DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (May 12, 1828 – April 09, 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter, and translator.

Dante attended King's College School from 1837 to 1842, when he left to prepare for the Royal Academy at F. S. Cary's Academy of Art. In 1846 he was accepted into the Royal Academy but was there only a year before he became dissatisfied and left to study under Ford Madox Brown. In 1848 he, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais began to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Rossetti, like William Blake, whose works he edited in later life, achieved the rare distinction of eminence in both painting and poetry. And as with Blake, both arts are, for Rossetti, a means of expressing fundamental intellectual and emotional attitudes.

The impress of his dominating personality and initiative, of his literary and pictorial talent influenced by acquaintance with Italian art and letters, and of his superior intellectual grasp, imposed upon the Brethren and their painting whatever of unity they displayed.

Into his first love experience (with Elizabeth Siddal), there entered all the idealism Rossetti had absorbed from the Platonic works in his father’s study, as well as from the poetry of Dante and the medieval troubadours, which he was himself translating into verse.

The mother’s High Anglicanism stimulated Rossetti’s asceticism and moral idealism at this time, and soon became an important element in the internal conflict which disturbed his adolescence and indeed in some degree continued into later years.

In November 1852, Rossetti left home to live at 14 Chatham Place, in rooms overlooking the Thames and Blackfriars Bridge. His mood at this time, reflected in some of his poems, inevitably, was often uncertain and unhappy.

In 1860, Rossetti married Miss Siddal. The influence of the vulgar but beautiful model, Fanny, had darkened the friendship of Elizabeth and Rossetti during recent years, and continued to affect their married life, saddened in time by the birth of a dead daughter and by young Mrs. Rossetti’s mental overstrain. On 10 February 1862, she was founded unconscious and dying of an overdose of laudanum.

Rossetti soon removed to the fine old house, 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, overlooking the river and close to Battersea Bridge.

Rossetti’s entry, as a widower, into this place, opens the final period in his career. The twenty years that lay before him were to establish his reputation as a leading poet and painter, who nevertheless refused to exhibit his paintings, and restricted his social life to that of a small circle of friends.

He turned from his former Dantesque and Arthurian subjects, to portraits of beautiful feminine models, often representing mythological or fanciful conceptions.

Disappointment and cynicism had begun to displace Rossetti’s former idealism. In poetry, he had for many years been almost completely silent. Inspiration had passed with the passing of his first rapture for Elizabeth Siddal.

The critics, sincerely appreciative for the most part, many of them personal friends of the poet, led a chorus of praise, and Rossetti’s reputation as a poet-painter was firmly established.

But Rossetti had a very bad period, in which he attempted suicide by laudanum, the drug which had killed his wife. Three months in Scotland largely restored his mental balance, and an immediate return to Kelmscott and Janey almost completed the cure. (The “chloralized years” his brother called them).

Although he still chiefly painted “women”, the “flowers” gradually disappeared, and in harmony with his existence these feminine subjects become in time symbols of melancholy, of mystery.

Apart from all of this, a theme which came to have an almost morbid fascination for Rossetti was the clandestine passion and its punishment, as in “The Bride’s Prelude” presents.

More works of Rossetti:

“The Staff and Scrip”, a poem of sentimentalized pseudo-chivalry.

“Jenny”, like “The Last Confession”, reminds us in its “modernity” of Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite principle of the “modern” picture. “Jenny” is, as he says, another “unblessed damozel”. Her treatment is, however, weakened by an unconvincingly pious sensuality and by the conventional sentimentality of the period in any literary or pictorial reference to prostitution. In “Found”, he presented a similar theme. For Rossetti, the Blessed Damozels were never far from the unblessed.

He was impressed too, by the passing of epochs, the raise and fall of civilizations it had witnessed. These thoughts and feelings found expression in one of his best poems in this kind, “The Burden of Nineveh”.

“Sudden Light”, one of the loveliest of Rossetti’s lyrics, gives exquisite expression to the sense of the timeless and repetitive which haunted his most profound emotional experience.

Rossetti wrote three little lyrics of fading love: “Even So” (by verbal economy and emotional control), “A Little While”, and “A New Year’s Burden”.

“Song of Bower”, inferior but emotional, is a passionate outburst at the fear of separation from Fanny. The sonnet “Dantis Tenebrae” was written in memory of his father. The poem “Lost Days”, is one of conscience-stricken regret. Written shortly after his wife’s death, it is one of his most powerful sonnets.

“The House of Life” records all the phases, the intellectual and emotional experiences, of Rossetti’s “regenerate rapture”, his belief in an integrating passion that would compensate for the sorrows and frustrations of the past.

Inevitably there are differences of equality amongst the hundred and two sonnets of the complete “House of Life”, but a high average is maintained throughout. Several sonnets indeed are early, some of them are not love sonnets at all.

His last love sonnet, “Ardour and Memory”, written as late as 1879, is a sonnet of saddened retrospection in the absence of the beloved. It is full of images drawn from nature.

In “Rose Mary”, the first of the three “ballads” in his late volume “Ballads and Sonnets”, Rossetti combined two favourite themes: the supernatural, and clandestine passion and its punishment.