The exaltation of spirit is more sustained, the diction more finely distilled, the air clearer, the whole balance and setting of the narrative more perfect than in “Dante at Verona.” The passion of chivalric love, worship, heroism, loyalty, burns at a white-heat from the first line to the last. Every phrase is purged, chastened, and full-charged; and flies swiftly with its portentous burden of meaning straight to the mark. It breathes the very soul of that romantic chivalry to which the modern world is turning with a shaken conscience and a regenerate will; impelled to a larger application of its principles than the golden ages knew. The glory of true knighthood in its championship of the weak, its resistance of tyranny, its heroic self-sacrifice, its contempt of ease, its defiance of pain, its devotion to principle, is as yet a tardy sunrise brokenly discerned through the long reaches of historic years; an unsteady dawn of world-light clouded by men’s lust of private power; a scant and partial gleam of what it must involve for the social life to be.
“The White Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy” stand together as Rossetti’s sole and supreme achievements in the realm of historical romance. They stand, in fact, alone in conception and treatment among modern English ballads: unequalled even by Tennyson’s “Revenge,” and crowning the lyric with something almost of the epic quality. The theme of “The White Ship” is found in the familiar story of Henry I. of England, who is said to have “never smiled again” after the loss of the “white ship” in which his son and heir—not mentioned by name in the poem—perished in crossing the channel from Normandy. “The King’s Tragedy” relates, through the mouth of Catherine Douglas (“Kate Barlass”), the assassination of James I. of Scotland by Sir Robert Graeme. In neither ballad is the action lifted to an unfamiliar or phantasmal world; in both it is transfused, as it passes across the stage of actual history, with a glow and glamour of supernatural light; brought near to us with a direct realism of incident and detail as convincing as it is transparent, and yet shrouded in an atmosphere of mysticism and reserve, pervaded with a sense of doom and fatality, that holds us in a mingled awe and exaltation such as we feel in the purest Greek tragedy, amid the strivings of the gods with men. The narrative of “The White Ship” is told bluntly, vividly, incoherently, by the humblest of the king’s retinue and the sole survivor of the royal train, “the butcher of Rouen, poor Berold;” and the movement seems to gather the more power and sincerity from his untutored lips. Its dominant motives, its finer touches,—the withholding of the hero’s name and the allusions to him merely as “the Prince,” the emphasis on the manner of the death of the “lawless, shameless youth” who died, after all, for his sister’s sake—the emphasis throughout on character rather than on incident—these are true marks of romantic poetry.
But “The King’s Tragedy” far surpasses the earlier ballad in sustained and unfaltering dignity of passion, in the tender humanness of the narrative setting, the grandly simple presentation of the climax, and the weird portent of the earlier scenes. None but the two or three who saw the writer in the course of his task can know what the poem cost Rossetti in his dying year,—the last great product of a literary genius still ascendant when obscured by death, and if not the finest of all his ballads, sharing at least the rank of “Sister Helen,” “Rose Mary,” and “The Blessed Damozel.” Never does he use the supernatural machinery with a more masterly restraint or yet with a more powerful effect of dread and presage, than when he brings the aged woman of the sea, like one of the witches of “Macbeth,” to confront the King with her fourfold vision of his doom:
“Four years it is since first I met,
’Twixt the Duchray and the Dhu,
A shape whose feet clung close in a shroud,
And that shape for thine I knew.
“A year again, and on Inchkeith Isle
I saw thee pass in the breeze,
With the cerecloth risen above thy feet