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| Complete Literary Analysis of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti |
Pre-Raphaelite Poetry Study
This comprehensive literary analysis enables readers to understand what the term “Pre-Raphaelite” signifies and why the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed. It provides a thorough examination of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, its key characteristics in poetry, and the movement’s use of literary sources for artistic inspiration.
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Readers will learn about the major poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, and become familiar with their most significant poems through detailed critical analysis.
Pre-Raphaelite Movement:
The Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-nineteenth century, during its initial period, was primarily concerned with painting. The artists of this movement deliberately chose the period preceding the Italian painter Raphael because they identified strongly with the views and sentiments prevailing in the medieval age. Its members firmly believed that the Classical models and polished compositions exemplified by Raphael in particular had exerted a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art—hence the movement’s name “Pre-Raphaelite.”
The group subsequently ventured into poetry because its leader, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was simultaneously a painter and a poet.
The poets who came to be associated with the Pre-Raphaelite group included William Morris, Christina Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. They founded a monthly review called The Germ to propagate their artistic and literary ideas. The movement represented a development of the Romantic revival, and its primary concern was art—especially the connection between poetry and the visual arts, including painting and plastic arts.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formally born in 1849 as a protest against the persisting doctrines of the academic convention of their time, which compelled young artists to copy the art of the school of Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelite endeavor aimed to create perfect pictures, painted brightly and functioning as photographic representations of objects.
This fascination with visual precision and detail was later transferred from art to poetry. The pictures that were drawn carefully with elaboration of every detail found their way into poetic composition, with imagination enriched by abundant content drawn from the medieval and Romantic worlds.
Pre-Raphaelite poetry constituted a protest against contemporary poetry of the kind written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was full of tradition and immersed in the immediate, everyday problems of Victorian society. Every poem written by the Pre-Raphaelites was perfected with picturesque detail, characterization, individual charm, mystery, and sensuality.
Their poems became beautiful narratives of beautiful paintings—or paintings rendered in words. The poets wholeheartedly followed the doctrine of “Art for Art’s sake,” asserting the autonomy of aesthetic experience from moral or utilitarian considerations.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
In 1848, the young artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited the Royal Academy exhibition and was particularly drawn to a painting by William Holman Hunt entitled The Eve of Saint Agnes. It was not common at that time to create paintings based on works by poets, so Rossetti’s fascination led him to seek out Hunt.
Both men realized they could learn much from each other. Through Hunt, Rossetti met John Everett Millais, and the three formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—a group united by their dissatisfaction with the artistic concerns prevailing in mid-nineteenth-century England.
The name “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” was given to the group because of the medieval subject matter they employed in their paintings and, subsequently, in their poetry. The young artists preferred the simplicity of lines and the large, flat surfaces of brilliant color found in early Italian painters from the period before Raphael.
These qualities were not promoted by the more academic outlook adopted by the Royal Academy during the mid-nineteenth century, which instead stressed the strong light and dark shading characteristic of older artists.
Another significant influence on the young artists was the writing of the art critic John Ruskin, who advised artists “to go to nature in all singleness of heart… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing.” This combination of influences contributed to the group’s extreme attention to detail and the brilliant colors for which they became known. The artists even became among the first to paint their canvases outdoors in an effort to capture the minute detail of everything they observed.
Later, the group included four other members, bringing their total to seven. Although these additional members were not exclusively artists, the group felt that seven was the necessary number to be taken seriously by the public and critics.
The Brotherhood grew stronger, and in 1849 they made their presence known to all by submitting a group of paintings to the Royal Academy, each bearing the initials “PRB.”
Fleshly School of Poetry:
The term “Fleshly School of Poetry” was invented by the Scottish author Robert Williams Buchanan (1841–1901) and appeared as the title of an article in the Contemporary Review of October 1871. In this newsletter, Buchanan chastised the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others, particularly Algernon Swinburne, for its “morbid deviation from the healthy forms of life.” Buchanan declared that these poets exhibited “weary wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility.”
The provocative poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites was considered morally objectionable by the prim and proper Victorians, especially when it came to the description of the human body. The Pre-Raphaelites did not shy away from displaying their salacious leanings.
However, it is difficult to charge them with grossness or decadence in any simple sense. Swinburne and others strongly objected to Buchanan’s accusation that the poetry of their school was “fleshly.”
Rossetti’s Troy Town and The House of Life are indeed somewhat “fleshly,” but Rossetti is not an offensive sensualist, as he deals with the physical body as something inseparable from inner beauty and the spiritual self.
Literary critics Grierson and Smith observe: “Never since Venus and Adonis, Hero and Leander and the Songs and Sonnets of Donne had the passion of the senses been presented with such daring frankness.” Readers found Swinburne to be as intense in his ability to mix shock with amazement as Lord Byron had done before him. Nonetheless, it is said that the Pre-Raphaelites possessed an emotional edge over other poets that led them to excessive sensuousness, thereby acquiring the smear of being dissolute.
Characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: Style, Themes, and Literary Devices
The adjective “Pre-Raphaelite” in literary terms suggests certain peculiarities and techniques in style that distinguish Pre-Raphaelite poetry from other Victorian verse.
Use of Numerical Imagery
Pre-Raphaelite poets frequently employed specific numbers for symbolic effect. As exemplified in Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel: “She had three lilies in her hand / And the stars in her hair were seven.”
Use of Sensory Details
The movement emphasized vivid sensory description, as seen in Rossetti’s My Sister’s Sleep: “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.”
Use of Sound Devices and Auditory Imagery
Pre-Raphaelite poetry paid meticulous attention to sound and silence, as demonstrated in My Sister’s Sleep: “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.”
Archaizing and Medievalizing Language
The poets deliberately employed archaic diction and medieval themes, as in William Morris’s Old Love: “They hammer’d out my basnet point / Into a round salade,’ he said. / ‘The basnet being quite out of joint / Natheless the salade rasps my head.’”
Taste in Decoration and Ornamentation
Pre-Raphaelite poetry reveled in decorative imagery, as Christina Rossetti wrote in A Birthday: “Raise me a dias of silk and down; / Hang it with vair and purple dyes; / Carve it in doves and pomegranates, / And peacocks with a hundred eyes; / Work it in gold and silver grapes, / In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys.”
Recurrence of Moods
The poets frequently returned to themes of mortality and seasonal decline. Morris wrote in The Earthly Paradise: October: “The year grown old / A-dying mid the autumn scented haze, / That hangeth o’er the hollow in the wold.” Rossetti similarly wrote in The Stream’s Secret of “The sere / Autumnal springs, from many a dying year / Born dead.”
Metre and Musicality
Pre-Raphaelite verse is renowned for its musical quality and metrical virtuosity, as exemplified in Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse: “Nor shall they feel or fear, / Whose date is done, / Aught that made once more dark the living sun / And bitterer in their breathing lips the breath / Than the dark dawn and bitter dust of death.”
Short Biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter, Poet, and Pre-Raphaelite Leader
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti in London on May 12, 1828, to Gabriele and Frances Rossetti. He was their second child and eldest son. Rossetti attended King’s College School from 1837 to 1842, which he left to join the Royal Academy at F.S. Cary’s Academy of Art. In 1849 and 1850, Rossetti submitted his first important paintings, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini, for exhibition. The latter painting forsakes conventional perspective and adopts a naturalistic outlook, showing an adolescent Mary working at a piece of embroidery.
Around the same time, Rossetti met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who modeled for many of his paintings and sketches. They became engaged in 1851 but did not marry until 1860 for several reasons: her ill health, his financial difficulties, and his own unwillingness to commit. When they finally married, the union lasted only twenty months, as Elizabeth died from a self-administered overdose of morphine on February 10, 1862.
After his wife’s death, Rossetti moved to Chelsea, to a large house on the Thames which he shared with Swinburne, sometimes also with his brother William Michael Rossetti and George Meredith. He continued painting and writing poetry, receiving help from benefactors that made him relatively prosperous. Another of his models, Fanny Cornforth (who appears in Bocca Baciata, The Blue Bower, and Found), became his mistress and housekeeper.
However, because she was full-bodied and blond, Rossetti never idealized her. While modeling for him was first done by Lizzie Siddal, and sometimes by models like Ruth Herbert and Annie Miller, most of the time Rossetti used Janey Morris.
Rossetti’s choice of models and his idealization of them helped alter the idea of feminine beauty in the Victorian period. The tall, thin, long-necked, long-haired stunners of frail health that we see in paintings like Beata Beatrix, Pandora, Proserpine, La Pia, and La Donna della Finestra became the prevailing standard.
Rossetti exercised wide influence because of his role as the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He collaborated on the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856 and translated fragments of Medieval Italian Verse and Dante’s Vita Nuova.
In the late 1860s, Rossetti experienced numerous medical issues: he began to suffer from headaches, weakened eyesight, and insomnia, becoming addicted to chloral mixed with whiskey. Chloral exacerbated his depression and paranoia, which Rossetti failed to control.
The final straw was Robert Buchanan’s attack on Rossetti and Swinburne in The Fleshly School of Poetry (1871). In the summer of 1872, Rossetti suffered a mental breakdown, experienced hallucinations, and was plagued by disturbing voices. He was taken to Scotland, where he attempted suicide, but he recovered within a few months enough to paint again. However, his health deteriorated slowly, and he died of kidney failure on April 9, 1882.
The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Complete Analysis of Everlasting Love and Heavenly Longing
The Blessed Damozel is a dramatic lyric poem of 144 lines arranged in twenty-four six-line stanzas. Dante Gabriel Rossetti completed the first version of The Blessed Damozel in 1847 and published it in the February 1850 issue of The Germ, the journal established by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The theme of the poem is everlasting love. Although the death of the damozel has separated her from the man she loves, the love between them remains eternal and continues to live. So too does the hope that one day they will reunite in heaven. Rossetti wrote The Blessed Damozel as a tender, simple portrayal of ingenuous young love that thrived in the world of knights and nobles.
The poem presents a romantic, dreamlike atmosphere in which a virginal young woman who has recently died stands at the gates of heaven, thinking of and longing for the young man she left behind, while he likewise yearns for her on earth.
Rossetti links the heavenly damozel with her earthbound lover by mixing the spiritual imagery of heaven with the physical imagery of earth. The seven stars of the heavenly constellations that adorn her hair flow down her back with the color of “ripe corn”; at the same time, the young man thinks he feels her hair fall over him but discovers it is only the fall of autumn leaves.
The Blessed Damozel peers out from a golden banister at the line separating heaven from space, with eyes that are deeper than the bottom of still waters. In one hand she holds three lilies, indicating her purity and her nearness to God. The damozel’s robe hangs loosely about her, and there is no embroidery on it except a single white rose fastened upon it—a reward from the Blessed Virgin Mary in appreciation of the damozel’s devotion to Heaven.
The damozel feels that she has stood in the heavenly realm for no more than a day. To the young man to whom she promised her love, it seems as if she has been gone for ten years. The damozel stands on a rampart built by God around Heaven, so high that when she looks down she can barely see the sun.
Below the rampart, day and night come and go, and around the damozel stand lovers newly united in Heaven, greeting one another. Souls keep rising to Heaven like “thin flames.” The damozel, however, is not interested in what is happening in Heaven but continues to look down into the vastness of space, yearning for her earthbound young man.
She sees time storming inexorably and visualizes that when he does appear someday in a white robe with a halo around his head, they will go hand-in-hand into Heaven and soak up the radiant light of God. They will lie in the shadow of the tree of life, where the Holy Spirit as a dove will sometimes alight, and every leaf will speak His name. She will then teach her beloved the songs that she sings, and he will stop every now and then to absorb the knowledge that the song contains.
On earth, the young man wonders whether God will invite him to enjoy infinite union with his beloved. The damozel, meanwhile, says that after her beloved arrives in Heaven they will visit groves where Mary lives with her five handmaidens, who weave golden threads into white cloth for the robes of the newly dead melting into eternal life.
The damozel will speak with pride of her love for the young man, and Mary will approve and take them to the place where all souls kneel around God while angels sing and play their stringed instruments. The damozel will ask Christ to allow her and her young man to live forever together, united in love. The young man imagines he sees her smile, but she actually casts her arms down on the golden banister and weeps, and her beloved feels her tears.
My Sister’s Sleep by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
In My Sister’s Sleep, Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes the last moments of a dying girl’s life through the voice of her brother. The descriptions and imagery both create a dark mood in the poem and impart a sensory dimension to it. The poet employs techniques that convey to the reader the pain of loss that the mother and brother feel.
The poem examines different emotions and reactions to the death of a loved one and emphasizes the differences of feeling between what the brother and mother of the girl display.
Rossetti expertly develops these emotions through his descriptions of the characters’ body language and speech; he never explains his characters bluntly. The reactions of the characters, along with the descriptions of sight and sound, simile, and word choice, produce a dark and somber mood. Stanzas ten through fifteen demonstrate these techniques particularly effectively.
A sense of calm and stillness pervades Rossetti’s language in this poem. The ticking of the clock and the sound of chairs moving on the floor above provide the only audible disturbances to the long-held vigilance.
All remains still, except for when the mother lays down her knitting needles and rises to acknowledge the arrival of Christmas day. Few words are spoken by the pair, but the poem ends with the joint exclamation: “Christ’s blessing on the newly born.”
In My Sister’s Sleep, Rossetti expresses his emotional feeling about the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution in England. In this poem, Margaret suffers a long illness, and her mother lacks sufficient money to pay for healthcare. The poet describes a small family living in a small house, impoverished, with one member named Margaret who is sick. Her mother cannot afford to pay for her healthcare, and the narrator—her brother—can only stare at her hopelessly on Christmas night.
Soon Margaret dies, and her mother notices and repeatedly consoles herself that Margaret is not dead. She says her daughter has left the earth and will be born again in another world as soon as the clock passes beyond twelve and the new day of Christmas appears.
The theme is death—the death of one person that will be replaced by the birth of new life or a new human elsewhere. The tone is cold, silent, and sad as a result of Margaret’s death. But toward the end, the tone brightens because Christmas day has arrived, signaling new life and the start of a new day.
Short Biography of Christina Rossetti:
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote creatively from an early age. By the age of seventeen, she had composed enough poems for her grandfather to print a small volume of her work, entitled Verses, on his home press. By the age of nineteen, she was writing for the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ and beginning to establish her literary reputation. At this time, she wrote under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyn, created by her brother Dante Gabriel. This pseudonym gave her the anonymity and protection she desired in the early stages of her career.
Rossetti’s first volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published in 1862. It was divided into two sections: non-devotional and devotional poetry. This collection secured Christina Rossetti’s literary reputation. She published her second volume, A Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, in 1866, four years after her first. When Rossetti was forty-two years old, she published Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. A Pageant and Other Poems, published in 1881, includes the sonnet sequences Monna Innominata and Later Life.
Rossetti’s final volume, Verses (1893), published when she was sixty-three, contains the devotional poems she had previously included in three of her books of devotional prose: Time Flies, Called to be Saints, and The Face of the Deep. In Verses, these poems are grouped together under seven headings. One section, entitled Some Feasts and Fasts, contains a selection of poems written to celebrate feast days in the Church calendar. The final section, New Jerusalem and its Citizens, contains poems that look forward to the splendors and comfort in heaven to which the Bible alludes.
Rossetti also published two books of short stories—Commonplace and Speaking Likeness—during her writing career. Between 1874 and 1893, Rossetti produced six volumes of devotional prose, five of which were published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
These include The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments, Called to Be Saints, The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite, and Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year.
An Apple Gathering by Christina Rossetti:
An Apple Gathering is a poem of seven stanzas, each containing four lines. The central issue in this poem, as in many other poems by Christina Rossetti, is betrayed love or unreceptive love. The speaker in the poem appears more baffled than heartbroken by her lover’s betrayal. The poet sets the poem outdoors to highlight the alienation and danger the speaker experiences when left alone by her beloved.
In the first stanza, the speaker makes it clear that she has engaged in sexual activity before marriage—she “plucked pink blossoms from mine apple tree.” Because she has lost her virginity before marriage, she is shunned by society, deemed unfit by the people she lives with, and no man will marry her.
The next stanza speaks about all the people the speaker knows who have taken advantage of her before rejecting her. In subsequent stanzas, the speaker directly addresses a character called “Willie,” with whom she may have had a love affair and who has either abandoned her or died. Regardless, the separation from her beloved plunges her into a state of despair and isolation. The last stanza presents the question of what will happen to the speaker of the poem.
Christina Rossetti repeatedly uses the first-person pronoun “I” to emphasize the suffering and anguish of the speaker. The speaker suffers because she made the mistake of falling in love before marriage and faces abandonment not only by her lover but also by the society in which she lives.
She demonstrates that ideal love is far from reality by showing the trial of love through images of uncertainty and change as they occur in nature. Imagery of gardens, apples, Eve, and blossoms is abundantly used to imply temptation and enticement, while images of plucked fruits, ripeness, and harvest convey downfall and abandonment.
Biblical references are employed to emphasize that Victorian society was orthodox and unable to accept a woman on whom the social stigma of promiscuity had been attached. Because the narrator “plucked pink blossoms from mine apple tree,” she later in the year “found no apples there.” The main part of the poem reflects on the loving pairs of individuals who have been able to gather apples from other trees. The speaker is left with only her memories, which she counts as more valuable than the apples gathered by others.
The repetition of the four-line stanza conveys the confined situation in which the narrator finds herself due to the strict rules of the society in which she lives. The personal voice used in the poem speaks directly about the isolation and desertion she experiences from all—whether her lover or the people around her. She uses extended metaphors drawn from vegetative life to convey her feelings: her love comes to her as temptation and then becomes the cause of her downfall.
Dead Before Death by Christina Rossetti:
Dead before Death is a fourteen-line sonnet with a rhyme scheme that changes after every four lines. The speaker appears profoundly depressed in the poem. She declares that time brings promises, but even those promises do not bring fulfillment. Consequently, nothing matters to her, and she might as well be dead, because at least in death nothing would be expected of her.
She feels lost in her life. For the rest of eternity, since after death she cannot truly tell people how she feels—death being the one time a person would be free to do so—she would remain lost in darkness for all time.
The title itself plainly states what the poet attempts to express. The speaker feels as though everything has come to an end, as if death has fallen upon her—but ironically, she remains alive.
The poem may be interpreted as Rossetti’s assertion that women of her time had no real independence, no place in society, were not included in matters of importance, and were not given any opportunity to develop as self-sufficient individuals.
Their lives were monotonously identical: they were recognized only as somebody’s daughter, sister, wife, mother, or widow, and this sometimes stifled them completely. There was no way to achieve recognition, no support for their efforts, and so they felt dead from the beginning. Rossetti employs the pronoun “we” rather than “I” in the poem, making an assertion for an entire class of people—and that class appears to be women.
The lines “All fallen the blossom that no fruitage bore, / All lost the present and the future time” express the feeling of the senselessness of one’s existence if it did not bear any fruit—the fruit being any achievement that gives an individual a sense of being alive.
This senselessness of existence encompasses not only the present but also the future, expressing the doubt that a life that does not produce some kind of fruit has any meaning. The lyrical self is “dead before death,” and the poet hopes that it can only be revived in the next life after death.
A Birthday by Christina Rossetti:
A Birthday is a sixteen-line poem consisting of two eight-line stanzas of irregular pattern. The narrator conveys her happiness for her love’s forthcoming birthday, speaking in the voice of Christina Rossetti herself.
Rossetti consistently attempted to express her feelings through elements of nature, and in a similar manner, the narrator in the poem shows how her heart can find expression for its feelings through natural imagery. She employs the images of a songbird, a fruit-laden apple-tree, and a rainbow to express the depth of her love.
The narrator expresses the depth of her feelings for her love’s birthday by beginning every second line in the first stanza with “My heart is like——” Rossetti uses repetition and reiteration to emphasize the narrator’s eagerness yet inability to express her joy through words alone.
She strains to find a correct correspondence for her feelings, using images of celebration and joy. The laden apple-tree signifies the nourishment of life. The rainbow symbolizes God’s promise to Noah and mankind that He will not flood the earth again. Through these similes, the narrator describes and compares her delight at the arrival of her love.
This “love” could be interpreted as romantic love for the opposite sex, but this reading is improbable, as it appears that her “love” is somehow connected to her Christian faith. The love is for Easter and the spring, which signal rebirth and reawakening. The images in this poem point unmistakably to the arrival of spring. Rossetti frequently alludes to the Second Coming of Christ as the ultimate “birthday” in her work. The Second Coming is vital to the Christian faith because it connotes the replacement of the old with the new.
When she speaks of the purple throne, Rossetti refers to the Temple of Jerusalem from the Old Testament, which represents God’s presence on Earth. It is apparent that whoever or whatever this “love” signifies, the narrator is extremely ecstatic at the thought of the arrival.
The singing bird in the poem sings melodiously to express itself just as human beings use words to express their feelings. The voice of her heart can be understood through the singing bird’s melody and movement. She personifies other objects and speaks of them as if they too are human and possess emotions. This ability to bestow divinity upon nature was a chief characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists, and Christina Rossetti employs it to masterful effect.
Pre-Raphaelite Style, Themes, Literary Sources, and Aims of the Brotherhood
Pre-Raphaelite Style
The Pre-Raphaelite style in poetry concentrates on disciplined study and exact description of nature. It employs the use of bright, vivid colors in verbal imagery, mirroring the pictorial techniques of Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Pre-Raphaelite Themes
Subjects for Pre-Raphaelite poetry are drawn from contemporary society and literature. Major literary sources include Arthurian Legends, the works of Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, The Bible, Ancient Mythology, and the poetry of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Brotherhood articulated four primary aims. First, to have honest ideas to express in both art and poetry. Second, to study nature carefully so as to know how to express those ideas accurately. Third, to sympathize with what is direct, solemn, and genuine in previous art, while eliminating what is conformist, self-promoting, and produced through mere mechanical practice. Fourth, to produce good pictures and poetry that promote the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
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