SECOND
PAPER
Subject : #14217 Poesia Anglesa dels segles XIX i XX Grupo
C
Student´s name :
Title of the paper : Dante Rossetti and
Christina Rossetti
Author or topic : Analysis and comparison
Academic year 2007/2008
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ana Cuenca Peris
acuenpe@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
An analisis and a comparision between these two authors and their
sonnets
“Nuptial Sleep” and “After Death”respectively.
INTRODUCTION
The idea of this work is to understand better two
important authors of the Victorian period, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
Christina Georgina Rossetti are. These two authors are siblings, and for this
reason I thought that could be interesting to analyze them, to show
how the way of writing and facing topics changes between men and women, and
also between two siblings.
In first place I want to explain a bit of their lives because is easier
to understand and analyze the poems if we know something about the period in
which they lived and how their lives were.
Both authors lived in the Victorian period, which owes its name to Queen
Victoria who ruled from 1837 to 1901. During this period the British society
suffered a big change due to the Industrial Revolution and the increase of
population. The expansion of trade and industry developed on a social turn; the
middle-class gained power and influence. They turned more educated reading more
books and newspapers and founded cultural and social institutions.
Thanks
to the middle-class all arts gain importance because they encouraged the
education for all classes and for this reason people were more interested in
literature or the other arts.
Concerning Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), his real name was Gabriel
Charles Dante Rossetti but in his publications he put the name Dante before
because of its literary associations. He was one of the founders of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.
The Pre-Raphaelites was a movement that was against the materialism of the
Victorian Period. The ideal of the Brotherhood was to explain moral and social
ideas, in a realistic manner.
Dante was a poet but also a painter, perhaps he was more famous for his
paintings. In their pictures he wrote a poem, because he thought that was
really important the communion between all the arts and he tries to achieve this
communion between the poetry and paint.
At the beginning, the Pre-Raphaelites style can be appreciated in both
his paintings and his poetry but then abandons that style. He began to use
idealised topics and literary motifs of medieval romances forgetting the
realism. Both, poems and paintings were full of symbolism.
In the other hand we have Christina Georgina Rossetti, (1830- 1894) She
was an important poet. She and her mother were very religious and this plays an
important role in her life and in her poetry. She belongs to the
Pre-Raphaelites movement as her brother but she was less agreeing with its
ideals.
She wrote since she was 7 years old but her first work was published when
she has 31 years old. Christina wrote for all her life although focuses her
writings in religious and children poetry.
The biblical influences are very important in her works. In most of her
poems appear biblical references. Her style is based on complete sentences
copied from the Bible.
BIOGRAPHIES
Dante Gabriel
Rossetti (May 12,
1828 – April 09,
1882) was an English
poet, illustrator,
painter,
and translator.
The son of
émigré Italian
scholar Gabriel Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, D.G.
Rossetti was born in London, England and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti.
His family and friends called him "Gabriel", but in publications he
put the name Dante first, because of its literary associations. He was the
brother of poet Christina Rossetti, the critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti, and was a
founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.
Like all his
siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended King's College School. However, he also
wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval
Italian art.
He studied at Henry Sass's
Following the
exhibition of Holman Hunt's painting The Eve of
In 1850,
Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, who became an important model
for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. They were married in 1860.
Rossetti's first
major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early
Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce
Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage
girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life
subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a
country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti
increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This
was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the
image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci.
Although he won
support from John Ruskin, criticism of his paintings caused
him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to watercolours, which could
be sold privately.
In 1861,
Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English
translations of Italian poetry including Dante
Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas
Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the
1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his
new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically
wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a
designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass
and other decorative devices.
Both these
developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by
the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum
shortly after giving birth to a dead child. Rossetti became increasingly
depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate
Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her
image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix.
These paintings
were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's
depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his
new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical
eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden,
the wife of his business partner William
Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.
During this
time, Rossetti acquired an obsession for exotic animals, and in particular wombats. He
would frequently ask friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at
the London Zoo
in Regent's Park,
and would spend hours there himself. Finally, in September 1869, he was to
acquire the first of two pet wombats. This shortlived wombat, named
"Top", was often brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in
the large centrepiece of the dinner table during meals.
During these
years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his
wife's grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created
a controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly
school of poetry". The eroticism and sensuality of the poems caused
offense. One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep
after sex. This was part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence The House of Life,
a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an
intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a "moment's
monument", implying that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting
moment, and to reflect upon their meaning. The House of Life was a
series of interacting monuments to these moments — an elaborate whole made from
a mosaic
of intensely described fragments. This was Rossetti's most substantial literary
achievement.
In 1881,
Rossetti published a second volume of poems, Ballads and Sonnets which
included the remaining sonnets from the The House of Life sequence.
Toward the end
of his life, Rossetti sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug
addiction to chloral and increasing mental instability, possibly worsened
by his reaction to savage critical attacks on his disinterred (1869) poetry
from the manuscript poems he had buried with his wife. He spent his last years
as a withdrawn recluse.
On Easter
Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend, where he'd gone in yet
another vain attempt to recover his health, which had been destroyed by chloral
as his wife's had been destroyed by laudanum. He is buried at Birchington-on-Sea,
Kent, England.
His grave is visited regularly by admirers of his life's work and achievements
and this can be seen by fresh flowers placed there regularly.
(From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti)
Christina
Rossetti was
born in
Rossetti began
writing at age 7 but she was 31 before her first work was published — Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).
The collection garnered much critical praise and, according to Jan Marsh,
"Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death two
months later led to Rossetti being hailed as her natural successor as 'female
laureate'." The title poem from this book is Rossetti's best known work
and, although at first glance it may seem merely to be a nursery rhyme about
two sisters' misadventures with goblins, the poem is multi-layered, challenging,
and complex. Critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways: seeing it
as an allegory about temptation and salvation; a commentary on Victorian
gender roles and female agency; and a work about erotic desire and social
redemption. Some readers have noted its likeness to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" given
both poems' religious themes of temptation, sin and redemption by vicarious
suffering. Her Christmas poem "In the Bleak Midwinter" became widely
known after her death when set as a Christmas carol by Gustav Holst
as well as by other composers.
Rossetti
continued to write and publish for the rest of her life although she focused
primarily on devotional writing and children's poetry. She maintained a large
circle of friends and for ten years volunteered at a home for prostitutes. She
was ambivalent about women's suffrage but many scholars have
identified feminist
themes in her poetry. Furthermore, as Marsh notes, "she was opposed to
war, slavery
(in the American South), cruelty to animals (in the prevalent practice of animal
experimentation), the exploitation of girls in under-age
prostitution and all forms of military aggression."
In 1893 Rossetti
developed cancer and Graves' disease then died the following
year due to the cancer on December 29, 1894; she is buried in Highgate
Cemetery. In the early 20th century Rossetti's popularity faded as
many respected Victorian writers' reputations suffered from Modernism's
backlash. Rossetti remained largely unnoticed and unread until the 1970s when
feminist scholars began to recover and comment on her work. In the last few
decades Rossetti's writing has been rediscovered and she has regained
admittance into the Victorian literary
(from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Georgina_Rossetti)
ANALYSIS AND COMPARISION
After this brief introduction is necessary to analyze and compare two
poems, one written by Dante Rossetti and the other written by Christina
Rossetti. The poems that I’ve chosen are Nuptial Sleep by Dante Rossetti and
After Death by Christina Rossetti. According to the title it may seem the two
poems have nothing to do, but after read it and analyze it one can observe that
these two sonnets speak more or less about the same topic although from a
different point of view.
Now, I put the two poems:
Nuptial sleep
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1870)
At length
their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:
And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on each other where they lay apart.
Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,
And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.
Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams
Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti shows a
mundane point of view about life in this poem just as he did among his entire
poetry. Thus, this Nuptial Sleep shall be a good example of his work. It is a
sonnet in which the two first stanzas depict the sexual meeting between two
lovers on their first night together in a very illustrative way. He was
strongly criticised for them precisely for being too much explicit.
In spite of being the most polemical ones, I
feel that these two stanzas are not as important as the other two, because they
are just a description, a very good one, but that’s it. My point is that there
is no story in the two first quartets; there is action, but not a temporal
movement, since it describes a punctual fact.
The last six lines of the sonnet hold the
meaning and the intention of it. The lovers fall asleep and as he wakes
realises it is the first day of the rest of his life. Therefore, despite the
title may refer to the first half of the poem, its true motivation is this
combination of after-before within the ending, that relates the change on their
lives.
As said, the title focuses more on the earthly
consequences of the meeting of the lovers, but the poem seems to give more
credit to the story. The title is sexual, the poem is not. This reveals the
interests of the author, the worldly expression of which gives title to the
poem, not forgetting a spiritual content, strongly marked in the end.
After
death
Christina
The
curtains were half drawn; the floor was swept
And
strewn with rushes; rosemary and may
Lay
thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where,
through the lattice, ivy-shadows crept.
He
leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And
could not hear him; but I heard him say,
"Poor
child, poor child"; and as he turned away
Came
a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He
did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That
hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or
ruffle the smooth pillows for my head.
He
did not love me living; but once dead
He
pitied me; and very sweet it is
To
know he still is warm though I am cold.
Christina Georgina Rossetti is thought to be
more concerned about spirituality than his brother. After Death is a proof of
this. She only invests the first stanza in describing the image of the poem. It
transmits tranquillity and is a good heading to the story. The rest of the poem
narrates the simple fact of dying with the beloved person.
This sonnet plays with what it is said and what
is not. We know more of what it is happening through what characters don’t do
than the other way round. In this sense, the second and third stanzas are
connected, explaining what the man who is with her does and does not do before
the imminence of her death.
She appears to know everything he feels. She
knows he will miss her and why he does not dare to touch her or why he keeps
silent. She thinks he didn’t love her enough, probably because she had a
highest and spiritual concept of love. Yet she knows now he loves her, for he
has realised what he is about to lose. She makes a fantastic comparison between
the degree of love and her temperature, ironically the closest she is from
death the more loved she feels.
Of course, the title After Death couldn’t be
realistic, because obviously nobody is able to write from beyond. But then
again, she believes in reincarnation and therefore this chronological paradox
gains sense. Only after death she will feel she is loved in a true way.
Comparing both poems, we can see they have
similarities and differences too. Analyzing firstly the similarities we can see
that both are sonnets but with different structure. The structure of the first
is ABBA-ABBA-CDC-DCD while the second is ABBA-ABBA-CDE-EDC. Both sonnets have
the same topic, love, but both authors speak about it from a different point of
view and in a different sense.
In both poems appear two characters, two
lovers, the woman and the man. In Dante’s poem the author explain the poem from
the point of view of a man. He explains his feelings about the other person in
an earthly manner while in Christina’s poem the author explain her feelings
from a woman’s point of view although she also explains how he feels.
Although both poems seem similar, the way in
that they are written is completely different. Dante uses the first two stanzas
to describe the action; he gives more importance to describe it than his
sister, while she describes the action and the context just barely, giving more
importance to the feelings and the spiritual face of love.
Despite writing about the same thing (love),
the way they treat it is completely different. Dante deals with his poem
focusing on a sexual matter and Christina is more spiritual but nonetheless
they both give love more importance than it appeared initially. Yet they don’t
feel it on a same level: Dante disguises standard love under sex; Christina
covers spiritual love with romanticism. They move on different levels but both
poems hide a love content when read carefully. Whether this difference
responses to a sex disjunction or not, we don’t know but having in
consideration their era we can assume that Christina’s writing would have been
totally different if were born man.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
-
www.poemhunter.com/dante-gabriel-rossetti/
-
www.poemhunter.com/christina-georgina-rossetti
-
http://www.victorianweb.org/
-
http://www.telecable.es/personales/deb1/influencias/Dante%20Gabriel%20Rossetti.htm
-
www.liceus.com/cgi-bin/aco/lit/02/110160.asp
-
www.answers.com/topic/preraphaelism
-
www.fashion-era.com/victorians.htm
-
www.experiencefestival.com/spiritual_love
-
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9064154/Dante-Gabriel-Rossetti
-
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9064153/Christina-Rossetti