Lyndon Ashmore champions the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti recently became a household name after the BBC drama Desperate Romantics appeared on our screens and established him in the audience’s mind as the rakish, charming deviant that fronted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the middle of the Nineteenth-Century. The series, despite the question of quality or artistic merit, did aid a little towards building a picture of the Brotherhood along with the unfolding of their artistic prominence in an institution that offered very little manoeuvrability, the English Royal Academy of Arts. However, Rossetti deserves attention not just for charismatically fronting a group of artists superior to himself, but also for his sometimes neglected writing which often contains the same defining features of technique as those exhibited in his painting and consequently can often result in some quite striking pieces of verse.

At the time the style of painting that the PRB championed caused outrage within the art institution which was used to the more delicate work of John Constable and Solomon Hart (although later in 1863 John Everett Millais – a key figure in the PRB – would eventually come to be accepted by the Academy). The same could certainly be said for Rossetti’s poetry which prompted critics such as Robert Buchanan to launch unflinching attacks on his verse. In 1871 Buchanan wrote an essay entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ that condemned the apparent vulgarity and baseness that he perceived in the writing of Rossetti and attacked the “combination of the simple and grotesque” that led to a “morbid deviation from healthy forms of life”.

Perceptions of the work have now changed, but it still remains that the sisterly arts of painting and poetry were clearly very masterly bridged by the brush and pen of Rossetti. This parallelism is aided by the fact that Rossetti often wrote poems under the same title and with the same subject matter as his paintings. His 1873 painting ‘The Blessed Damozel’ is presented in typical Pre-Raphaelite style: the colours are bright and intense; the heroine is suitably pale and forlorn; and the symbolism is rife. But what is interesting is the way in which Rossetti manages to recreate this in his poetry. Before he embarks on verse that takes the reader deep into the story of the couple’s troubled love, he first uses a steady hand to carefully paint in the deep vermillion hues, the burnished gold and the tapestry of symbolism that is so characteristic of his canvases.

The opening stanzas of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ present the reader with an image of the “three lilies in her hand”, the seven “stars in her hair” and the “gold bar of heaven” that is the “rampart of God’s house” from which she leans. These descriptions are an unambiguous presentation of the painting’s symbolism; the precision of numbers and connotations (some obvious, some implicit, but all present) develop a story of the damozel’s yearning for her lover while describing the exact composition of the painting. The same is done throughout other works such as the two sonnets contained in ‘Mary’s Girlhood’ that correspond intricately with the paintings ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ and ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’. The sonnet ‘Found’ also masterly adopts its rhyme scheme in a way that greatly accentuates the plight of the lone woman by foregrounding her only vocalisation in the poem: “’Leave me – I do not know you – go away!’”. It is in this line that Rossetti’s command of the two arts becomes most apparent; he has adapted the rhyme scheme of the poem to foreground the same struggle and fear of the woman as is so clearly centralized in the composition of the painting.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti in writing poetry as well as painting was among the minority of the PRB and I think there is a question in terms of production as to whether he was primarily a painter or poet. His artistic output was less in quantity and quality when compared to the others in the brotherhood, but the discourse between his paint and words was something none of the others offered in the same way. Did he write as a painter, or paint as a poet? In Rossetti’s work I think the two undoubtedly infiltrate each other to the extent that part of one is always evident in the other. It also appears that even his poems that aren’t written alongside a painting contain aspects that hold an affinity to the canvas and the same applies to his paintings that often contain the tapestry of textual reference and symbolism that would be more commonly found in poetry. This parallel of output is perhaps symptomatic of a mind that can’t decide to concentrate on one specific discipline, but either way it is very clear that Rossetti’s brushstrokes, palate, symbolism and mind for composition have shaped his verse to an extent that enables us to clearly view as well as read.