Dante Gabriel Rossetti The House of Life, Sonnet Sequence A Variorum Edition with Introduction and Notes

THE HOUSE OF LIFE
A Sonnet-Sequence
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
To view the image on this page please refer to the printed
version of this book.

Rossetti’s pen-and-ink design for his Sonnet on the Sonnet. S. 258. Private
Collection. See p. 38 note 9.

THE HOUSE OF LIFE
A Sonnet-Sequence
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Variorum Edition
with an
Introduction and Notes

by
Roger C. Lewis

Boydell & Brewer
2007

Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.

The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed
for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort
has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission,
and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in
subsequent editions.

ANNAE UXORI
For my wife Nancy

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Edited Text and Apparatus
List of Abbreviations and Sigla
Introduction
Sonnet Texts and Notes
[PROEM Sonnet]

x
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xiii
xvi
1
27
35

Part I. Youth and Change.
Sonnet I. Love Enthroned.
Sonnet II. Bridal Birth.
Sonnet III. Love’s Testament.

Sonnet IV. Lovesight.
Sonnet V. Heart’s Hope.
Sonnet VI. The Kiss.
Sonnet VIa. Nuptial Sleep.
Sonnet VII. Supreme Surrender.
Sonnet VIII. Love’s Lovers.
Sonnet IX. Passion and Worship.
Sonnet X. The Portrait.
Sonnet XI. The Love-Letter.
Sonnet XII. The Lovers’ Walk.
Sonnet XIII. Youth’s Antiphony.
Sonnet XIV. Youth’s Spring-Tribute.
Sonnet XV. The Birth-Bond.
Sonnet XVI. A Day of Love.
Sonnet XVII. Beauty’s Pageant.
Sonnet XVIII. Genius in Beauty.
Sonnet XIX. Silent Noon.
Sonnet XX. Gracious Moonlight.
Sonnet XXI. Love-Sweetness.
Sonnet XXII. Heart’s Haven.

Sonnet XXIII. Love’s Baubles.
Sonnet XXIV. Pride of Youth.
Sonnet XXV. Winged Hours.
Sonnet XXVI. Mid-Rapture.
Sonnet XXVII. Heart’s Compass.
Sonnet XXVIII. Soul-Light.

39
39
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44
46
47
48
52
55
56
58
61

63
65
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70
71
72
73
76
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80
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83
85
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88

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Table of Contents

Sonnet XXIX. The Moonstar.
Sonnet XXX. Last Fire.
Sonnet XXXI. Her Gifts.
Sonnet XXXII. Equal Troth.
Sonnet XXXIII. Venus Victrix.
Sonnet XXXIV. The Dark Glass.
Sonnet XXXV. The Lamp’s Shrine.
Sonnet XXXVI. Life-in-Love.
Sonnet XXXVII. The Love-Moon.
Sonnet XXXVIII. The Morrow’s Message.
Sonnet XXXIX. Sleepless Dreams.
Sonnet XL. Severed Selves.
Sonnet XLI. Through Death to Love.
Sonnet XLII. Hope Overtaken.
Sonnet XLIII. Love and Hope.
Sonnet XLIV. Cloud and Wind.
Sonnet XLV. Secret Parting.
Sonnet XLVI. Parted Love.

Sonnet XLVII. Broken Music.
Sonnet XLVIII. Death-in-Love.
Sonnets XLIX, L, LI, LII. Willowwood.
Sonnet LIII. Without Her.
Sonnet LIV. Love’s Fatality.
Sonnet LV. Stillborn Love.
Sonnets LVI., LVII., LVIII. True Woman.
I. Herself.
II. Her Love.
III. Her Heaven.
Sonnet LIX. Love’s Last Gift.
End of Part I.

90
91
92
94
96
97
98

100
102
103
104
106
107
109
111
112
113
115
116
117
119
129
130
131
133
133
137

139
142
142

Part II. Change and Fate.
Sonnet LX. Transfigured Life.
Sonnet LXI. The Song-Throe.
Sonnet LXII. The Soul’s Sphere.
Sonnet LXIII. Inclusiveness.
Sonnet LXIV. Ardour and Memory.
Sonnet LXV. Known in Vain.
Sonnet LXVI. The Heart of the Night.
Sonnet LXVII. The Landmark.
Sonnet LXVIII. A Dark Day.
Sonnet LXIX. Autumn Idleness.
Sonnet LXX. The Hill Summit.

144
144
146

147
149
151
154
155
157
158
161
164

Table of Contents

Sonnets LXXI., LXXII., LXXIII. The Choice.
Sonnets LXXIV., LXXV., LXXVI. Old and New Art.
I. St. Luke the Painter.
II. Not as These.
III. The Husbandmen.
Sonnet LXXVII. Soul’s Beauty.
Sonnet LXXVIII. Body’s Beauty.
Sonnet LXXIX. The Monochord.

Sonnet LXXX. From Dawn to Noon.
Sonnet LXXXI. Memorial Thresholds.
Sonnet LXXXII. Hoarded Joy.
Sonnet LXXXIII. Barren Spring.
Sonnet LXXXIV. Farewell to the Glen.
Sonnet LXXXV. Vain Virtues.
Sonnet LXXXVI. Lost Days.
Sonnet LXXXVII. Death’s Songsters.
Sonnet LXXXVIII. Hero’s Lamp.
Sonnet LXXXIX. The Trees of the Garden.
Sonnet XC. “Retro Me, Sathana!”.
Sonnet XCI. Lost on Both Sides.
Sonnets XCII., XCIII. The Sun’s Shame.
Sonnet XCIV. Michelangelo’s Kiss.
Sonnet XCV. The Vase of Life.
Sonnet XCVI. Life the Beloved.
Sonnet XCVII. A Superscription.
Sonnet XCVIII. He and I.
Sonnets XCIX., C. Newborn Death.
Sonnet CI. The One Hope.
End of The House of Life.
Appendix One. Dating and Ordonnance
Appendix Two. Poems: Proof States
Appendix Three. Poems: Chronology 1868–71
Appendix Four. Poems: Bibliographical Summaries
Appendix Five. Ballads and Sonnets: Chronology 1879–82
Appendix Six. Ballads and Sonnets: Bibliographical Summaries
Appendix Seven. Locations of Sources
Appendix Eight. Unpublished and Excluded Sonnets
Bibliography of Works Cited or Consulted

ix

167
172
172
174
177
179
181
184
186
187
189
191
193
195
196
197
200
202
204
207
209
212
214
215
216
218
219
223
223
227
247
250
254
261
274
278
288
298

List of Illustrations
Frontispiece: Rossetti’s pen-and-ink design for his
Sonnet on the Sonnet
Plate I: Annotated proofsheet of 25 Apr 81
with Prefatory Note to House of Life
Plate II: Self-portrait by Elizabeth Siddal
Table: Locations of proofsheets for Ballads and Sonnets

xxii
opp. 131
23

Acknowledgements
This book began as a proposal for a Ph.D. dissertation more than
forty years ago. I cannot now remember the names of everyone who
helped me with the research necessary to complete this variorum
edition. Many of them, some of those most vividly and fondly
remembered, are now beyond thanking, but I must thank them anyway.
I shall start by naming my predecessors in undertaking a separate
edition of the House: Frederick Page, Paull Baum, Janet Troxell,
Kathryn Gordon and Thomas Delsey, whose work I have built on.
No one has done more to unearth Rossetti’s manuscripts, letters
and scarce printed materials than William E. Fredeman, the godfather of
Pre-Raphaelite studies and Editor of The Correspondence of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (D. S. Brewer, 10 vols): my book is the first to make extensive use of that monumental edition. Neither has anyone done more
to help me personally and professionally with this edition than Dick
Fredeman. From July 1975, when my research assistant Gavin Murdock
and I descended on his Allison Road home and library, to a few days
before his death in July 1999, Dick shared his collection, his letters
edition-in-progress, his wisdom, expertise and vast network of contacts
to aid my editorial efforts. The generosity and hospitality he offered
to fellow-scholars during the Allison Road days were matched by his
wife Jane Cowan Fredeman, who continued to extend them both
towards me after Dick was gone by acting as my editor on this book.
I was assisted in the early stages of this edition by my able and
supportive mentors F. E. L. Priestley and Malcolm M. Ross. Other
Rossettians who have aided and encouraged my research include
Robert N. Keane, Robert S. Fraser, Joseph P. Gardner, Rosalie Glynn
Grylls (Lady Mander), Roger W. Peattie, Allan and Page Life, Mark
Samuels Lasner and Jerome J. McGann. The co-operation of collectors
and family custodians of rare material is essential in work of this
kind: it is too late now to thank two of William Rossetti’s granddaughters, Imogen Dennis and Lucy O’Conor, and collectors Simon
Nowell-Smith, Sir Paul Getty and Halsted B. Vanderpoel, but
without their help this edition would have been badly compromised.
Booksellers are vitally important to scholarly editing as well: I must
thank Maggs Bros., Ian Hodgkins and Co., Antony Rota, Bernard
Quaritch and John Fleming.
The list of Librarians and Curators who enabled my research both
in person and by other means would fill pages, so I am forced to be

xii

Acknowledgements

both selective and collective. The staff of every repository mentioned
in Appendix Seven (Location of Sources) is here formally thanked, but
my greatest demands were made on personnel at the Firestone
Library at Princeton, the Fitzwilliam Museum Library at Cambridge,
the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale and the
Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington: I was particularly obliged to
Rob Fraser at Princeton, Phyllis Giles and P. Woudhuysen at the
Fitzwilliam, Marjorie Wynne at Yale and Phyllis Nixon and Rowland
Elzea at Delaware Art Museum. Donald Sinclair advised me on using
the Symington Collection at Rutgers. George Brandak showed me
around the Rossetti family archive at the University of British
Columbia. Tim Burnett helped solve my problems in the British
Library Department of Manuscripts. Finally, I am grateful to the staff
in the Bodleian Library Bibliographic Centre, the Folger Shakespeare
Library and Dan Tierney in the New York Public Library for teaching
me the mysteries of collating machines.
I acknowledge with gratitude and humility the enormous role
that my editors played in the creation of this book. Jane Cowan is
mentioned above. I thank the editorial staff at Boydell & Brewer,
particularly Caroline Palmer. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my
tireless and unflappable technical editor, my indispensable wizard of
word-processing, Barbara Lange.
Chasing Rossetti manuscripts is expensive. My initial searching in
England was facilitated by a Queen Elizabeth II Ontario Scholarship
and two Canada Council Pre-Doctoral Fellowships. Later research
was generously funded through two Research Grants awarded by the
Canada Council and its successor the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC); many smaller SSHRCC
Grants were made through Acadia University, which also gave me
several Reid Summer Study Awards and a generous amount of
supported leave. Indeed, Acadia, my academic home, supported my
research in countless ways, not least through assigning several
student research assistants to me over thirty years. Other support
received came from the University of Toronto Research Travel Fund,
the British Council, the Nuffield Foundation and the Royal Academy.
I had many research assistants but the best of them were Gavin
Murdock, Keith Anderson, Joe Kanary and my wife Nancy: this book
is dedicated to her.

Note on the Edited Text
and Apparatus
This is a variorum edition in the sense that it lists all the textual
variants, including revisions and trials (both cancelled and uncancelled),
in Rossetti’s manuscripts, notebooks, letters, proofsheets and printed
texts with authority. No periodical or other separate printing of a
House of Life sonnet is considered to have authority unless the copy-text
derives directly from the poet or he is known to have seen proofs of
the items. It is not the sort of variorum edition that includes a history
of scholarship on the poem with representative excerpts or a large and
various selection of notes and comments on the text by previous editors
and critics. Both my bibliographies, the following list of frequently
cited sources and the terminal list (pp. 298–301) of occasionally cited
sources, do not therefore aim at completeness or inclusiveness. I have
not attempted an exegesis or paraphrase of the poem.
Rather, I have striven to present the essential materials needed for
such a critical task and to indicate where supporting materials may
be found. I have read many critical studies of the sequence and
individual sonnets in it, some of which I have cited below because I
found them relevant and insightful or helpful in establishing context
in the way that Rossetti’s exchanges by post with Swinburne or Caine
provide context for some of the sonnets. Not every brilliant article on
The House of Life is mentioned in this book, but neither is it crammed
with all the dull and superfluous criticism of this poem that has been
pouring forth since Robert Buchanan started the tradition in 1871.
The reader is left to construct an interpretation of the poem and to
choose between good and bad criticism of it.
My primary purpose has been to print exactly the text that
Rossetti intended the reader to have, in its final form. To that end, I
chose as copy-text the first edition of Ballads and Sonnets (1881), the
last form of the sequence seen through the press by the poet. Some
emendations were adopted from the resetting in 1882 of this text,
called the fourth edition, because the poet had identified to his
publisher mistakes he wanted corrected in the next edition or
because there were obvious mistakes, wrong indents or dropped-out
characters, that he would have corrected had he lived to see proofs of
the fourth edition. I also accepted William Rossetti’s restoration to

xiv

Note on the Edited Text and Apparatus

the sequence of Nuptial Sleep as VIa, although the poet had
suppressed it in 1881.
Original or early editions of all sources cited or quoted are fully
identified. Where an accessible and reliable reprint of a rare original
exists, I have noted the fact. The abundant quotes from the Fredeman
Correspondence edition follow the Editorial Procedures outlined there
on pp. xxxv–xli, Vol. I. Rossetti’s quoted letters follow the MSS exactly
and respect his erratic usage. When the letter quoted is in one of the
later volumes not yet published, other printed sources follow the
WEF identification e.g. the Doughty-Wahl or Bryson collections of
letters.
In this edition, protocols for abbreviations, dates, insertion of
marginal content and documentation in annotations and footnotes
are consistent where practicable with the WEF edition so that the two
may be used together with a minimum of confusion. For the WEF,
Doughty-Wahl, Bryson and Lang (Swinburne) editions of letters, I
identify the quote by a letter number. However, in editions like Roger
Peattie’s of William Rossetti’s correspondence and William’s own
editions of his brother’s and sister’s letters, where there is so much
commentary and annotation, I use ‘No.’ for a letter citation: otherwise
my numbers refer to pages. Some page references to Doughty-Wahl
occur when their notes are being cited because their note numbering
is not consecutive (i.e., the same letter could have more than one n1).
Conjectural dates for letters are enclosed in square brackets; a prefatory
? before a date in square brackets indicates that it is a guess.
Date and place references for composition and publication of each
sonnet are followed by source abbreviations. In my Frequently
Cited/Consulted Sources I have relied heavily on the records of
William Rossetti, William Bell Scott, Ford Madox Brown, Jane Morris,
Hall Caine, Thomas Hake, Theodore Watts-Dunton and other
contemporaries, not because they were profound scholars or eminent
literary authorities, but because they were close friends and eyewitnesses to the poet’s life.
Recording revisions and variants is discussed below under
‘Stylistic Conventions and Sigla’. As befits a variorum edition, I have
tried to compile complete rather than selective lists of variants, but
even with magnifying glasses and infrared photography it is not
always possible to decipher a palimpsest, reconstruct a cancelled or
erased passage or read an illegible scrawl.
While I have aimed at an exact reproduction of the texts of the
sonnets, I have not followed the first edition precisely in the matter of
accidentals. Line numbers were inserted to help the reader follow
often-complex lists of variants. There are no broken-up or spilled-

Note on the Edited Text and Apparatus

xv

over lines. Rossetti’s dashes are all en-dashes with spaces around
them. I have not capitalized the first word of each sonnet.
The ‘curly’ quotation marks of Ballads and Sonnets are not present
because the book is set in Palatino. While following the first edition
in using Roman numerals above each sonnet title, in my notes,
commentary and tables I have sought to avoid confusion with the
Poems (1870) version of the sequence by identifying all 1881 sonnets
by their Arabic number and all 1870 sonnets by their Roman number.

List of Abbreviations and Sigla
Frequently-recurring names and frequently-cited sources are
usually abbreviated in the notes and apparatus; these protocols and
others follow as closely as possible those used in W. E. Fredeman’s
The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (WEF). Abbreviations for
MS and other rare or unique sources appear in Appendix Seven. A
bibliography of works cited or consulted occasionally is on pp. 298–
301; throughout the text citations of these works consist of the author’s
last name, the year of publication and page or chapter numbers
ACS

Algernon Charles Swinburne

CGR

Christina Georgiana Rossetti

DGR

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

EES

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (DGR’s wife)

FLR

Frances Lavinia Rossetti (DGR’s mother)

HC

Thomas Henry Hall Caine

JM

Jane Morris

PR/B

Pre-Raphaelite/Brotherhood

PRISM

Pre-Raphaelitism

TWD

Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton

WBS

William Bell Scott

WMR

William Michael Rossetti

Rossetti’s Printed Works
B&S

Ballads and Sonnets (Ellis and White, 1881)

EIP

The Early Italian Poets (Smith, Elder, 1861)

HL

The House of Life (Poems pp. 187–255; B&S pp.
161–263)

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

xvii

Poems

Poems (Ellis, 1870–72 eds 1–6)

Poems: New

Poems: A New Edition (Ellis and White, 1881)

Tauchnitz

Poems (7th ed. Tauchnitz, 1873)

Works; CW

WMR, ed. The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
London: Ellis, 1911. Enlarged from WMR’s
Collected Works (CW). 2 vols. London: Ellis and
Scrutton, 1886.

Stylistic Conventions and Sigla
MS/MSS

Manuscript(s)

Ed./eds

Edition(s)

Vol./vols

Volume(s)

Sig./sigs

Signature(s)

Fol./fols

Folio(s)

n/nn

Note(s)

Date/month/year

15 Oct 81 or 5 Jul: but, months without year or
day are spelled out or given in full, as are
single and non-nineteenth-century years, e.g.
15 Oct 1781

Ampersands

Used only in abbreviated bibliographical
references: ‘WEF 69.258 & nn’ or ‘PML MSS
6081 & 6083’

MSS, Revisions and Variants
I have as far as possible listed the MSS in chronological order and
given the variants the same order. When an early version of a sonnet
differs greatly from the final text I give it in full. When two sources
are compared, the earlier one comes first: the readings of the later one
are in bold face, the two separated by a virgule (/). Proofsheets and
printed texts revised in Rossetti’s hand are treated as MSS:
angle brackets enclose a word, phrase, line or passage
deleted from a MS. The new reading substituted follows. If further
deletions and substitutions occur, they too will be enclosed in

xviii

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

angle brackets following in the order of substitution until the
final reading in that MS.
double, or triple, angle brackets are used to indicate
revisions within revisions; deletions and substitutions within
double brackets are thus enclosed within single brackets.
[MS breaks off here] square brackets contain editorial insertions: they
are also used to identify conjectural dates, speculative readings or
references (sometimes preceded by a question mark if the editor
is guessing) or to separate editorial comment from the text of
revisions and variants.
Frequently Cited or Consulted Sources
ALC
The Ashley Library: A Catalogue of Printed Books,
Manuscripts, and Autograph Letters Collected by
Thomas J. Wise. 11 vols. London: Printed for
Private Circulation, 1922–36. Reissued with a
new preface by Simon Nowell-Smith. Folkestone:
Dawson’s, 1971.
AN

William Minto, ed. Autobiographical Notes of the
Life of William Bell Scott and Notices of His Artistic
and Poetic Circle of Friends 1830–82. 2 vols.
London: Osgood, 1892.

Bibliography

WMR. Bibliography of the Works of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. London: Ellis, 1905; repr. New York:
AMS, 1971.

Bryson

John Bryson, ed., with Janet Camp Troxell.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their
Correspondence. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.

Buchanan

Robert Buchanan. The Fleshly School of Poetry
and Other Phenomena of the Day. London: Strahan,
1872. Expanded from Buchanan’s pseudonymous attack on DGR in the Contemporary
Review (Oct 71): 334–50. Repr. New York: AMS,
1975. For more bibliography and other details
of this controversy that precipitated DGR’s
breakdown in the summer of 1872 see
Appendices 8 & 9 in WEF Vol. V.

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

xix

Caine

Hall Caine. Recollections of Rossetti. London:
Stock, 1882; contains many excerpts from DGR’s
letters to HC, some misquoted and conflated.

ClassLists

WMR. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Classified Lists of
His Writings with the Dates. London: privately
printed in 100 copies, 1906.

DGRDW

WMR. Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and
Writer. London: Cassell, 1889. Repr. New York:
AMS, 1970. Includes sonnet-by-sonnet prose
paraphrase of HL pp. 179–262.

Doughty

Oswald Doughty. A Victorian Romantic: Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. London: Frederick Muller,
1949. Rev. ed. 1960.

DW

Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, eds.
Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 4 vols. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965–67. Vol. I 1835–60 Letters
1–353 pp. 1–385; Vol. II 1861–70 Letters 354–1094
pp. 387–921; Vol. III 1871–76 Letters 1095–1744
pp. 923–1468; Vol. IV 1877–82 Letters 1745–2615
pp. 1469–1953.

FL/FLM

WMR. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters
with a Memoir. 2 vols. London: Ellis, 1895. Vol. 1:
Memoir (FLM). Vol. 2: Letters (FL); repr. New
York: AMS, 1970.

FLCGR

The Family Letters of Christina Georgiana Rossetti,
ed. WMR. London: Brown, Langham, 1908.

FR

‘Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets’,
Fortnightly Review (March 1869): 266–73.

Grylls

Rosalie Glynn Grylls [see also Rosalie, Lady
Mander]. Portrait of Rossetti. London:
Macdonald, 1964.

Harrison

The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. Antony H.
Harrison. 3 vols. Charlottesville: U Virginia P,
1997.

xx

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

HRA

Helen Rossetti Angeli. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His
Friends and Enemies. London: Hamilton, 1949.

Kelvin

Norman Kelvin, ed. The Collected Letters of
William Morris. 5 vols. Princeton NJ: Princeton
UP, 1984–96.

Lang

Cecil Y. Lang, ed. The Swinburne Letters. 6 vols.
New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1959–62.

Lewis

Roger C. Lewis. Thomas J. Wise and the Trial
Book Fallacy. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.

Marillier

Henry Currie Marillier. Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life.
London: Bell, 1899.

MS Diary

MS Diary of WMR in the Angeli-Dennis Papers
at UBC, an almost continuous record of literary
and artistic events and family activities from
early PRB days to the close of WMR’s life in 1919.

Masefield

John Masefield. Thanks Before Going: Notes on
Some of the Original Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
London: Heinemann, 1946.

Peattie

Roger W. Peattie, ed. Selected Letters of William
Michael Rossetti. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania UP, 1990.

PFB 1) 2) 3)

Paull Franklin Baum, ed. 1) Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
An Analytical List of Manuscripts in the Duke
University Library with Hitherto Unpublished
Verse and Prose. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1931;
2) The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1928; 3) ‘The Bancroft Manuscripts of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’, Modern Philology (Aug 1941):
47–68.

PRISM

William E. Fredeman. Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1965.

List of Abbreviations and Sigla

xxi

RP

WMR, ed. Rossetti Papers, 1862–70. London:
Sands, 1903.

S/Surtees

Virginia Surtees. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.
S. followed by a number identifies an entry in
the catalogue.

SR

WMR. Some Reminiscences. 2 vols. London:
Brown Langham, 1906.

Wahl

John Robert Wahl. The Kelmscott Love Sonnets of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Cape Town: A.H.
Balkema, 1954.

WA/GBH

George Birkbeck Hill, ed. Letters of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti to William Allingham 1854–70. London:
Unwin, 1897.

WEF

William E. Fredeman, ed. The Correspondence
of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 10 vols. Completing
Editors: Roger C. Lewis, Jane Cowan, Roger
Peattie, Allan Life, Page Life. Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 2002–; Vol. I 1835–54; Vol. II 1855–62;
Vol. III 1863–67; Vol. IV 1868–70; Vol. V 1871–
72; Vol. VI 1873–74; Vol. VII to be issued in 2007.

WMRD

Odette Bornand. The Diary of William Michael
Rossetti 1870–1873. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.

Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
To view the image on this page please refer to the printed
version of this book.

Annotated proofsheet for Ballads and Sonnets of 25 Apr 81 with
Prefatory Note to The House of Life. Princeton. See p. 34 note 5.

Introduction
The Building of The House of Life
In 1909, Wilfred S. Blunt, author of the sonnet sequence Esther,
asserted to Sir Sydney Cockerell that he considered Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s 103-sonnet poem The House of Life ‘the greatest of all the
great Victorian poems’. This image of its loftiness has been popular
among the poem’s would-be interpreters, who regard it as an unscaled,
perhaps unscalable, pinnacle among Victorian peaks. Certainly, its
textual complexities are formidable, and it is impossible to attempt an
authoritative interpretation of the House without the benefit of a
proper critical edition. The final version, which appeared in Ballads
and Sonnets (1881), contained sonnets written as early as 1847, before
the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and as late as 1880.
The individual ‘sonnet-stanzas’ of the House were thus composed over a
period of thirty-four years, twice the time it took Alfred Tennyson to
compose all the individual lyrics of In Memoriam.
The sequence itself appeared in three different states: 16 sonnets
in 1869, published in the Fortnightly Review with the title ‘Of Life,
Love, and Death’; 50 sonnets and 11 lyrics published in Poems (1870)
with the title ‘Sonnets and Songs, towards a Work to Be Called The
House of Life’; 102 sonnets (including an unnumbered proem-sonnet
but no songs) published in Ballads and Sonnets (1881) as The House of
Life in a two-part sequence with the subtitles ‘Youth and Change’ (59
sonnets) and ‘Change and Fate’ (42 sonnets). Jerome McGann identifies
a fourth state (McGann 2003: 386), the Bodleian Library MSS of 30
sonnets and songs that J. R. Wahl published as The Kelmscott Love
Sonnets of D. G. Rossetti, but McGann’s claim that these documents
form ‘a relatively coherent’ version of the sequence is difficult to
support. They form no entity and have no unity beyond being a
collection of fair copies that Rossetti included in letters to Jane Morris.
Some of these poems were never part of any version of the House.
Nevertheless, McGann’s emphasis on the instability of this long
poem is critically sound: it is a house built upon ever-shifting sands.
Some poems added to the final House in 1881 originally appeared
in the ‘Sonnets for Pictures and Other Sonnets’ section of Poems
(1870). To the despair of his printer, Rossetti experimented with a
half-dozen different sonnets in the initial position and shifted large

2

Introduction

groups of sonnets within the sequence in the course of his manic
composing and revising from 1868 to 1870. He constantly revised
individual octaves, sestets and lines as well, introducing these
changes at all stages, even on press-proofs. Some of his proofsheets
used as printer’s copy contain so much revision and additional
material that an editor may be justified in regarding them as MSS. As
John Carter remarked in 1972, no publisher today would tolerate this
amount of revision at the proof stage from a best-selling novelist,
never mind a poet.
What does all this textual instability signify, and how should an
editor deal with it? Answers to the first question abound among Rossetti
critics. Perhaps the most common is that Rossetti was a relentless perfectionist, a ferocious competitor in the struggle to determine the poetic
survival of the fittest. His goal was hyperdense, multifaceted significance, to be achieved by what he described to Hall Caine as ‘fundamental brainwork’ (WEF 81.104) and summed up in a phrase from
his sonnet on the Sonnet as ‘arduous fulness’, a phrase once parodied
by the unsympathetic critic John Addington Symonds as ‘plethoric
verbiage’. Rossetti contrasted his compositional methods with those
of his more fluent and prolific friends Swinburne and Morris, depicting
himself as agonizing upon his couch, the racked and tortured medium
through whom the Muse vouchsafed only a few lines at a time. Too
much emphasis on biographical explanations of The House of Life,
however, obscures Rossetti’s ambition to be regarded as a fine
sonneteer. As C. S. Lewis observed, the man who writes a good love
sonnet needs not only to be enamoured of a woman but also to be
enamoured of the sonnet.
Like that other inveterate reviser, Tennyson, Rossetti was
diffident about his poetic gift, determined to publish only work
adjudged to be his finest by family and friends and paranoid about
criticism from all others. In this matter his painting parallels his
poetry to some extent: he was as reluctant to exhibit as he was to
publish, and he painted out heads as often as he cancelled stanzas. But
there is a very important difference. He thought of his poetry as
untainted by commercialism, affirming an integrity and evincing a
dedication in his literary art that he felt he had surrendered by
painting so many potboilers. He began and ended his career as an
artist by writing poetry; it is striking that in the 1880s he was revising
poems that he had written in the 1840s. What Johnson said of Pope is
true of Rossetti: ‘to make verses was his first labour, and to mend
them was his last’.

Introduction

3

I
My own belief is that I am a poet ... primarily and that it is
my poetic tendencies that chiefly give value to my pictures;
only painting being – what poetry is not – a livelihood – I
have put my poetry chiefly in that form. On the other
hand, the bread-and-cheese question has led to a good deal
of my painting being pot-boiling and no more – whereas
my verse, being unprofitable has remained … unprostituted. … As with recreated forms in painting, so I should
wish to deal in poetry chiefly with personified emotions;
and in carrying out my scheme of the House of Life (if ever I
do so) shall try to put in action a complete dramatis personae
of the soul. D. G. Rossetti to Dr T. G. Hake (WEF 70.110)
Written to an enthusiastic admirer upon the publication of Poems
(1870), the passage above conveys the sense of inspired poetic vocation
that possessed Rossetti for only three short periods of his life: 1849–53,
the years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; 1868–71, a time of nearly
continuous literary production beginning at Penkill Castle, Ayrshire,
and ending at Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire; and 1879–81, an Indian
summer of literary creativity that culminated in Poems (1881) and
Ballads and Sonnets. On 13 April 1880, Rossetti told Hall Caine, one of
his first biographers, that he gave up poetry in favour of painting in
1853 when he was twenty-five, writing ‘extremely little I might
almost say nothing except the renovated Jenny in 1858 or 1859’ until
he began work on his 1870 Poems (WEF 80.125). He also revealed to
Caine that he wrote on a sort of orgiastic principle, working himself
into states of manic intensity followed by exhaustion and depression:
I wrote the tale [Hand and Soul] ... all in one night in
December 1849. ... In such a case a landscape and sky all
unsurmised open gradually in the mind – a sort of spiritual
‘Turner’ among whose hills one ranges and in whose waters
one strikes out at unknown liberty. But I have found this
only in nightly work which I have seldom attempted, for
it leaves one entirely broken, and this state was mine
when I described it at the close of the story. (WEF 80.116)
But the fact is that Rossetti’s best writing was done this way, when
his painting activities dwindled to make way for bursts of imaginative composition sustained often for months at a time. The second
period of literary creativity began tentatively in 1868 when he
thought his career as a painter threatened by failing eyesight, but in

4

Introduction

1870 it had reached a multiple climax of acclaim among the literati
and success with the reading public, satisfying the author’s own
demanding criteria for poetic excellence. However, the euphoria
waned when the writing stopped, giving way in late 1871 to obsession
and in 1872 to despair and madness. For eight years Rossetti wrote
almost nothing. Then the pattern asserted itself one last time. Slowly
at first but eventually attaining all the old mastery, Rossetti enjoyed
in 1880–81 a final poetic blossoming, even improving on his triumph
of eleven years earlier by bringing out not one but two successful
volumes in October-November of 1881. But scarcely more than a
month after the publication of Poems (1881) on November 10, he was
raving again: from that breakdown, he never recovered.

II
Much has been written on the first two creative periods: Rossetti’s
‘Pre-Raphaelite’ youth, and the fascinating circumstances under
which Poems (1870) was produced dominated in the popular mind by
the Gothic episode of the exhumation in Highgate Cemetery in which
his friends recovered the MS poems from his wife’s grave.1 The
textual story of the building of Poems (1870) in general and the House
in particular is recounted in detail in Appendices One to Six.
That Rossetti intended The House of Life to be read as a unified
whole is clear from the excerpt quoted above from his letter of 21
April 1870 to Dr Hake. His use of terminology from drama suggests
that he was aiming at more than self-expression and prepares us for
his eventual omission of the lyrics. It is true that this drama takes
place within ‘the soul’, but in The Stealthy School of Criticism, the poet
insisted that ‘the motive powers of art reverse the requirement of
science, and demand first of all an inner standing point’ (Works 619).
From that point, the ‘personified emotions’ may be seen as characters
in a drama that is more Jungian than Dantesque.
Rossetti’s letters show that the idea of a sonnet sequence evolved
gradually and intermittently in his mind. Many sonnets written
before 1870 were not composed consciously as part of a larger
1

On Rossetti’s ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ youth see WEF Vols I & II and Gordon H.
Fleming, 1967 & 1971. On the context and publication history of Poems
(1870), see WEF Vols IV & V, especially Appendices 1–5 & 8–9. See also
Lewis Chapter 3 and articles by Robert S. Fraser, Robert N. Keane and
Janet Camp Troxell in Fraser 1972, a publication commemorating
Princeton’s acquisition of the Troxell Rossetti Collection.

Introduction

5

scheme, although some, such as 69 and 70, were revised in varying
degree, both before and after the appearance of Poems (1870), to take
their place within the sequence. His experimentation with grouping
and positioning can be partially followed in some collections of House
MSS: the Fitzwilliam Library sonnets are numbered in pencil on the
upper left of each leaf, some having as many as four cancelled
numbers while other numbers were never altered. This process is
also evident in proofsheets.
Much has been made of Rossetti’s declaration to William Bell
Scott that his sonnets were ‘occasional’ and his apparent contradiction of
that statement in his cancelled preface to the 1881 sequence: ‘These
poems are in no sense occasional.’ In August 1871, during the period
of the ‘Kelmscott Love Sonnets’, Rossetti wrote to Scott:
I hardly ever do produce a sonnet except on some basis of
special momentary emotion; but I think there is another
class admissible also – and that is the only other I
practise, viz. the class depending on a line or two clearly
given you, you know not whence, and calling up a sequence
of ideas. This also is a just raison d’être for a sonnet, and
such are all mine when they do not in some sense belong
to the ‘occasional’ class. (WEF 71.129)
Naive Freudians read Rossetti’s poetry as disguised and distorted
autobiography. But there is much evidence that he regarded all
intense human experience, including his own, as symbolic of deeper
realities. While he never formulated, as Carlyle did, a distinction
between extrinsic and intrinsic symbols, such a distinction is clear
from both his creative and his critical writing. He believed that only
trivial poetry could be made from incidents not amounting to events:
one way to ensure that an occasion, or incident, amounts to an event,
or symbolic experience, is continuous revision. In 1854, including his
new sonnet Lost on Both Sides (91) in a letter to William Allingham, he
remarked, ‘my sonnets are not generally finished till I see them again
after forgetting them, and this is only two days old’ (WEF 54.55). This
is an understatement. Sonnet 91 in particular and House sonnets in
general underwent so much revision before their final appearance in
1881 that the poet’s use of the word ‘tattoo’ to describe this process
aptly characterizes many of his MSS and proofsheets. The depersonalizing, symbolizing tendency of much of this revision cannot be
dismissed as mere self-censorship; Rossetti was following that
impulse towards an impersonal art that he celebrated in the proem
Sonnet and Transfigured Life (60).

6

Introduction

The 1854 letters to Allingham contain the first references discovered to those very important MSS, Rossetti’s vest-pocket notebooks, four of which were acquired by Thomas J. Wise for the Ashley
Library. These tiny documents contain poems in process, in nearly
every stage of composition from single words or scribbled phrases to
final drafts. After agreeing with Allingham that the last lines of
Sonnet 91 are ‘certainly foggy’, Rossetti amends them from his vestpocket notebook containing ‘various sonnets and beginnings of
sonnets written at crisises (?!) of happy inspiration’. Then he copies
for his friend a sonnet ‘which I remember writing in great glory on
the top of a hill which I reached one after-sunset in Warwickshire last
year’ (WEF 54.57). A study of the development of this poem from its
appearance here to its inclusion in the final House as The Hill Summit
(70) reveals to what purpose Rossetti could shape what began as the
record of an intense moment. In September 1869, he sent his brother a
revised version of the sestet with the following question:
The symbolism being thus more distinct than before, do
you not think this sonnet should properly be transferred
to the House of Life section? (WEF 69.156)
The only earlier references to the House come in a letter of 30
August to Jane Morris (WEF 69.143) and Proof State 2 of Poems (1870)
dated 18 August (see Appendix Two). By the summer of 1869, some
overall plan for a sonnet sequence had formed itself in the poet’s
mind; he revised The Hill Summit to fit into the pattern he was
working out for The House of Life.
Many sonnets of the other, non-occasional, sort developed from
or drew upon single lines or couplets that he had evidently written in
these little notebooks as they were ‘given’ to him. Silent Noon (19), an
apparently ‘occasional’ poem and a sonnet often read as an entry in
Rossetti’s erotic diary, combined four separate notebook entries made
over so long a period of time that all four could not possibly refer to a
single experience. Even some of the ‘Kelmscott Love Sonnets’ contain
imagery not inspired by that locale: the final two lines of The Lovers’
Walk (12) came out of a notebook, although the first twelve are clearly
set at Kelmscott. The point of carrying these books in the vest-pocket
was to facilitate easy transcription of passing impressions which
might be of use later in the ‘fundamental brainwork’ of composition
and revision Rossetti described to Caine. In the following letter of
1876 he explains this matter to his fellow-poet Hake upon presenting
him with a notebook:

Introduction

7

Let me beg your acceptance of a waistcoat pocket book,
such as I always carry. I enclose it with the MS. The waistcoat pocket is the only one of all pockets into which the
hand slips willingly whatever be the body’s position
whether walking, standing, sitting, lying or squatting.
Kneeling you see I exclude. A dive into the trousers pocket
is often laborious and coat pockets inaccessible. Thus the
best thoughts of the lazy minstrel may doze past his brain
unjotted but for the waistcoat pocket book. (WEF 76.44)
The concept of a group of sonnets with related themes and images
in sequential order appears in letters to several correspondents
between December 1868 and August 1871. Rossetti first mentions it to
Allingham 23 December 1868, in a letter which also gives eye trouble
as the cause of ‘inaction’ in painting and ‘the looking up of ravelled
rags of verse’:
I have been looking up a few old Sonnets, and writing a
few more new ones, to make a little bunch in a coming
number of the Fortnightly. (WEF 68.173)
These sonnets, the embryonic phase of The House of Life, appeared
three months later with the title Of Life, Love and Death: Sixteen
Sonnets. Appendix One includes a comparison of this selection with
the 1870 and 1881 phases of the sequence: it is apparent from this
comparison that the poet intended from the start to end the series
with the richly suggestive and paradoxical image of death as a
newborn child (Newborn Death, 99 and 100).
Rossetti’s letters to his brother William at this time indicate how
carefully he was selecting and revising. Despite the fact that in both
1870 and 1881 he worried about the slightness of his volumes, he
excluded many sonnets from the House, either discarding them from
various proof states or including them in ‘other sonnets’ sections;
some sexually explicit ones were suppressed or left unfinished (see
Appendix Eight). Early sonnets such as 71–73 and 90 were finally
included after heavy revision discussed with William (e.g., WEF
69.130, 137, 139, 144, 146, 154, 156 and 168). What strikes one most about
these letters is the precision and thoroughness with which the poet
prepared his printer’s copy and revised his proofs. Always he strives
for more exact expression, more coherent structure to render the inner
logic of an imaginary set of circumstances. Nuptial Sleep (6A) exemplifies
this procedure. He thought it one of his best sonnets, having no wish
to suppress it in 1870 as he did in 1881 (except en famille). The fact
that in 1869 he did remove the sonnet After the French Liberation of

8

Introduction

Italy in the name of decorum indicates that he did not regard Nuptial
Sleep as obscene or vulgar (Lewis 137–40). Neither did he regard it
sentimentally as the record of some private sexual encounter – his
correspondence about it with William and Swinburne shows that he
was searching for what Coleridge had defined as the essence of
poetry, the best words in the best order. In changing the title from
Placatâ Venere to Nuptial Sleep and adding ‘married’ in line 6 to ‘help
it stand fire’, he presumably thought that Patmorish marital imagery
would be less likely than Swinburnian pagan symbolism to draw on
him the abuse that was heaped upon Swinburne after he published
his Poems and Ballads (WEF 69.146 and 154). His fears proved only too
justified when Buchanan selected Nuptial Sleep as the prime example
of Rossetti’s ‘fleshliness’, yet the poet had feared the charge of
idolatry more than adultery, for he deleted paganism, not eroticism,
from the sonnet. There is no evidence that Jane Morris opposed the
publication of Nuptial Sleep in 1870. That she seems to have advised
Rossetti against including erotic poetry in his 1881 volume shows her
concern for his health – another literary war might have caused
madness or death – rather than her fear of personal embarrassment.
The exchange of letters with Swinburne during this period was
especially stimulating for Rossetti, more often at his best with one
who was his literary equal as well as an enthusiastic admirer.
Swinburne seems to have grasped at once what Rossetti was
attempting in his sonnet sequence which so many, including William,
thought obscure. On 26 February 1870, while Swinburne was
working on his review of Poems from proofsheets, Rossetti wrote to
him as follows:
I am delighted to hear that you are battling with the British
dragon on the subject of my ‘obscurity’ in the Sonnets. I
opine that I am likely when I read your elucidation to see
how much better they might have been made by your
light, just as I did with the pictures of mine you described.
I trust no inconvenience will result to your labours by the
fact that I am now slightly transposing that section – but
only in masses – putting the love sonnets first – (beginning
at Bridal Birth [2] and ending at Stillborn Love [55]) and the
other sonnets following these (Inclusiveness [63] to Superscription [97] with a new one for a close [The One Hope, 101]).
Two other new ones occur in the love-sonnets. The section
then winds up with the songs. This is better I think, as the
love-sonnets are the preponderant portion. (WEF 70.35)

Introduction

9

Swinburne wrote back two days later:
Thanks for your new sonnet, which is lovely. It will make no
difference to my critical work that you have – very rightly I
think – re-arranged the cycles of sonnets. (Lang 2: 105)
The comments of both poets draw attention to the element of
structure. Both ‘masses’ and ‘cycles’ suggest relatedness, as does the
inclusion of The One Hope ‘for a close’. Here also appears the concept
of a two-part work beginning with ‘love-sonnets’ and ending, after a
second group of sonnets, with the songs, for the sake of evidently,
balance. As the design worked itself out in the poet’s mind after 1870,
the songs, never an integral part of the sequence, got dropped. In
fact, a week after receiving Swinburne’s letter, Rossetti removed the
lyrics A New Year’s Burden and Even So because ‘they seemed to jar
with the other love songs and to make a false climax’ (WEF 70.45). He
kept adding and deleting sonnets until he had an even fifty just
before press-time; again in 1881, he finally reached an even hundred,
numbering The One Hope 101 as if to balance the unnumbered proem
Sonnet and thus provide a frame for his ‘century’ of sonnets.
Swinburne’s review appeared in the Fortnightly Review for May
1870 (Swinburne 1875). The fulsome praise of his friend embarrassed
Rossetti but the critical insight of the essay pleased him. After refuting
‘charges of darkness and difficulty’ in the sonnets, Swinburne
proceeds with characteristic exuberance to argue that The House of Life
is a unified organic whole which eludes mechanical dissection:
But such work as this can be neither unwoven nor recast
by any process of analysis. The infinite depth and wealth
of life which breathes and plays among these songs and
sonnets cannot be parcelled and portioned out for praise
or comment. This House of Life has in it so many mansions,
so many halls of state and bowers of music, chapels for
worship and chambers for festival, that no guest can
declare on a first entrance the secret of its scheme. Spirit
and sense together, eyesight and hearing and thought, are
absorbed in splendour of sounds and glory of colours
distinguishable only by delight. But the scheme is solid
and harmonious; there is no waste in this luxury of
genius: the whole is lovelier than its loveliest part. Again
and again one may turn the leaves in search of some one
poem or some two which may be chosen for sample and
thanksgiving; but there is no choice to be made. (7)

10

Introduction

Swinburne recognizes that the unity of the sequence does not
depend on any narrative progression:
There seems no story in this sequence of sonnets, yet they
hold in them all the action and passion of a spiritual
history with tragic stages and elegiac pauses and lyric
motions of the living soul. (8)
He hails as successful Rossetti’s striving for ‘inclusiveness’ (as
sonnet 63 is called), his attempt ‘to put in action a complete dramatis
personae of the soul’:
Resignation and fruition, forethought and afterthought,
have one voice to sing with in many keys of spirit. ... And
of all splendid and profound love-poetry, what is there
more luminous or more deep in sense and spirit than the
marvellous opening cycle of twenty-eight sonnets, which
embrace and express all sorrow and all joy of passion in
union, of outer love and inner, triumphant or dejected or
piteous or at peace? (9)
After a detailed paraphrase of this ‘opening cycle’ which remains
unsurpassed by the subsequent efforts of William Rossetti (DGRDW),
Paull Baum {PFB 2)}, John Masefield and Kathryn Gordon (1968),
Swinburne concludes by emphasizing what he sees as the central
theme of the sequence: the metaphorical identity of the Lover and the
Artist made possible through the worship of his Mistress/Muse:
In all the glorious poem built up of all these poems there
is no great quality more notable than the sweet and
sovereign unity of perfect spirit and sense, of fleshly form
and intellectual fire. This Muse is as the woman praised
in the divine words of the poet himself:
‘Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought
Nor Love her body from her soul.’ (13)2
One of Rossetti’s first critics remains one of his most perceptive.
Yet Swinburne’s word ‘fleshly’ was soon to explode in both their
faces.

2

Swinburne is quoting the final lines of ‘Love-Lily’, Song 1 in the 1870
H