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Florence Boos
University of Iowa

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poetic Daughters: Introspective Lyricism in Fin de Siècle and Modernist British Women Poets

According to views prevalent earlier in the last century, modernists and Victorians once looked at each other across an impassable divide. 'On or about 1910,' Virginia Woolf effused, 'Human nature changed.' But as this audience will know, the past forty years have seen increasing efforts by literary scholars and critics to discern the many bridges between modernists, Edwardians, late Victorians and their intellectual forebears. Such a link is the well-documented influence of Dante Rossetti's art and criticism on Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats and an entire generation of male artists and critics of the early twentieth century. This talk will suggest that there was another, less well-heralded way in which Dante Rossetti influenced the generation which succeeded him: by the effect of the example of his romantic sonnets on women poets.

Nor until very recent decades have the women poets of the 1890s and early twentieth century been sufficiently reprinted and valued so that anyone might wish to examine broad patterns and influences in their works, but this gap has now been remedied by the efforts of Kathleen Hickock, Angela Leighton, Margaret Reynolds, Linda Hughes, Catherine O'Reilly and others. The poems of Victorian women have also been usefully reinterpreted in the light of women predecessors such as Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti. I would like to add to this discussion a renewed claim for Pre-Raphaelite influence: more broadly, of the poetry of Dante as well as his sister, William Morris and Algernon Swinburne, on that of several women poets writing between 1890 and 1930. Here I will discuss only the influence of Dante G. Rossetti. An entire essay could be devoted to the influence of his ballads alone, but in this talk I can consider only a small strand of this larger pre-Raphelite web of influence: how the sonnets of Dante Rossetti's 'House of Life' and his other introspective lyrics (e. g., 'The Portrait,' 'The Stream's Secret,' 'Long Ago' and others), provided a partial model for lyrics and sonnet sequences by several women poets, among them Rosa Newmarch, C. A. Dawson, Ellice Hopkins, Amy Levy, Mathilde Blind, Olive Custance, Michael Field, and Violet Jacob.

This is a somewhat ironic claim from a twenty-first century feminist perspective. As I argued many years ago in my book The Poetry of Dante Rossetti, and as many critics have since also observed, the attitudes toward women and sexuality expressed in Rossetti's poetry provided brocaded and romantic versions of assumptions about gender roles which Victorian and modern women worked (and still work) to render less oppressive. To note Rossetti's influence is not to make a claim about what rationally ought to have happened, however, but a study of what seems in fact to have occurred. Women poets turned to Rossetti's poetry because it was associated with avant-garde literary movements in general; because much of it centred on women and romantic expression as a central theme; and because the sonnet and short lyric were admirably suited to the introspective emotions and moods which they wished to record. Moreover, the mingled intensity and diffuseness of Rossetti's poetic imagery and language was perhaps usefully unspecific and androgynous; and his central vision of the love experience-subtle, evanescent, melancholic, frustrated, postponed, residing in the spirit and body of the lover more than a specific love object-was intuitively similar to the perceived inner life of many women poets of the period. Rossetti had rendered sublime the expression of an experience that many in his culture might have found merely empty or aberrant (a frustrated passion for another man's wife); for 'new women' seeking to celebrate eroticized friendships or lesbian romances, spiritualized or erotic unreciprocated passions, or even the emotions which underlay a fulfilled marriage, the form and mannerisms of a Petrarchan sonnet as mediated by Rossetti provided sympathetic modes of expression.

Since these examples of shared language, metaphors or other poetic mannerisms need demonstration, I will prepare a handout of about ten example of cross-influence, so that listeners can decide for themselves whether they evince the presence of Rossettian 'traces.' The most significant poets influenced by the Rossettian lyric mode are in my view Amy Levy, Mathilde Blind and Michael Field, but examples of clear intertextuality also occur in C. A. Dawson, Rosa Newmarch, Olive Custance, Violet Jacob and Ellice Hopkins. In the 'Sonnet and Dedication to L. F.' which introduces her long blank verse sequence Sappho (1889) for example, C. A. Dawson echoes Rossetti's 'The House of Life,' though the observer and objects of the love vision are all female:

The lily bells were chiming reveries
In the life-garden, and each swaying flower
Deep-shadowed in the dusk of branchy bower
Burgeoned into a maiden. Such as these-
A sunrise vision under leafing trees-
Have been those women of a parted hour
Whose sorrows urged my song-a dim love-power
Stretching from twilight of dead centuries,
To thrill the hush of noon with echoes sweet.

Oh thou! to me the blest of that throng
That ever passes with unceasing beat
Of tireless footsteps-thou, white life and strong, -
Receive of love, now learning at thy feet,
And mistress of none other speech-a song.

Examples of 'House of Life'-influenced poems appear through Mathilde Blind's work. Of these, 'Dead,' from Songs and Sonnets (1893) offers a meditative instance:

The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold
Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:
They have forged our chains of being for good or ill;
And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.
Our perishable bodies are the mould
In which their strong imperishable will-
Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil-
Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.
Vibrations infinite of life in death,
As a star's travelling light survives its star!
So may we hold our lives, that when we are
The fate of those who then will draw this breath,
They shall not drag us to their judgment-bar,
And curse the heritage which we bequeath.

A more modernist and 'symbolist' Rossettian inflection is provided by Olive Custance's 'Peacocks: A Mood,' published in her 1902 Rainbows:

In gorgeous plumage, azure, gold and green,
They trample the pale flowers, and their shrill cry
Troubles the garden's bright tranquillity!
Proud birds of Beauty, splendid and serene,
Spreading their brilliant fans, screen after screen
Of burnished sapphire, gemmed with mimic suns-\
Strange magic eyes that, so the legend runs,
Will bring misfortune to their fair demesne . . .

And my gay youth, that, vain and debonair,
Sits in the sunshine-tired at last of play
(A child, that finds the morning all too long),
Tempts with its beauty that disastrous day
When in the gathering darkness of despair
Death shall strike dumb the laughing mouth of song. (Rainbows, 1902)

In conclusion, I would suggest that although Rossetti was not the only poet to whom Edwardian and modernist poets could have turned for models of depressive introspection, the pervasiveness of parallels in diction, rhythm, form and tone suggest that for many his verses had indeed provided a significant precedent. In life Rossetti was somewhat possessive about his artistic creations, proud of the original features of manner which gave a 'trace' of identity, and cool to many aspects of the claims of the 'new woman.' Yet in the afterlife of memory he would surely have been pleased 'for the gift of grace unknown,' that elements of the form and sensibility of his haunting sonnets on loss and death survived in paradoxical and much transmuted form-'between the scriptured petals softly blown'-to help form the poetic tastes of another century.