This has been reproduced on behalf of the author for web publication with minor corrections and formatting changes, and the addition of hyperlinks to images of paintings and illustrations mentioned in the text.

Readers wishing to refer to this essay should use the original place of publication: Bentley, D.M.R. “The Character of Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and Fictional Prose.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, NS 27 (Fall 2018): 4-32.

THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

D.M.R. BENTLEY

I

On the eve of the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in September 1848, sent some of his poems to for comment. With one exception, “The Card-Dealer” (or “Vingt-et-un” as it then was), the poems cannot be identified with certainty, but there is a strong likelihood that they included one or more of “,” “Retro me, Sathana,” “For an Annunciation, Early German,” “The Portrait,” and “Mater Pulchrae Delectionis” (later “Ave”), all of which were wholly or largely written by then and some of which he had sent to Leigh Hunt for comment late in 1847 or early in 1848 under the title “Songs of the Art Catholic.” Unfortunately, the letter containing Hunt’s response to the poems does not appear to have survived; however, two of his comments are registered by Rossetti in a letter written on or about 23 July 1848. One of these, an explanation of the title of “Vingt-et-un” and a stanza of the poem that Hunt had “obscure,” is of restricted interest, but the other is more general and of very considerable interest as a reflection of Pre-Raphaelite poetics in the months when the PRB was coming together and Rossetti, Hunt, and other members of their circle were turning their attention not only to such things as the name of the group and a manifesto to establish its principles (their “List of Immortals”), but also to poetry per se through the formation of a Literary Society that met for the first time in mid August (Correspondence I:64-67). [5] In his letter Rossetti prefaces his response to Hunt’s comments by addressing his fear that they are “Burchettical” (1:66)—that is, harsh and even caustic in the manner of , an assistant master at the Central Training School for Art in South Kensington and a fellow member of the Cyclographic Club, the artistic forerunner of the PRB, in which a coterie of artists commented on one another’s drawings.1 The letter continues:

I quite agree with you in what you say about the “hotness” of my verses, if you mean (as I suppose) a certain want of repose and straining after original modes of expression. Of these aspects I am endeavouring to rid myself, and hoped in some degree to have cast them off in My Sister’s Sleep, which is one of the last things I have written, and which, I confess, seems to me simpler and more like nature than those I have shown you. (Correspondence 1:6) THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

Four terms and phrases in this passage—“hotness,” “a certain want for repose,” “straining after original modes of expression,” and “simpler and more like nature”—require varying degrees of elucidation, and collectively as well as individually provide valuable insights into an emerging Pre-Raphaelite poetics.

1. Hotness

As used by Hunt, “hotness” doubtless brought with it many of the “extended uses” of “hot” listed by the Oxford English Dictionary: “characterized by intensity of feeling; fervent, passionate; zealous, eager, keen.” In a comment by one artist to another, such as Hunt’s to Rossetti, “hotness” may also reflect the metaphorical terminology used in discussions of paintings to describe colours—orange, for instance—as “warm” or “hot,” and blue as “cool” or “cold.” “Coolness peculiarly belongs to blue” and some “browns” display “red” or “hotness,” observes George Field in Chromatography (1835) (156) and again in Rudiments of the Painters’ Art (1850) (62; 6); hence, “cool” or “cold” colours are “retiring” (to the rear, subdued) and “warm” or “hot” colours are “forward” (foregrounding, strident). By using “hotness” to describe Rossetti’s “verses” Hunt is thus faulting them, as Rossetti correctly surmised, for an emotional and intellectual intensity that “want[s]” moderation and needs cooling down, and of trying to hard to be original—of making a “violent effort or strong endeavour” to achieve that “end or object” (OED).

2. A Certain Want of Repose

In everyday usage, “repose” means and meant “the temporary rest or cessation from physical and mental exertion in order to recover one’s energy” (OED), but in discussions of art in Rossetti’s day and earlier it had a related and more [6] specialized meaning that Joshua Reynolds describes and illustrates at length in Discourse 8. Arguing that “variety” is essential to “all arts” because it “reanimates attention” and serves “to recreate and relieve” the mind, he cautions that too much “variety” in a painting “entirely destroys the pleasure proceeding from uniformity” because “attention, the exercise of the mind, is too violent”:

In a composition, when the objects [or figures] are scattered and divided into many equal parts, the eye is perplexed and fatigued, from not knowing where to rest, where to find the principal action, or which the principal figure; for where all are making equal pretensions to notice, all are in equal danger of neglect. The expression which is used very often on these occasions is, the piece wants repose; a word which perfectly expresses a relief of the mind from that state of hurry and anxiety which it suffers, when looking at a work of this character. (130-31)

Reynolds follows his discussion of “repose” in painting with an example drawn from “that faithful and accurate painter of nature, Shakespeare”:

[T]he short dialogue between Duncan and Banquo, whilst they are approaching the gates of Macbeth’s castle. Their conversation very naturally THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

turns upon the beauty of its situation, and the pleasantness of the air … The subject of this quiet and easy conversation gives that repose so necessary to the mind after the tumultuous bustle of the preceding scenes and perfectly contrasts the scene of horror that immediately succeeds … This is also frequently the practice in Homer; who, from the midst of battles and horrors, relieves and refreshes the mind of the reader, by introducing some quiet rural image, or picture of familiar domestic life. (133)

By contrast with Shakespeare and Homer, Reynolds contends, “modern writers seem … to be always searching for new thoughts, such as never could occur to men in the situation represented …, always on the stretch” (133). A still more specialized use of “repose” was still current in discussions of paintings in the 1840s and ’50s, an example being the section entitled “Repose, in Painting” in the fifth edition of T.H. Fielding’s The Theory and Practice of Painting in Oil and Water Colours, for Landscape and Portraits (1854): “By the term ‘repose,’ is implied those parts of … [a] picture, either in deep shadow or middle tint, where lights, shadows, and colours, are so subdued, that the eye can rest upon them without fatigue, after the excitation produced by the brilliancy and effect of the principal parts” (30). Almost as contemporaneous and much closer to home for Hunt and Rossetti are ’s observations about Egyptian art in “The Epochs of Art as [7] Represented in the Crystal Palace” (1864), where “repose” is closely tied to “rest” and said to be “the thought which the Egyptians derived from Nature most absorbingly” (Fine Art 55). In practice what Dante Rossetti was probably doing to remedy the “want for repose” in his “verses” was introducing passages to offset the “excitation”—the “hotness”—of their “principal parts” and provide them with a moderate amount of “variety.”

3. Straining after Original Modes of Expression

Rossetti’s second phrase almost uncannily echoes Reynolds’s statement about “modern writers” being “always on the stretch” for “new thoughts,” which Reynolds goes on to support by naming classical writers whose work suffers from a lack of “repose” (133). Some examples of the causes and consequences of “straining after”—“making a violent effort or strong endeavour” to achieve (OED)—“original modes of expression” can be found, perhaps (or perhaps not) surprisingly, in Max Nordau’s Degeneration (trans. 1895). In his chapter on “Mysticism” Nordau argues that, although “original modes of expression” in which the “junction of words which by their sense have little relation to each other” (“echolalia”) is regarded by some as evidence of “cleverness” and as “confer[ing] upon their originator the reputation of a ‘brilliant’ … author,” it is recognized by “the psychologist as … imbecility” (66). So, too, is the “uncontrolled association of ideas, reverie, and fugitive thought, because they exact only a very limited adaptation to fact” (a statement with which Hunt might well have agreed). In the ensuing chapter on “The Pre-Raphaelites,” Rossetti is accused of precisely these vices, with supportive examples from “The Blessed Damozel,” “My Sister’s Sleep,” and other poems (86-94). By Nordau’s lights, Rossetti did not succeed in ridding himself of “straining after original modes of expression.”

4. Simpler and More Like Nature THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

Almost needless to say, this phrase goes to the heart of the beliefs and practices of the Pre-Raphaelites during the period of the PRB (1848-53) and in varying degrees in subsequent years. “From young artists nothing ought to be tolerated but simple bonâ fide imitation of nature,” had intoned in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843); “their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalize; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of nature, and tracing the finger of God” (1:416-17). The subtitle of the first two numbers of (1850-51) is “Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art,” and “the simplicity of nature” is a phrase repeated in all four of the evolving statements of [8] purpose that appear on its back cover.2 Whether in poetry, literature, or art, the goal of the Pre-Raphaelites in all was—to quote W.M. Rossetti’s description of “My Sister’s Sleep” as it appears in the first number of the magazine (January 1850)—to achieve and encourage an “intimate intertexture of … spiritual sense with material form,” to make “small actualities … vocal of lofty meanings” (18).

II

If a “simpler and more like nature” is augmented by an increase in “repose” and a reduction of “straining after original modes of expression” as components of an emerging Pre-Raphaelite poetics in 1848, then they also should be reflected and discernible in the revisions that Rossetti made to poems published in The Germ and existing in versions dating from earlier. One such poem is “My Sister’s Sleep,” which was published in the New Monthly Belle Assemblée in September 1848 and probably already in the hands of the magazine’s editor when the Hunt-Rossetti conversation took place. Prior to its appearance in the first number of The Germ, “My Sister’s Sleep” underwent extensive revision dictated to some extent by Coventry Patmore’s complaint early in December 1849 that it was “too self-conscious in parts” (P.R.B. Journal 31, and see 28) and to some extent by Rossetti’s desire to eliminate awkward lines and stanzas; however, a number of major and minor changes indicate that it was indeed revised to accord with the poetics contained in Rossetti’s August letter to Hunt. A stanza heavy with “lofty meanings” in the New Monthly Belle Assemblée version is omitted, and the poem is augmented by two more natural and reposeful—less forced and demanding—stanzas. In the omitted stanza, a complex of “lattice-work,” “plants of evergreen,” and the sudden eclipse of the moon is heavily suggestive of the crucifixion and eternal life:

I watched it [the moon] through the lattice-work; We had some plants of evergreen Standing upon the sill: just then It passed behind and made them dark. (qtd. in Youatt 141)

In the two new stanzas, the focus is less on the theme of death and rebirth/resurrection than on the speaker’s mother and the poem’s domestic setting; moreover, its symbolism—the “candle,” the flame,” and the “mirror”—is simpler, more subtle, and less “wanting in repose”:

Her little work-table was spread [9] With work to finish. For the glare Made by her candle, she had care THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

To work some distance from the bread.

Through the small room, with subtle sound Of flame, by vents the fireshine drove And reddened. In its dim alcove The mirror shed its clearness round. (Rossetti, “Songs” 21)

As the revelation that the speaker’s sister is dead approaches, a new stanza creates a moment of “repose”:

Almost unwittingly, my mind Repeated … [my mother’s] words after her; Perhaps tho’ my lips did not stir; It was scarce thought, or cause assigned. (“Songs” 22)

Even minor revisions may have been undertaken in the interest of adding “repose”: “my thoughts kept a shifted poise, / And going not, would not abide” becomes “I knew the calm as of a choice / Made in God for me, to abide,” and “Lightly she stooped, and smiling turned” becomes “She stooped an instant, calm, and smiling turned” (“Songs” 21; 22). Despite his attempt to rid himself of “a certain want of repose and straining after original modes of expression,” Rossetti was not merely unable to rid himself entirely of them; in the 1850s and ’60s, in such poems as “The Song of the Bower” (1859), “Troy Town” (1859), and “Eden Bower” (1869), he actually revelled in the very qualities that he had earlier recognized as “faults.” But during the lifetime of the PRB, in works such as “The Bride’s Prelude,” “Hand and Soul,” and most of the poems in and arising from the verse journal of his trip with Hunt to Paris and Belgium in the fall of 1849, “hotness” as he understood it is almost entirely absent, as it is from most of the poems that he wrote and published during the mid to late ’50s when he enjoyed the admiration and support of Ruskin and the Oxford generation of Pre-Raphaelites. Indeed, if there is a consummate example of Rossetti’s embrace of “repose” and his rejection of “straining after original modes of expression” it is a poem begun in 1849, largely written circa 1851-53, and first published in ’s Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in December 1856: the “The Staff and Scrip,” where the episodic nature of the narrative furnishes the variety and rhythm of the former, and the latter disappears beneath a seemingly effortless literary .

III

One effect of the foregoing discussion of the conversation between Hunt and [10] Rossetti in August 1848 is to confirm that, although imaginative writing in the Pre-Raphaelite mode and with the Pre-Raphaelite imprimatur did not appear in print until the inception of The Germ in January 1850, poetry bearing the hallmarks of Pre-Raphaelitism began to emerge over a year earlier in tandem with Pre-Raphaelite painting and the painterly discourses surrounding it. So, what, if anything, can be taken from this as a means of arriving at a workable definition of what does and does not define the poetry and, by extension, prose fiction that is labelled “Pre-Raphaelite”?3 An obvious, circular, and highly restrictive answer is simply poems and works of fiction written by members of the PRB and, if less restriction were desirable, their associates (such as ) and their heirs (most notably, William Morris), but this THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE begs the questions of what characteristics qualify a piece of imaginative writing as Pre-Raphaelite. A more complex and potentially useful answer lies in the pictoriality of the piece in question, which is to say, its strong and deliberate relationship with the visual aspects of the natural world—“actualities”—as directly perceived as possible and with the visual arts, primarily paintings but, in some instances, other media such as sculpture. As such, Pre-Raphaelite pictoriality has several facets, from the generic to the local, and makes use of devices such as ekphrasis, blazon, word picture,4 pictorial allusion, painterly concepts and terminology, and direct reference to works of art, real or imagined, the goal being—to borrow from Isaac Disraeli’s descriptions of Spenser and Sidney in his much-reprinted Amenities of Literature (1841)—to create “circumstantial descriptions that are minute yet vivid” “delineations of objects both in art and nature” that “bring the object closer to the eye” and “might be transferred to canvas” (2:359, 394).5 All the facets of pictoriality thus understood are present in literary works published by members of the PRB in The Germ: poems and in one instance a short story (“Hand and Soul”) by , James Collinson, and the Rossetti brothers that for heuristic purposes can be taken and examined as core examples of Pre-Raphaelite literary pictoriality.6 As if programmatically, primacy of place in the first number of the magazine is given to two poems preceded by an illustrative etching: Woolner’s resonantly Petrarchan “My Beautiful Lady” and “Of My Lady. In Death” with an illustration by Hunt. Reflecting the fact that it illustrates two poems, Hunt’s etching is divided into two compartments, one below the other. The etching for “My Beautiful Lady” is an illustration of the stanza in which the speaker explains why he came to think “weeds beautiful”:

Because one day I saw my lady pull Some weeds up near a little brook, Which home most carefully she took, Then shut them in a book. (Germ 1:2) [11]

It is quite possible that Hunt recognized in this stanza a metaphor for Pre-Raphaelite writing in its relationship to the “small actualities” of Nature: attention to plants not usually considered beautiful, their careful handling, and their transference to a book. Whereas the illustration for “My Beautiful Lady” is taller than it is wide as required by its two standing figures, the illustration for “Of My Lady. In Death” is the reverse in accordance with its subject: the lines in which, on hearing “first the bell’s harsh toll / … for his lady’s soul,” the speaker “dropped, in a dead swoon, / And lay a long time cold upon … [his] face” (1:9). In its background, a line of cowled monks process past two statues that may allude to the fact that Woolner was a sculptor, but may also reflect Coventry Patmore’s comment in September 1849 that Woolner’s poems were “sometimes slightly over passionate and generally sculpturesque in character” (qtd. in W.M. Rossetti, P.R.B. Journal 16), by which Dante Rossetti took him to mean “that each stanza stands too much alone and has its own ideas too much to itself” (Correspondence 1:99).7 Be this as it may, the pictoriality of “My Beautiful Lady” resides in its initial blazon of the lady (“she is very fair; / Her brow is white, and bound by simple hair”), its many vignettes of the natural world (such as “A hawk poised high in the air, whose nerved wing-tips / Tremble with might suppressed, before he dips,” 1:1), and its distinctly painterly attention to visual effects:

where the sun strikes … THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

… what is pale receive[s] a flush, Rich hues—a richer blush …

Whene’er she moves there are fresh beauties stirred; As the sunned bosom of a humming-bird At each pant shows some fiery hue …; The first white flutter of her robe to trace, Where binds and perfumed jasmine interlace, Expands my gaze triumphantly.

The azure beauty of the evening draws: When sober hues pervade the ground. (1:1, 2, 3)

“Of My Lady. In Death,” begins with the grief-stricken speaker’s statement that now “All seems a painted show,”8 and the poem is at its most pictorial in his account of her slow death of consumption (“Her beauty by degrees / Sank, sharpened with disease … I saw her fingers lax, and change their hue”), in his account of the stasis that afterwards descended on his world, and in his description of the creatures and plants that thrive above her grave in evident indifference to the tragedy that has occurred: [12]

Small birds twitter and peck the weeds That wave above her head, Shading her lowly bed: Their brisk wings burst light globes of seeds, Scattering the downy pride Of dandelions, wide: Speargrass stoops with watery beads: The weight from its fine tips Occasionally drips: The bee drops in the mallow-bloom, and feeds. (1:6)

More than ten years after their publication in The Germ, revised versions of “My Beautiful Lady” and “Of My Lady. In Death” were incorporated into Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady (1863), which was very favourably reviewed in the 12 December 1863 number of The Athenaeum by Gerald Massey (an associate of the PRB; see W.M. Rossetti, Selected Letters 57), who quotes several stanzas of the two poems, remarking of a sequence of three that it is “a Picture.” My Beautiful Lady “shows us that the Poet of Form [sculpture] might have been a Poet in Colour,” he writes; it is “the work of a thorough artist.” The second number of The Germ also begins with a combination of poem and illustration, Collinson’s relentlessly typological “The Child Jesus. A Record typical of the five Sorrowful Mysteries” and his no less relentlessly numerological “Ex ore infantium et lactentium perfecizli [sic] laudem,” which illustrates the verse paragraph that foreshadows “The Crowning with Thorns”: “one bright summer eve” when “The child sat by himself upon the beach,” he is joined first by “Three children, and then two,” one of whom—a type of John the Baptist—“had upon his head a wreath / Of hawthorn flowers, and in his hand a reed,” both of which he bestows on Jesus, saying, “Here is one /Whom you shall prefer instead of me / To be our king” (2:53). All of the poem’s five vignettes are rich in closely observed visual details, but Collinson’s painterly eye is perhaps most apparent in passages that dwell THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE on colours, patterns, and the effects of light.9 Some of these are very local—the “blue-eyed scarlet wings” of a moth, the “waxen vaulted cells” of a hive of “wild bees,” the wind creating “Light flakes of waving silver o’er the fields / Ready for mowing,” and the sinking “sun … broadening as it near[s] / The low horizon” (2:52, 55). Others are more extended (and notice the pairs of complementary colours in the fourth line of the passage):

Three cottages that overlooked the sea Stood side by side eastward of Nazareth. Behind them rose a sheltering range of cliffs, [13] Purple and yellow, verdure-spotted, red, Layer upon layer built up against the sky.

… like the wreathed shadows and deep glows Which the sun spreads from some old oriel Upon the marble Altar and the gold Of God’s own Tabernacle … … so the blossoms and the vine, Of Jesus’ home climbing above the roof, Traced intricate their windings all about The yellow thatch …

… there came a day when Mary sat Within the latticed doorway’s fretted shade, Working in bright and many colored threads A girdle for her child, who at her feet Lay with his gentle face upon her lap. Both little hands were crossed and tightly clasped Around her knee. On them the gleams of light Which broke through overhanging blossoms warm, And cool transparent leaves, seemed like gems Which deck Our Lady’s shrine. (2:49, 50, 52)

The first of these passages is evocative of a landscape painting, the second refers the scene to ecclesiological architecture, and the third could be mistaken for a verbal description of a Madonna and Child. In all three, pictoriality combines with Collinson’s Catholic-leaning religiosity to create tableaux that are made loudly vocal of lofty typological meanings. Because William Michael Rossetti was by inclination an agnostic rather than a Christian, religion is almost entirely absent from the poems that he published in The Germ; however, pictoriality is present in many passages where, as John Holmes has recently remarked in “Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite Principles: Science, Nature, and Knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s ‘Fancies at Leisure’ and ‘Mrs. Holmes Grey,’” “precise observational detail” combines with “attention to the process of observation” (17).10 This is certainly true of the two sets of lyrics entitled “Fancie at Leisure” in the second and third numbers of The Germ and “To the Castle Ramparts” in the fourth, all of which reflect William Michael’s view, as expressed in his 1851 essay entitled “Præraphaelitism,” that “the artist … is endowed, or, to be an artist, ought to be endowed, with the faculties of observation and analysis” and that the Pre-Raphaelite artist “contemplates the rendering of nature as it is,—in other words, as it seems to the … [him] from his point of view, material and THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE intellectual (for there is no separating the two things)” (Fine Art 170, 171). [14] The poems are written in a variety of forms (including bouts-rimés sonnets), and they sometimes address or refer to a companion of the speaker, but all focus in places on perception and on the effects of light, shadow, and distance:

The runnell’s fall Over the rise of pebbles, and its blink Of shining points which, upon this side, sink In dark, yet still are there …

The moon makes chequered chestnut-shade There by the south-side …

… nor will your eye Meet any [blueflies]11 where the sunshine is not strong.

The ash you called so stiff Curves, daily, broader shadow down the cliff.

The sky’s blue almost purple, and these three Hills carved against it, and the pine on pine The wood in their shade has.

… a fry Of insects in one spot quivered for ever, Out and in, in and out, with glancing wings That caught the light …

… the fields far down Lay to their heaving distance for the eyes, Satisfied with one gaze unconsciously, To pass to the glory of heaven, and to know light. (76, 77, 78, 129, 130, 175)

The syntax and word-order in some of these passages are awkward and sometimes confusing, but “blink” in the first passage and “glancing” in the second-to-last are well chosen for their combination of what is perceived with the activities of the perceiving eye. In all the passages, close attention to detail has the effect of bringing the reader closer to their subject: Nature. Given W.M Rossetti’s scientific bent, it is quite possible that he brought an interest in optics with him on his excursions into Nature and pictoriality. Although it was not published in The Germ—indeed not until 1868—William Michael’s long blank-verse poem “Mrs. Holmes Grey” warrants brief quotation here because it was largely written in September 1849 and intended [15] for publication in the magazine. It is also his most substantial and accomplished contribution to Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Much of the determinedly matter-of-fact poem consists of “a newspaper report of … [a] coroner’s inquest” and much of it is an attempt “to approach nearer to the actualities of dialogue and narration than had … yet been done” (P.R.B. Journal 130), but its opening verse paragraphs contain passages of vivid pictoriality: “fishes silvery with distended death” lie on the beach; there is “No want of blue … in the upper sky:— / But also many piled-up flat grey clouds”; THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

“the sun / Sank, a red glare, between two lengthened streaks, / Hot dun, that stretched to southward”; and, when the protagonist pushes open a “wicket-gate” at his destination, a description of the garden follows:

The garden was but scantily stocked with flowers, And these were fading mostly, thinly leaved, The earth plots littered with the fall of them. Stately some dahlia-clusters yet delayed, Crimson, alternating with flame-colour. He stretched his fingers to the velvet bloom Of one, and drew a petal ’twixt them. Then The plaited flower fell separately to earth By ring and ring; only the calyx stood Upon its stalk. The autumn time was come. Out of the bordering box stiff plantain grew. Scarce would the loose trees have afforded shade, So lessened was the bulk between their boughs, Had there been sun to cast it. In the grass Rested the moisture of the recent rain. (P.R.B. Journal 131-33)

“Calyx” is a word that might occur more readily to a botanist than to an artist, but most of the passages quoted are word pictures that, like William Michael’s contributions to The Germ, invite readers to move in their mind’s eye from space to space—“silvery” fish, “grey” clouds, “Hot dun” streaks of clouds, “Crimson, alternating with flame-colour[ed]” dahlias—as if moving around an actual Pre-Raphaelite picture. Judged by the “principle of strict actuality and probability of detail which the Praeraphaelites upheld in their pictures,” “Mrs. Holmes Grey” is indeed, as William Michael Asserts, “a Praeraphaelite poem” (P.R.B. Journal 130).12 The great majority of the twelve works that Dante Rossetti published in The Germ are remarkable for their strong and often complex pictoriality. The presence of three of these— “Hand and Soul” as well as “My Sister’s Sleep” and “The Blessed Damozel”—in the first two numbers of the magazine [16] continue and contribute greatly to the programmatic quality initiated by Woolner’s poems and Hunt’s etching. By placing “My Sister’s Sleep” under the title “Songs of One Household. No. 1,” in the first number of The Germ, Rossetti made it appear to be the first in a series of poetic equivalents of Netherlandish genre paintings of scenes and events in domestic life. Moreover, two of the details added before the publication of the poem in The Germ—the lone candle and the “mirror shed[ding] a clearness round”—may have been suggested by Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage, which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1842 and admired by Rossetti and Hunt prior to their trip to northern France and Belgium in the fall of 1849 (see Correspondence 1:128). “What a picture it is!” enthused the reviewer for the Critic about “My Sister’s Sleep” in February 1850; “A poet’s tongue has told what an artist’s eye has seen” (qtd. in W.M. Rossetti, “Introduction” 12). As became strikingly apparent in Rossetti’s later painting based on it, “The Blessed Damozel” derives in considerable measure from pictorial representations of the Virgin Mary in heaven that also lie centrally in the background of the three verse paragraphs in “Mater Pulchrae Delectionis” that contain lines such as “My love just sees her standing up / Where the light of the throne is bright”; “The cherubim, order’d and join’d, / Slope inward to a golden point”; and “thy face looks from the veil / Sweetly and solemnly and well, / Like a THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE thought in Raphaël” (qtd. in W.M. Rossetti, “Notes” 662),13 a reference to the painter that prompts the reader to envisage any one of his many Madonnas. In the opening lines of “The Blessed Damozel,” the narrator’s description of her “lean[ing] out / From the gold bar of Heaven” with “Three lilies in her hand / And … [seven] stars in her hair” (Germ 1:80) contains several pictorial elements: the lilies recall the lily stems of numerous paintings of the Annunciation (and anticipate Rossetti’s paintings of the theme): the Damozel’s location and the stars in her hair are evocative of pictures of the Ascension and Enthronement, such as those in the woodcuts of Dürer’s Life of the Virgin, all or part of which he may have owned;14 and, when seen purely colourifically, other elements of the opening description—the “gold” of the “bar of Heaven,” the Damozel’s “blue … eyes,” the “white rose of Mary’s gift” on her “robe,” and her “hair … yellow like ripe corn”—further associate her with paintings of the Virgin and the Saints. A stanza added towards the end of the poem for its publication in The Germ also contains lines that evoke paintings (“Herself [Mary] shall bring us, hand in hand, / To Him round whom all souls / Kneel—the unnumber’d solemn heads / Bowed with their aureoles,” 2:83), and the poem as a whole is centrally concerned with perspective, with point-of-view, and with what can and cannot be seen. Robert Buchanan’s motives for virulently attacking Rossetti in “The Fleshly School of Poetry” are very far from admirable, but there is astuteness [17] in his observation that the first two stanzas of “The Blessed Damozel” are “a careful sketch for a picture” and that “the general effect [of the poem] is that of a queer old painting in a missal” (340).15 In both “My Sister’s Sleep” and “The Blessed Damozel” local, generic, and evocative pictoriality position the poems in relation to works of art and, by doing so, proclaim them to be the products of an educated artistic imagination. Much the same can be said of “Hand and Soul” but with even greater emphasis because of the multifaceted pictoriality of its framing prologue and epilogue by a student of art history and its Vasarian biography of the fictional thirteenth-century artist Chiaro di Messer Bello dell’ Erma. Its epigraph of the framed short story from Bonaggiunta Uribiciani is dated “1250” (Germ 1:23), and the two paragraphs of its prologue place Chiaro in the context of the painters who preceded Cimabue, whom Vasari regards as “the principal cause of the renewal of painting” in the Renaissance in the sense that he influenced and was then eclipsed by Giotto (Vasari 13), and then credits “the eloquent pamphlet” by a non-existent historian amusingly named “Dr. Aemmster” (hamster) for drawing attention to “the tryptic and two cruciform pictures” by Chiaro at Dresden (1:23). In the course of the biography of Chiaro, which culminates in an account of the circumstances leading to the creation of a “still more solemn and beautiful” picture that he was painting when he died, references to actual people and places in the art world bestow an aura of authenticity on the narrative: Chiaro studies under the artist Giunta Pisano (c.1180-1250); the art historian Seroux D’Agincourt (1730-1814) receives passing mention (25); and in the epilogue the narrator claims to have seen the picture in the Pitti Gallery in 1847, hanging “beneath … [a] head by Raphael,” identifies its “most absorbing wonder … [as] its literality,” and states that, thanks to Dr. Aemmster, it is captioned “in the latest catalogues” as “Figura mystica di Chiaro dell’ Erma” (1:23, 32-33).16 Numerous references to other fictional artists and to various subjects and types of art dominate much of Chiaro’s biography (“Madonnas … Saints … Holy Children … frescoes … a moral allegory of peace,” 1:24-28) ensure that the pictoriality of “Hand and Soul” seldom flags, as do descriptions of Chiaro (“there was a glory upon … [his face], as upon the face of one who feels a light around his hair,” 24) and his room overlooking “the gardens fast by the Church of San Rocco”: “Beside the matters of his art and a very few books, almost the only object to be noticed in Chiaro’s room was a small consecrated image of St. Mary Virgin wrought out of silver, before which stood always, in summer-time, a glass THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE containing a lily and a rose” (25). When he wrote this passage in December 1849, Rossetti must have had in mind his pen-and-ink drawings of The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1848-49), where Dante’s room is also populated by, among other things, books, “the matters of his art” (he is drawing [18] an angel), a glass vase containing a rose (but not a lily), and a small statue (of Florence rather than the Virgin Mary). At the heart of “Hand and Soul” are a fictional artist and a fictitious painting that exist only in verbal reifications that are successful enough to have prompted “more than one admirer of … [the] short story to make] enquiry in Florence or Dresden after the pictures of Chiaro” (W.M. Rossetti, “Notes” 679). All nine of the poems that Rossetti published in the third and fourth numbers of The Germ were products of his trip to France and Belgium, and six are sonnets about—or, to use his word, “for”—paintings by Mantegna, Giorgione, and Ingres (two) that he saw in Paris and paintings by Jan Memling (two) that he saw in Bruges, a city in which, he writes in “The Carillon,” Memling and Jan van Eyck “hold state” (3:126). In most cases the sonnets for pictures combine elements of empathetic projection and speculative interpretation, often in the form of questions, a pattern established before the formation of the PRB in “For an Annunciation, Early German” (1847) and “For ‘Our Lady of the Rocks’ by Leonardo da Vinci” (1848)17 and continued in three later sonnets, “For ‘The Wine of Circe,’ by Edward Burne-Jones” (1869), “For the Holy Family, by Michelangelo” (1880), and “For Spring, by Sandro Botticelli” (1880). The octave of “For ‘Our Lady of the Rocks’ by Leonardo da Vinci,” for example, addresses three interpretative questions to the Virgin—“Mother, is this the darkness of the end, / ? and is that outer sea / Infinite imminent Eternity?” (1-3)—and ends with a third.18 “A Dance of Nymphs, by Andrea Mantegna; in the Louvre)” speculates about whether, if at all, the “meaning” of the dance “reached” the male figure (2) on the left of the picture, and the second of the two sonnets for “‘Angelica Rescued from the Sea-Monster,’ by Ingres; in the Luxembourg” focuses on Angelica, and wonders whether it was the “scattered whirl / Of … foam [that] drenched [her]?—or the waves that curl / And spit …? Or … the champion’s blood … —or … [her] own blood’s anointing …?” (4-8). All six of the sonnets contain moments of ekphrasis, none more so than the sonnet for “A Marriage of St. Katharine, by … [Hans Memmeling]; in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges,” which eschews interpretation and speculation in favour of vivid description: in the octave the saint “kneels, and on her hand the holy Child / Setteth the ring … Awe … hath possessed her eyes in thought” (2-3, 6-7) and in the sestet the postures and activities of other figures are delineated:

There is a pause while Mary Virgin turns The leaf, and reads. With eyes on the spread book, That damsel at her knees reads after her. John whom He loved and John his harbinger [19] Listen and watch. Whereon soe’er they look, The light is starred in gems, and the gold burns. (9-14)

To the extent that all the ancillary figures in these lines are reading, watching, and looking, they are surrogates of the poet and then of the reader, who is asked to envisage each figure in turn and then to contemplate the glorious background of the painting as a whole. Although “A Trip to Paris and Belgium,” the verse journal containing the poems that Rossetti revised for publication in the last two numbers of The Germ, was not published until after his death and has been discussed at length elsewhere (see my “Pre-Raphaelite Abroad”), THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE it warrants brief but climactic consideration here as the quintessential example of Pre-Raphaelite pictoriality in process. Besides sonnets for pictures and several other subjects, from the Place de la Bastille and a bawdy Can-Can in Paris to the battlefield at Waterloo and a roadside shrine in Belgium, it contains several dismissive references to artists not favoured by the PRB, a crisp example being in the sestet of “At the Station of the Versailles Railway”:

I leaned over the bridge, And wondered, cold and drowsy, why the knave Claude is in worship; and why (sense apart) Rubens preferred a mustard vehicle. The wind veered short. I turned upon my heel Saying, “Correggio was a toad”; then gave Three dizzy yawns, and knew not of the Art. (8-14)

The presence of Rossetti’s yawn-inducing trio of Claude Lorrain, the supposed inventor of the Claude glass for picturesque landscape viewing, is particularly interesting in the present context because one component of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic in literature as well as in art is a determination to avoid such conventions of the picturesque aesthetic as the imposition of order on variety through the division of landscapes into foreground, middle ground, and background and the analogous use of the here/there convention to direct the reader’s eye. In his “Præraphaelitism” essay of 1851, W.M. Rossetti suggests that a nineteenth-century artist should use his “faculties of observation” for “the confirmation or otherwise of the axioms he has been taught”:

Perhaps he will walk out into the sunlight, and be struck with the teasing fact that, so far as his unaided perceptions testify, there is no principal shadow occupying one third of the space, and that really the background declines to recede in that accommodating ratio which he knows it bound to abide by. Or perhaps he will mix with the intellectual and the beautiful, and, finding a hardly appreciable leaven of Greek ideal, be compelled to lapse into the notion that [20] mind can speak through homely features, and loveliness be English as well as Hellenic. Or he will come across groups of endless variety, consistency, and interest, which by rights do not compose at all. (170-71)

Bracketing the rejection of the classical conception of beauty in this passage is a humorous rejection of the picturesque aesthetic that by 1851 William Michael had put into practice in several of his contributions to The Germ, as had his brother, but with greater poetic facility, in “A Trip to Paris and Belgium,” which is arguably as detached from the language and genre of conventional picturesque viewing and site-seeing as was possible at the time. Short passages from the “London to Folkestone” and “Antwerp to Bruges” sections of “A Trip to Paris and Belgium” provides a good illustration of how the “faculties of observation” operate in the blank-verse portions of the journal as a whole. In the first passage, Rossetti records the effects of the train’s speed on the perception of proximate and distant objects as seen sometimes with difficulty through the window of the carriage and provides a distinctly unlovely description of Hunt:

A constant keeping-past of shaking trees, And a bewildered glitter of loose road; THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

Banks of bright growth, with single blades atop Against the white sky; and wires—a constant chain— That seem to draw the clouds along with them (Things one stoops against the light to see Through the low window; shaking by at rest, Or fierce like water as the swiftness grows); And, seen through fences or a bridge far off, Trees that in moving keep their intervals Still one ‘twixt bar and bar; and then at times Long reaches of green level, where one cow, Feeding among her fellows that feed on, Lifts her slow neck, and gazes for the sound.

There are six of us: I that write away; Hunt reads Dumas, hard-lipped with heavy jowl And brows hung low, and the long ends of hair Standing out limp. (1-18)

In the second passage, an account of the two men’s departure from Antwerp on a ferry, Rossetti first describes the effect of the rocking of the boat on perception and then the degradation of colour and the diminution of size and clarity caused by distance:

We know we move [21] Because there is a floating at our eyes Whatso they seek; and because all the things Which on our outset our were distinct and large Are smaller and much weaker and quite grey,19 And at last gone from us. (2-6)

Whether looking at passing objects, the interior of a carriage, or a receding scene landscape, Rossetti’s “faculties of observation” here and at many other points in his verse journal yield enough “unaided perceptions” to justify the claim that he has almost, if not quite, transcended, the pictorial “axioms he … [was] taught.”

IV

Aside from “A Trip to Paris and Belgium,” the focus to this point has been on the ways in which Pre-Raphaelite literary pictoriality is present in works published in The Germ by members of the PRB. A survey of the pictoriality of other Pre-Raphaelite works is far beyond the scope of the present essay, but some illustrative examples of its presence in major poems by Rossetti is in order. Many but by no means all of these poems were begun or written in the late 1840s and early ’50s, but nearly all were revised in the ensuing decade for inclusion in Poems (1870) with no apparent abandonment of the goal of creating—to quote Disraeli again—“circumstantial descriptions that are minute yet vivid,” “delineations of objects both in art and nature” [that] “bring the object closer to the eye” and “might be transferred to canvas.” THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

Pre-Raphaelite pictoriality is most readily apparent in Rossetti’s sonnets for his own pictures. None of these was published in The Germ, and only two—the sonnets written to accompany Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849-50)—were written during the period of the PRB. The two “Mary’s Girlhood (For a Picture)” sonnets are largely given over to describing the Virgin’s moral characteristics and to explaining the painting’s abundant “symbols,” but the sestet of the first is a literary prolepsis that looks forward to the Annunciation in lines that Rossetti would soon “transfer … to canvas” in ! (1850-51): “one dawn at home, / She woke in her white bed, and had not fear / At all,—yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed: / Because the fulness of the time was come” (11-14).20 By and large the sonnets that Rossetti wrote for his own pictures after the dissolution of the PRB embed ekphrastic elements in commentaries that elucidate or supplement the picture’s subject and theme by drawing the reader/viewer’s attention to some of its key elements and by providing information about its significance, mythological sources, and other matters. Thus “Body’s Beauty” (1867), the sonnet for Lady (1868), situates Lilith in biblical mythology (“The witch … [Adam] [22] loved before the gift of Eve”), describes her pose and activity (“she sits … subtly of herself contemplative”), names and explains her floral adjuncts (“The rose and poppy are her flowers” because of their association with, respectively, “soft-shed kisses and soft sleep”), and, finally, provides a vivid image of her fatal effect on Adam and potentially on all men: “Lo! As that youth’s eyes burned as thine, so went / Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent / And round his heart one strangling golden hair” (2, 5-6, 9, 11-14). While “Body’s Beauty” is faithful to the details of , its companion sonnet “Soul’s Beauty” (1867) is more complex in its pictoriality: after accurately delineating and interpreting the binarisms of Sibylla Palmifera (1866-70) in its octave (“love and death, / Terror and mystery … palm and wreath”), it contains lines in its sestet—“Lady Beauty … long known to thee / By flying hair and fluttering hem”—that evoke female figures in Botticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus (see Helsinger 161). Rossetti’s other sonnets for his own pictures also have complicated relationships with the works they accompany: to give just three further examples, “ at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (For a Drawing)” (1858) consists of a dialogue between the saint and her lover and concludes with a line whose rhythm and caesuras mimic her ascent of the stairs to Simon’s house (“He needs me, calls me, loves me: let me go,” 14); “Cassandra (For a Drawing)” (1861) consists of two sonnets, the first identifying the figures in the picture and the second spoken by Cassandra; and “Proserpina (For a Picture)” (1872) is an anaphoric meditation by Proserpine on her hellish location and divided self that provides an interpretation of the patch of light that illuminates the “Tartarean grey” wall (6) in the painting but ignores the ivy behind the goddess and the incense burner besider her. With few exceptions Rossetti’s sonnets for his own pictures not only provide readings of the pictures’ signifying elements, but also provide the viewer with commentaries on the thoughts and emotions of the figure or figures in them that, because they are written by the artist, simultaneously expand, control, and restrict interpretative possibilities. Two of the most vividly pictorial of the poems that originated in the late 1840s are “The Card-Dealer” (“Vingt-et-un” in Rossetti’s letter to Hunt) and “The Bride’s Prelude.” The former was inspired by the The Fortune Teller (also known as The Wish) by the German Romantic painter Theodore Von Holst, an engraving of which, Rossetti told in March 1848, was one of two “pictorial adornment[s] of … [his] room” (the other being an “outline from … Brown’s Abstract Representation of Justice” (Correspondence 1:58). In addition to drawing loosely on several details in Von Holst’s picture (the fortune teller’s sinister “gaze,” her “smooth polished silent” cards, the box of jewels on the table THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE beside her), the poem contains an allegorized suit of her cards (“The heart, that doth but crave / More, having [23] fed,” 38-39, and so on) that may owe something to the pack of cards decorated with fanciful caricatures that Rossetti designed in 1840 (see Surtees No. 4). The opening stanzas of the “The Bride’s Prelude” are among the most vividly pictorial written by Rossetti, and in two instances—“counterchanged” and “lozenged arm-bearings”—use heraldic terms for visual effects21 (the word “repose” in its artistic sense may also be present here):

… even in the shade was gleam enough To shut out full repose From the bride’s ’tiring-chamber, which Was like the inner altar-niche Whose dimness worship had made rich.

Within the window’s heaped recess The light was counterchanged In blent reflexed manifold From perfume-caskets of wrought gold And gems the bride’s hair could not hold …

Against the haloed lattice-panes The bridesmaid sunned her breast; Then to the glass turned tall and free, And braced and shifted daintily Her loin-belt through her côte-hardie.

The belt was silver, and the clasp Of lozenged arm-bearings; A world of mirrored tints minute The rippling sunshine wrought into ’t, That flushed her hand and warmed her foot. (11-20; 26-35)

Carefully constructed word pictures of varying detail occur at several points later in the poem, especially in descriptions of the bride and bridesmaid: “Her arms were laid along her lap / With the hands open”; “The bride turned in her chair, and hid / Her face against the back”; she “Knelt,—the gold hair upon her back / Quite still in all its threads,—the track / Of her still shadow sharp and black”; “The sun … o’erspread / Like flame the hair upon her head / And fringed her face with burning red” (46-47; 86-87; 393-95; 478-80). “The Staff and Scrip” also contains word pictures (“The Queen [Blanchelys] sat idle by her loom … Her women, standing two and two, / In silence combed the fleece,” 21; 26-27)22 and a heraldic device (“a green banner wrought / With one white lily stem,” (81-82), and, as Oliver Elton has long since observed, it “falls naturally into four pictures, or panels, representing [24] the meeting [of the Pilgrim and Queen Blanchelys], the arming [of the Pilgrim], the vigil [of the Queen and her ladies], and the return [of the Pilgrim’s body]” (2:13). (In fact, the poem includes a fifth “picture … or panel” set in “The bright pavilions” of “Heaven,” where the “white shield” on which he had painted “her face” against a “golden” background now hangs, 206-08.) A different but related pattern of pictoriality is operative in “Ave” (1847 and later), where four of the poem’s central verse paragraphs correspond to one THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE of Rossetti’s Marian paintings of the 1840s and ’50s: the paragraph containing the lines “That eve thou didst go forth to give / Thy flowers some drink” to Mary Nazarene (1857), where she is depicted tending a lily and a rose; the paragraph containing the lines “through His boyhood, year by year / Eating with him the Passover” to The Passover of the Holy Family (1855-56),23 where she is depicted gathering bitter herbs for the meal; the paragraph containing the lines “When thou … washed thy garments in a stream” to The Annunciation (1855), where she is depicted doing so; and the paragraph containing the lines “when the twilight gone / Left darkness in the house of John” to Mary in the House of John (1858), where she is depicted filling a lamp while John looks on (64-65). Pre-Raphaelite pictoriality is also present in various ways in “A Last Confession” (1849, 1869-70) and “Jenny” (1848 and mainly 1858-69). In “A Last Confession” the narrator makes several passing references to religious art—for example, to “painted images” of saints in “church” and to “pictures where / Souls burned with Latin shrieking in their mouth”—and his narrative of the passage of the woman he has murdered from girlhood to adulthood is to an extent paced by similar references and by vivid word-pictures: “She might have served a painter to portray / That heavenly child which in the latter days / Shall walk between the lion and the lamb”; she cuts her hand on the “little image of a flying love / Made of our coloured glass-ware”; “as she stooped in laughing … [he] could see / Beneath the growing throat the breasts half-globed / Like folded lilies deepest in the stream”; and her shift in affection and loyalty becomes glaringly apparent when she ceases to pray to “An image of Our Lady … wrought / In marble by some great Italian hand” and prays instead “Before some new Madonna gaily decked, / Tinselled and gewgawed, a slight German toy” (54-56; 145-46; 224-26; 356-57; 384-85). In “Jenny” the narrator also employs word pictures and references to works of art in his meditation on the sleeping prostitute, in one instance in tandem:

Fair shines the gilded aureole In which our highest painters place Some living woman’s simple face. And the stilled features thus descried [25] As Jenny’s long throat droops aside,— The shadows where the cheeks are thin, And pure wide curve from ear to chin,— And Raffael’s, Leonardo’s hand To show them to men’s souls, might stand, Whole ages long, the whole world through, For preachings of what God can do. (230-40)

A similarly complex example of pictoriality comes when the dawn begins to illuminate the streets below Jenny’s room and the room itself, disclosing a scene that recalls Rossetti’s depiction of a drover carting a calf to the slaughterhouse in Found (1854): and then displaying a painterly attentiveness to details and the effects of light:

And there’s an early waggon drawn To market, and some sheep that jog Bleating before a barking dog; And the old streets come peering through Another night that London knew; And all as ghostlike as the lamps. (304-09) THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

As the light enters Jenny’s room the speaker’s description displays a painterly attention to the effects of light:

So on the wings of day decamps My last night’s frolic. Glooms begin To shiver off as lights creep in Past the gauze curtains half drawn-to, And the lamp’s doubled shade grows blue,—

And in the alcove coolly spread Glimmers with dawn your empty bed; And yonder your fair face I see Reflected lying on my knee, Where teems with foreshadowing Your pier-glass scrawled with diamond rings. (310-14; 317-22)

“Glooms begin / To shiver off” captures the psychological as well as the perceptual effect of the dawn light, and “the lamp’s doubled shade grows blue” is, as Buchanan notes, one of the “picturesque touches” in the poem (344). Even a sampling of similar touches in The House of Life (1870, 1881) and other poems would surely be redundant at this point. As has been amply demonstrated, Rossetti was a master practitioner of Pre-Raphaelite literary [26] pictoriality, and it is almost ubiquitous in his writing. More than this, it is a hallmark and signature of his poetry and short fiction, and its impact on other writers was deep and long-lasting. Indubitably the writer most deeply affected by Rossetti’s pictoriality is William Morris: The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems, regarded as the first volume of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, is dedicated to “My friend, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter”; it includes three poems—“King Arthur’s Tomb,” “The Blue Closet,” and “The Tune of Seven Towers”—inspired in part by medieval ivory carvings, and it abounds in heraldic devices and word pictures such as “The blue owls on my father’s hood / Were a little dimm’d as I turn’d away” in “The Judgment of God” (5-6) and “all these things I hold them just / As dragons in a missal-book … the colours are so bright; / Likewise we note the specks of white, / And the great plates of burnish’d gold” in “A Good Knight in Prison” (39-40, 43-45).24 Christina Rossetti’s poems in The Germ are relatively thin on pictoriality but, as revealed by the comments assembled by Antony H. Harrison in Christina Rossetti in Context, critics in the 1860s and later, regarded her poetry as “picturesque” and praised her for her “painted scenes” (27). Certainly, Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems both contain vivid word-pictures such as, in the title poem of the former, the description of Lizzie resisting the assaults of the goblins, which recalls Ecce Ancilla Domini! in its colouration (“White and golden … / Like a lily in a flood,— / Like a rock of blue veined stone,” 408-10), and, in the title poem of the latter, the description of the waiting bride and her floral adjuncts (“By her head lilies and rosebuds grow … Red and white poppies grow at her feet,” 25, 31), which recalls her brother’s many paintings of women with emblematic floral accessories. Nor did Pre-Raphaelite literary pictoriality manifest itself only in the Pre-Raphaelites and their close associates. The line from The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems to the “Conclusion” of Pater’s The Renaissance is direct and clear, but the pictoriality of some of the preceding essays in the collection may also owe a debt to Morris, and his Imaginary THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

Portraits to Rossetti as well as Morris. In a macabre variation of “Hand and Soul” in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward believes that he has put “the secret of … [his] soul” into his painting of Dorian, who later declares the decaying painting to be “the face of my soul” (9, 150). The young W.B. Yeats “was in all things Pre-Raphaelite” (Collected Works 10:342), and Pre-Raphaelite pictoriality never ceases to be a presence in his poetry and drama, from the “glimmering crimson … / Of many a figured embroidery” on Niamh’s “white vesture” and the “citron colour gloom[s] in her hair” in The Wanderings of Oisin (26-27; 25; 24) to the many references to artists and works of art in such [27] late poems as “Lapis Lazuli,” “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” and “Under Ben Bulben.” But decades before Yeats wrote his epitaph, literary and artistic tastes had turned against Pre-Raphaelitism. After visiting Ford Madox Ford’s house in 1914, the director of the Leicester Galleries Oliver Brown reported that “he was taking down some Pre-Raphaelites and preparing the walls for decorations by Wyndham Lewis” (qtd. in Cork 208) The “Yeux Glauques” and “Siena Mi Fe; Disfecemi Maremma” sections of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” are elegiacally forensic in their treatment of the Pre-Raphaelites and the writers of the 1890s. T.S. Eliot writes of the “prejudice against Pre-Raphaelite imagery … natural to one of … [his] generation,” and in “La Figlia Che Piange” he seems bent on transcending “The Blessed Damozel,” which he blames for retarding “[his] appreciation of Beatrice by many years,” “first by rapture and next by … revolt” (Selected Essays 225):

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— Lean on a garden urn— Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair— Clasp your flowers to you with pained surprise. (1-4)

But the poem ends with an admission of at least partial failure:

She turned away, but with the autumn weather Compelled my imagination many days, Many days and many hours: Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers. And I wonder how they should have been together! I should have lost a gesture and a pose. Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose. (17-24)

By 1917, when “La Figlia Che Piange” was published as the final, even valedictory, poem in Prufrock and Other Observations, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Pre-Raphaelite literary pictoriality of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the chief exemplar were out of fashion, but they could not be quite forgotten. [28]

NOTES

1Near the end of the letter, Rossetti encourages Hunt to be “more severe” in criticizing his work (Correspondence 1:67). 2In the third and fourth numbers, the title and subtitle become Art and Poetry: Being Thoughts towards Nature Conducted Principally by Artists. The statements on the back cover of the magazine contain clarifications of its aims: “the writings on Art will be to encourage and enforce an entire THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE adherence to the simplicity of nature … the chief object of the etched designs will be to illustrate this aim practically”; “this Periodical … [is] intended to enunciate the principles of those who … enforce a rigid adherence to the simplicity of Nature either in Art or Poetry” and to publish writing “in the spirit, or with the intent of exhibiting a pure and unaffected style.” But see David Latham for his support of Morris’s correction of both Ruskin and W.M. Rossetti overstating the centrality of naturalism, arguing instead that “it is the jarring conflict of tensions among these three paradoxical principles—a literary subject within a naturalistic setting with a decorative style—that gives Pre-Raphaelite art its power” (129). 3See Latham, who suggests a number of answers to the question he asks in his “A ‘World of its own Creation’: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and the New Paradigm for Art”: “We all recognize Pre-Raphaelite paintings when we see them. But how do we recognize Pre-Raphaelite poems?” (127). Latham suggests such characteristics as the choice of non-elitist genres, the artifice of a reflexive art based on art, the “jarring juxtaposition of incongruities” (146)—what Pater called grotesque correspondence and Ruskin called “fearless connections” (133). Laura Kilbride starts her suggestive survey—“The Pre-Raphaelite School: REcent Approaches”—with a similar contrast between the artistic and the literary: “While the facts about how and why Pre-Raphaelite artists sketched, painted, sculpted, or wove are at least established enough provoke debate, basic truths about the techniques, influences, and innovations of Pre-Raphaelite literary style remain to be established” (615). One aim of the present essay is to contribute to these discussions. 4The first recorded use of this term meaning “a vivid description in words, presenting the described object to the mind like a picture,” was in 1835 (OED). The earliest recorded use of the closely related “word painting”—“the action of describing something vividly in words” and “a vivid written description”—was in 1807. 5Disraeli states that Spenser “excelled in the pictorial faculty” and that Sidney’s “poetic eye was pictorial” (2:394, 359), two descriptions that could also apply to Rossetti. Amenities of Literature is the first recorded use of “pictorial” in the sense of “like a painting or picture; representing as if by a picture; painterly, picturesque, graphic” (OED). One aim of the Literary Club may have been to foster a literary pictoriality commensurate with Pre-Raphaelite art. 6In The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics, Paola Spinnozi and Elise Bizzotto provide a broader discussion of the magazine than attempted here, focusing on it as a testing ground for “‘realistic’ and ‘visionary’ attitudes” and “germinal,” “poetical imageries” (137) whose impact is discernible in the fin de siècle and Modernism (see especially their fourth chapter). 7Rossetti adds that he thinks Patmore’s “objection [is] groundless or at least irrelevant” (Correspondence 1:99). 8It is notable that when Woolner revised this line for inclusion in My Beautiful Lady (1863), it became less pictorial: “All is but coloured show” (87). 9In his journal entries for 15 and 17 September 1849, William Michael provides glimpses of Collinson gathering and assembling materials for “The Child Jesus” on the Isle of [29] Wight: “we went, under a splendid sky, to Blackgang-chine, Collinson noting down many things he observed on the way … We went over Carrisbrook Castle together, and he, on the way, wrote down something, either verses or material for verses” (P.R.B. Journal 14). 10See also William Michael’s journal entries of 18 and 24 September (again on the Isle of Wight) indicate that his interest in Nature and perception was at least as artistic as it was scientific: “picking up grasshoppers on the Undercliff, I find them to be very diverse in color, some of them brown, and some quite a clear red mostly … Whilst lying down in the midst of long yellow grass with an intensely blue sky over me, and holding my hand near my face, I was greatly struck with the difference in color resulting from a change in the opening and shutting either eye, my hand appearing red and warm in color in one instance, and quite pale in the other, as well as considerable alteration in the hues of yellow and blue about me” (14, 16). 11Probably blue-bodied dragonflies or, as Holmes suggests, damselflies, which are similar but smaller. THE CHARACTER OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AND FICTIONAL PROSE

12For a reading of the significance of the details in the opening verse paragraphs, see my “‘Very Clever’” (8-9). 13A similar but more elaborate and pictorial reference to “Raphaël” appears in “On Mary’s Portrait, which I painted six years ago” (1847): “‘So, along some grass bank in heaven / Mary the Virgin, going by / Seeth her servant Raphaël … She smiles: and he, as though she spoke, / Feels thanked, and from his lifted toque / His curls fall as he bends to her” (qtd. in W.M. Rossetti, “Notes” 663). “On Mary’s Portrait …” later became “The Portrait” (1847-70), a poem in which a painting of its creator’s dead beloved becomes an aide de memoire (“Here with her face doth memory sit”) that twice echoes Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (“This is her picture as she was: / It seems a thing to wonder on … and there she stands / As in that wood that day,” 1-2; 28-29), albeit in a very different register, the result being, intentionally or not, a multi-layered pictoriality. 14See Correspondence 11:115 and 2:171 for Rossetti’s purchase of etchings by Dürer in Paris and for his admiration of the German artist. 15Nor is Buchanan incorrect in suggesting that “The Blessed Damozel” “would have been almost too much in the shape of a picture” (342). 16A similar array of devices is used in Rossetti’s more uncanny and Poeian “Saint Agnes of Intercession” (1850), where references to actual artists and places give an aura of authenticity to the fictitious artist and painting around which the short story revolves. 17It may not be coincidental that the vast majority of the poems for pictures that Rossetti wrote between “For an Annunciation, Early German” and the brace of poems he wrote for The Question (1875) are Petrarchan sonnets with a space between the octave and the sestet, thus consisting of two rectangular blocks of type within a larger, almost square unit whose relationship with the off-white of the page parallels that of a picture on a wall. 18W.M. Rossetti describes “For Our Lady of the Rocks” as a “camera-obscura exercise of Rossetti’s transmuting imagination” (“Notes” 663). 19In “ Overtaken” (1871), in the 1881 version of The House of Life, this process is reversed: “I deemed thy garments, O my Hope, were grey, / So far I viewed thee. Now the space between / Is passed at length; and garmented in green … thou stand’st today” (1-4). 20When the sonnet or sonnets accompany the picture to which they refer, as was the case with those for Girlhood of Mary Virgin, they become part of what has become widely known as “double works” or “picture-sonnets” (see Helsinger’s perceptive readings of several of Rossetti’s sonnets for pictures, 55 and elsewhere). [30] 21Both terms are used in Archibald Barrington’s A Familiar Introduction to Heraldry (1848) (see, for example, 177 and Plate F). In A Manual of Heraldry, Historical and Popular (1863) Charles Boutell defines “counterchanged” and its cognates as “transmuted” and as “denot[ing] a reciprocal exchange of Metal for Colour, and Colour for Metal, either in the same Composition, or the same ‘Charge,’” and gives examples of arms consisting of “Lozengy” or “Lozenge-shaped figures” (86, 41-42). Reviewing the volume in the “Fine Arts” column of the Athenaeum, Rossetti’s erstwhile Pre-Raphaelite brother F.G. Stephens quotes Boutell on the importance of heraldry “to historical painters, now so attentive to … accuracy,” adding that “to the history of the arts much light is given by the study” (183). 22In the background of Before the Battle (1858), the principal figures of which are a knight and a lady attaching a banner to his lance, several women are weaving and carding wool. 23The sonnet “The Passover in the Holy Family (For a Drawing)” dates from 1867. 24See Helsinger 66-86 for an excellent discussion of Morris’s uses of heraldry and colour.

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