Personal Experience in Rossetti's House of Life

Extract

The sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, despite the intensity of feeling and glow of style which seem to immerse the reader in their spirit, are obscure. Often we find ourselves left with a very vague conception as to the import of the sonnet as a whole. Yet the vagueness does not result, as sometimes with Swinburne, from the haziness of meaning, or from the fine diffusion of thought or feeling through the large fecundity of images and words. Rossetti's obscurity arises often from the use of special symbols bound up with his view of life; more often from the fact that although a sonnet takes its inceptions from some specific and personal experience, the poet generalizes and allegorizes it in such a way as to imply the personal experience and still give us no clew to it. The experience is vividly present to his own imagination so that the sonnet is a commentary upon it; yet the actual object is either not present or only vaguely adumbrated. Thus a study of Rossetti's life as a background for his poetry, recreating the lost implications, should and does illuminate the poetry very vividly. Such a study in this particular case, moreover, affords a revealing instance of the way in which experience transmutes itself into lyric art. I wish, then in this paper, to bring together in concise form all the material for dating and grouping the sonnets of The House of Life and to discuss how far we are justified in giving to these sonnets an autobiographical interpretation.