Food for Thought

Tuesday, December 2

Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London (1863): This portrait of the Rossetti family (from left to right, Christina, Maria, and Frances, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) was taken by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

The Rossettis are an odd family. Their father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian revolutionary exiled to England, where he earned almost nothing teaching Italian. Their mother was Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's doctor. DGR, as he signed himself, was accepted into the Royal Academy in 1846, but after a year he left to study with Ford Madox Brown. As you know, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ("PRB") with William Holman Hunt and John "Everett" Millais in 1848. Together, they broke many conventions of Royal Academy art and experimented with techniques blending photographic realism with allegory, narrative, and symbolism. The Brotherhood saw connections between painting and poetry; they were particularly interested in the effects of Browning and Tennyson and in depicting literary subjects from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Keats.
Though Rossetti had a wild, charismatic personality and a desire to paint rich, elaborate works, he applied the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's aesthetic principles more quietly as well-in his own poetry. In several cases, he painted and wrote about his subject, most famously "The Blessed Damozel," which is both a painting and a poem.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

His sister, Christina, was not an official member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her poetry, however, is more remarkably Pre-Raphaelite than many paintings in its color, its finely wrought visual images, its spirituality and its feeling of unsettling balance. Like many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Christina's poetry expresses a luminous spirituality and a sensuous relationship with this world. The poems we're reading were all written in the 1850s.

This is a pen and ink sketch of the opening poem in the "House of Life" sonnet sequence. This sketch accompanied the 1880 edition of "The House of Life." If it reminds you of the work of poet-painter William Blake (1827-1857), trust your instincts. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brother, William, was one of the few nineteenth-century printers to produce editions of several of Blake's illuminated poems and sequences. Like Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti evidences an interest in angels, in the inescapable bounds between the human and spiritual worlds, and in poems that are like paintings and paintings of poems.

D.G. Rossetti," The House of Life"

1) The first poem compares a sonnet to "a moment's monument" and a "coin." How is a sonnet like these things? What do to the two metaphors reveal?

2) The critic Robert Buchanan focused on "Nuptial Sleep" as the target of his attack on the Pre-Raphaelites, an article called "The Fleshly School of Poetry." Why would he have called this sonnet "fleshly"?

3) How does the sonnet sequence (the excerpts that you have read) connect love with death? What is the relationship of love and death to nature?

Christina Rossetti

4) Who is the speaker in "After Death"? Who is the "he" the speaker is describing? What's weird about this situation?

5) What are the characteristics of the "land" the speaker of "Cobwebs" describes?

6) What is the subject of "In an Artist's Studio"? How are the images of canvas and mirror used?

More Questions to Ponder

1) Compare Christina Rossetti's "In an Artist's Studio" to DGR's poem, "Without Her." How does such a comparison enhance the way we see/read each poem?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Body's Beauty" (1869): The sonnet in "The House of Life" was written to accompany this painting, which is also called "Lady Lilith."

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Copyrighted by Hugh Dubrulle and Meg Cronin, 2006.