And God, who made me and my sire and thee,
May take the charge upon him.
1899-1908.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his 'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms about poets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridge among English poets has anything like the same definite grasp upon whatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanity partly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, that has given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art.
And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a line as
And when the night-vigil was done,
is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement of the normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is as satisfying to the ear as the more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and 'move.' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythms which had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety of rhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he has produced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found but rarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry.