Here the sound ‘wed’ has called up the sound ‘wet.’ In the poem My Sisters Sleep, in one place where the moon is spoken of, it is said:
‘The hollow halo it was in
Was like an icy crystal cup.’
It is stark nonsense to qualify a plane surface such as a halo by the adjective ‘hollow.’ The adjective and noun mutually exclude each other, but the rhyming assonance has joined ‘hollow’ to ‘halo.’ With this we may also compare the line:
‘Yet both were ours, but hours will come and go’
(A New Year’s Burden),
and
‘Forgot it not, nay, but got it not’ (Beauty).
Many of Rossetti’s poems consist of the stringing together of wholly disconnected words, and to mystic readers these absurdities seem naturally to have the deepest meaning. I should like to cite but one example. The second strophe of the Song of the Bower says:
‘... My heart, when it flies to thy bower,
What does it find there that knows it again?
There it must droop like a shower-beaten flower,
Red at the rent core and dark with the rain.
Ah! yet what shelter is still shed above it—
What waters still image its leaves torn apart?
Thy soul is the shade that clings round it to love it,
And tears are its mirror deep down in thy heart.’[100]