She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
These are no waters of earth, nor are the lilies and the stars—the three and the seven—those of our familiar vision. The water is some pool beyond the well at the world’s end, and the lilies and the stars are such as might have been held one in each hand by the Prologue to a fourteenth-century mystery play at the church porch.
Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,
To Him round whom all souls
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads
Bowed with their aureoles:
And angels meeting us shall sing
To their citherns and citoles.
It is not a sufficient explanation of this to say merely that Rossetti was a painter as well as a poet. Nor was it wholly that he, beyond the example of any poet before him, sought to wring the last voluptuous essence out of the very nature of words themselves. Nor, finally, was diction of this kind simply the inevitable consequence of the deliberate Pre-Raphaelite pact. Beyond all these contributary causes, there was in Rossetti a native distrust of common life, kept by his artistic vitality just this side of morbidity, that led him to the creation of a world, lustrous, brooding, its fauna and flora always a little fabulous, a world of murmured incantations and living heraldry. Here Rossetti suffered the pangs and gathered the compensations common to humanity, but his emotion, simple in character though it was, found its natural element in this embroidered and incense-laden world, and could not easily fulfil itself elsewhere. And in the diction of his poetry Rossetti delineated his world exactly, with its “twilit hidden glimmering visages.” Hardly any other poet, I suppose, could have praised the beloved for her “sultry hair.”