Reverting to my inquiry as to whether his work took much out of him, he remarked that his poetry usually did. “In that respect,” he said, “I am the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant’s surcease of agony until the thing on hand is finished.”
It was obvious that what Rossetti meant by being racked and tortured, was that his subject possessed him; that he was enslaved by his own “shaping imagination.” Assuredly he was the reverse of a costive poet: impulse was, to use his own phrase, fully developed in his muse.
I made some playful allusion, assuredly not meant to involve Mr. Swinburne, to Sheridan’s epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and to the Abbé de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses cost no trouble: “They cost you what they are worth,” replied the bard.
“One benefit I do derive,” Rossetti added, “as a result of my method of composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done.”
Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new sonnets of The House of Life. Sitting in that studio listening to his reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest. The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete: the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of hope, the same foreshadowings of gloom.
“You doubtless think it odd,” he said at one moment, “to hear an old fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was as young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix a note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a few are obviously the work of earlier years.”
I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet entitled Without Her.
“I cannot tell you,” he said, “at what terrible moment it was wrung from me.”
He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he said:
“All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to tears. It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a result. I have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly sensitive—Tennyson, and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott. I once heard Tennyson read Maud, and whilst the fiery passages were delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compass, the softer passages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks. Morris is a fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a little prone to sing-song, is Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks well—at least he did so when I knew him intimately as a young man.”