The value of a poet’s verdict on his own poems is not always to be measured by his critical faculty when applied to general literature. The friends of Rossetti have been unanimous in his praise as a critic both of prose and of poetry, though his desultory reading and vehemence of judgment led him sometimes into extravagances of worship or condemnation, and blunted his discrimination of relative merits in divergent schools. Hence his persistent and quite explicable antipathy to Wordsworth, and his exaggerated estimate of Chatterton in later life. But in his criticism of his own work it is inevitable that a poet should be somewhat biassed by associations and memories bearing upon its production. It is difficult to take seriously Rossetti’s admission to the indiscreet admirer of one of his shorter poems,—“You are right: ‘The Cloud Confines’ is my very best thing.” Lyrically unimpeachable indeed it is, though not more so than the exquisite “Autumn Song,” “A New Year’s Burden,” “Insomnia,” “Three Shadows,” or “Sunset Wings;” and therefore are we fain to take Rossetti’s judgment as based largely on technical considerations when, in selecting his own favourites from among the “House of Life” series, he adds to the noble sonnet “Lost Days” (already quoted) the less impassioned but more coherent and melodious “Still-born Love,” “The One Hope,” and “Known in Vain.” These certainly excel in some of the highest qualities of the sonnet form—unity of idea, and the steady set of the rhythmic flow and ebb in motive and application; though in none of these does the sestet conform to the pure Guittonian model on three-rhyme-sounds, blending the first and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth lines in a double tercet, as it does with signal success in “Lost on Both Sides,” “The Portrait,” and “Hope Overtaken;” and in only one out of his chosen four (“The One Hope”) does Rossetti attain what he personally preferred as the most perfect order of sestet rhymes, based upon two terminal sounds, and rhyming the first, fourth, and fifth lines against the second, third, and sixth; thus opening the sestet with a quatrain harmonizing in structure with the octet above, and yet avoiding the rhymed couplet at the close which would remove the whole poem from the Italian mould in which, despite many irregularities, nearly all Rossetti’s sonnets are cast. The sestet of “Lost Days” (like several others in the series) exemplifies what is generally held to be the best arrangement of the two-rhymed sestet in the Guittonian form,—that in which the first, third, and fifth terminals chime against the second, fourth, and sixth. Admirable as these four sonnets are, however, in clarity of thought and cumulative power, it is doubtful whether they should rank higher, from the broadest standards of poetry, than “Lost on Both Sides,” “Lovesight,” “Mid-rapture,” or “Supreme Surrender;” in all of which the gathering force of the motive sweeps in a fine torrent—mournful, searching, tender, or triumphant—to its eddying close, and the best tribute to the metrical art of each is that it conveys so perfectly the inmost fulness of the thought. Frequently, indeed, Rossetti ends a sonnet with a rhymed couplet on a new terminal sound, following a Guittonian quatrain, as in “Mid-Rapture,” “True Woman,” “Her Heaven,” and “The Song-Throe;” or in some cases following a Shakespearean quatrain after a Guittonian octet, as, for instance, in “Venus Victrix” and “The Love-Moon.” Very rarely does he compose a whole sonnet in the Shakespearean measure, namely, that in which the two rhyme-sounds of the doubled-quatrained octave occur in alternate lines, and the former of them is carried forward with a new rhyme for the similarly alternated quatrain of a sestet clenched with a rhyming couplet on another note, as in “Willow-Wood” (No. III.). The question of the legitimacy of a rhymed couplet at the close of anything but a wholly Shakespearean sonnet has been much debated by conflicting authorities on poetic form. The sonnet is at once the most elastic and the most arbitrary of vehicles for the concise embodiment of a single thought and its accessory similes. From the scholar’s point of view, no indiscriminate grafting of one essentially national and historic growth of form upon another is theoretically defensible. But, since no European language is of exclusive stock, the fusion of Latin and Saxon speech in the varied beauty of modern English seems hardly less anachronistic than the adaptation of traditional metres to the new requirements of the poetic faculties of the age.
Akin to the “House of Life” in spirit and substance is “The Portrait;” a reminiscence, after the death of the loved model, of hours which saw the painting of the picture on a stormy summer day. Here the sonnet’s long-drawn strain gives place to a quicker measure:
“But when that hour my soul won strength
For words whose silence wastes and kills,
Dull raindrops smote us, and at length
Thundered the heat within the hills.
That eve I spoke those words again
Beside the pelted window-pane;
And there she hearkened what I said,
With under-glances that surveyed