It is impossible to adequately criticise “Rose Mary” without reference to the question already raised by Mr. Theodore Watts, as to whether in future editions of Rossetti’s poems the “Beryl Songs” should not be removed from their present places in the interludes of the poem and relegated to a note at the end. Writing on this point in the “Athenæum,” Mr. Watts said:—“The only case in which Rossetti’s changes were not improvements was the case of the changes in ‘Rose Mary,’ made, not after, but before, it appeared in type,—changes which can only be called lamentable. It had lain in its perfect form for years, and although it had been read in manuscript to scores of friends, no line in it had been altered. But when passing ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ through the press in 1881, at a time when he was out of health, Rossetti called to mind certain remarks upon a supposed lack of clarity in his work which had fallen not only from some critics but from certain friends; and in an evil moment it occurred to him that it would be a gain to ‘Rose Mary’ if the three parts were knit together by lyrics, and he set to work to write the ‘Beryl Songs’ which now appear in the ballad. The lyrics themselves are not good, for his endowment of metre was not equal to his other poetical gifts; but had they been as good as the lyrics in ‘Maud’ the disaster to the poem would have been none the less grievous. A friend whom at that time he consulted upon everything strongly fought against the introduction of these incongruities, but Rossetti was too ill to be persistently opposed, and only became conscious of the mistake when it was too late, the book being then before the public.”
It is obvious that the friend here alluded to is Mr. Watts himself, and it must be remembered that inasmuch as every line of the ballad without the lyrics had been familiar to him for years, his verdict can hardly be accepted as that of an unbiassed judge. It is, at all events, dubious whether any editor would now presume to disturb the sequence of the poem.
In one other ballad of kindred structure does Rossetti sustain a similar flow of exquisite imagination, in verbal beauty and subtlety of idiom hard to surpass in modern English verse. “The Bride’s Prelude” is indeed but a lovely fragment, a delicate vignette, a little character-sketch bathed in the warmest and finest of mediæval colouring; a prelude only, as it modestly claims to be; but, like Chopin’s preludes in music, so perfect in its limited range that the ear craves no further melody for a long while after its brief passion has sung itself to rest. It is a bride’s confession to her younger sister on her wedding morn; and, taking the form of a broken monologue interspersed with descriptive passages of the highest poetic order, its movement is more deliberate, its ornament more richly wrought, perhaps, than that of the more dramatic ballads. It might almost be said that nowhere else does Rossetti so oppress the reader with the actual feeling of the atmosphere in which the tale is told. The intense and sultry stillness of the chamber at mid-noon, where the two women sit together probing for the first and only time the one dire secret of the past, weighs upon us like veritable glare and burning silence, save for the bride’s difficult speech, and the shocked sister’s faint answers, and the keen, far-off sounds in the courtyard below, till the last word is said. Every minute detail of sight and sound heightens the effect of warmth and colour in contrast to the bare simplicity and hard tragedy of the narrative.
“The room lay still in dusty glare,
Having no sound through it
Except the chirp of a caged bird
That came and ceased: and if she stirred,
Amelotte’s raiment could be heard.
“Although the lattice had dropped loose,
There was no wind; the heat