V
When we come to the study of the lives of the Victorian poets, we shall find that Rossetti’s whole existence was governed by his passion for one woman, whom he loved in a strange mystical way, with a love that was half art (art in the good sense) and half idolatry. To him she was much more than a woman; she was a divinity, an angel, a model for all things beautiful. You know that he was a great painter, and in a multitude of beautiful pictures he painted the face of this woman. He composed his poems also in order to please her. He lost her within a little more than a year after winning her, and this nearly killed him. I may say that throughout all his poems, speaking in a general way, there are references to this great love of his life; but there is one portion of his work that we must consider as especially illustrating it, and that is the “House of Life,” a collection of more than one hundred sonnets upon the subject of love and its kindred emotions. But the love of which Rossetti sings is not the love of a young man for a girl—not the love of youth and maid. It is married love carried to the utmost degree of worship. You will think this a strange subject; and I confess that it is. Very few men could be praised for touching such a subject. Coventry Patmore, you know, was an exception. He made the subject of his own courtship, wedding, and married life the subject of his poetry, and he did it so nicely and so tenderly that his book had a great success. But Rossetti did his work in an entirely different way, which I must try to explain.
Unlike Patmore, Rossetti did not openly declare that he took any personal experience for the subject of his study; we only perceive, through knowledge of his life, and through suggestions obtained from other parts of his work, that personal love and personal loss were his great inspiration. As a matter of fact, any man who sings about love must draw upon his own personal experience of the passion. Every lover thinks of love in his own way. But the value of a love poem is not the personal part of it; the value of a love poem is according to the degree in which it represents universal experience, or experience of a very large kind. It must represent to some degree a general philosophy of life. Even the commonest little love-song, such as a peasant might sing in the streets of Tokyo, as he comes in from the country walking beside his horse, will represent something of the philosophy of life if it is a good and true composition, no matter how vulgar may be the idiom of it. When we come to think about it, we shall find that all great poetry is in this sense also philosophical poetry.
Rossetti, as I have already shown you, was a true philosopher in certain directions; and he applied his philosophical powers, as well as his artistic powers, to his own experiences, so as to adapt them to the uses of great poetry. He is never narrowly personal. And his sonnets are really very wonderful compositions—not reflecting universal experience so as to be universally understood, but reflecting universal experience so as to be understood by cultivated minds only. These productions are altogether above the range of the common mind; they are extremely subtle and elaborate, both as to thought and as to form. But their subject is not at all special. Rossetti had the idea that every phase of happiness and sorrow belonging to married life, from the hour of the wedding night to the hour of death, was worthy of poetical treatment, because married life is related to the deepest human emotions. And in the space of one hundred sonnets he treats every phase. This series of sonnets is divided into two groups. The first contains poems relating to the early conditions of love in marriage; the second group treats especially of the more sorrowful aspects of a married life—the trials of death, the pains of memory, and the hopes and fears of reuniting after death. The second part does not, however, contain all the sad pieces; there are very sad ones in the first group of fifty-nine. We have already studied one of the first group, the piece called “The Birth-Bond.” There is another piece in this group, the first of four sonnets, which is exquisite as a bit of fancy. It is entitled “Willow-wood.”
I sat with Love upon a woodside well,
Leaning across the water, I and he;
Nor ever did he speak nor looked at me,
But touched his lute wherein was audible
The certain secret thing he had to tell:
Only our mirrored eyes met silently
In the low wave; and that sound came to be
The passionate voice I knew; and my tears fell.
And at their fall, his eyes beneath grew hers;
And with his foot and with his wing-feathers
He swept the spring that watered my heart’s drouth.
Then the dark ripples spread to waving hair,
And as I stooped, her own lips rising there
Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth.
This is a dream of the dead woman loved. The lover finds himself seated with the god of love, the little naked boy with wings, as the ancients represented him, at the edge of a spring near the forest. He does not look at the god of love, neither does the god look at him; they were friends long ago, but now—what is the use? She is dead. By the reflection in the water only he knows that Love is looking down, and he does not wish to speak to him. But Love will not leave him alone. He hears the tone of a musical instrument, and that music makes him suddenly very sad, for it seems like the voice of the dead for whom he mourns. It makes his tears fall into the water; and immediately, magically, the reflection of the eyes of Love in the water become like the eyes of the woman he loved. Then while he looks in wonder, the little god stirs the surface of the water with wings and feet, and the ripples become like the hair of the dead woman, and as the lover bends down, her lips rise up through the water to kiss him. You may ask, what does all this mean? Well, it means as much as any dream means; it is all impossible, no doubt, but the impossible in dreams often makes us very sad indeed—especially if the dead appear to come back in them.
Another example of regret, very beautiful, is the sonnet numbered ninety-one in this collection. It is called “Lost on Both Sides.”
As when two men have loved a woman well,
Each hating each, through Love’s and Death’s deceit;
Since not for either this stark marriage-sheet
And the long pauses of this wedding-bell;
Yet o’er her grave the night and day dispel
At last their feud forlorn, with cold and heat;
Nor other than dear friends to death may fleet
The two lives left that most of her can tell:—
So separate hopes, which in a soul had wooed
The one same Peace, strove with each other long,
And Peace before their faces perished since:
So through that soul, in restless brotherhood,
They roam together now, and wind among
Its bye-streets, knocking at the dusty inns.
The comparison is of the hopes and aims of the artist to a couple of men in love with the same woman—bitter enemies while she lives, because of their natural rivalry, but loving each other after her death, simply because each can understand better than anybody else in the world the pain of the other. Afterward the men, once rivals, passed all their time together, wandering about at night in search of some quiet place, where they can sit down and drink and talk together. In Rossetti’s time such quiet places were not to be found in the main streets, but in the little side streets called bye-streets. After this explanation, the comparison should not be obscure. The artist who loves does all his work with the thought of the woman that he loves before him; his hope to win fame is that he may make her proud of him; his aims are in all cases to please her. After he has lost her, these hopes and aims, which might have been antagonists to each other in former days, are now reconciled within him; her memory alone is now the inspiration and the theme. I hope you will notice the curious and exquisite value of certain words here: “Stark,” meaning stiff, nearly always refers to the rigidness of death; it is especially used of the appearance and attitude of corpses, and its application in this poem to the cover of the marriage bed is quite enough to convey the sense of death without any more definite observation. Again the expression “long pauses,” referring to the sound of the church bells, makes us understand that the bells are really ringing a funeral knell; for the ringing of wedding bells ought to be quick and joyous. It might seem a strange contradiction, this simile, but the poet has in his mind an old expression about the death of a maiden: “She became the bride of Death.” Thus the effect is greatly intensified by the sombre irony of the simile itself.
We might extract a great many beauties from this wonderful collection of sonnets; but time is precious, and we shall have room for only another quotation or two. The following is one to which I should like especially to invite your attention—not only because of its strange charm, but also because of the curious legend which it recalls—a legend which we have already studied:
BODY’S BEAUTY
Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent,
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.
The reference to the rose and the poppy may need some explanation. The rose has been for many centuries in Western countries a symbol of love; and the poppy has been a symbol of death and sleep from the time of the Greeks. It is from the seeds of the poppy that opium is extracted. The Greeks did not know the use of opium; but they knew that the seeds of the flower produced sleep, and might, in certain quantities, produce death. We have the expression “poppied sleep” to express the sleep of death.
A final word must be said about Rossetti’s genius as a translator. He has given us, in one large volume, the most precious anthology of the Italian poets of the Middle Ages that ever has been made—the poets of the time of Dante, under the title of “Dante and his Circle.” This magnificent work would alone be sufficient to establish his supreme excellence as a translator of poetry; but the material is mostly of a sort that can appeal to scholars only. Rossetti is better known as a translator through a very few short pieces translated from French poets, chiefly. Such is the wonderful rendering of Villon’s “Ballad of Dead Ladies,” beginning
Tell me now in what hidden way is
Lady Flora, the lovely Roman?
Where’s Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere,—
She whose beauty was more than human?—
But where are the snows of yester-year?
Even Swinburne, when making his splendid translations from Villon, refrained from attempting to translate this ballad, saying that no man could surpass, even if he could equal, Rossetti’s version. The burthen is said to be especially successful as a rendering of the difficult French refrain:
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
You will find this matchless translation almost anywhere, so we need not occupy the time further with it; but I doubt whether you have noticed as yet other wonderful translations made by this master from the French. Such is the song from Victor Hugo’s drama “Les Burgraves”; you will not forget Rossetti’s translation after having once read it.
Through the long winter the rough wind tears;
With their white garments the hills look wan.
Love on: who cares?
Who cares? Love on!
My mother is dead; God’s patience wears;
It seems my chaplain will not have done!
Love on: who cares?
Who cares? Love on!
The Devil, hobbling up the stairs,
Comes for me with his ugly throng.
Love on: who cares?
Who cares? Love on.
Another remarkable translation from the same drama is that of the song beginning:
In the time of the civil broils
Our swords are stubborn things.
A fig for all the cities!
A fig for all the kings!
and ending:
Right well we hold our own
With the brand and the iron rod.
A fig for Satan, Burgraves;
Burgraves, a fig for God!
But even more wonderful Rossetti seems when we go back to the old French, as in the translation which has been called “My Father’s Close.”
Inside my father’s close
(Fly away O my heart away!)
Sweet apple-blossom blows
So sweet.
Three kings’ daughters fair,
(Fly away O my heart away!)
They lie below it there
So sweet!
Now the Old French of the first stanza will show you the astonishing faithfulness of the rendering:
Au jardin de mon père,
(Vole, mon cœur, vole!)
Il y a un pommier doux,
Tout doux.
Besides the small exquisite things, there are long translations from mediæval writers, French and Italian, of wonderful beauty. Compare, for example, the celebrated episode of Francesca da Rimini in Dante (which Carlyle so beautifully called “a lily in the mouth of Hell”), as translated by Byron, and as translated by Rossetti, and observe the immeasurable superiority of the latter. It would be very pleasant, if we had time, to examine Rossetti’s translations more in detail; but the year advances and we must turn to an even greater master of verse—Swinburne.