Few brothers were more constantly together, or shared one another’s feelings and thoughts more intimately, in childhood, boyhood, and well on into mature manhood, than Dante Gabriel and myself. […] He was always and essentially of a dominant turn, in intellect and in temperament a leader. He was impetuous and vehement, and necessarily, therefore, impatient; easily angered, easily appeased, although the embittered feelings of his later years obscured this amiable quality to some extent; constant and helpful as a friend where he perceived constancy to be reciprocated; free-handed and heedless of expenditure, whether for himself or for others; in family affection warm and equable, and (except in relation to our mother, for whom he had a fondling love) not demonstrative. Never on stilts in matters of the intellect or of aspiration, but steeped in the sense of beauty, and loving, if not always practising, the good; keenly alive also (though many people seem to discredit this now) to the laughable as well as the grave or solemn side of things; superstitious in grain, and anti-scientific to the marrow. Throughout his youth and early manhood I considered him to be markedly free from vanity, though certainly well equipped in pride; the distinction between these two tendencies was less definite in his closing years. Extremely natural and therefore totally unaffected in tone and manner, with the naturalism characteristic of Italian blood; good-natured and hearty, without being complaisant or accommodating; reserved at times, yet not haughty; desultory enough in youth, diligent and persistent in maturity; self-centred always, and brushing aside whatever traversed his purpose or his bent.
WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI: Preface to The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1891)
Painter, writer and translator, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was described by John Ruskin as the most important and original artistic force in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was the older brother of Christina Rossetti, and son of an Italian patriot who came to England in 1824 as a political exile. Though Dante Gabriel was educated at King’s College School, London, Italian was spoken at home; from 1843 to 1846 he attended Carey’s Art Academy in Bloomsbury Street, later became a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, and grew closely acquainted with Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, which led in the autumn of 1848 to the formation of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, a group of artists, poets and critics, whose aim was to bring about a revolution in English painting and poetry – fidelity to nature (bright colours, meticulous observation of flora), a rejection of the ‘grand style’ of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a high moral seriousness, and a revolt against the ugliness of modern life and dress were some of the PRB’s concerns. The Germ, the periodical they launched in 1850, gave voice to their ideals. Symbolism and the love of exotic romantic subject matter were characteristics of the movement, which lasted no more than six years. Rossetti, better known in his earlier years as a painter, turned increasingly to poetry, especially when in 1850 he met Elizabeth Siddal (Lizzie), whose painting and poetry he encouraged, and who modelled for many of the circle’s painters (the drowned Ophelia in Millais’s painting, for example, and Rossetti’s own wonderful pen and brown and black ink drawing in the Ashmolean). They married in 1860, she gave birth to a still-born child, and eventually died in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum. Though Rossetti had been unfaithful to her throughout their long relationship, he was deeply affected by her death, and buried with her the manuscripts of several poems that she had inspired.
In 1868 he renewed his acquaintance with Jane Morris, William Morris’s wife, whom, as Jane Burden, he had met in Oxford, where he, Burne-Jones, Morris and Arthur Hughes had been commissioned to undertake some decorations for the Oxford Union. She now inspired many of his sonnets, including the ‘Willowwood’ sequence, first published in March 1869 in The Fortnightly Review, which Vaughan Williams set as ‘Willow-Wood’, a cantata for medium voice, in 1902–3. Jane Morris, however, was not his only muse: he arranged for the poems he had buried with Lizzie to be exhumed, and both women continued to inspire his poetry. Poems, published in 1870, included the first part of The House of Life. The following year Rossetti and William Morris lived together at Kelmscott Manor, where the latter seemed to approve of Rossetti’s ongoing relationship with Jane. She continued to model for him and inspire more sonnets for The House of Life, which were attacked by Robert Buchanan in a scurrilous pamphlet, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (‘Nuptial Sleep’ was held to be obscene and did not appear in the 1881 edition), to which Rossetti replied in ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’, which appeared in the December 1872 issue of The Athenæum. Ill-health, above all his devotion to chloral, and increasing paranoia, dogged his final years, though he continued to paint and write, and earned the admiration of Oscar Wilde. Ballads and Sonnets were published in 1881, and contained forty-seven new sonnets, thus bringing the final number to 101.
Rossetti’s poems have inspired a considerable number of songs, most notably by Bantock, Bax, Burrows, Farrar, Hart, Head, Ireland, Kelly, Orr, C. Scott, Somervell, Wood and, of course, Claude Debussy, who set ‘The blessed damozel’ during 1887 and 1888 in a translation by Gabriel Sarrazin.
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?
Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, –
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
’Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: –
So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.
(Farrar, Orr)
One flame-winged brought a white-winged harp-player
Even where my lady and I lay all alone;
Saying: ‘Behold, this minstrel is unknown;
Bid him depart, for I am minstrel here:
Only my strains are to Love’s dear ones dear.’
Then said I: ‘Through thine hautboy’s rapturous tone
Unto my lady still this harp makes moan,
And still she deems the cadence deep and clear.’
Then said my lady: ‘Thou art Passion of Love,
And this Love’s Worship: both he plights to me.
Thy mastering music walks the sunlit sea:
But where wan water trembles in the grove
And the wan moon is all the light thereof,
This harp still makes my name its voluntary.’
Sometimes she is a child within mine arms,
Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,
With still tears showering and averted face,
Inexplicably filled with faint alarms:
And oft from mine own spirit’s hurtling harms
I crave the refuge of her deep embrace, –
Against all ills the fortified strong place
And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms.
And Love, our light at night and shade at noon,
Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away
All shafts of shelterless tumultuous day.
Like the moon’s growth, his face gleams through his tune;
And as soft waters warble to the moon,
Our answering spirits chime one roundelay.
There came an image in Life’s retinue
That had Love’s wings and bore his gonfalon1:
Fair was the web, and nobly wrought thereon,
O soul-sequestered face, thy form and hue!
Bewildering sounds, such as Spring wakens to,
Shook in its folds; and through my heart its power
Sped trackless as the immemorable hour
When birth’s dark portal groaned and all was new.
But a veiled woman followed, and she caught
The banner round its staff, to furl and cling,
Then plucked a feather from the bearer’s wing,
And held it to his lips that stirred it not,
And said to me, ‘Behold, there is no breath:
I and this Love are one, and I am Death.’
Love to his singer held a glistening leaf,
And said: ‘The rose-tree and the apple-tree
Have fruits to vaunt or flowers to lure the bee,
And golden shafts are in the feathered sheaf
Of the great harvest-marshal, the year’s chief,
Victorious Summer; aye, and ’neath warm sea
Strange secret grasses lurk inviolably
Between the filtering channels of sunk reef.
All are my blooms; and all sweet blooms of love
To thee I gave while Spring and Summer sang;
But Autumn stops to listen, with some pang
From those worse things the wind is moaning of.
Only this laurel dreads no winter days:
Take my last gift; thy heart hath sung my praise.’
When vain desire at last and vain regret
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget?
Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet, –
Or may the soul at once in a green plain
Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain
Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
Between the scriptured petals softly blown
Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown, –
Ah! let none other alien spell soe’er
But only the one Hope’s one name be there, –
Not less nor more, but even that word alone.