“THE MOSS ON A ROCK OR THE NOTE OF A CHAFFINCH”

The central problems suggested by the “scandal of form” were, in various ways, always wrestled with in Rossetti’s writing. Much of his poetry, in fact, can be read as an exploration of the distinctions and tensions pointed to in the previous pages. To restate the topic in different words, the larger

problem at issue is what one twentieth-century critic, writing in a different literary context, refers to in noticing how the “rule of language over poetry has often seemed like a tyranny of inert material over creative inspiration” (Shapiro 234). Rossetti in fact admitted as much about his own writing in a comparison he made between himself and Swinburne: “I am the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the racked and tortured medium never permitted an instant’s surcease of agony until the thing on hand is finished.” That Rossetti may have been influenced by happenstance associations between words and sounds is allowed up to a point, but beyond that (and the threshold has been rather low), it becomes a matter of

impropriety and poetic failure. Like the rhapsode of Plato’s Ion, to admit that one is a medium worked upon by external powers is the first concession leading to the conclusion that the person inspired by other forces knows nothing at all and is a mere slave, one subject to the agency of another source. In the context of the later Victorian poets, that source was often feared to be the “rule of language” itself, as reflected in the belittling notion of the Victorian poet as a technical virtuoso with little intellectual or

To amplify this issue with respect to what has been said in an earlier section of this chapter, for Rossetti’s poems to be regarded as “occasional” would court the stigma of mundane triviality on the one hand and, on the other, the stigma of personal confessionalism. Such a disclosure would be objectionable for making a show of immoral or vulgar experience, which was essentially sexual in the context of the later nineteenth century. At the same time, the “occasional” categorization would make an explicit theme of non- monumentality as such, and, from another vantage, such poems might be seen to monumentalize kinds of experience thought to have no business being elevated in the first place—“occasion,” like the “rule of language,” exerting another type of suspect control over poetry and creative inspiration. Swinburne’s classicizing tendencies, touched on in the previous chapter, were considered misguided for a similar reason, where the blunt treatment of sexual topics under the guise of a Hellenistic ideal was taken to be an

obscene mixing that debased whatever it touched. In a different but related context, the initial shock delivered by Pre-Raphaelite painters around 1850 and soon after was served in much the same manner and elicited withering condemnations from reviewers. Dickens, in a famous example, thought the ordinary, “Pre-Raphaelite” depiction of Biblical scenes disgusting,

family seemed to him unrecognizable in the unsteady hand and exaggerated coloring of Millais’s technique. As Millais’s example suggested, Pre-

Raphaelite artists, both painters and poets, were victims of contradictions that their own art promulgated and even in a sense depended upon for its significance. Simultaneously too abstract and too concrete, at once richly sensuous in coloring and yet compositionally austere, Pre-Raphaelite works had little ground for defense against a kind of criticism whose aesthetic preferences were already decided against such mixing.

Even William Michael, who championed Gabriel with the expected filial sympathy, was aware that his brother’s poetry was, as he wrote,

“abstract in thought and ornate in structure” (WMR, Designer and Writer 181). As his brother’s editor and explicator, William had no reason to shun the recondite corners of Gabriel’s work, and, like their father, who elucidated what he took to be the anti-Papist esotericism of Dante, William also made a career of clarifying poetry’s dark figures. But a more impartial and insightful critic is Walter Pater, who was also drawn to the abstract and the ornate in Rossetti’s poetry, but felt no urge to apologize for what he called a “forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions” (Appreciations 217). In combination with such “grotesque materialising of abstractions” was what Pater saw as an odd “definiteness of outline,” and the blending of the two

was for him the source of the more bizarre effects of Rossetti’s work— ultimately a sign of his “poetic mania.” For Pater, that is, the possibility that Rossetti might have been the “racked and tortured medium” of his own efforts was an indication of his significance as a poet touched by a variety of Plato’s divine mania. Rossetti’s particular kind of maniacal word-weaving was thus capable of producing an “insanity of realism” that was a liability to his reputation, and, at least for Pater, was also the most compelling cause for reading and promoting his poetry. The challenge for Rossetti’s poetry,

however, was that it seemed to need to establish its meanings not by way of but despite its own status as poetic language.

Like Pater, Coventry Patmore was struck by a quality of precision in Rossetti’s rendering of detail, and his response registers similar concerns. As for Pater, Patmore was drawn in by the peculiarity of his verse—what

Patmore saw as Rossetti’s representative eccentricity. Writing about the lyric “Even So” (written in 1859, first published in 1870), Patmore’s remarks, which focus especially on the poem’s third stanza, recall the “forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions” noticed by Pater. Patmore was clearly impressed by “Even So” and commended the third stanza for how it seems “scratched with an adamantine pen upon a slab of agate,” yet his praise is qualified by an unexplained distaste for how Rossetti’s writing

has a tendency to interrupt itself: “in Rossetti, as in several other modern poets of great reputations, we are constantly being pulled up, in the

professedly fiery course of a tale of passion, to observe the moss on a rock or the note of a chaffinch” (quoted in WMR, Works 668). Although he does not specify the objection, what seems to concern Patmore in “Even So” is that the speaker imagines ships on the horizon as “black flies” that are “soon to drop off dead.” The speaker’s initial animated passion, Patmore implies, is left behind when the poem expands upon the appearance of the ships seen at the water’s edge:

The sea stands spread

As one wall with the flat skies, Where the lean black craft like flies Seem well-nigh stagnated,

Soon to drop off dead. (ln. 9-13)

The implication is that the “fiery course of a tale of passion” is halted by the act of noticing details that cannot be absorbed as elements motivating the speaker’s “tale of passion.” Here the interruption occurs as a

particularization (ships that have become flies) that is indeed out of place in the context of the poem’s breezy reflection on the loss of love between the speaker and the former lover who ostensibly listens to the speaker’s

utterance. Although he does not put it this way, Patmore’s objection echoes a common Victorian dissatisfaction with the Pre-Raphaelite tendency toward

embroidery effects and a fondness for peripheral ornament valued for its own sake rather than as a support to narrative sequence. In this sense, Patmore’s description of being “pulled up” by Rossetti’s poetry is apt for identifying a central technique of his verse.

V. IMAGES OF VOICE: “SILENCE SHALL GROW TO AWE WITHIN THINE EYES”