The articulate heart : Christina Rossetti, William Morris, D.G. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite poetry of love

摘要

This thesis concerns silence and confession; the warring impulse in theudpoetry of Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and D. G. Rossetti betweenudthe necessity of concealing love and the desire to confess it. Lovers haveudalways been torn between the desire to keep silent and the desire toudexpress love and poets have long veered between guardedness andudeffusion. Yet in the work of the three poets with whom this study isudconcerned we find a reticence mixed with an avowal of love which isudpeculiarly their own and peculiarly informative about how these poetsudregarded the relationship o~ poetry to love and the relationship of poet toudtext.udThe tension . between silence and confession is evident in both theudpublic and personal lyric sequences of the Pre-Raphaelite poets which areud'told' by the poet-singer and their ballads and longer narratives in whichudthe protagonists, usually women, are given their own voices. Theseudwomen confess much in words but their bodily signs are sometimes evenudmore important than their speech in conveying the sexual and sociopoliticaludquandaries in which they find themselves. In their covertudmanipulations of the traditional forms, structures and techniques of theudballad, romance and epic, the Pre-Raphaelites found a freedom toudtransgress the accepted boundaries of what could be said aboutudrelationships between men and women and in doing so producedudradically suggestive poetry.udIn the first part of this thesis entitled 'Elegies' I examine first-personudlyric seq':lences. Two of these are well known sonnet s_equences: ChristinaudRossetti's Monna Innominata and D. G. Rossetti's The House of Life. Theudother sequences have for various reasons long remained hidden fromudscrutiny. William Morris's 'Seasonal Lyrics' (verses for the months) areudhidden within the morass of The Earthly Paradise. Christina Rossetti's 'ByudWay of Remembrance' quartet is a long overlooked, starker and darkerudprecursor to both Monna Innominata and her striking sequence of Italianudpoems posthumously published in Italian by William Michael Rossetti asudII Rosseggiar dell' Oriente (the first complete English translation of which isudincluded as Appendix A of this thesis) which is perhaps the mostudpersonal and obscure of all the poems treated in this thesis.udThese sequences along with a body of nominally public lyrics such asudthose which I have designated Christina Rossetti's 'It' poems, andudMorris's fugitive personal lyrics, elegise the death of love whilstudcelebrating it as the prime human and poetic experience. All three poetsudexperiment with poetry as 'love's last gift'. Christina Rossetti, WilliamudMorris, and D. G. Rossetti explore the interconnections between the poetloverudand the love poem. The love poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites is audsometimes voluble, sometimes 'silent' discourse about the impact of loveudand the loss of love on the identity. The lyric sequences rehearse the storyudof love's loss alternating bursts of agonised protest with announcementsudof stoical acceptance; whilst the riddling personal lyrics probe the causes ofudthe disintegration of self and at the same time try to reintegrate that selfudthrough the 'self' protection of silence and privacy.udThe second part of this thesis is entitled 'Narratives'. I examine howudthe male Pre-Raphaelite poet constructs the female lover as a legendaryudcharacter. In Pre-Raphaelite painting the ideal beloved is a silent,udbeautiful woman 'subtly of herself contemplative'. In Pre-Raphaeliteudnarrative poetry, particularly balladry, the woman is the lover as well asudthe beloved and she often articulates her love with passionate precision.udIn Chapter Four I analyse the psychological studies of women in loveudfound in William Morris's tales of Cupid and Psyche and The Lovers ofudGudrun, and I compare the characters of Guenevere as created by WilliamudMorris and Alfred Tennyson and Iseult as created by A. C. Swinburne,udTennyson, and Matthew Arnold.udIn the last chapter of this thesis I deal with Pre-Raphaelite sexualudfantasy and gender politics in ballads and longer narrative poems. TheudPre-Raphaelites gave themselves great poetic latitude by setting theirudballads in faery lands forlorn; using the conventions of fantasy, dreamudand medievalism they wrote poems concerning nuns and maidens,udknights and ladies, and sirens and sorcerers which deliver a rare eroticudcharge. These poems combine a strangled cry of desire with a sometimesudbrutal modernity of overt symbol- another type of silence andudconfession at the heart of the articulation of love in Pre-Raphaelite loveudpoetry.