailing, vociferous wheels/ august appeals shuddering, difficult

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4. Ash./Bod. 10 its rear-type, to what Power ‘tis due:–/ and its reverse to whom ‘tis due:– 5. Bod./Fitz. title replaced by pencilled note to printer, ‘This to be used as introductory & printed in italics.’ 1 <sonnet>/Sonnet 2 /the Soul’s 5 /arduous 7 men/Time 9 <sonnet>/Sonnet /coin: its 10 /The / its converse, to what Power In Fitz. a series of trial words for ‘converse’ (line 10) appears below the text: rear-foil, mintage, minttype 6. Fitz./ Trox. 5 arduous/ intricate 13 or ‘mid/ or, ‘mid The following inscription and date appear at the bottom left of Trox.:

‘DG Rossetti pro Matre fecit Apr:27. 1880’ 7. Trox./ Prin. 7 <prevail>/ may rule Prin. appears to be printer’s copy. On the top left DGR’s note reads: ‘To Printer: This is to be printed in italics of same size as type – to be printed on a leaf with blank back.’ Cancelled, verso, is ‘Part I Youth and Change.’ 8. Prin./B&S No variants. 9. Printed MSS: The design DGR sent to his mother (see Frontispiece) appeared in WMR’s Illustrated Ed. of his brother’s poems (1904) opposite p. 94 and was engraved as frontispiece for Sharp 1882. It is also reproduced as Surtees pl. 386 (S.258). Texas has a print of it inscribed, ‘To Constantine Ionides with DG Rossetti’s kind regards’. There is a pencil sketch for the allegorical figure of The Sonnet in Birmingham (Catalogue of Drawings 1939: 329’04).

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PART I. YOUTH AND CHANGE.

SONNET I. LOVE ENTHRONED.

I marked all kindred Powers the heart finds fair: – Truth, with awed lips; and Hope, with eyes upcast; And Fame, whose loud wings fan the ashen Past To signal-fires, Oblivion’s flight to scare; And Youth, with still some single golden hair Unto his shoulder clinging, since the last Embrace wherein two sweet arms held him fast; And Life, still wreathing flowers for Death to wear.

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Love’s throne was not with these; but far above All passionate wind of welcome and farewell He sat in breathless bowers they dream not of; Though Truth foreknow Love’s heart, and Hope foretell, 12 And Fame be for Love’s sake desirable, And Youth be dear, and Life be sweet to Love. Date of Publication: 1881, B&S Date of Composition: 1871, Works MS Sources: 1. Ashley Notebooks 1410 (BL) Notebook No. 1, p. 3 ‘And passionate youth he dreams of love with some stray golden hair Still to his shoulder clinging’ [lines 5–6]

Notebook No. 1, p. 15 ‘And Youth, with one bright spray of golden hair Still to his shoulder clinging since the last Embrace wherein his sweet love held him fast’ [lines 5–7]

Manuscripts: (1) (2) Princeton HL fols 2a, 9a (3) Bodleian Eng. poet. d. 43 fol. 4 (4) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 4a: (2) is a fair copy of (1) and (3) is a fair copy of (2).

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Revisions/Variants: 1. All MSS/B&S 2 <proud>/ awed Prin.(1) 3 past/Past [thus on all MSS, evidently revised in proof] 4 / signal- fires, Prin.(1) 4 /to scare Prin.(1)

5 <some bright spray of woman’s hair> / still some single golden hair Fitz. 6 / Unto Fitz. 7 <sweet> / sweet Prin.(1) 11 / dream Fitz

SONNET II. BRIDAL BIRTH.

As when desire, long darkling, dawns, and first The mother looks upon the newborn child, Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled When her soul knew at length the Love it nurs’d. Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst And exquisite hunger, at her heart Love lay Quickening in darkness, till a voice that day Cried on him, and the bonds of birth were burst. Now, shadowed by his wings, our faces yearn Together, as his fullgrown feet now range The grove, and his warm hands our couch prepare: Till to his song our bodiless souls in turn Be born his children, when Death’s nuptial change Leaves us for light the halo of his hair.

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Date of Publication: 1870, Poems Date of Composition: 1869, Works Manuscripts: (1) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 5a (2) Fitzwilliam ‘Poems and Sonnets’ fol. 18b (3) Poems Proof State 12 {Princeton} (4) B&S, DAM Proofs, Sig. M, p. 165 (5) Beinecke Tauchnitz Revisions/Variants: 1. The earliest draft is Fitz.(1), revised: title /Bridal Birth

1 As when desire, long darkling, dawns, & first 2 The mother looks upon the newborn child

Text and Notes 3 <Even so one hour my lady gazed & smiled>/ Even so my lady stood at gaze & smiled 4 <So>/When her soul knew at length the Love it nursed 8 /on 9 Now, shielded in his wings, our faces yearn 10 Together, as his fullgrown feet now range 11–14 / 11–14 The grove, & his warm hands our couch prepare <Till to [?] our unbodied clinging souls>/ Till to his song our bodiless souls in turn Be born his children, when Death’s nuptial change Leaves us for light the halo of his hair.

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2. Fitz.(2) yields the same text as, but is a later draft than, Fitz.(1): Fitz.(2)/ B&S title / Bridal Birth 3 lady/Lady 4 nursed/ nurs’d 9 shielded in/ shadowed by 10 / Together 11 / The grove 11 / warm 12 / to his song our bodiless 13 <when Death’s bridal change>/ when Death’s nuptial change 14 / Leaves us for At the bottom of this leaf there is a cancelled version of lines 12–13: 3. Revisions in proof for B&S: 3 /Lady Poems Proof State 12 (Prin.) 4 /nurs’d 1870 reading altered in DAM Proofs of B&S, Sig. M, p. 165 (Box 46, file 5.7) 9 <shielded in>/shadowed by Poems reading altered in Tauchnitz

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SONNET III. LOVE’S TESTAMENT.

O thou who at Love’s hour ecstatically Unto my heart dost evermore present, Clothed with his fire, thy heart his testament; Whom I have neared and felt thy breath to be The inmost incense of his sanctuary; Who without speech hast owned him, and, intent Upon his will, thy life with mine hast blent, And murmured, “I am thine, thou’rt one with me!” O what from thee the grace, to me the prize, And what to Love the glory, – when the whole Of the deep stair thou tread’st to the dim shoal And weary water of the place of sighs, And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes Draw up my prisoned spirit to thy soul!

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Date of Publication: 1870, Poems Date of Composition: 1869, Works Letter: DGR to ACS [8 Apr 70](WEF 70.86): ACS was writing his review of Poems while DGR was at Scalands working on the proofs: ‘I forgot to mention, (in case desirable) that 2 titles of sonnets are changed – “Flammifera” to “Love’s Redemption” and “Run and Won” to “The Vase of Life.”’ Manuscripts: (1) (2) (3) Fitzwilliam HL fols 6a, 79b, 7a (4) Princeton HL fol. 11a (5) Poems Proof State 13 {Princeton} (6) Beinecke Tauchnitz Revisions/Variants: 1. The earliest draft is Fitz.(1), titled Flammifera, which reads before revision: O thou who in these hours unwearyingly Unto my lips did’st evermore present

The body and blood of Love in sacrament: Whom clasping I have felt thy breath to be The inmost incense of his sanctuary

Text and Notes Who at a word hast owned him, and intent Upon his will, thy life with mine hast blent, And murmured in the cup, Remember me! – O what from thee the grace, for me the prize, And what to him the glory, – when the whole Of the deep stair thou tread’st to the dim goal And weary water of the place of sighs, And there dost work Love’s pleasure, as thine eyes Draw up my prisoned spirit to thy soul! 2. Fitz. MSS (1) & (2)/ Poems title / Love’s Redemption Fitz.(1) & (2) 1 Fitz.(1) / at Love’s hour ecstatically Fitz.(2) 2 / dost Fitz.(1) 4 <Whom clasping, I have><Whom I have clasped & neared &>/ Whom I have neared and Fitz.(1) 6 Fitz.(1) <without word>/ Without speech Fitz.(2) 8 / O’er the cup Fitz.(1) 10 / Love Fitz.(1) & (2) 11 / shoal Fitz.(1) & (2) 13 Fitz.(1) / deliverance Fitz.(2) 3. Prin. MS (4) is a fair copy in DGR’s hand that agrees with Poems.

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4. Revisions in proof: title {Poems} / Love’s Redemption Prin. MS (5), Proof State 13 (see Letter above WEF 70.86 to ACS) Tauchnitz: in Dec 73 DGR’s friend Franz Hueffer brought out a seventh ed. of Poems (dated 1874) for the German publisher Tauchnitz, corrected throughout by DGR (see Appendix Four); DGR wrote Ford Madox Brown 31 Jul 73 that he had been made ‘my own editor with the Tauchnitz proofs’ (WEF 73.265). In a letter of 4 Oct 78, he stated that Tauchnitz ‘has my last revisions beyond the last English edition [i.e., the sixth Ellis ed. of 1872] (WEF 78.226)’. For this seventh ed., DGR altered line 6 by inserting a comma: and, intent In the Beinecke Tauchnitz {MS (6)} are entered revisions which agree with those made by DGR on Fitz. MS (3), a torn-out p. 190 of Tauchnitz marked as printer’s copy for B&S: 5. Fitz. MS (3)/B&S title / Love’s Testament 2 /heart <present>/present, 3 The body and blood of Love in <sacrament;>/ Clothed with his fire, thy heart his testament; 8 <murmured o’er the cup, Remember me! –>/ murmured, “I am thine, thou’rt one with me!” Revisions in line 8, <me! –>/ me!” and in line 9, / to must have been made on one or more revises between Fitz. MS (3) and the proofs of Sig. M, Apr 81.

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6. The difference between the first and last versions of the octave is remarkable. The 1881 version has indisputable authority, representing as it does DGR’s final intention and having been seen through the press by him. Yet we can guess why he revised the 1870 version, since he spoke irritably to his friends about murdering the beauty of old sonnets so they would stand the anticipated critical fire when they appeared in 1881 (WEF 81.212 [DW

2475]). He seems to have told a nervous JM that he would eliminate anything that was not quite colourless from HL (WEF 81.285 [DW 2522]). The 1870 octave, although Dantesque in DGR’s earliest PR manner, presents a striking metaphorical identification of sexual intercourse with Holy Communion that might have seemed to some readers not just fleshly but blasphemous.

SONNET IV. LOVESIGHT.

When do I see thee most, beloved one? When in the light the spirits of mine eyes Before thy face, their altar, solemnize The worship of that Love through thee made known? Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,) Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies, And my soul only sees thy soul its own? O love, my love! if I no more should see Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, Nor image of thine eyes in any spring, – How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, The wind of Death’s imperishable wing? Date of Publication: 1870, Poems Date of Composition: 1869, Works

Manuscripts: (1) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 8a (2) Poems, Proof States 2, 12 {Princeton} (3) Iowa, revised page from Poems Proof State 7

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Text and Notes

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Revisions/Variants: 1. Fitz.(1) with revisions: title /Lovesight 5 /dusk 6–7 <My happy cheek upon thy bosom lies, And our lips mingle kisses, words & sighs,> Along thy face, along thy neck, along Thy breast, my pressed lips feel the pulses throng, 9 O love, my love! [DGR’s printer seems to have read the first ‘l’ as upper-case: it appears in Proof State 2 as ‘O Love, my love,’ uncorrected on p. 115 of the Prin. proofs where DGR made other changes in this line; it continues thus through Proof States 4, 6 and 7 but changes back to lower case in Proof State 12] 2. Revisions in proof for Poems: 6–7 / Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies, 12 <sound, upon Life’s darkening slope,>/sound upon Life’s darkening slope [These 1870/1881 readings were introduced between Fitz.(1) and Poems Proof State 2.] 9,12 <when I no more shall see . . . how then shall sound>/ if I no more should see . . . how then would sound [This important shift to the conditional was made on Proof State 2, p. 115 (Prin.)] 4 /known? DGR marked this correction on p. 133 of Proof State 7 with a note: ‘I have just noticed this. It must have fallen out, as in other cases I have noticed.’ (Iowa)

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The House of Life

SONNET V. HEART’S HOPE.

By what word’s power, the key of paths untrod, Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore, Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore Even as that sea which Israel crossed dryshod? For lo! in some poor rhythmic period, Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God. Yea, in God’s name, and Love’s, and thine, would I Draw from one loving heart such evidence As to all hearts all things shall signify; Tender as dawn’s first hill-fire, and intense As instantaneous penetrating sense, In Spring’s birth-hour, of other Springs gone by.

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Date of Publication: 1881, B&S Date of Composition: 1871, Works MS Source: Duke MS Note Book IV, No. 6: ‘As instantaneous penetrating sense, In Spring’s first hour, of other Springs gone by’ [lines 13–14] Manuscripts: (1) DAM Box 22{see PFB 3): 52} (2) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 9a (3) Bodleian Eng. poet. d. 43 fol. 3 (4) Princeton HL fol. 12a Revisions/Variants: 1. DAM is the earliest draft; Prin. seems to be printer’s copy, having no variants from B&S 2. All MSS/B&S [at the top of DAM is DGR’s note: ‘H. of L. To come first in the series’;

at the top right of this leaf is a pencil note, mostly erased, concerning two of the ‘Sonnets for Pictures’ from Poems, there called Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera: they are to be added to the 1881 HL and retitled Soul’s Beauty{77} and Body’s Beauty{78}]

Text and Notes 2 / Love explore DAM 3 /Till DAM song/Song [thus in MS until Prin.] 8 Love/love [thus in MS until Prin.]

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12 [alternate reading at bottom of DAM:] Like fires by dawn restor’d, we know not whence, Or &c. – / first hill-fire DAM 14 /birth-hour DAM

SONNET VI. THE KISS.

What smouldering senses in death’s sick delay Or seizure of malign vicissitude Can rob this body of honour, or denude This soul of wedding-raiment worn today? For lo! even now my lady’s lips did play With these my lips such consonant interlude As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay. I was a child beneath her touch, – a man When breast to breast we clung, even I and she, – A spirit when her spirit looked through me, – A god when all our life-breath met to fan Our life-blood, till love’s emulous ardours ran, Fire within fire, desire in deity. Date of Publication: 1870, Poems Date of Composition: 1869, Works Manuscripts: (1) (2) Fitzwilliam HL fols 10a, 58b. Revisions/Variants: 1. In the right margin of Fitz.(1) C.F. Murray has written, ‘see reverse of Willowwood III Sonnet 51 {Fitz.(2)} for earlier draft.’ Fitz.(1) was revised as follows: 1 <withering>/smouldering 4 <My>/This

6 <jubilant>/consonant 12 <now the>/all our 13 /Our /Love’s emulous

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The House of Life

2. Fitz.(2) was revised as follows: 1 <What withering pulses in life’s>/What smouldering pulses in death’s 6 <jubilant>/consonant 7–8 As <mighty>laurelled Orpheus <won not>longed for when he wooed The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay

12 <now the lifebreath>/all our life-breath 13 /Our /love’s emulous [cancelled at bottom of leaf: <death’s sick delay> ] 3. While Fitz.(2) may have been written out earlier than Fitz.(1), DGR’s revisions bring it closer to the 1870/1881 text than the revised Fitz.(1). The two revised drafts agree except in lines 12–13, where Fitz.(2), agreeing with Poems and B&S, has ‘life-breath’ and ‘love’s’ instead of Fitz.(1)’s ‘life-breaths’ and ‘Love’s’.

SONNET VIa. NUPTIAL SLEEP.

At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart: And as the last slow sudden drops are shed From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled, So singly flagged the pulses of each heart. Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start Of married flowers to either side outspread From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red, Fawned on each other where they lay apart. Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams, And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away. Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day; Till from some wonder of new woods and streams He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay. Date of Publication: 1870, Poems Date of Composition: 1869, Works

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Text and Notes

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MS Source: Proof State 2 of Poems {Princeton}: DGR wrote the following on HL half-title page (verso), dated by printer’s stamp 21 Aug 69: ‘L.S. [for ‘Love’s Sleep’ ?] Then their close bosoms sundered / with the start Of opening flowers to either side / outspread etc. [lines 5–6]

So was the long kiss severed etc. [line 1] Their bosoms sundered with the / natural art Of opening flowers etc.’ [lines 5–6]

Letters: (1) DGR to WMR 21 Aug 69 (WEF 69.130&n1): ‘I think I must include the sonnet Placatâ Venere [an early title] as it is one of my best, but if you are showing the things en famille you had better remove it, (it is torn out as you will see) and replace it at the end of the first section of sonnets – not as paged.’ (2) WMR to DGR 23 Aug 69 (Peattie 218): ‘Put in Placatâ Venere by all means – at any rate, so long as the collection remains private. I must re-read the poem before expressing a distinct opinion as to publication.’ (3) WMR to DGR 24 Aug 69 (Peattie 221): ‘Placatâ Venere – should go in, even in a published form. For that, I think you might perhaps reconsider the title – which appears to me a nearer approach to indecorum than anything in the sonnet itself.’ (4) DGR to WMR 2 Sept 69 (WEF 69.146): ‘I have changed the title of Placatâ Venere to Nuptial Sleep which I think will help it to stand fire, and have improved some lines in it. However when you see it, I want you to say if you think one can say “their long kiss severed” & “their bosoms sundered” or whether “was severed” & “were sundered” are necessary. I should think either would do.’ (5) DGR to WMR 14 Sept 69 (WEF 69.154): ‘About Nuptial Sleep. I enclose the proof before the last to ask you about the M.S. alteration at the bottom, which is now in print. Above & below it I have written a further variation underlined. Do you think this or the present printed one best? I incline to the printed one. Then as to “chirped at each other” [line 8]. This is expressive of the lips kissing at each other as they lie apart. But is it clear, or if clear is it pleasant? Would it be better “kissed at each other” or more likely “moaned to each other”?’

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(6) WMR to DGR 16 Sept 69 (Peattie 230): ‘Nuptial Sleep. I like best of the two the alteration now in type. “Chirped” I personally have always had a certain antipathy to – though I never felt called upon to raise so mere a point of taste: I regard it as Leigh-Huntish – or perhaps more rightly Browningish. At the same time I think the meaning perfectly clear, and the term graphic – only a shade too much so. My impression is you will not do better than “kissed at each other.” “Moaned” I think too strong, and might be misunderstood as meaning that they really began definite sentimental outpourings. “Crooned” might avoid this objection: but I suspect “Kissed” is best.’ (7) DGR to WMR 3 Oct 69 (WEF 69.168): ‘I think I have hit the mark now in that line of Nuptial Sleep: – “Fawned on each other where they lay apart.”‘ (8) DGR to F. S. Ellis c. 25 Apr 81 (WEF 81.188 [Texas]): ‘I am omitting the sonnet – “Nuptial Sleep” – which seems to restrict the circulation of the book [B&S].’ Manuscripts: (1) BL, Ashley 3846 (2) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 102b (3) Poems Proof States 4, 6 {Princeton} Revisions/Variants: 1. The octave in Ash. 3846 read, before revision: Placatâ Venere So their mouths came asunder, with fierce smart: And as the last slow sudden drops are shed From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled, So singly flagged the pulses of each heart. Then their close bosoms sundered at one start, As when a flower bursts open on its bed From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red, Chirped at each other where they lay apart. 2. The sestet is identical with the text of Poems (except that Ash. 3846 has a

colon instead of a semicolon at the end of line 12. These revisions occur: 1 <mouths came asunder>/ lips drew asunder 2 / like / rain-drops 3 / the short storm 3. Ash./ Fitz 1 /sweet 2 /drops are 3 /all the storm 4. Fitz./ Proof State No. 4 (see Letter (4) above) title Placatâ Venere/ Nuptial Sleep 1 So their lips drew asunder/ At length their long kiss severed 5–6 Then their close bosoms sundered at one start,

Text and Notes As when a flower bursts open on its bed/ Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start Of married flowers to either side outspread

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8 / Moaned to 12 light,/ light day:/ day; 5. Proof State 4/ Proof State 6 8 <Moaned to>/ Fawned on

6. ‘Fleshliness’ would appear to be nothing if not precise: DGR clearly strove to amend what Swinburne had called his ‘fornicative’ sonnet to avoid the label he devised for Swinburne after the 1866 Poems and Ballads row: ‘poeta nascitur non fit for publication’. Nevertheless, Robert Buchanan’s notorious attack on DGR, The Fleshly School of Poetry, singled out Nuptial Sleep as especially gross. Perhaps for this reason DGR did not include it in his 1881 volumes, but he never cancelled it from HL, where it appeared through all seven eds (including the Tauchnitz of 1873) of Poems. In 1894, the Boston publisher Copeland and Day issued a HL ‘being now for the first time given in its full text’ containing the long out-of-print sonnet. It was restored to HL by WMR in 1904 as VIb in his Illustrated Ed. of DGR’s poems (renumbered VIa in his 1911 Works), accompanied by a long note on its publishing history (2: 232–34) displaying WMR’s confidence that by then DGR’s reputation as a poet was beyond the reach of scandal. DGR made the following defense of this poem in his 1871 response to Buchanan’s assault, ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’ (Works 617–18): ‘A Sonnet entitled Nuptial Sleep is quoted and abused [in the Fleshly School attack] . . . and is there dwelt upon as a “whole poem”, describing “merely animal sensations”. It is no more a whole poem, in reality, than is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled The House of Life [in Italian, “stanza” means “room”]. . . . The sonnet [embodies], for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have shown that it is not here) to the exclusion of those other highest things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.’

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SONNET VII. SUPREME SURRENDER.

To all the spirits of Love that wander by Along his love-sown harvest-field of sleep My lady lies apparent; and the deep Calls to the deep; and no man sees but I. The bliss so long afar, at length so nigh, Rests there attained. Methinks proud Love must weep When Fate’s control doth from his harvest reap The sacred hour for which the years did sigh. First touched, the hand now warm around my neck Taught memory long to mock desire: and lo! Across my breast the abandoned hair doth flow, Where one shorn tress long stirred the longing ache: And next the heart that trembled for its sake Lies the queen-heart in sovereign overthrow.

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Date of Publication: 1870, Poems Date of Composition: 1869 (first appeared in Proof State 4) Manuscripts: (1) (2) Princeton: Miscellaneous MSS in the Troxell Collection, Box 4, Folder 16 (3) BL, Ashley 1403 (4) Fitzwilliam HL fol. 11a (5) LC: Whittal Poetry Collection: H. B. Forman’s ‘A series of Holograph MSS ... of Rossetti ... 1849– 1880’ fol. 5 (6) Poems Proof States 7, 12 {Princeton} (7) Beinecke Tauchnitz Revisions/Variants: 1. Prin.(1), a pencil draft, is the earliest version: title Sovereign Service 1 To all the spirits of Love that wander by 2 Across the opened heaven of nuptial sleep 3 My lady lay apparent; and the deep 4 Called to the deep; and no man saw but I.

5 The bliss so long afar at length so nigh 6 There lay disused. Methought proud Love must weep 7 That by Fate’s will he ever should make cheap 8 The sacred hour for which the years did sigh. 9 <With this> hand’s touch now warmed beneath my neck>

Text and Notes

10 11 12

13 14

With the first touch of this warmed hand (I said) How long did memory mock desire! And lo! Across my breast the abundant hair doth flow <Where one >shorn tress long held the heart in check> <Where but one curl the heart’s poor shrine might deck> Where one poor curl<was treasured for her sake> so long was treasured Hers I was made, and mine she too can be O Love, – this service and this sovereignty!

2. Prin.(2) is another early draft, in ink: title Sovereign Service 1 To all the spirits of love that wander by 2 Across the bridal meadow-lands of sleep 3 My lady lay apparent; and the deep 4 Called to the deep; and no man saw but I. 5 The bliss so long afar, at length <so>brought nigh, 6 Lay there disused. Methought proud Love must weep 7 <When