^^m ^^S^^^^^^^o ^^^^^^^fes^ ^^^ ^%K ^^M ^^H m ^^ s K ^B ^^S s^ixt S^^fl ^ MARY LAKE MEMORIAL ^m BALLADS G SONNETS DAIH'E GABRIEL SOSSETH 1/ 1 < > Portland, Maine THOMAS B. MOSHER MOCCCCIII >^a^ ^^^^_ • • • •• • • DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI FROM THE PHOTOGRAPH BY W. 4 0. DOWNEY TO THEODORE WATTS, THE FRIEND WHOM MY VERSE WON FOR ME, THESE FEW MORE PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 238858 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (A Canzone) OBORN in May and dead at Eastertide, O mournful nightingale That sang as solemn in our English vale As any in the Italian country side. Now comes the spring again, When listeners hush and every songster sings ; The swallows sweep with darting wings At last and larks arise. For spring is here and only waits in vain One sweeter note for which we all are fain That sounds in Paradise. Yea, thou art dead, nor hast thou any care That the first hawthorn swells in bud to-night, Nor yet for our despair ; Nor for the songs that once were thy delight. Whose singing wings shall never cease to beat In music strange and sweet. And make a southern April in our air. IN MEMORIAM But thou art gone before To that remote, eternal, final shore That was thine unforgotten goal ; And thou hast climbed the mount of Paradise ; And thy triumphant soul, With him who living went that way. And him who saw all Heaven with blinded eyes, Rejoices in the day I Rejoice at last, O souls, That never were on earth completely glad For the full vision that ye had Of everlasting things ; Now sing within your shining aureoles And strike the golden strings Of an eternal lyre ! Thou, too, O latest comer in the Qiiire, Whom most I praise with him Thy master, and our milder English seer. Lift up thy music clear ; For never didst thou find the vision dim. Or long to linger here Among the roses and the summer green. But, knowing not a wavering in desire. With unrelenting wings Thou fleddest past us towards eternal things As swallows fly to summers never seen. A. Mary F. Robinson. CONTENTS PREFACE ...... DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI BY WALTER PATER BALLADS AND SONNETS : mdccclxxxi Ballads : ROSE MARY ...... THE WHITE SHIP ..... THE king's tragedy .... The House of Life : a sonnet-sequence « introductory sonnet part i. youth and change : PAGS xvii xxiii 5 49 65 103 I. LOVE ENTHRONED 107 - II. *BRIDAL BIRTH 108 XE III. ♦love's redemption 109 m IV. V. *lovesight . heart's hope I ID III jj VI. *THE KISS 112 ■g: VII. *NUPTIAL SLEEP . 113 ^ VIII. ♦supreme surrender . 114 ~ » The sonnets marked * are those which lypaarad 4a the Poems of 1870. vii vy V' W V X. ^X XI. >< XII. XIII. XIV. XV. >c\ XVI. f CHIMES . 218 PARTED PRESENCE 225 / A DEATH-PARTING 227 SPHERAL CHANGE 229 SUNSET WINGS 230 SONG AND MUSIC 232 THREE SHADOWS 233 ALAS, SO LONG ! 234 ADIEU 235 INSOMNIA 236 POSSESSION 237 THE CLOUD CONFIN] ss 238 XI CONTENTS Sonnets : PAGE FOR THE HOLY FAMILY (bY MICHELANGELO) ^ FOR SPRING (by SANDRO BOTTICELLI) . FIVE ENGLISH POETS — I. THOMAS CHATTERTON II. WILLIAM BLAKE III. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE IV. JOHN KEATS V. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ^ TIBER, NILE AND THAMES THE LAST THREE FROM TRAFALGAR CZAR ALEXANDER THE SECOND WORDS ON THE WINDOW-PANE '^ WINTER SPRING ..... the church-porch untimely lost (oliver madox brown ) place de la bastille, paris ** found" (for a picture) . A SEA-SPELL (fOR A PICTURE) FIAMMETTA (fOR A PICTURE) THE DAY-DREAM (fOR A PICTURE) ASTARTE SYRIACA (fOR A PICTURE) PROSERPINA (per UN QUADRO) PROSERPINA (for A PICTURE) LA BELLA MANO (PER UN QUADRO) LA BELLA MANO (fOR A PICTURE) 244 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 xu CONTENTS Additional Poems : mdccclxxxvi* n/. AT THE SUN-RISE IN 1 848 *AUTUMN SONG .... THE lady's lament A TRIP TO PARIS AND BELGIUM THE STAIRCASE OF NOTRE DAME, PARIS NEAR BRUSSELS A HALF-WAY PAUSE *ANTWERP AND BRUGES ON LEAVING BRUGES VOX ECCLESI^, VOX CHRISTI THE MIRROR .... DURING MUSIC *ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY-TREE ON CERTAIN ELIZABETHAN REVIVALS ENGLISH MAY DAWN ON THE NIGHT-JOURNEY TO PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON *raleigh's cell in the tower for an annunciation . *for a virgin and child by memmelinck *for a marriage of st. catherine, by THE SAME *MARY's GIRLHOOD (fOR A PICTURE) II. THE CHURCH PORCHES. II. . 271 272 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 * First brought together in the Collected Works, (1886) and, excepting a few which have an asterisk prefixed to title, not found elsewhere. The poems with asterisk were printed by Rossetti " in some outlying form, but not in his volumes." See Notes by W. M. Rossetti. Xlll CONTENTS PAGE VERSES FOR ROSSETTl's OWN WORKS OF ART : MICHAEL SCOTT's WOOING .... 3O2 MNEMOSYNE 302 POEMS IN ITALIAN (OR ITALIAN AND ENGLISH) FRENCH, AND LATIN: LA RICORDANZA 3O3 MEMORY ....... 303 CON MANTO d'oRO, ETC. .... 303 WITH GOLDEN MANTLE, ETC. . . . 303 ROBE d'oR, etc. ..... 303 A GOLDEN ROBE, ETC. . . . . 303 BARCAROLA BARCAROLA BAMBINO FASCIATO THOM^ FIDES ... 304 305 306 VERSICLES AND FRAGMENTS .... 307 TRANSLATIONS : LA PIA DANTE 3II CAPITOLO A. M. SALVINI TO FRANCESCO REDI, 16 ...... 312 *TWO LYRICS FROM NICCOLO TOMMASEO : I. THE YOUNG GIRL .... 315 II. A FAREWELL 318 TWO SONGS FROM VICTOR HUGO's "bURGRAVES" 32O LILITH FROM GOTHE . . . . 322 NOTES : I. VARIANTS IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE . 325 II. NOTES BY W. M. ROSSETTI . . . 327 PREFACE w PREFACE ITH the completion of Ballads and Sonnets our editorial labours in connexion with the poetical works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti come to an end. The main object of giving I the American reader an untampered text in Rossetti's original order of publication and " in a format commensurate with his rank and dignity as a poet," thus stands accomplished. A few additional poems brought together from various sources since 1881 by his brother and editor, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, are I properly placed at the close of the present volume.^ There are in existence, however, certain desiderata which might well have found place here had that been possible. I " One of these is a grotesque ballad about a Dutchman, begun at a very early date, and finished in his last illness. The other is a brace of sonnets, interesting in subject and as being the last thing that he wrote. These works were presented as a gift of love and gratitude to a friend, with whom it remains for I For what may be regarded as a final contribution to the literature of odds and ends, see Some Scraps of Verse and Prose by Dante Gabriel Rossetti^ in The Pall Mall Magazine for December, 1898, pp. 480-496. From this source in our reprint oi Poems (pp. 331-335,) we have availed ourselves of the one piece worth reprinting, to wit : Ave, in an earlier and more extended form. xvii PREFACE publishing at his own discretion." ^ Further light is thrown upon this subject by Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton in an article entitled RossettVs Unpublished Poems^ Therein a promise was made : " Time ... is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti's admirers can no longer be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the present year Jan Van Hunks and the 'Sphinx Sonnets,' the former of which will show a new and, I think, an unexpected side of Rossetti's genius.'* Seven years have elapsed since this was written but these " rights " unhappily remain unsatisfied ! Concerning three other poems, " two of them sonnets, a third a ballad of no great length," we have already dealt with the first sonnet — Nuptial Sleep — in the only manner possible. As regards the second sonnet — After the French Liberation of Italy — which Rossetti put into print when preparing the volume of 1870, we can for once entirely agree with him and his editor as to the propriety of its remaining unpublished.'* 2 See Preface to the Collected Works, Vol. I, pp. xxxiii; also Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer : Notes by W. M. Rossetti, (Lon- don, 1889,) p. 175, where the title of the first poem is given as The Dutchman's Pipe. The sonnets (p. 93,) were entitled The Sphinx. 3 Contributed to The Athenceum for May 23, 1896. See also a letter of great interest in The Spectator lor April 25, 1896, upon which we base our closing paragraph. 4 This sonnet along with his Autumn Song is now and again offered at an exorbitant price to collectors : Verses / By / Dante Gabriel Rossetti/ London: Privately Printed: / 1881. Octavo. Wrapper. Pp. 16, (including half-titles and blank leaves). xviii PREFACE Lastly, the ballad "of no great length" — Dennis Shand — which we have been privileged to read in the cancelled proof- pages, may also be safely relegated to the realm of abortive verse. Contrariwise two juvenile translations are intentionally omitted by us : the longest, taken from a poem — Der Arms Heinrich — is by Hartmann von Aue the old German minne- singer.5 An earlier effort consists of a version of Burger's Lenore completed on or about Rossetti's sixteenth year.^ Regarding our illustrations the two facsimiles are taken from Mr. William Sharp's volume of very positive value, — Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a Record and a Study, 7 while the Rossetti portrait, chosen for frontispiece, is an enlarged copy by Bierstadt process of the original photograph of 1862. One would indeed rejoice to know that an authoritative biography of Rossetti was set down for publication in the immediate future. For this boon we may have some few years more to wait. Nevertheless it is tolerably certain that the 5 Printed in the Collected Works, (Vol. II, pp. 420-460,) under the title of Henry the Leper : A Swabian Miracle- Rhyme. 6 See W. M. Rossetti's preface to Lenore by Gottfried August BUrger : Translated from the German by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (quarto), London, 1900. An original unpublished ballad in MS., composed at the same early age, and consisting of tvventj-five four-line stanzas, entitled William and Mary, was quite recently offered for sale by a Chicago bookseller, (April, 1903). 7 The original design for the Introductory Sonnet is in pen-and-ink and was presented to Rossetti's mother on her eightieth birthday, April 27, 1880. xix PREFACE friend to whom "he unlocked the most sacred secrets of his heart" will, when the time has arrived for him to speak, take the world into his confidence. In that day we shall possess a picture of the poet-painter as he appeared to one who loved him very dearly, limned in language of enduring truth, for all time present and to come. We now take leave of Rossetti in a prefatory way : of his poetry and art there can be no final leave-taking. ** Clouds are there none to dim for thee heaven's glow; The measured hours compel not thee at all ; Chance or necessity thou canst not know. Thy splendour wanes not when our night doth fall, Nor waxes with day's light however clear, Nor when our suns the season's warmth recall." DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI h DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI TT was characteristic of a poet who had ever something A about him of mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a name it may seem now established in English literature, to a special and limited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of exquisite fame before they were in the full sense published. The Blessed Damozel, although actually printed twice before the year 1870, was eagerly circulated in manuscript ; and the volume which it now opens came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of interest. For those poems were the work of a painter, understood to belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then rising into note ; and the reader of to-day may observe already, in The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own. Common to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, xxiii DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI was the quality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that earliest poem — a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be. At a time when poetic originality in England might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one n^w poet more, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcing attention — an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man's own proper speech ; as that speech itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. That he had this gift of trans- parency in language — the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume of typically perfect translations xxiv DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI from the delightful but difficult * * early Italian poets : " such transparency being indeed the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes complex or obscure ; but the term was always, one could see, deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew it. One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the pictures of those early painters contem- porary with Dante, who has shown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition of outline is -indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family circumstances, he was ever a lover — a ** servant and singer," faithful as Dante, ** of Florence and of Beatrice" — with some close inward XXV •H^J^ DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI conformities of genius also, independent of any mere circumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time, that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation. **Tell me now," he writes, for Villon's " Dictes-moy oil, n'en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine" — "Tell me now, in what hidden way is Lady Flora the lovely Roman : " — **way," in which one might actually chance to meet her; the unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent to place or region. And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of his conformities to Dante, the really imagina- tive vividness, namely, of his personifications — his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the xxvi DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI winged spirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole '* populace" of special hours and places, <'the hour" even ** which might have been, yet might not be," are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate voices. " Stands it not by the door — Love's Hour — till she and I shall meet; With bodiless form and unapparent feet That cast no shadow yet before, Though round its head the dawn begins to pour The breath that makes day sweet?" — *' Nay, why Name the dead hours ? I mind them well : Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell With desolate eyes to know them by." Poetry as a mania — one of Plato's two higher forms of *< divine" mania — has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the ** defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness ; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the scholastic realism of the Middle Age. In Lovers Nocturn and The StreanCs Secret^ con- gruously perhaps with a certain feverishness of soul in xxvii DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI the moods they present, there is at times a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism — •* Pity and love shall burn In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands ; And from the living spirit of love that stands Between her lips to soothe and yearn, Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn And loose my spirit's bands." But even if we concede this ; even if we allow, in the very plan of those two compositions, something of the literary conceit — what exquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, as they stand ! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of water, all its details for the eye of a painter ; in the other, how subtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleep and dreams ! In both of them, with much the same attitude and tone. Love — sick and doubtful Love — would fain inquire of what lies below the surface of sleep, and below the water ; stream or dream being forced to speak by Love's powerful *' control ; " and the poet would have it foretell the fortune, issue, and event of his wasting passion. Such artifices, indeed, were not unknown in the old Provencal poetry of which Dante had learned something. Only, in Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by a serious purpose, by that sincerity of his, which allies itself readily to a serious beauty, a sort xxviii DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI of grandeur of literary workmanship, to a great style. One seems to hear there a really new kind of poetic utterance, with effects which have nothing else like them; as there is nothing else, for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream in Genesis^ or Blake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or Addison's Nineteenth Psalm. With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common things — dawn, noon, night — are full of human or personal expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the picturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time — the '* hollow brimmed with mist," or the ** ruined weir," as he sees it from one of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his *' house of life " (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl) attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial or descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is certainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote and mystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but incorporate itself xxix DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI with some phase of strong emotion. Every one under- stands how this may happen at critical moments of life ; what a weirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into **the white-flower'd elder-thicket," when Godiva saw it * * gleam through the Gothic archways in the wall," at the end of her terrible ride. To Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every moment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions of man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite to him. But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love — of love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material beauty — which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers ; Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory, Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the words of Merim^e, se passionnent pour la passion^ one of Love's lovers. And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty as material, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter, indeed, have been for the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism, by schoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are. In our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI which the words matter and spirit do but roughly dis- tinguish, play inextricably into each other. Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way of taking life ; and in this, Dante is the central represent- ative of its spirit. To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent : if the spiritual attains the definite visability of a crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity. And here again, by force of instinct, Rossetti is one with him. His chosen type of beauty is one, Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought, Nor Love her body from her soul." Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous also, or material. The shadowy world, which he realises so powerfully, has still the ways and houses, the land and water, the light and darkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do in the moulding of those bodily powers and aspects which counted for so large a part of the soul, here. xxxi DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other, swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius, mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a world where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those affections — of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunate collisions with those other great matters ; how it looks, as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them : all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, and especially of what he designed as his chief poetic work, *' a work to be called The House of Life^^^ towards which the majority of his sonnets and songs were contributions. The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance or destiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one's own at all, if it be changed too lightly ; in which every object has its associations — the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books, the hair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in the secret drawers, the names and words scratched on the windows, windows open upon prospects the saddest or the sweetest; the house one must quit, yet taking xxxii DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI perhaps, how much of its quietly active light and colour along with us ! -j— grown now to be a kind of raiment to one's body, as the body, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of the soul — r under that image, the whole of Rossetti's work might count as a House of Life^ of which he is but the '* Interpreter." And it is a ** haunted" house. K A sense of power in love, defying distance, and those barriers which are so much more than physical distance, of unutterable desire penetrating into the world of sleep,\however ** lead-bound," was one of those anticipative notes obscurely struck in The Blessed Damozel^ and, in his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer in mesmerism. Dream-land, as we said, with its ** phantoms of the body," deftly coming and going on love's service, is to him, in no mere fancy or figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, or addition to, our waking life ; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully upon sleep, for the lack of it became mortal disease with him. "One may even recognise a sort of morbid and over-hasty making-ready for death itself, which increases on him ; thoughts concerning it, its imageries, coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, one might think, of even the very saddest, quite whole- some wisdom. xxxiii DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI And indeed the publication of his second volume of Ballads and Sonnets preceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth. That volume bears witness to the reverse of any failure of power, or falling-off from his early standard of literary perfection, in every one of his then accustomed forms of poetry — the song, the sonnet, and the baUad. The newly printed sonnets, now complet- ing the House of Life ^ certainly advanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness ; his dramatic power in the ballad, was here at its height ;i while one monumental, gnomic piece. Soothsay^ testifies, more clearly even than the Nineveh of his first volume, to the reflective force, the dry reason, always at work behind his imaginative creations, which at no time dispensed with a genuine intellectual structure. For in matters of pure reflection also, Rossetti maintained the painter's sensuous clearness of conception ; and this has something to do with the capacity, largely illustrated by his ballads, of telling some red-hearted story of impassioned action with effect. Have there, in very deed, been ages, in which the external conditions of poetry such as Rossetti's were of more spontaneous growth than in our own ? The archaic side of Rossetti's work, his preferences in regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those who have certainly xxxiv I DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI thought so, who fancied they could have breathed more largely in the age of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages, in the words of Stendhal — ces si^cles de -passions ou les dmes pouvaient se livrer franchement a la plus haute exaltation^ quand les passions qui font la possibilite com7ne les sujets des beaux arts existaient. We may think, perhaps, that such old time as that has never really existed except in the fancy of poets ; but it was to find it, that Rossetti turned so often from modern life to the chronicle of the past. Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond any other, is strong in the matter of heroic and vehement hatreds and love, the tragic Mary herself being but the perfect blossom of them ; and it is from that history that Rossetti has taken the subjects of the two longer ballads of his second volume : of the three admirable ballads in it. The King's Tragedy (in which Rossetti has dexterously interwoven some relics of James's own exquisite early verse) reaching the highest level of dramatic success, and marking perfection, perhaps, in this kind of poetry ; which, in the earlier volume, gave us, among other pieces, Troy Town, Sister Helen, and Eden Bower. Like those earlier pieces, the ballads of the second volume bring with them the question of the poetic value of the ** refrain " — xxxv DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI ♦' Eden bower's in flower : And O the bower and the hour ! " — and the like. Two of those ballads — Troy Town and Eden Bower ^ are terrible in theme ; and the refrain serves, perhaps, to relieve their bold aim at the sentiment of terror. In Sister Helen again, the refrain has a real, and sustained purpose (being here duly varied also) and performs the part of a chorus, as the story proceeds. Yet even in these cases, whatever its effect may be in actual recitation, it may fairly be questioned, whether, to the mere reader their actual effect is not that of a positive interruption and drawback, at least in pieces so lengthy; and Rossetti himself, it would seem, came to think so, for in the shortest of his later ballads, The White Ship — that old true history of the generosity with which a youth, worthless in life, flung himself upon death — he was contented with a single utterance of the refrain, *' given out " like the keynote or tune of a chant. In The King's Tragedy, Rossetti has worked upon motive, broadly human (to adopt the phrase of popular criticism) such as one and all may realise. Rossetti, indeed, with all his self-concentration upon his own peculiar aim, by no means ignored those general interests which are external to poetry as he conceived it ; as he has shown here and there, in this poetic, as also in picto- xxxvi DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI rial, work. It was but that, in a life to be shorter even than the average, he found enough to occupy him in the fulfilment of a task, plainly * ' given him to do." Perhaps, if one had to name a single composition of his to readers desiring to make acquaintance with him for the first time, one would select : The King's Tragedy — that poem so moving, so. popularly dramatic, and lifelike. Notwith- standing this, his work, it must be conceded, certainly through no narrowness or egotism, but in the faithfulness of a true workman to a vocation so emphatic, was mainly of the esoteric order. But poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions : it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things, after Gray's way (though Gray too, it is well to remember, seemed in his own day, seemed even to Johnson, obscure) or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth. Rossetti did something, something excellent, of the former kind ; but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay in the adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of phenomena, in the creation of a new ideal. i^ Walter Pater. 1883. BALLADS AND SONNETS MDCCCLXXXI ROSE MARY I Of her iwojights with the Beryl-stone Lost the first, but the second won. ROSE MARY PART I ^' \/[ ARY mine that art Mary's Rose, i V 1 Come in to me from the garden-close. The sun sinks fast with the rising dew, And we marked not how the faint noon grew ; But the hidden stars are calling you. *'Tall Rose Mary, come to my side, And read the stars if you'd be a bride. In hours whose need was not your own. While you were a young maid yet ungrown, You've read the stars in the Beryl-stone. ** Daughter, once more I bid you read ; But now let it be for your own need : Because to-morrow, at break of day, To Holy Cross he rides on his way, Your knight Sir James of Heronhaye. «* Ere he wed you, flower of mine. For a heavy shrift he seeks the shrine. Now hark to my words and do not fear ; 111 news next I have for your ear ; But be you strong, and our help is here. - 5 ROSE MARY ** On his road, as the rumour's rife, An ambush waits to take his life. He needs will go, and will go alone ; Where the peril lurks may not be known ; But in this glass all things are shown." Pale Rose Mary sank to the floor : — ** The night will come if the day is o'er I" ** Nay, heaven takes counsel, star with star, And help shall reach your heart from afar : A bride you'll be, as a maid you are." The lady unbound her jewelled zone And drew from her robe the Beryl-stone. Shaped it was to a shadowy sphere, — World of our world, the sun's compeer. That bears and buries the toiling year. With shuddering light 'twas stirred and strewn Like the cloud-nest of the wading moon : Freaked it was as the bubble's ball, Rainbow-hued through a misty pall Like the middle light of the waterfall. Shadows dwelt in its teeming girth Of the known and unknown things of earth ; The cloud above and the wave around, — The central fire at the sphere's heart bound, Like doomsday prisoned underground. 6 ROSE MARY A thousand years it lay in the sea With a treasure wrecked from Thessaly ; Deep it lay 'mid the coiled sea-wrack, But the ocean-spirits found the track : A soul was lost to win it back. The lady upheld the wondrous thing : — **I11 fare" (she said) *' with a fiend's-f airing But Moslem blood poured forth like wine Can hallow Hell, *neath the Sacred Sign ; And my lord brought this from Palestine. ** Spirits who fear the Blessed Rood Drove forth the accursed multitude That heathen worship housed herein, — Never again such home to win, Save only by a Christian's sin. ** All last night at an altar fair I burnt strange fires and strove with prayer ; Till the flame paled to the red sunrise, All rites I then did solemnize ; And the spell lacks nothing but your eyes." Low spake maiden Rose Mary : — ** O mother mine, if I should not see ! " **Nay, daughter, cover your face no more, But bend love's heart to the hidden lore. And you shall see now as heretofore." ROSE MARY Paler yet were the pale cheeks grown As the grey eyes sought the Beryl-stone : Then over her mother's lap leaned she, And stretched her thrilled throat passionately, And sighed from her soul, and said, **I see." Even as she spoke, they two were 'ware Of music-notes that fell through the air ; v A chiming shower of strange device, Drop echoing drop, once twice and thrice, As rain may fall in Paradise. An instant come, in an instant gone. No time there was to think thereon. The mother held the sphere on her knee : — ** Lean this way and speak low to me. And take no note but of what you see." ** I see a man with a besom grey That sweeps the flying dust away." *' Ay, that comes first in the mystic sphere ; But now that the way is swept and clear, Heed well what next you look on there." ** Stretched aloft and adown I see Two roads that part in waste-country : The glen lies deep and the ridge stands tall ; What's great below is above seen small, And the hill-side is the valley-wall." 8 ROSE MARY *' Stream-bank, daughter, or moor and moss, Both roads will take to Holy Cross. The hills are a weary waste to wage ; But what of the valley-road's presage ? That way must tend his pilgrimage." ** As 'twere the turning leaves of a book. The road runs past me as I look ; Or it is even as though mine eye ^ Should watch calm waters filled with sky While lights and clouds and wings went by." "In every covert seek a spear; They'll scarce lie close till he draws near." **The stream has spread to a river now; The stiff blue sedge is deep in the slough. But the banks are bare of shrub or bough." ** Is there any roof that near at hand Might shelter yield to a hidden band?" ** On the further bank I see but one, And a herdsman now in the sinking sun Unyokes his team at the threshold-stone." ** Keep heedful watch by the water's edge, — Some boat might lurk 'neath the shadowed sedge." ** One slid but now 'twixt the winding shores, But a peasant woman bent to the oars And only a young child steered its course. ROSE MARY *' Mother, something flashed to my sight! — Nay, it is but the lapwing's flight. — What glints there like a lance that flees ? — Nay, the flags are stirred in the breeze, . And the water's bright through the dart-rushes. ** Ah ! vainly I search from side to side : — Woe's me ! and where do the f oemen hide ? Woe's me ! and perchance I pass them by. And under the new dawn's blood-red sky Even where I gaze the dead shall lie." Said the mother : '* For dear love's sake, Speak more low, lest the spell should break." Said the daughter : " By love's control. My eyes, my words, are strained to the goal; But oh I the voice that cries in my soul I " *' Hush, sweet, hush ! be calm and behold." **I see two floodgates broken and old : The grasses wave o'er the ruined weir. But the bridge still leads to the breakwater ; And — mother, mother, O mother dear!" The damsel clung to her mother's knee, And dared not let the shriek go free ; Low she crouched by the lady's chair. And shrank blindfold in her fallen hair. And whispering said, ** The spears are there I " lO ROSE MARY The lady stooped aghast from her place, And cleared the locks from her daughter's face. " More's to see, and she swoons, alas ! Look,, look again, 'ere the moment pass ! One shadow comes but once to the glass. <' See you there what you saw but now?" *' I see eight men 'neath the willow-bough. All over the weir a wild growth's spread : Ah me ! it will hide a living head As well as the water hides the dead. * ' They lie by the broken water-gate As men who have a while to wait. The chiefs high lance has a blazoned scroll, — He seems some lord of tithe and toll With seven squires to his bannerole. **The little pennon quakes in the air, I cannot trace the blazon there : — Ah ! now I can see the field of blue, The spurs and the merlins two and two ; — It is the Warden of Holycleugh ! " <* God be thanked for the thing we know ! You have named your good knight's mortal foe. Last Shrovetide in the tourney-game He sought his life by treasonous shame ; And this way now doth he seek the same. II ROSE MARY *' So, fair lord, such a thing you are I But we too watch till the morning star. Well, June is kind and the moon is clear : Saint Judas send you a merry cheer For the night you lie at Warisweir ! '*Now, sweet daughter, but one more sight, And you may lie soft and sleep to-night. We know in the vale what perils be : Now look once more in the glass, and see If over the hills the road lies free." Rose Mary pressed to her mother's cheek, And almost smiled but did not speak ; Then turned again to the saving spell. With eyes to search and with lips to tell The heart of things invisible. ** Again the shape with the besom grey Comes back to sweep the clouds away. Again I stand where the roads divide ; But now all's near on the steep hillside. And a thread far down is the rivertide." '* Ay, child, your road is o'er moor and moss. Past Holycleugh to Holy Cross. Our hunters lurk in the valley's wake, As they knew which way the chase would take Yet search the hills for your true love's sake." 12 ROSE MARY ** Swift and swifter the waste runs by, And nought I see but the heath and the sky ; No brake is there that could hide a spear, And the gaps to a horseman's sight lie clear ; Still past it goes, and there's nought to fear." ** Fear no trap that you cannot see, — They'd not lurk yet too warily. Below by the weir they lie in sight, And take no heed how they pass the night Till close they crouch with the morning light. '*The road shifts ever and brings in view Now first the heights of Holycleugh : Dark they stand o'er the vale below. And hide that heaven which yet shall show The thing their master's heart doth know. '* Where the road looks to the castle steep, There are seven hill-clefts wide and deep : Six mine eyes can search as they list. But the seventh hollow is brimmed with mist ; If aught were there, it might not be wist." '* Small hope, my girl, for a helm to hide In mists that cling to a wild moorside : Soon they melt with the wind and sun. And scarce would wait such deeds to be done God send their snares be the worst to shun." 13 ROSE MARY * * Still the road winds ever anew As it hastens on towards Holycleugh ; And ever the great walls loom more near, Till the castle-shadow, steep and sheer, Drifts like a cloud, and the sky is clear.*' ** Enough, my daughter," the mother said. And took to her breast the bending head ; ** Rest, poor head, with my heart below. While love still lulls you as long ago : For all is learnt that we need to know. *' Long the miles and many the hours From the castle-height to the abbey-towers ; But here the journey has no more dread; Too thick with life is the whole road spread For murder's trembling foot to tread." She gazed on the Beryl-stone full fain Ere she wrapped it close in her robe again : The flickering shades were dusk and dun. And the lights throbbed faint in unison, Like a high heart when a race is run. As the globe slid to its silken gloom. Once more a music rained through the room ; Low it splashed like a sweet star-spray. And sobbed like tears at the heart of May, And died as laughter dies away. ROSE MARY The lady held her breath for a space, ^'d And then she looked in her daughter's face : But wan Rose Mary had never heard ; Deep asleep like a sheltered bird She lay with the long spell minister'd. »xi iniA ** Ah I and yet I must leave you, dear. For what you have seen your knight must hear. Within four days, by the help of God, He comes back safe to his heart's abode : Be sure he shall shun the valley-road." Rose Mary sank with a broken moan. And lay in the chair and slept alone. Weary, lifeless, heavy as lead : Long it was ere she raised her head And rose up all discomforted. She searched her brain for a vanished thing. And clasped her brows, remembering ; Then knelt and lifted her eyes in awe, And sighed with a long sigh sweet to draw : — ** Thank God, thank God, thank God I saw I " The lady had left her as she lay. To seek the Knight of Heronhaye. But first she clomb by a secret stair, And knelt at a carven altar fair. And laid the precious Beryl there. 15 ROSE MARY Its girth was graved with a mystic rune In a tongue long dead 'neath sun and moon A priest of the Holy Sepulchre Read that writing and did not err ; And her lord had told its sense to her. She breathed the words in an undertone : — ** None sees here but the fure alone. -^ ** And oh ! " she said, ** what rose may be In Mary's bower more pure to see Than my own sweet maiden Rose Mary ? " i6 ROSE MARY BERYL-SONG We whose home is the Beryl^ Fire-spirits of dread desire^ Who entered in By a secret sin, ^Gainst whom all powers that strive with ours are sterile, — We cry. Woe to thee, mother 1 What hast thou taught her, the girl thy daughter. That she and none other Should this dark morrow to her deadly sorrow imperil? What were her eyes But the fiend's own spies, O mother. And shall We not fee her, our proper prophet and seer? Go to her, mother. Even thou, yea thou and none other ^ Thou, from the Beryl: Her fee must thou take her, '-r- Her fee that We send, and make her. Even in this hour, her sin's unsheltered avower. Whose steed did neigh. Riderless, bridle-less. At her gate before it was day? Lo! where doth hover The soul oj her lover? 17 ROSE MARY She sealed his doom^ she^ she was the sworn a-pfrover^- Whose eyes were so wondrous wise. Yet blind ^ ah! blind to his peril! For stole not We in Through a love-linked sin^ ' Gainst whom all powers at war with ours are sterile^ Fire-spirits of dread desire^ We whose home is the Beryl? i8 ROSE MARY PART II ^ ^ pALE Rose Mary, what shall be done 1 With a rose that Mary weeps upon ? " ** Mother, let it fall from the tree. And never walk where the strewn leaves be Till winds have passed and the path is free." **Sad Rose Mary, what shall be done With a cankered flower beneath the sun?" ** Mother, let it wait for the night; Be sure its shame shall be out of sight Ere the moon pale or the east grow light." **Lost Rose Mary, what shall be done With a heart that is but a broken one?" * * Mother, let it lie where it must ; The blood was drained with the bitter thrust, And dust is all that sinks in the dust." *' Poor Rose Mary, what shall I do, — I, your mother, that loved you?" *\0 my mother, and is love gone? Then seek you another love anon : Who cares what shame shall lean upon ? " 19 ROSE MARY Low drooped trembling Rose Mary, Then up as though in a dream stood she. ** Come, my heart, it is time to go ; This is the hour that has whispered low When thy pulse quailed in the nights we know. "Yet O my heart, thy shame has a mate Who will not leave thee desolate. Shame for shame, yea and sin for sin : Yet peace at length may our poor souls win If love for love be found therein. '*0 thou who seek'st our shrift to-day," She cried, **0 James of Heronhaye — Thy sin and mine was for love alone ; And oh I in the sight of God 'tis known How the heart has since made heavy moan. ** Three days yet ! " she said to her heart ; ** But then he comes, and we will not part. God, God be thanked that I still could see I Oh I he shall come back assuredly, But where, alas I must he seek for me ? ** O my heart, what road shall we roam Till my wedding-music fetch me home ? For love's shut from us and bides afar. And scorn leans over the bitter bar And knows us now for the thing we are." 20 ROSE MARY Tall she stood with a cheek flushed high And a gaze to burn the heart-strings by. 'Twas the lightning-flash o'er sky and plain Ere labouring thunders heave the chain From the floodgates of the drowning rain. The mother looked on the daughter still As on a hurt thing that's yet to kill. Then wildly at length the pent tears came ; The love swelled high with the swollen shame, And their hearts' tempest burst on them. Closely locked, they clung without speech, And the mirrored souls shook each to each, As the cloud-m'oon and the water-moon Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon In stormy bowers of the night's mid-noon. They swayed together, shuddering sore, Till the mother's heart could bear no more. 'Twas death to feel her own breast shake Even to the very throb and ache Of the burdened heart she still must break. All her sobs ceased suddenly, And she sat straight up but scarce could see. * * O daughter, where should my speech begin ? Your heart held fast its secret sin : How think you, child, that I read therein?" 21 ROSE MARY '* Ah me ! but I thought not how it came When your words showed that you knew my shame And now that you call me still your own, I half forget you have ever known. Did you read my heart in the Beryl-stone ? " The lady answered her mournfully : — *' The Beryl-stone has no voice for me : But when you charged its power to show The truth which none but the pure may know, Did naught speak once of a coming woe?" Her hand was close to her daughter's heart. And it felt the life-blood's sudden start : A quick deep breath did the damsel draw, Like the struck fawn in the oakenshaw : «* O mother," she cried, ** but still I saw !" ** O child, my child, why held you apart From my great love your hidden heart? Said I not that all sin must chase From the spell's sphere the spirits of grace, And yield their rule to the evil race ? *' Ah ! would to God I had clearly told How strong those powers, accurst of old : Their heart is the ruined house of lies ; O girl, they can seal the sinful eyes. Or show the truth by contraries I " 22 ROSE MARY The daughter sat as cold as a stone, And spoke no word but gazed alone, Nor moved, though her mother strove a space To clasp her round in a close embrace, Because she dared not see her face. ** Oh ! " at last did the mother cry, *' Be sure, as he loved you, so will I ! Ah ! still and dumb is the bride, I trow ; But cold and stark as the winter snow Is the bridegroom's heart, laid dead below ! ** Daughter, daughter, remember you That cloud in the hills by Holycleugh? 'Twas a Hell-screen hiding truth away : There, not i' the vale, the ambush lay, And thence was the dead borne home to-day." Deep the flood and heavy the shock When sea meets sea in the riven rock ; But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea To the prisoned tide of doom set free In the breaking heart of Rose Mary. Once she sprang as the heifer springs With the wolfs teeth at its red heart-strings : First 'twas fire in her breast and brain. And then scarce hers but the whole world's pain. As she gave one shriek and sank again. 23 ROSE MARY In the hair dark-waved the face lay white As the moon lies in the lap of night ; And as night through which no moon may dart Lies on a pool in the woods apart, So lay the swoon on the weary heart. The lady felt for the bosom's stir, And wildly kissed and called on her ; Then turned away with a quick footfall, And slid the secret door in the wall, And clomb the strait stair's interval. There above in the altar-cell A little fountain rose and fell : She set a flask to the water's flow. And, backward hurrying, sprinkled now The still cold breast and the pallid brow. I Scarce cheek that warmed or breath on the air, ^ Yet something told that life was there. ** Ah ! not with the heart the body dies,! " The lady moaned in a bitter wise ; Then wrung her hands and hid her eyes. ** Alas ! and how may I meet again In the same poor eyes the self-same pain? What help can I seek, such grief to guide? Ah ! one alone might avail," she cried, — **The priest who prays at the dead man's side." 24 ROSE MARY The lady arose, and sped down all The winding stairs to the castle-hall. Long-known valley and wood and stream, As the loopholes passed, naught else did seem Than the torn threads of a broken dream. The hall was full of the castle-folk; The women wept, but the men scarce spoke. As the lady crossed the rush-strewn floor, The throng fell backward, murmuring sore, And pressed outside round the open door. A stranger shadow hung on the hall Than the dark pomp of a funeral. 'Mid common sights that were there alway, As 'twere a chance of the passing day, On the ingle-bench the dead man lay. A priest who passed by Holycleugh The tidings brought when the day was new. He guided them who had fetched the dead ; And since that hour, unwearied. He knelt in prayer at the low bier's head. Word had gone to his own domain That in evil wise the knight was slain : Soon the spears must gather apace And the hunt be hard on the hunters' trace ; But all things yet lay still for a space. 25 ROSE MARY As the lady's hurried step drew near, The kneeling priest looked up to her. *' Father, death is a grievous thing ; But oh I the woe has a sharper sting That craves by me your ministering. * * AlasTor the child that should have wed This noble knight here lying dead ! Dead in hope, with all blessed boon Of love thus rent from her heart ere noon, I left her laid in a heavy swoon. ** O haste to the open bower-chamber j That's topmost as you mount the stair : Seek her, father, ere yet she wake ; Your words, not mine, be the first to slake | This poor heart's fire, for Christ's sweet sake ! ♦ . | ** God speed I " she said as the priest passed through, *' And I ere long will be with you." Then low on the hearth her knees sank prone ; She signed all folk from the threshold-stone. And gazed in the dead man's face alone. The fight for life found record yet In the clenched lips and the teeth hard-set ; The wrath from the bent brow was not gone. And stark in the eyes the hate still shone Of that they last had looked upon. 26 ROSE MARY The blazoned coat was rent on his breast Where the golden field was goodliest ; But the shivered sword, close-gripped, could tell That the blood shed round him where he fell Was not all his in the distant dell. The lady recked of the corpse no whit, But saw the soul and spoke to it : A light there was in her steadfast eyes, — The fire of mortal tears and sighs That pity and love immortalize. ** By thy death have I learnt to-day Thy deed, O James of Heronhaye ! Great wrong thou hast done to me and mine ; And haply God hath wrought for a sign By our blind deed this doom of thine. *