Read Ebook: Pre-Raphaelite and other Poets by Hearn Lafcadio Erskine John Editor

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To the cultivated the very highest quality of emotional poetry is that given by blending the artistically sensuous with the mystic. This very rare quality colours the greater part of Rossetti's work. Perhaps one may even say that it is never entirely absent. Only, the proportions of the blending vary, like those mixtures of red and blue, crimson and azure, which may give us either purple or violet of different shades according to the wish of the dyer. The quality of mysticism dominates in the symbolic poems; we might call those deep purple. The sensuous element dominates in most of the ballads and narrative poems; we might say that these have rather the tone of bright violet. But even in the ballads there is a very great difference in the proportions of the two qualities. The highest tone is in the "Blessed Damozel," and in the beautiful narrative poem of the "Staff and Scrip"; while the lowest tone is perhaps that of the ballad of "Eden Bower," which describes the two passions of lust and hate at their greatest intensity. But everything is beautifully finished as work, and unapproachably exquisite, in feeling. I think the best example of what I have called the violet style is the ballad of "Troy Town."

Heavenborn Helen, Sparta's Queen, Had two breasts of heavenly sheen, The sun and moon of the heart's desire: All Love's lordship lay between.

Helen knelt at Venus' shrine, Saying, "A little gift is mine, A little gift for a heart's desire. Hear me speak and make me a sign!

"Look! I bring thee a carven cup; See it here as I hold it up,-- Shaped it is to the heart's desire, Fit to fill when the gods would sup.

"It was moulded like my breast; He that sees it may not rest, Rest at all for his heart's desire. O give ear to my heart's behest!

"See my breast, how like it is; See it bare for the air to kiss! Is the cup to thy heart's desire? O for the breast, O make it his!

"Yea, for my bosom here I sue; Thou must give it where 'tis due, Give it there to the heart's desire. Whom do I give my bosom to?

"Each twin breast is an apple sweet! Once an apple stirred the beat Of thy heart with the heart's desire:-- Say, who brought it then to thy feet?

"They that claimed it then were three: For thy sake two hearts did he Make forlorn of the hearths desire. Do for him as he did for thee!

"Mine are apples grown to the south, Grown to taste in the days of drouth, Taste and waste to the heart's desire: Mine are apples meet for his mouth!"

Venus looked on Helen's gift, Looked and smiled with subtle drift, Saw the work of her heart's desire:-- "There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!"

Venus looked in Helen's face, Knew far off an hour and place, And fire lit from the heart's desire; Laughed and said, "Thy gift hath grace!"

Cupid looked on Helen's breast, Saw the heart within its nest, Saw the flame of the heart's desire,-- Marked his arrow's burning crest.

Cupid took another dart, Fledged it for another heart, Winged the shaft with the heart's desire, Drew the string, and said "Depart!"

Paris turned upon his bed, Turned upon his bed, and said, Dead at heart with the heart's desire,-- "O to clasp her golden head!"

This wonderful ballad, with its single and its double refrains, represents Rossetti's nearest approach to earth, except the ballad of "Eden Bower." Usually he seldom touches the ground, but moves at some distance above it, just as one flies in dreams. But you will observe that the mysticism here has almost vanished. There is just a little ghostliness to remind you that the writer is no common singer, but a poet able to give a thrill. The ghostliness is chiefly in the fact of the supernatural elements involved; Helen with her warm breast we feel to be a real woman, but Venus and love are phantoms, who speak and act as figures in sleep. This is true art under the circumstances. We feel nothing more human until we come to the last stanza; then we hear it in the cry of Paris. But why do I say that this is high art to make the gods as they are made here? The Greeks would have made Venus and Cupid purely human. But Rossetti is not taking the Greek view of the subject at all. He is taking the mediaeval one. He is writing of Greek gods and Greek legends as such subjects were felt by Chaucer and by the French poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It would not be easy to explain the mediaeval tone of the poem to you; that would require a comparison with the work of very much older poets. I only want now to call your attention to the fact that even in a Greek subject of the sensuous kind Rossetti always keeps the tone of the Middle Ages; and that tone was mystical.

Having given this beautiful example of the least mystical class of Rossetti's light poems, let us pass at once to the most mystical. These are in all respects, I am not afraid to say, far superior. The poem by which Rossetti became first widely known and admired was "The Blessed Damozel." This and a lovely narrative poem entitled "Staff and Scrip" form the most exquisite examples of the poet's treatment of mystical love. You should know both of them; but we shall first take "The Blessed Damozel."

This is the story of a woman in heaven, speaking of the man she loved on earth. She is waiting for him. She watches every new soul that comes to heaven, hoping that it may be the soul of her lover. While waiting thus, she talks to herself about what she will do to make her lover happy when he comes, how she will show him all the beautiful things in heaven, and will introduce him to the holy saints and angels. That is all. But it is very wonderful in its sweetness of simple pathos, and in a peculiar, indescribable quaintness which is not of the nineteenth century at all. It is of the Middle Ages, the Italian Middle Ages before the time of Raphael. The heaven painted here is not the heaven of modern Christianity--if modern Christianity can be said to have a heaven; it is the heaven of Dante, a heaven almost as sharply defined as if it were on earth.

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL

The blessed damozel leaned out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven.

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, No wrought flowers did adorn, But a white rose of Mary's gift, For service meetly worn; Her hair that lay along her back Was yellow like ripe corn.

Herseemed she scarce had been a day One of God's choristers; The wonder was not yet quite gone From that still look of hers; Albeit, to them she left, her day Had counted as ten years.

It lies in Heaven, across the flood Of ether, as a bridge. Beneath, the tides of day and night With flame and darkness ridge The void, as low as where this earth Spins like a fretful midge.

Around her, lovers, newly met 'Mid deathless love's acclaims, Spoke ever more among themselves Their heart-remembered names; And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bowed herself and stooped Out of the circling charm; Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm, And the lilies lay as if asleep Along her bended arm.

From the fixed place of Heaven she saw Time like a pulse shake fierce Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove Within the gulf to pierce Its path; and now she spoke as when The stars sang in their spheres.

The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the still weather. Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together.

"I wish that he were come to me, For he will come," she said. "Have I not prayed in Heaven?--on earth, Lord, Lord, has he not prayed? Are not two prayers a perfect strength? And shall I fell afraid?

"When round his head the aureole clings, And he is clothed in white, I'll take his hand and go with him To the deep wells of light; As unto a stream we will step down, And bathe there in God's sight.

"We two will stand beside that shrine, Occult, withheld, untrod, Whose lamps are stirred continually With prayer sent up to God; And see our old prayers, granted, melt Each like a little cloud.

"We two will lie i' the shadow of That living mystic tree Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be, While every leaf that His plumes touch Saith His Name audibly.

"And I myself will teach to him, I myself, lying so, The songs I sing here; which his voice Shall pause in, hushed and slow, And find some knowledge at each pause, Or some new thing to know."

"We two," she said, "will seek the groves Where the lady Mary is, With her fine handmaidens, whose names Are five sweet symphonies, Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret, and Rosalys.

"Circlewise sit they, with bound locks And foreheads garlanded; Into the fine cloth white like flame Weaving the golden thread, To fashion the birth-robes for them Who are just born, being dead.

"He shall fear, haply, and be dumb: Then will I lay my cheek To his, and tell about our love, Not once abashed or weak: And the dear Mother will approve My pride, and let me speak.

"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.

"There will I ask of Christ the Lord Thus much for him and me:-- Only to live as once on earth With Love, only to be, As then awhile, forever now Together, I and he."

She gazed and listened and then said, Less sad of speech than mild,-- "All this is when he comes." She ceased. The light thrilled toward her, filled With angels in strong level flight. Her eyes prayed, and she smiled.

But soon their path Was vague in distant spheres: And then she cast her arms along The golden barriers, And laid her face between her hands, And wept.

In these beautiful lines we are reminded of the special duty of angels, from which they take their name, "messenger"--the duty of communicating between earth and heaven and bringing the souls of the dead to paradise. The Damozel, waiting and watching for her lover, imagines, whenever she sees the angels coming from the direction of the human world, that her lover may be coming with them. At last she sees a band of angels flying straight toward her through the luminous ether, which shivers and flashes before their coming. "Her eyes prayed," that is, expressed the prayerful desire that it might be her beloved; and she feels almost sure that it is. Then comes her disappointment, for the angels pass out of sight in another direction, and she cries--even in heaven. At least her lover imagines that he saw and heard her weeping.

Now you will better see the meaning of Rossetti's mysticism. When you make religion love, without ceasing to be religious, and make love religion, without ceasing to be human and sensuous, in the good sense of the word, then you have made a form of mysticism. The blending in Rossetti is very remarkable, and has made this particular poem the most famous thing which he wrote. We have here a picture of heaven, with all its mysteries and splendours, suspended over an ocean of ether, through which souls are passing like an upward showering of fire; and all this is spiritual enough. But the Damozel, with her yellow hair, and her bosom making warm what she leans upon, is very human; and her thoughts are not of the immaterial kind. The suggestions about bathing together, about embracing, cheek against cheek, and about being able to love in heaven as on earth, have all the delightful innocence of the Middle Ages, when the soul was thought of only as another body of finer substance. Now it is altogether the human warmth of the poem that makes its intense attraction. Rarely to-day can any Western poet write satisfactorily about heavenly things, because we have lost the artless feeling of the Middle Ages, and we cannot think of the old heaven as a reality. In order to write such things, we should have to get back the heart of our fathers; and Rossetti happened to be born with just such a heart. He had probably little or no real faith in religion; but he was able to understand exactly how religious people felt hundreds of years ago.

Let us now turn to a more earthly phase of the same tone of love which appears in "The Blessed Damozel." Now it is the lover himself on earth who is speaking, while contemplating the portrait of the dead woman whom he loved. We shall only make extracts, on account of the extremely elaborate and difficult structure of the poem.

THE PORTRAIT

This is her picture as she was: It seems a thing to wonder on, As though mine image in the glass Should tarry when myself am gone. I gaze until she seems to stir,-- Until mine eyes almost aver That now, even now, the sweet lips part To breathe the words of the sweet heart:-- And yet the earth is over her. . . . . . . Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears The beating heart of Love's own breast,--Where round the secret of all spheres All angels lay their wings to rest,-- How shall my soul stand rapt and awed. When, by the new birth borne abroad Throughout the music of the suns, It enters in her soul at once And knows the silence there for God!

Here with her face doth memory sit Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, Till other eyes shall look from it, Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, Even than the old gaze tenderer: While hopes and aims long lost with her Stand round her image side by side, Like tombs of pilgrims that have died About the Holy Sepulchre.

What the poet means is this: "Now I sit, remembering the past, and look at her face in the picture, as long as the light of day remains. Presently, with twilight the stars will shine out like eyes in heaven--heaven which is my Holy Land, because she is there. Those stars will then seem to me even as her eyes, but more beautiful, more loving than the living eyes. The hopes and the projects which I used to entertain for her sake, and which died when she died--they come back to mind, but like the graves ranged around the grave of Christ at Jerusalem." The reference is of course to the great pilgrimages of the Middle Ages made to Jerusalem.

More than the artist speaks here; and if there be not strong faith, there is at least beautiful hope. A more tender feeling could not be combined with a greater pathos; but Rossetti often reaches the very same supreme quality of sentiment, even in poems of a character closely allied to romance. We can take "The Staff and Scrip" as an example of mediaeval story of the highest emotional quality.

"Who rules these lands?" the Pilgrim said. "Stranger, Queen Blanchelys." "And who has thus harried them?" he said. "It was Duke Luke did this; God's ban be his!"

The Pilgrim said, "Where is your house? I'll rest there, with your will." "You've but to climb these blackened boughs And you'll see it over the hill, For it burns still."

"Which road, to seek your Queen?" said he. "Nay, nay, but with some wound You'll fly back hither, it may be, And by your blood i' the ground My place be found."

"Friend, stay in peace. God keep your head, And mine, where I will go; For He is here and there," he said. He passed the hillside, slow, And stood below.

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