There shall be no more sea - Christina Rossetti writes poems about the sea

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
    Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
    One sonnet more…

The book has so many sonnets.  Christina Rossetti tells the truth.  The book is A Pageant and Other Poems (1881, the same year as her brother’s Ballads and Sonnets – so many sonnets), her third book of poems not counting devotional works and books for children and so on, and the least of them for reasons which include the large number of sonnets.

Christina Rossetti was facing the same problems as her brother, the same problems as every English-language poet.  There was a mismatch between the available forms and language of post-Romantic poetry and what poets were trying to express about themselves or their world.  Even as strong a poet as Christina Rossetti was affected.

I suppose I ought to defend this idea at some point. Reading a cluster of poets from the period it seems blatant, analogous to the exactly contemporary “crisis of Impressionism.”

Rossetti responded in two ways.  One was a reconnection with form, thus all of the sonnets, including many sonnet sequences, but also “The Months: A Pageant,” an allegorical poetic calendar that is the most conventional, kitschy Rossetti I have ever read.  It does have this marvelous stage direction:

[July retires into a shrubbery.]

The other response was Rossetti’s turn to devotional poetry and other devotional works, so that half of A Pageant is religious poetry.  Her next, and last, book of poems, Verses (1893) consists entirely of devotional poems.  I am not such a good reader of these poems, and I do not plan to read all of Verses, although I have paged through it. There are wonders, lines like “Steeped in this rotten world I fear to rot” (l.8 of “I, Lord, Thy foolish sinner low and small”) and poems like the sequence of three sea poems beginning with “Was Thy Wrath against the Sea?”

The sea laments with unappeasable
    Hankering wail of loss,
       Lifting its hands on high and passing by
           Out of the lovely light:

No foambow any more may crest that swell
    Of clamorous waves which toss;
        Lifting in hands on high it passes by
           From light into the night.  (ll. 1-8)

The poet tells the sea to reconcile itself with God’s purpose (“God doeth right”), yet the next poem is “And there was no more Sea,” and the third repeats the phrase:

Be stilled, my passionate heart;
    Old earth shall end, new earth shall be:
Be still, and earn they part
    Where shall be no more sea.  (ll. 9-12)

My difficulty with the devotional poems is that they are intentionally functional, meant to provide solace and aid worship, with imagery drawn from the (large, rich) pool of Christian tradition.  Yet, these sea poems – unconventional, personally expressive.

I read A Pageant but have barely mentioned it, and did not read Verses but am quoting from it.  I will say that the non-devotional poems from the earlier book, setting aside the longer allegorical stuff, are as good as the usual Christina Rossetti, which at this point meant better than anyone publishing poems in English.  This sea poem – not devotional, something else – was added to the 1888 edition of the book:

Birchington Churchyard

A lowly hill which overlooks a flat,
  Half sea, half country side;
  A flat-shored sea of low-voiced creeping tide
Over a chalky weedy mat.

A hill of hillocks, flowery and kept green
  Round crosses raised for hope,
  With many-tinted sunsets where the slope
Faces the lingering western sheen.

A lowly hope, a height that is but low,
  While Time sets solemnly,
  While the tide rises of Eternity,
Silent and neither swift nor slow.

This poem is followed by one titled “One Sea-side Grave.”  The grave is that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again - D. G. Rossetti translates

Mostly with older poets I ought to stick with some kind of Selected Poems.  That is what I used to do.  I began to feel, though, like I was missing something important about the context, about the books as such, so I have been reading more poetry books in their original form, or something like it.  All of the poems in order, at least, although I have come to appreciate the scanned copies of the  original books, stray thumbs and all.  Most of what I read recently were original texts.  In only one case was this a mistake, a waste of time.  That case was not Dante Gabriel Rossetti, even if his final 1881 book was second-rate by his own standards.

Rossetti is a funny case, though, because a Selected Poems is almost moot for him.  He wrote two perfect books, if you have any taste for his verse, the 1870 Poems and the books of translated Italian verse that I think of as Dante and His Circle (1874 – there is an 1861 version titled The Early Italian Poets).  I assume any Selected edition is mostly just going to choose from these two books, perhaps just from Poems, the home of “The Blessed Damozel” and “The Woodspurge” and the best “House of Life” sonnets.

And the Villon translations.  I do not have much of a taste for Rossetti’s painting, so I selfishly wish that he had sacrificed a few to create more translations. 

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
    Where are they gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword,-
  But where are the snows of yester-year?  (from “The Ballad of Dead Ladies”)

The Dante book, which includes the strange prose-poetry hybrid The New Life (1295) along with numerous poems written by Dante and others – many written to Dante by others – now seems to me like one of the greatest Victorian translations, alongside Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat and perhaps Longfellow’s Manrique.  Rossetti had a knack for capturing the voice of the pre-Raphaelite poet:

And I wrote this sonnet:-

I felt a spirit of love begin to stir
    Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;
    And saw Love coming towards me, fair and fain
(That I scarce knew him for his joyful cheer),
Saying, “Be now indeed my worshipper!”
    And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again
    Then, while it was his pleasure to remain,
I chanced to look the way he had drawn near…

And then there is some stuff about Beatrice, of course, but what I like here is the naturalness with which Rossetti understands the allegorical figure.  Rossetti has the properly archaic imagination to envision Dante and Love wandering around Florence, looking at girls, looking for one in particular.

I think one of Rossetti’s tricks is that he has studied and absorbed poets like Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the ones who brought the Italian sonnet into English in the early 16th century, so even if it is a two hundred year anachronism they feel right, not as fancied up as Shakespeare, but not antique, either.

I don’t know how he did it.

A sonnet pays the toll of Death - D. G. Rossetti's impearled sonnets

A sonnet is a moment’s monument, –
    Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
    To one dead deathless hour.  Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
    Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
    As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

I’m going to do a poetry roundup, whatever I have been reading for the last whenever.  This will go on for days.  Fictionists, see you in a couple of weeks.  I read many sonnets.  The above is the beginning of the sonnet that introduces a sequence of a hundred and one more of them titled “The House of Life” found in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets (1881), his last book before his death, and only his second books of original poetry.  It is not nearly as good as the 1870 Poems.  Back then, the “House of Life” sequence only included fifty poems, not a hundred and two, meaning that for this reason alone the 1870 book is more than twice as good as the 1881 book.

As Rossetti says in Sonnet LXXIV, Art has “turned in vain / To soulless self-reflections of man’s skill.”  The book demonstrates too much empty virtuosity, a kind of surfeit of beauty.  What moment is a poem catching if it has to be “impearled”?  And how much impearling is possible before the poem is in bad taste?  Rossetti has thickened rhetorically and thinned substantially.

So I break the poems into lines and images, and scrounge around for something more beautiful than pearls.  The hearts of two lovers lean on the heart of Love – is that over-elaborate -

As the cloud-foaming firmamental blue
    Rests on the blue line of a foamless sea.  (“The Lover’s Walk,” Sonnet XII)

After “Sleepless Dreams” (Sonnet XXXIX in 1881), the night is “A thicket hung with masks of mockery / and watered with the wasteful warmth of tears.”

I do not even have to know what Rossetti means – this from “The Cloud Confines,” not a sonnet, but a mood piece:

The sky leans dumb on the sea,
    Aweary with all its wings;
    And oh! the song the sea sings
Is dark everlastingly.

The edition of the book that I read is an 1887 reissue that includes a number of unpublished poems.  A group from a trip to France suggest what happens when the pearls are stripped away:

In France (to baffle thieves and murderers)
A journey takes two days of passport work
At least. The plan 's sometimes a tedious one,
But bears its fruit. Because, the other day
In passing by the Morgue we saw a man
(The thing is common, and we never should
Have known of it, only we passed that way)
Who had been stabbed and tumbled in the Seine,
Where he had stayed some days. The face was black,
And, like a negro's, swollen; all the flesh
Had furred, and broken into a green mould.  (“The Paris Railway-Station”)

First, I have added to my collection of literary visits to the Paris Morgue; second, even if this is not great poetry as it stands, it suggests a way to end the crisis of beauty.

I will let Rossetti finish the introductory sonnet:

A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
    The soul, – its converse, to what Power ‘tis due:–
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
    Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,
It serve; or, ‘mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath,
In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.

All right, this conceit, especially in the last two lines, is terrific.

Please click here for a painting depicting “Rossetti reading proofs of Ballads and Sonnets at 16 Cheyne Walk” – I have never before seen a painting on the subject of the reading of proofs. 

Mere virtue and rancid matter - Swinburne's letters - The original probably verges on coarseness.

In A Place in the Country (1998), the new (in the U.S., and more importantly in my hands) W. G. Sebald book, Sebald calls what appear to the naked eye to be long, detailed literary essays “extended marginal notes and glosses” (p. 5), and if that’s what those are, then I hate to think what these are here at Wuthering Expectations.

So today, some genuine marginal glossing, on Volume 2 of The Swinburne Letters, Yale University Press, 1959, covering 1869-1875.  When we last saw Swinburne, he had just achieved early fame and notoriety with Atalanta and Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866).  Now he is in his thirties and is settling into a career as a poet and essayist, if he does not drink himself to death first.

He also goes hiking in the French Massif with Richard Burton, corresponds with Victor Hugo, and hangs out with Robert Browning and James McNeill Whistler.  None of this is why I enjoy Swinburne’s letters.  Rather I am on the lookout for this sort of thing:

A foul mouth is so ill matched with a white beard that I would gladly believe the newspaper scribes alone responsible for the bestial utterances which they declare to have dropped from a teacher whom such disciples as these exhibit to our disgust and compassion as performing on their obscene platform the last tricks of tongue now possible to a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling; Coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons who make the filth they feed on.  (Jan. 30, 1874, p. 274)

Take a breath, Algernon!  Two guesses who the “teacher” is.

Here Swinburne needs to title a book of poems, but his favorite is too close to someone else’s.

Damn the minor poets, what right have they to call their titles (or their souls) their own, if we condescend to find any use for them?  (Jan. 20, 1875, 374-5)

Swinburne is some kind of comic demon.  An old woman possesses artifacts of Percy Shelley: “I need not say that I suggested strychnine, duly reduplicated, with earnestness worthy of Carlyle, but seemingly in vain” (Feb. 23, 1869, 6).  He wants to review Flaubert’s Sentimental Education “foreseeing that as before in his case the British press will generally exude mere virtue and rancid matter” (Nov. 25, 1869, 56).  After delivering a scatological burst borrowed from Rabelais (“turdilousifartishittical etc.”), Swinburne suggests that

the translation is no doubt – and very properly – softened down to the standard of English delicacy.  The original probably verges on coarseness.  (Feb. 12, 1870, 89)

Lest it seems that Swinburne is all rancid matter, I suggest a glance at any of Swinburne’s letters to Dante Gabriel Rossetti  (sorry, not Mar. 1, 1870 which is full of obscene parodies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems) in which Swinburne works his way through Rossetti’s upcoming collection of poems, including the sonnet sequence “The House of Life.”  It is a high level poetry workshop in which Swinburne the craftsman weighs the sound, sense, and beauty of every detail.  It is a treat to see how much this gleeful weirdo loves poetry, to see him wallow in it.

A couple of years later, D. G. Rossetti cut off his friendship with Swinburne (“and no one knows why,” including Swinburne, says the editor, p. 178).  Swinburne talks poetry with others – it is the only thing he really cares about – but no one else, in this book, who is really his peer.  It is sad, really.  Damn the minor poets.

The Best Books of 1861 - Yet if ye will but stay, whom I accost, And listen to my words a little space

What an amazing run the Victorian novel had from 1859 to 1861, or, really, from 1847 ( the annus Brontëus) through the 1870s.  Amazing in the quantity and quality of books of books that are still read, and not that the French and Russian and even, finally, American literatures of the period are insufficiently bulky.

This is only partly due to the irritatingly productive Anthony Trollope, who finished Framley Parsonage in 1861 and began serializing Orley Farm.  I am not sure how often the latter is read, but the former has survived pretty well.  Charles Dickens finished Great Expectations.  George Eliot published Silas Marner.  Margaret Oliphant wrote her first Carlingford stories.  This is a good haul, I would say, without having to resort to – I am on Wikipedia, 1861 in Literature – Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne or Thackeray’s Adventures of Philip.

One more wonderful piece of English, or semi-English, literature dates from 1861, the first version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Early Italian Poets, a book of translations of 13th and 14th century poems.  The centerpiece of the book is a complete translation of La Vita Nuova, Dante’s – the other Dante, the Dante-Dante – peculiar blend of prose and poetry celebrating his love for and mourning his loss of Beatrice:

Yet if ye will but stay, whom I accost,
  And listen to my words a little space,
    At going ye shall mourn with a loud voice.
It is her Beatrice that she hath lost;
  Of whom the least word spoken holds such grace
    That men weep hearing it, and have no choice.

NYRB has kept Rossetti’s version of The New Life in print.  Much of it, I would guess, is unsurpassable.

Let’s see.  Emily Dickinson was writing energetically, to the knowledge of no one.  Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs, now one of the most-read slave narratives, is from this year.  Frankly, the Civil War seems to have done in American literature for a few years.

I have no idea what was good in the French literature of 1861.  That Wiki page includes George Sand’s wacky Consuelo, but that is wrong by almost 20 years.  Come back next year for 1862.  Good, good French stuff in 1862.

Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured in Russia (I have not read this one).  The symbolic patriotism of Gottfried Keller’s The Banner of the Upright Seven in Switzerland (I have read it, and recommend it to the most dedicated readers of Keller).  Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg, the Estonian national epic.  Sorry, the what?  Now I am itching, ridiculously, to read the thing.

I expect most of these books to still be on this list when I repeat this exercise 50 years from now.  In the face of books as strong as Great Expectations and Silas Marner, 50 years does not sound so long.

The 1861 painting up top is John Morgan’s “Gentlemen of the Jury,” borrowed from Wiki.