Wind on together and apart,
A fiery serpent for your heart,”—
whereas her visitor in the poem finds her in all her prime and pride, and asks,—
“What has man done here? How atone
Great God, for this which man has done?
. . . . . .
But if, as blindfold fates are tossed
Through some one man this life be lost,
Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?”
“Jenny,” perhaps, being cast in a more meditative form, lacks the poignancy and fervour of the utterance which comes, in “A Last Confession,” from the lips of the sinner himself instead of from the spectator merely, but it surpasses all contemporary studies of its kind in its bold and masterly handling of a difficult theme. Both, however, are distinct from the lyric poems in that their abruptness of movement and irregularity of structure are the abruptness and irregularity of quick dramatic thought, impatient of metrical elaboration, surcharging the poetic vehicle with subject matter; an effect which must not be confused with the ruggedness of the true ballad-form, whose broken music haunts the ear by its very waywardness and variety of rhythm, and gains its end by a studied artlessness the more exquisite for its apparent unconstraint. Nor is the effect of Rossetti’s universal preference for assonance over rhyme—a special characteristic of romantic poetry—identical in the ballads, sonnets and monologues just quoted. In the sonnets it relieves the rigid tension of the rhyme-system with an overtone of delicate caprice. In “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” it heightens the suggestion of impulse, and even haste of thought and emotion outrunning the metrical order which it chose. In the ballads, it is the result of the finest workmanship, not of accident or pressure of thought upon speech; it is the rich inlaying of the most highly-wrought woof of imaginative language with the brilliance of a perpetual surprise.