The Moment and Monument of Two Rossetti Sonnets
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Ryerson University, Department of English
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@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. of her own and an illuminated sonnet by her painter-poet brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).@Christina Rossetti to William Rossetti, 20 June 1889, Letter 1665 in The Letters of Christina Rossetti: A Digital Edition.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.@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. 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.
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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.
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.@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 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.
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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.”@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. 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.
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The Moment and Monument of Two Rossetti Sonnets
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Ryerson University, Department of English
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 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
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"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