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The Moment and Monument of Two Rossetti Sonnets

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Ryerson University, Department of English

Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti
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
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
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
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

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
    Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
    One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart's quiet home,
    To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
    Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come.
And so because you love me, and because
    I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
    Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honoured name:
    In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
    Of time and change and mortal life and death.
The touch of the human hand in Dante Gabriel's illuminated "A Sonnet is  a moment's monument" and Christina's holograph copy of "Sonnets are full of love" emphasizes the personal nature of these poems as paratextual supplements to the "main" birthday gift of the Treasury of English Sonnets. While traces of their personal meanings in the gift of April 1880 may be ghostly presences in their subsequent published forms, each new setting brought its own expressiveness to these two sonnets. In its public location as the engraved frontispiece to William Sharp's biography, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study, published after the poet-artist's untimely death in 1882, the illuminated sonnet memorializes Dante Gabriel's verbal/visual aesthetic as the touchstone to his life and work As the unillustrated proem to D.G. Rossetti's sonnet sequence, The House of Life, in his Ballads and Sonnets collection of 1881, "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" comments on the work's main themes of erotic love in relation to death, time, and art. While these thematics are present in the illuminated sonnet "DG Rossetti pro Matre facit," the dominant meanings that emerge in this context are principally concerned with what humans can make out of a shared heritage, a common store of memory, and a recognition that we live and love with death ever in view. 
The meanings of Christina's "Sonnets are full of love" are also materially informed by its various contexts. In its first published form as the dedicatory poem to her mother for A Pageant and Other Poems, the reference to "this my tome /Has many sonnets" aptly refers to the book of her own verses that follows. However, in its holograph form as a presentation poem inserted into the back of Main's Treasury of Sonnets, "this my tome" names the gift of the book itself, to which Christina has added "One sonnet more," specifically as "a love sonnet" for her mother. Celebrating the mother's "fourscore years," the sonnet simultaneously commemorates her in the human eternity offered in the act of writing, and confirms the daughter's shared belief in an immortal life that "transcends the laws / Of time and change and mortal life and death." At the same time, the sonnet's closing lines act as a gentle corrective to the ending of Dante Gabriel's sonnet, which halts on Charon's shore, unable to find an eternity outside the realm of art.
Together, these holograph poems by the Rossetti siblings attest to the critical significance of material context in expressing poetic meaning. Memorializing both an individual birthday and a cultural tradition whose past continues to live in the present, the Rossettis' two sonnets are monuments marking their own place within family relationships and literary history.

The Moment and Monument of Two Rossetti Sonnets

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Ryerson University, Department of English

Endnotes

1 A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter--that is, in lines of ten syllables each, in which the dominant rhythm is patterned on five weak/strong stresses. A sonnet's organization determines its "argument." The Shakespearean or English sonnet works out its tensions, statements, counter-statements, and resolutions, over 3 quatrains and a couplet (abab cdcd efef gg). A Petrarchan or Italian sonnet develops its arguments in two parts: an octave of two quatrains (abbaabba) and a sestet (the rhyme scheme in these six lines varies, but cdcdcd is typical). Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti generally wrote variants of the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet. DGR's "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" varies the sestet to include a couplet: cdcdee. CGR's "Sonnets are full of love" varies the octave organization so that the rhymes end abbababa; the sestet uses the rhyme pattern of cdeecd.

2 Christina Rossetti to William Rossetti, 20 June 1889, Letter 1665 in The Letters of Christina Rossetti: A Digital Edition.

3 William Michael Rossetti, "Bouts-Rimés," Pall Mall Gazette vol. 16 in Rossetti Archive. Although William doesn't mention this in the article, sister Christina was as avid and adept a bouts-rimés sonneteer as her brothers. See also Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 84-5.

4 Christina Rossetti to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, April 2, 1880, Letter 837 in The Letters of Christina Rossetti: A Digital Edition.

5 Christina sent Dante Gabriel the exact size manuscript for the illuminated sonnet. The verso of an extant draft design for "A Sonnet is a moment's monument" shows, in Christina's hand, "Size of Treasury of English Sonnets." See Rossetti Archive h

6 See Jerome. J. McGann's Commentary for "Introductory Sonnet" (A Sonnet is a moment's monument") for D.G. Rossetti's Ballads and Sonnets (1881) in the Rossetti Archive.

7 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Athens: Ohio UP, 2002), 65.

Links

Page 1

"Letter 1665" http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/crossetti/L1665

"Bouts-Rimés" http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/ap4.n12.16.rad#0.1.6

"Letter 837" http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/crossetti/L837

" Rossetti Archive " http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s258b.rap

"Jerome. J. McGann's Commentary for "Introductory Sonnet"" http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1880.s258.raw