BOOKS•

MR. ROSSETTI'S POEMS.* MR. RossErrl's poems, though few and not diffuse, take a great deal of reading. Most of them are archaic in form, which is one obstacle to rapid apprehension ; and then, again, Mr. Rossetti's style, especially when he is writing reflectively and not engaged in painting a dramatic picture is not a concentrated style which makes a single powerful impression at starting and goes on developing but deepening the meaning from beginning to end of a poem ; it is rather a liquid and softly-flowing style, which passes with easy grace from one thought to another that is germane to the subject, till it seems to have flowed round it and circled it with a succession of various ideal criticisms which rather illustrate than vivify it. That Mr. Rossetti is a true poet no one can doubt who reads the book. How far bis poetry will make itself a life and name in the hearts of men is, of course, much more doubtful. And the doubt seems to lie in this,—whether or not there be not too much art in proportion to the intensity of the feeling,—whether the poem be not often too elaborate for the fire,—whether there be not, in the majority of the poems at least, a want of singleness of effect which makes them difficult to master, and difficult, too, when mastered, to remember. To us they seem poems much easier to admire than to love. We read and re-read without that access of charm at every fresh reading which a master mind usually secures. No doubt the fault may be in the reader,—of that we are perfectly well aware. But we find but very few of these poems,—a few we do find,—with that depth of melody and that magical charm for the imagination which render each reperusal a fresh pleasure.

• Poems. By Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: F. S. Ellis.

We will illustrate what we seem to miss by what we find in Mr. Rossetti. No sculpturing of the vacant, numbing, desolating pain of grief, the pain that cannot even as yet recover recollection, was ever more powerful, more terribly real than this :—

"THE WOODSPURGE.

"The wind flapped loose, the wind was still Shaken out dead from tree and hill: I had walked on at the wind's will,— I sat now, for the wind was still.

"Between my knees my forehead was,— My lips, drawn in, said not ' Alas ! '

My hair was over in the grass, My naked ears heard the day pass.

"My eyes, wide open, had the run Of some ten weeds to fix upon ; Among those few, out of the sun,

The woodepurge flowered, three cups in one.

"From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory :

One thing then learnt remains to me,—

The vvoodspurge has a cup of three."

The only line here which to our mind a little mars the effect by an

undue word is the second. For a poet in describing such a mood of mind as this, to speak of the wind as " shaken out dead from tree and hill" seems to us somewhat ostentatious of dreariness and

misery. But excepting that, which contains the least jar of would-be desolation about it, the song, as a picture of the vacant anguish which cannot think, is pure perfection. Indeed, "my naked ears heard the day pass" is a line which Wordsworth in his highest moods might have envied. And how grandly and simply the final verse sums up the drift of the whole,—in a way ever to be remembered, so as to ring in the heart as well as in the ear ! The song which follows it, called " The Honeysuckle," has much of the same singular power of compressing a mood of un- speakable sadness into a few keenly-cut words. But now to illus- trate what we mean as to this tendency to injurious elaboration and to excess of artistic decoration which seems to us to mar the effect of so many of these poems, take the preceding song, which has some curiously felicitous lines in it, but which is to our minds altogether spoiled for its intended purpose by this sort of artifi- ciality. The title itself, " Penumbra," has a touch of over- subtlety about it :—

" I did not look upon her eyes,

(Though scarcely seen, with no surprise, 'Mid many eyes a single look,) Because they should not gaze rebuke, Thenceforth, from stars in sky and brook.

"I did not take her by the hand, (Though little was to understand From touch of band all friends might take,) Because it should not prove a flake Burnt in my palm to boil and ache, " I did not listen to her voice, (Though none had noted, where at choice All might rejoice in listening,) Because no such a thing should cling In the wood's moan at evening.

"I did not cross her shadow once, (Though from the hollow west the sun's Last shadow runs along so far,) Because in June it should not bar My ways, at noon when fevers are.

"They told me she was sad that day, (Though wherefore tell what love's soothsay, Sooner they, did register ?) And my heart leapt and wept to her, And yet I did not speak nor stir.

" So shall the tongues of the sea's foam (Though many voices therewith come From drowned hope's home to.cry to me,).

Bewail one hour the more, when sea And wind are one with memory."

The first verse is pure and perfect in its simplicity, the second begins to offend us by artificial imagery.

"Because it should not prove a flake Burnt in my palm to boil and ache,"

is a true Elizabethan conceit, and immediately transforms the lover's mood of miserable self-control, into a sentimental effort to. ransack nature for a striking image of discomfort. Then, again, in the third verse, the reason assigned for not listening to her voice,—" because no such a thing should cling in the wood's moan at evening," is non-natural, has not the ring of true feeling about it, and has a touch of affectation : indeed, as in the previous.

verse, the lover falls into sentimental falsehood, assigning a reason for not doing what it was simply too painful to do if his reserve were to be kept at all. In the fourth verse, the reason assigned for not crossing her shadow appears to be of the same class of

conceits; but as it is utterly unintelligible to us after much study, we cannot criticize it. Indeed, this verse seems to us wholly bad. Then come two noble verses, the last full of an intensity which invests even the vagueness of the grand final image,—admitting, as it does, of so many interpretative suggestions,—with an air of true mystery, rather than with mere indefiniteness or obscurity. Now the blots, as we deem them, on this song, the air of self- conscious elaboration about the grief in the passages we have named, seem to us typical of the faults most frequent in the whole book,—a tendency in the art to outrun the feeling at times, and to add in cold blood what seem excrescences when looked at by the light of the genuine feeling delineated. A great majority of the sonnets seem to us in this sense forced,—an effort of the imagination to give elaborate expression to feelings which did not naturally flow into this form, but sat in somewhat artificial poses for their likeness.

And in a different way the majority of those ballads which Mr.

Rossetti has furnished after the archaic fashion with " burdens" seem to us to be liable to the same criticism,—though we except " Sister Helen," which is altogether perfect, and a marvellous ex- ample of success in what we might have thought the impossible attempt to write, now, a ballad of the past, full of the most profound pathos as well as of the very heart of an obsolete superstition. " Sister Helen" alone would prove Mr. Rossetti to be a fine poet. "Troy Town" and "Eden Bower," especially the last, appear to us as painful and elaborate failures in the attempt to revive an archaic form of poetry, as "Sister Helen" is a triumphant success. Of course, it cannot but be a question for the special discrimination of each reader's taste, whether or not these burdens,—for instance, "Eden bower's in flower" and "And 0 the bower and the hour !" in the ballad called " Eden Bower,"—add to the effect of the poems or not. To us, on the contrary, except in "Sister Helen," where these interpolations are managed with unusual skill, they only provide us with a monotonous and parrot-like interruption at fixed periodic intervals with the most irritating and even impertinent effect, which extends itself to the whole ballad, and invests it with an atmosphere of absurd and vexatious iteration.

But with all subtractions which the strictest criticism can make,—and to us, at least, some eight or nine of the poems, and by far the greater number of the sonnets, are cast in artistic moulds which throw a forced and unreal character over them, —some poems of great beauty and pathos remain, which should secure for Mr. Rossetti a permanent name among the poets of England. Of these we have already extracted one of the shorter ones. Let us add that, of the longer poems, besides " Sister Helen," " The Blessed Damozel," archaic as it is, seems to us a perfect and lovely poem. It is intense enough in feeling to fill the fanciful mannerism of the form with life and nature. Of those in which there is no attempt at any special mannerism of style, " Jenny " is no doubt the finest. The subject, which cannot but repel many readers, is to our minds far less repugnant than that of the earlier sonnets, and is dealt with with a purity of feeling and a delicacy of poetic touch that redeem it from all imputation of coarseness. The dreamy, refined, self-indulgent young man, musing through the night,—while the fair girl whom he has danced with at some of the public assignation-rooms of London, and accompanied home to her room, lies asleep, her supper still uneaten, with her head upon his knee, wearied with dissipa- tion and thankful to find her companion so gentle and considerate of her fatigue,—till at length the reproachful dawn enters the room, and he, having meditated himself into shame both for him- self and her, steals away after placing her carefully on the un- ruffled bed, and laying 4he unearned wages of sin within her hair, is delineated with the most masterly hand ; and the train of his certainly not too remorseful, but yet humiliating reflections, is full

of4trt0 and beauty :— " How Jenny's clock ticks on the shelf !

Might not the dial scorn itself That has such hours to register ?

Y t as to me, even so to her

golden sun and silver moon, In daily largesse of earth's boon, Counted for life-coins to one tune.

And if, as blindfold fates are toss'd, Through some one man this life be lest, Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?

"Fair shines the gilded aureole In which our highest painters place Some living woman's simple face.

And the stilled features thus descried

As Jenny's long throat droops aside,—

The shadows where the cheeks are thin,

And pure wide curve from ear to chin,—

With Raffael's or Da Vinci's hand

To show them to men's souls, might stand, Whole ages long, the whole world through, For preaching& of what God can do. What has man done here? How atone, Great God, ter this which man has done ? And for the body and soul which by Man's pitiless doom must now comply With lifelong hell, what lullaby Of sweet forgetful second birth Remains ? All dark. No sign on earth What measure of God's rest endows The many mansions of his house."

The poem, fine as it is, seems to us to need, for its motive, some- thing more of a startled horror of self-condemnation, as the early light enters and with it the thoughts which decide him to steal away. Dramatic and perfectly pure and fine as the poem is, it suggests, we think, a note of deeper shame and bitterer self-accusation towards the close than the poet has given us, both to complete the moral picture and to focus the somewhat too eloquent philosophizing of such a reverie iu some such inevitable conclusion as 'thou art the man.' A pang of true remorse, a flash of self-accusation fiercer and more personal than the hesitating shame which alone seems to drive the muser from Jenny's room, would have been, we think, at once truer to nature, and more likely to leave an indelible impres- sion on the imagination of the reader. We must not, however, cavil with what is so fine, because we fancy we see how the poet might have wade it finer.

" A Last Confession," again, seems to us a poem of rare power, whilst the song within it,—which Mr. Rossetti seems to have com- posed both in Italian and English, or at least to have composed in one language and given a perfectly original version of it in the other,—would be a gem among the purest gems of song. The utter incapacity of a loving woman even to conceive of any worth or beauty in herself except as one of the belongings of him who had taught her to love, was never more simply or more magically expressed:—

" She wept, sweet lady, And said in weeping : What spell is keeping Tho stars so steady? Why does the power Of the sun's noon-hour To sleep so moveTo ? And the moon in haven, Stained where she passes As a worn-out glass is,— Wearily driven,

Why walks she above me ?

" Stars, moon, and sun too, I'm tired of either And all together!

Whom speak they unto That I should listen ?

For very surely, Though my arms and shoulders Dazzle beholders, And my eyes glisten, All's nothing purely!

What are words said for At all about them, If he they are made for Can do without them ?'

" She laughed, sweet lady, And said in laughing: His band clings half in

It is such models of simplicity and intensity as this, which make us the more inclined to carp at the large' number of Mr. Rossetti's poems apparently strained, manneristic, elaborated beyond nature. If the fault, as it may well be, is in us, and not in the poet, we fear, nevertheless, that the same fault will be too frequently found among his other readers to admit of this volume attaining the popularity which a few of the pieces beyond question deserve.

My own already ! Oh! do you love me? Oh ! speak of passion In no new fashion, No loud inveighinga, But the old sayings You once said of me.

" ' You said : "As summer

Through boughs grown brittle, Comes back a little

Ere frosts benumb her,—

So bring'st thou to me All leaves and flowers,

Through autumn's gloomy

To-day in the bowers."

"' Oh! does he love me,

When my voice teaches The very speeches Ho then spoke of me ?

Alas ! what flavour Still with me lingers ?'

(But she laughed as my kisses Glowed in her fingers With love's old blisses.) Oh ! what one favour Remains to woo him, Whose whole poor savour

Belongs not to him?"' •