The subject was painted for Lord Mount Temple. I have not seen the work, but doubtless it is composed of the three first verses of the poem, which must have been painted on the author’s mind long before it reached the canvas. The poem, which is not very musical or imaginative beyond the motif it carries out, has a great charm for many. It is simple in diction and emotional, and a merit not often found in Rossetti’s love poetry is its spiritual character, the lover not being near to incite the girl to passion of the naked kind which pervades his sonnets.
The author cannot be said to exhibit himself personally in this poem, nor in the other with which his fame is equally bound up, namely, “Sister Helen.” Both appear to tell their own story, which is the perfection of narrative, a truth which critics cannot too forcibly insist on. It is no easy matter for a writer himself to appear beautiful in the midst of his beautiful verses, unless his subject and its treatment is of the most elevated kind, as in Coleridge’s “Love,” which is so deliciously pure, and in the first verse or two of Wordsworth’s “Intimations.”
LVI.
A subject overwrought, like the sermon of a Calvin, must verge on the satanic. The poem of “Sister Helen” escapes this only through the pangs of hate being mollified in every verse by the despairing, heart-broken utterance of a refrain addressed to the Virgin Mother, and poured out in the agony of a once-religious, still-believing, soul, wailing with a bitterness which nothing can soften—an eternal hatred of her seducer; nothing short of seeing him in the flames of hell,—willing herself to suffer in them a torment that is only less than her thirst of revenue.
That she should breathe forth all this in a subdued voice of sorrow in the ear of the blessed Mary Mother is almost too touching for perusal; yet the pathos of the situation is even further enhanced by the tender and sad replies she gives to her innocent little brother, from whom she struggles to conceal, almost vainly, the anguish of her heart and its wicked aim. The refrains, for the most part full, are not always equal to the occasion, but might easily have been so rendered by so feeling a writer.
Of course the time must come when the poetry of England is melted down and merged into an anthology, and it is probable that the “Sister Helen,” as being the strongest emotional poem, as yet, in the language, will be among the most lasting works, and escape dissolution for a long time to come; perhaps will survive all change. And here a very remarkable fact thrusts itself before the mind; a representative one, which is that if Rossetti had written not another line besides this poem, his genius would have appeared all the greater: for lesser work is a fatal commentary on greater.
All suffer from this comparison with themselves except Gray, who wrote so little; and even he, after his Elegy, is scarcely saved the self-reproach.
Rossetti, in his writings, did not exercise much imagination, and none of the philosophic kind, by means of which the idea ascends, metaphor above metaphor, as high as the perspective of thought can attain. He did not look to musical sonance in his metre and his choice of words. He did not realize that love, to be acceptable in verse to the higher orders of mind, must be spiritual and chaste, that when carnal we possess it only in common with the beasts of the field. He could not have put on canvas the scenery of his fifth sonnet for exhibition, except in contravention of Lord Campbell’s Act.
From what I have read of his sonnets in his first edition, the vehicle of expression which such composition should formulate was beyond his reach. Above all other forms it demands the philosophic imagination, which scarcely any poet has enjoyed, because its possessors revert to science, as being within their compass, and as subject to higher reward. In Rossetti’s sonnet the expression of the thought rises no higher than its first statement, it has no grand climacteric. His imagination, in fact, was introspective rather than retrospective, and was scarcely prospective at all.