Afterthought

Summary

The figure of resurrection returns us to that context of Rossetti's exhumation of his verse with which we began. And I want to end by going back now to the place in this study of the disinterment of Rossetti's little book, to dwell finally upon the power it has had to fundamentally inflect discourses of Pre- Raphaelitism. Indeed, I want to claim that, aside from its actual physical occurrence, even if Rossetti hadn't exhumed the book, a thought (if not an act) of exhumation, reciprocally of resurrection, would still haunt the movement. For, resurrection encapsulates the fundamental dilemma of transformation within image/text relations that preoccupied the Pre-Raphaelites. Such a quality of return is present, as I hope to have demonstrated, in those repeated preoccupations with resurrected figures, with a death that is not final; in Christina Rossetti's voices from the grave; in the lost and resurrected forms of Ophelia and Chatterton, of Beatrice, of Proserpine, of Eurydice to name but a few.

Yet somewhat remarkably we also already find the motif of exhumation writ large in a curious occasion of second sight in D. G. Rossetti's poem from 1848 originally titled in manuscript ‘Unburied Death’. When publishing the poem for the first time after his brother's death, William Michael Rossetti changed the title to ‘Afterwards’. One can only conjecture he did so because the actual title was both too prescient and, posthumously, contributed to what had by then become an indelible narrative, a narrative forever uncannily inscribed in advance in the title of this early manuscript work:

She opened her moist crimson lips to sing;

And from her throat that is so white and full

Was o'er my heart: as when a viol-string

Having been broken, and the first musical ring

Once over, – all the rest is but a dull

Crude dissonance Echoless jar, howe'er thou twist and pull

The sundered fragments. A most weary thing

It is within the perished heart to seek

Pain, and not find it; but a sort of pall

Like sleep upon the mind. A cold set plan

Of life then comes; and grief that is not weak

Because it hath no tears. Say, can'st thou call

This a life, friend, or this man a man.