N I N E S - View Exhibit

Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

On April 27, 1880, Frances Rossetti turned eighty. In honour of her birthday, the poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) gave her mother a copy of David Main's Treasury of English Sonnets, embellished with a hand-written sonnet@ of her own and an illuminated sonnet by her painter-poet brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).@With their dual English/Italian heritage, the Rossetti siblings were proficient sonneteers themselves. In their youth, they had played a sonnet-writing game known as bouts-rimés, in which they would each write a sonnet based on 14 pre-set end words, usually using the Petrarchan rhyme structure of octave and sestet. The object of the game was to combine sense with speed, and they grew proficient enough to write sonnets in under ten minutes, some of them very good.@ In 1880, they were mature poets who had written many sonnets, including the intricate sonnet sequences they published in their poetry collections the following year: Christina's Monna Innominata in A Pageant and Other Poems (Macmillan 1881) and Dante Gabriel's House of Life in Ballads and Sonnets (Ellis 1881). This exhibit examines how the material context of the birthday gift of Main's Treasury of Sonnets, the holograph forms of both sonnets, and the combined visual/verbal expression of Dante Gabriel's illuminated manuscript, contribute to the meanings generated by "A sonnet is a moment's monument" and "Sonnets are full of love."

In 1880, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an acclaimed painter and poet then in the process of preparing his second collection of poems for publication. Since his establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, Dante Gabriel had explored the complex relations between the visual and verbal arts and public (that is to say, institutionalized) and personal systems of signification. The illuminated sonnet he created for insertion in his mother's birthday gift represents a particular expression of these concerns. In the context of the Treasury presentation to his mother, "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" is an occasional poem, prepared specifically to celebrate an auspicious family event. Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti had drafted the sonnet in the months prior to Frances's birthday, the poem achieved its complete expression in the visual/verbal form he wrote and designed for insertion into the gift of Main's Treasury of Sonnets.

The Sonnet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A Sonnet is a moment's monument, —
Memorial from the soul's eternity,
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own intricate fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night prevail; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The Soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:—
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath.
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

The poem, which is about Love and Death, eternity and art, is both a generalized and public memorial on the sonnet itself as a cultural artifact, and a private memorial to a beloved mother, commemorating the moment of her 80th birthday. Sensitive to the likely brevity of his elderly mother's remaining years, Dante Gabriel consulted with Christina as to whether he ought to change the sonnet's closing to dilute or negate its emphasis on death. The proposed substitution no longer exists, but Christina notably rejected the emendation, averring that her devout mother looked forward to death as the portal to immortality, and suggesting that the substitution would introduce both a moral and an aesthetic error, as the existing closing was poetically superior.@ If, as Dante Gabriel's verses argue, the sonnet in general has two faces, this particular sonnet has both a private face, speaking to a domestic celebration of a family occasion, and a public face, speaking to a long historical tradition of sonnet writing and the place of D.G. Rossetti's work within that tradition. In this context, the sonnet not only comments on its power to memorialize time as it passes, but also reflects on its ability to capture for posterity, as this illuminated manuscript testifies, a son's love for his mother by offering her his best work.

The Sonnet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Christina provided her brother with the specific dimensions of the book intended for the birthday gift, so that the artist-poet could prepare his illuminated sonnet on an exact-size manuscript, designed for insertion into the front of the Treasury.@ Dante Gabriel memorialized the moment of the illuminated sonnet's making in the lower left corner of the manuscript: "DG Rossetti pro Matre facit Apr: 27: 1880" (DG Rossetti made this for his Mother April 27 1880; my translation). Dante Gabriel wrote out the sonnet in calligraphic script within an illustrative frame composed of an angelic figure wearing a laurel wreath (inscribed above as "ANIMA"—"soul"), surrounded by rose bushes and holding a lyre in her right hand and a winged hourglass in her left. The first two words of both octave and sestet --"A Sonnet"-- are set off in a dark rectilinear box. Beside the first line of the sestet, which begins "A Sonnet is a coin," Dante Gabriel drew two sides of a coin, showing a butterfly and a snake.

The visual text interacts dialogically with the verbal text to expand and enrich its meaning. In a letter to his mother on her birthday, Dante Gabriel explained the visual symbolism as follows: “The Soul is instituting the ‘memorial to one dead deathless hour’; a ceremony easily effected by placing a winged hour-glass in a rose-bush, at the same time that she touches the fourteen-stringed harp of the sonnet, hanging round her neck. On the rose-branches trailing over in the opposite corner is seen hanging the Coin, which is the second symbol used for the sonnet. Its ‘face' bears the soul, expressed in the butterfly; its ‘converse’ the Serpent of Eternity enclosing the Alpha and Omega.”@ Dante Gabriel did not gloss the rose bushes, but family members would surely have recognized a personal allusion to the Rossetti family name. The rose is a traditional symbol for the passion and brevity of love and life, but Dante Alighieri, the poet-artist's namesake, also used the multi-foliate rose to represent paradise in his Divine Comedy, a work well-known to the Rossettis.

The Sonnet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

In placing Dante Gabriel's illuminated sonnet in the front of the Treasury of Sonnets and writing her own, unilluminated verses on the back fly-leaf, Christina acknowledged the rightful place of the oldest son, while also privileging her brother's visual/verbal contribution as a work of art in itself. This placement also instituted Christina as a meta-editor for Main's Treasury of Sonnets. In this context, D.G. Rossetti's illuminated "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" functioned as a directive frontispiece, and her own "Sonnets are full of love" provided a closing commentary to the volume of English sonnets. The Rossettis' pair of sonnets thus become the "Alpha" and "Omega" of this national collection, thereby commenting on the long tradition of sonnets circulating in manuscript for private/public expressions of love, ambition, rivalry, and loss.

In 1880, Christina Rossetti was the critically acclaimed author of three poetry collections and was then in the process of preparing her fourth book of verse for publication. Her "Sonnets are full of love" is one of many occasional poems she wrote, variously commemorating birthdays, deaths, feasts and fasts in the Church calendar, and secular holidays such as Valentine's Day. Dante Gabriel seems to have offered to illuminate her poem as well, but Christina wanted this gift for her mother to be entirely from her own hand.@ In her birthday offering, Christina Rossetti engages the love-sonnet tradition by writing a love poem to her mother, her "first Love," her inspiration/muse, and the spiritual guide "whose blessed glow transcends the laws/ Of time and change and mortal life and death":

The Moment and Monument of Two Rossetti Sonnets

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Ryerson University, Department of English