A BRIEF COMPARATION BETWEEN BOTH, DANTE GABRIEL AND CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI
Although it could seem that both poets are different at all, they share an important thing: their poetry reflect many facets of their own rich, complex personality, and their most significant experiences in its development. The possible common description of their works could be: “moral idealism”, “emotional sincerity”( each one in his way), “love experiences”, “unhappiness” and the “unconscious revelation of the poet’s ego”.
For instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a period of crisis in his own development. Solitary retrospection, ill health, insomnia, with chloral and spirits an increasing but unavailing remedy for the last, had induced a depression so deep as to approach melancholia. “The House of Life” is a great example of this experience during those years. In those sonnets too we find regret for years in “Willow-wood”, where parted lovers wander, lost and unhappy, lamenting the frustrated past or the lonely, forbidding future. But also in “The House of Life” we find a new love, “regenerate rapture” as he calls it; but secret, clandestine.
Few of the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote were self expressive, as those of Christina’s. His sonnets on the leading romantic poets were academic in their emotional detachment (probably exercises undertaken in vain attempts to combat insomnia).
In his earliest poetry, an adolescent confusion of temperamental tendencies and parental and literary influences is often evident. The medievalism and Dantesquerie of his father, the High-Anglican devotionalism of his mother and sisters, his own instinctive aestheticism, pictorial, colourful and decorative, all combine and culminate in that unconscious symbol and revelation of the poet’s ego in youth: “The Blessed Damozel”.
Also, Christina Rossetti, in the same way as her brother, had problems that influenced her poetry. The desire to be socially accepted was, for instance, one of her “hidden” themes. Acceptance comes with fulfilling the gender concept of being a good wife and mother ('The Angel in the House'). However, Rossetti, being an unmarried woman poet, was not fulfilling her 'socially-ordained role'. Yet, Motherhood in”Sing-Song” is clearly connected to the concept of a child being born inside marriage and thus inside a socially ordained form of living. This becomes obvious in the poems "Eight o'clock", "Mother shake the cherry tree", "Wee wee husband", "I have a little husband"] and "What does the bee do?". Illegitimacy is not mentioned. The importance of marriage is stressed in poems like "A ring upon her finger" and "If I were king", which states "I'd make you queen/ For I'd marry you". Love is only right if its sanctioned by marriage, and being married turns a woman to a queen. An ideal world is created which mocks the Victorian reality. Everybody is married and all families consist of a father and a mother. After the wedding, the roles are consigned as follows:
What does the bee do?
Bring home honey. And what does father do?
Bring home money.
And what does mother do?
Lay out the money.
And what does baby do?
Eat up the honey. [440]
The only one without a certain task is the baby, who only lives to be fed and is not yet of any use to his family. This underlines again the carefreeness of childhood without the responsibilities of adult life.
Furthermore, apart from Sing-Song's being highly autobiographical, in it, Rossetti also addresses, and thus shows herself to be aware of, some of the problems of her age— namely infant mortality, poverty and orphanage.
This is another characteristic that both, Christina and Dante Gabriel share, the consciousness of the problematic society of the time.
Christina Rossetti also addresses other social problems, for example poverty. In the poem "There's snow on the fields" [427], the poem contrasts the cold outside the house, with the warmth inside of the house, near the chimney with the warm food the speaker is eating. With such poems Victorian children were made aware of their much better position in life compared to children who lived on the streets or had to work for their living in mills and factories. They were encouraged to be thankful for what they had.
If we analyse a poem of each one, we can easily find all these characteristics we have already said they share.
For instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “My Sister’s Sleep”, which tells of a girl’s death on Christmas Eve, is far more effective in its realism, its severe emotional restraint, than the decorative and sentimental “Blessed Damozel”. The tale is told in stark and moving simplicity and economy of words.
“MY SISTER’S SLEEP”
She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:
At length the long-ungranted shade
Of weary eyelids overweigh'd
The pain nought else might yet relieve.
Our mother, who had lean'd all day
Over the bed from chime to chime,
Then rais'd herself for the first time,
And as she sat her down, did pray.
Her little work-table was spread
With work to finish. For the glare
Made by her candle, she had care
To work some distance from the bed.
Without, there was a cold moon up,
Of winter radiance sheer and thin;
The hollow halo it was in
Was
like an icy crystal cup.
Through the small room, with subtle sound
Of flame, by vents the fireshine drove
And redden'd. In its dim alcove
The mirror shed a clearness round.
I had been sitting up some nights,
And my tired mind felt weak and blank;
Like a sharp strengthening wine it drank
The stillness and the broken lights.
Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years
Heard in each hour, crept off; and then
The ruffled silence spread again,
Like water that a pebble stirs.
Our mother rose from where she sat:
Her needles, as she laid them down,
Met lightly, and her silken gown
Settled: no other noise than that.
"Glory unto the Newly Born!"
So, as said angels, she did say;
Because we were in Christmas Day,
Though it would still be long till morn.
Just then in the room over us
There was a pushing back of chairs,
As some who had sat unawares
So late, now heard the hour, and rose.
With anxious softly-stepping haste
Our mother went where Margaret lay,
Fearing the sounds o'erhead--should they
Have broken her long watch'd-for rest!
She stoop'd an instant, calm, and turn'd;
But suddenly turn'd back again;
And all her features seem'd in pain
With woe, and her eyes gaz'd and yearn'd.
For my part, I but hid my face,
And held my breath, and spoke no word:
There was none spoken; but I heard
The silence for a little space.
Our mother bow'd herself and wept:
And both my arms fell, and I said,
"God knows I knew that she was dead."
And there, all white, my sister slept.
Then kneeling, upon Christmas morn
A little after twelve o'clock
We said, ere the first quarter struck,
"Christ's blessing on the newly born!"
Date: 1848
Rhyme: abba
Meter: iambic tetrameter
Genre: ballad
The hyper-realistic treatment of circumstantial detail makes this a paradigm example of a poem done in an early Pre-Raphaelite style, on a contemporary subject.
The poem is notable for its Pre-Raphaelite, colourful, decorative, descriptive detail, and its creation of a tense, silent and real atmospehere.
We have here the realism, the pictorial quality, the admirably economy of words and emotional expression.
The poem is a kind of theoretical work, or poetical experiment. When DGR wrote it in 1847 he consciously strove to depart from the “hot” style that William Holman Hunt had reproached: “I quite agree with you in what you say of the ‘hotness’ of my verses, if you mean (as I suppose) a certain want of repose and straining after original modes of expression. Of these aspects I am endeavouring to rid myself, and hoped in some degree to have cast them off in “My Sister's Sleep” , which is one of the last things I have written, and which, I confess, seems to me simpler and more like nature than I have shown you” (see Fredeman, Correspondence, 48. 7 ). But of course the simplicity itself became a type of poetical selfconsciousness and “original mode of expression”, as Coventry Patmore noted when he commented on the poem in December 1849 (see Fredeman, The P.R.B. Journal, 31 ).
And a poem of Christina Rossetti:
“SONG”
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
In "Song," Christina Rossetti is both working through and against the Italian male poetic tradition so important to her brother. The female speaker in "Song" does what Dante Gabriel's idealized and objectified woman in "The Blessed Damozel" is never able to do. As George P. Landow discusses in "The Dead Woman Talks Back: Christina Rossetti's Ironic Intonation of the Dead Fair Maiden," the dead woman literally addresses her beloved from the grave and for once is allowed to "talk back" and be heard. The obvious impossibility of this situation occurring under normal circumstances suggests the extent to which the female voice was suppressed in society. As Landow points out, the speaker's unwillingness to let her beloved grieve over her absence is reminiscent of Dante Gabriel's notion of the selfless female.
What initially appears to be a typical self-sacrificing female speaker turns out to be a complete rejection of this Victorian stereotype. In contrast to Dante Gabriel's poem "The Blessed Damozel" in which the male speaker imagines his dead beloved desperately longing for him in heaven, the female speaker in Christina Rossetti's "Song" has an attitude of total indifference to the male figure.
By the end of the poem, Christina Rossetti has reversed Dante Gabriel's projections about erotic, romantic love. The female speaker is in a state of quiet contentment devoid of all sensory pleasure and experience, a far cry from Dante Gabriel's physical, materialistic view of heaven. The male speaker in "The Blessed Damozel," hopes for some form of communication across death, and the possibility of being reunited in heaven. For the speaker in "Song," communication is not possible, and she has no intention of clinging to the memory of her beloved. Thus, Christina Rossetti reconfigures the male poetic tradition from a new female point of view.
Both, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were very integrated with feeling, with emotion, as we can see in these two poems. Both are influenced by the atmosphere of their time, the context in which they are writing,; their emotions and feelings in that moment. Dante Gabriel speaks about his love experiences and Christina, in the same way, speaks also of her love experiences, that is to say, her common theme is the renunciation of the worldly love.
For Dante Gabriel Rossetti as for the most Romantic poets, intellect was closely integrated with feeling, with emotion. For him, therefore, emotion was a basic element of poetry, the most essential of all. Poetry he declared was “best where most impassioned, as all poetry must be”.
Nearly all the essential poetry Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote is intensely personal, subjective in essence, though by no means lacking in objectivity. Woman and love are its chief inspiration, a traditional source of lyric inspiration. His verse is sensuous and passionate but also sincere, profound and intellectual. He not only thinks trough the senses like his romantic predecessors, he also thinks intellectually of his love experiences, relating them to Dantesque, and Platonic or rather Neo-Platonic idealism.