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Victorian Poetry
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Elizabeth SiddaPs Poetry:
A Problem and Some Suggestions
CONSTANCE W. HASSETT
For the many readers of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic,
the memorably impossible information about Siddal concerns her hair. When
her grave was opened seven years after her death to retrieve Gabriel's manu-
script poems, "literary London buzzed" with the rumor (based on a persis-
tent non-fact of biology) "that her hair had 'continued to grow after her
death, to grow so long, so beautiful, so luxuriantly as to fill the coffin with
its gold!'"2 The disinterment story takes on a vivid life of its own in Elisabeth
Bronfen's grim "Case Study" where it culminates an account of Siddal's
lifelong "deanimation" as sickly woman and artist's cipher.3 Bronfen seems
to resent that Siddal was "so readily transformed into legend" (p. 177) but
does not hesitate to offer the jarringly morbid suggestion that Siddal ail-
but- willed the tragic end of her first pregnancy (May 2, 1861): "As if to find
an acme to her courtship with death, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter"
(p. 176).
From Pound to Hardwick, these authors show no awareness of the
poetry Siddal wrote in the 1850s, of its posthumous publication in the 1890s,
443
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444 I VICTORIAN POETRY
and its availability since 1978 in a modern edition.4 The critics who do
know of Siddal's poetry find biographical inference irresistible. Some take
her 1862 death by a laudanum overdose to be almost certainly a suicide
and allow this not- quite -fact to introduce a certain amount of moire distor-
tion into their reading of the poems. Barbara T. Gates, for example, in Vic-
torian Suicide (1988) cites Siddal's "A Year and a Day" to suggest (with a
misleading plural) that the poetry is "haunted by images of watery death."5
Siddal, in Gates's view, "seems finally to have become obsessed with Ophelia's
lot, to have decided to live - and die - a fiction" (p. 149).
The most thoroughgoing biographical reading of Siddal's poetry is
Violet Hunt's The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death.6 The paucity of
verifiable facts and the scanty number of poems permit Hunt (better known
for her 1920s novels) to treat Siddal's texts like rumors. Assuming that
Lizzie "is the protagonist throughout" (p. 65), Hunt snips and cuts freely,
wrenching lines from their context and sometimes reversing stanzas to com-
pile an intimate expressive record of moods and wiles that Hunt herself
despises. Quoting every known poem, but not any poem in its entirety,
Hunt mixes undated stanzas with unfounded speculation about the Pre-
Raphaelite circle of painters. Thus "True Love" with its two knights and
one lady becomes a poem a clef showing that Lizzie was "using Walter
Deverell" in an attempt to persuade Gabriel to regularize their "situation"
by marrying her (p. 69). 7 Because there are not enough facts available to
completely confirm, modify, or refute such acute guesswork - even the most
assiduous biographer admits that "the documentary trail of Elizabeth Siddal's
life goes cold"8 in the crucial two years preceding her marriage - recent
critics who follow Hunt's biographical lead tend to proceed with rhetorical
caution. Stanley Weintraub, for example, describes what he takes to be an
especially melancholy passage of "Dead Love" - not every reader will agree
with him about the tone - as "almost a message" to Gabriel.9
Interestingly, Marxist art historians Griselda Pollock and Deborah
Cherry have registered the strongest theoretical protest against Gabriel-
centered critiques of Siddal's life and work. Their joint essay "Woman as
sign in Pre-Raphaelite literature" scrupulously unravels long-standing er-
rors about Siddal's name and age, and the oft-told tale of her discovery like
some new planet or continent.10 Biographical discrepancies, they contend,
represent Siddal as Gabriel's beloved, enigmatic young muse and, by ob-
scuring her working-class origin, serve to enhance the aura of his genius:
"His individuality and his stature as an artist are erected on the negation of
the female model." Elizabeth Siddal's appearance, in their view, was and
still is "appropriated as a signifier" of Gabriel Rossetti's artistry and person-
ality (p. 94). A close examination of Siddal's poems and paintings is beyond
the scope of Pollock and Cherry's ambitious essay, which aims at underwriting
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 445
a new, feminist practice of art history, but the emphatically argued point of
their work is to encourage attention to SiddaPs role as a producer of art (p.
91). n
The literary critic who turns to SiddaPs art, motivated perhaps by a
prior interest in Pre-Raphaelite or Victorian women's poetry, promptly en-
counters another obstacle to appreciation, one that proves even more for-
midable than the enticements and lacunae in the biography: blandly deni-
grating praise. The terms of remembrance for SiddaPs poetry were firmly
and discouragingly established in William Michael Rossetti's various edito-
rial apologies; in his view, his sister-in-law's work is meager, derivative, and
morbid. Eking out her material in four different installments,12 Rossetti dreads
"overrating her" (WMR, Burlington, p. 295) and repeatedly explains that
her "performances [were] restricted in both quantity and development"
(WMR, Burlington, p. 273) and that she possessed a "limited but refined
artistic faculty."13 Challenged by the untidiness of SiddaPs manuscript re-
mains, William Michael regrets that the verse is "scrappily jotted down."
Adding that the "amount" of material is "scanty," he insinuates the crite-
rion for assessment: quantity of production is the measure of creativity; and
he dismisses Elizabeth Siddal, even while promoting her, as a very slender
talent (WMR, Burlington, p. 291). Even without accepting Rossetti's aes-
thetic calculus, a modern critic might legitimately wish that the literary
remains were more abundant. A body of fifteen poems and some fragments,
all of uncertain date or sequence, precludes standard and welcome kinds of
critical narrative: it is impossible, for example, to write about SiddaPs "imagi-
native development" and her "eventual recognition" of features in her work14
or the ways in which her "productions were circulated, the kind of reviews
they received" and the regard in which she held herself as a "producer" of
poetry.15 The lack of material to give contour to SiddaPs life as a writer
might be the reason why so fine a critic as Angela Leighton alludes grump-
ily and without quotation to SiddaPs "generally meagre and underdevel-
oped" art (p. 130). 16
Critical interest in Siddal is further hampered by unchallenged ac-
ceptance of William Michael's description of the "wail of pang and pathos"
in certain of the poems (WMR, Reminiscences, 1:196). Expressions of dis-
may at the "unrelieved melancholy" of SiddaPs monotonously "frustrate"
verse are common;17 and in Doughty's still definitive biography of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti impatience with SiddaPs "sad and sentimental and self-
consciously pathetic broodings" reaches a kind of alliterative peak.18 In
one instance, Doughty patronizingly dismisses SiddaPs lines on "Holy Death"
(from "Lord, May I Come?" WMR, Reminiscences, 1:200) as the literal ex-
pression of her personal hope for a life beyond the grave: "To the hereafter
poor Lizzie had forwarded her soul's sentimental desires - a kind of spiritual
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446 / VICTORIAN POETRY
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 447
The poem's title, "Love and Hate," was supplied by William Michael Ros-
setti at the time of publication and commentary ever since has attempted
to locate the exact provocation for its emotion, an anger that is taken
unproblematically to be SiddaPs very own. Hunt points to Gabriel's flirta-
tion with the model Annie Miller (p. 190), Weintraub to his scheme to
move to Algeria (p. 91), and Marsh, somewhat more speculatively, men-
tions his hypothetical breaking off of their "unofficial engagement" in 1858. 23
The legitimate reason for positioning Gabriel as a kind of obnoxious muse is
the hope that his various offenses might provide clues to the date of compo-
sition and the sequence of the poems. But amidst the highly engaging and
resourceful guesswork, the generative core of the poem has been ignored,
namely, the cunning phrase "I neither sing nor pray." A denial that is a
literal impossibility in a poem, this pseudo- statement plays upon the differ-
ence between a speaker disinclined to use words and the artist who makes a
poem out of rhymed ballad stanzas. Clearly, the emotion that drives Siddal
to authorship is not the emotion that prompts the speaker's argument and
silences. Fascinated with the verbal decorums that underwrite her medium,
Siddal creates with "Love and Hate" a poem that, by its demands for the
addressee's silence and averted gaze, flaunts its own outspokenness.24
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448 I VICTORIAN POETRY
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT 1 449
But Siddal's literary tact leads her to a different passage in the narrative,
one that bears the poem's most profound meaning and, because it is re-
ferred to later in typically recursive ballad fashion, is the means of structur-
ing the entire piece. In The Gay Goshawk,19 Siddal draws attention to the
moment when the maiden's father and stepmother examine her sleeping
"corpse" and conduct a scarring trial:
Then spak her cruel step-minnie,
"Take ye the burning lead,
And drap a drap on her bosome,
To try if she be dead."
For the first- time reader (or listener) the dismayed exclamation "Alas! alas!"
seems to be the maiden's response to the searing lead. In folk-logic, this
burning test of the sleeping draught's efficacy marks (literally) the cost to
the maiden of her pursuit of love. When the cry turns out to be her father's -
"Alas! alas!" her father cried, / "She's dead without the priest" - the
daughter's scheme is assured. Death is a ruse, silence a triumph, and both
are poetic stratagems for narrating a complex tale of a daughter's defiance.
If the drop on her breast henceforth proves her devotion to Lord William, it
also testifies - and this is the crucial point - to the fact that no resourceful,
family- defying, and successful lady-lover goes completely unpunished. This
traditional understanding of feminine risk is codified at the ballad's ending
when the wedded and safely distant daughter rounds off her adventure
with words for her family:
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450 I VICTORIAN POETRY
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 451
orphan:
O mother, open the window wide
And let the daylight in;
The hills grow darker to my sight,
And thoughts begin to swim.
By enforcing the mother- child bond across three generations, Siddal's young
mother may perhaps fend off or qualify the lifelong sorrow of that famous
son, the Tristram (whose name means "sad birth") of Malory's Le Morte
D Arthur and Scott's own "Sir Tristrem" (1804).33 To die of "great love" might
well mean to die the traditional death of the lovelorn, but it might alterna-
tively (and also) mean to die as a consequence of being "great" with child.
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452 I VICTORIAN POETRY
This latter possibility is enforced not only by the Tristram analogy, but by
the speaker's expressed anxiety about her own ghostly restlessness. The
dread that one's spirit will "walk" can be variously motivated; and modern
readers may well recall "The Unquiet Grave," an anthology favorite in which
a revenant reproves her survivor whose grieving attendance at the gravesite
lasts disquietingly beyond "a twelvemonth and a day."34 As we shall see,
this traditional measure of male fidelity becomes an issue in Siddal's own
"A Year and a Day" and, in a startling appropriation of the revenant ballad's
anti- elegiac sentiment, Siddal's metaphorically dying women repeatedly
suggest the irrelevance of male fidelity. But in "At Last," the perishing
woman's anxiety is best read in the context suggested by "Clerk Saunders."
When Saunders comes to claim Margaret's "faith and troth again," she
hesitates a moment to ask about the ultimate fate of women who die in
child-birth:
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 453
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454 I VICTORIAN POETRY
But in her own ballad, Siddal manages, in perfect keeping with the original's
"dry- eyed acceptance" of bitter reality,41 to offer her own controlled re-
sponse to exclusively maternal jeopardy. We will probably never know
whether Siddal wrote "At Last" before or after the death in childbirth of
her acquaintance Joanna Boyce Wells or whether as Lewis and Lasner sug-
gest, it was composed during her own pregnancy of 1861-62.42 But such
information is not really necessary. The facts about fatal pregnancies, in-
cluding the published details of Mary Wollstonecraft's death after the deliv-
ery of her second child, the future Mary Shelley,43 and grimly rumored "facts"
were enough to warrant anxiety. Medical historian Edward Shorter writes
sweepingly but reliably of the period before 1900 that "if a woman knew ten
or fifteen other women, she probably knew someone who had died giving
birth, or who would later die. Risks of this magnitude create a collective
sense of fearfulness" (p. 69). 44
Interestingly, in this context, Dante Gabriel Rossetti also responded
to the "The Lass of Lochroyan" and he too changed the ending. In his
"Stratton Water," Lord Sands rescues and weds the pregnant Janet just in
time for the birth of a legitimate son: "the night the mother should have
died / The young son shall be born" (Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
1:157). Siddal, for her part, fends off Gabriel's happy ending and at the
same time avoids the stark plotting that the ballad model prescribes. As
one astute observer has noted, in traditional materials it is rare for maidens
to "have as their lot an indeterminate position on the scale running from
despair to delight"; ballad heroines "are fated almost inevitably either to
the ecstasy of a marital union or to the agony" of separation and death
(Renwick, p. 32). SiddaPs originality lies in locating her heroine in a some-
what more "indeterminate" position. With her externalized and trinary
narrative, Siddal provides an old-style but wholly new tale in which an
affectionate mother, linked to her own mother and concerned for her sur-
viving child's well-being, dies of her "great love."
Organic death is not Siddal's only way of representing the risk inher-
ent in romantic relationships; there is another kind of fatality, the "living
death" portrayed in the "Fragment of a Ballad." Siddal's narrative presents
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT I 455
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456 I VICTORIAN POETRY
A Minstrelsy reader will observe that the unspecified "spell" in Siddal's final
stanza shows the poem's indebtedness (though in a different way from "At
Last") to the "Lass of Lochroyan"; there a lover suffers detention by en-
chantment (p. 428): "'Now break, now break, ye Fairy charms, / And set
my true love free!'" (Minstrels}', p. 429, stanza 13). 47 But because Siddal's
spell is a magical given that stifles the "breath" rather than a malevolent
intervention by a cruel mother-in-law or other spell-binder, her lovers' dif-
ficulties should be construed - as they are in Rossetti's poems - as internal
to the erotic relationship. Some degree of romantic estrangement is explic-
itly, if ambiguously, intimated by the poem's inaugural negative:
"Unsummoned my love returned to me." If the lover's unbidden return
means that he did not or could not come when formerly entreated, perhaps
desire for his coming has waned, slowly "consum'd with that which it was
nourish'd by."
The "Fragment of a Ballad" does not, however, specify or assign blame.
It doles out none of the ironic censure found in Christina Rossetti's The
Prince s Progress where a "strong" lover arrives belatedly, "Too late for love,
too late for joy" (Crump, 1:95-110, 11. 47, 481). It has more in common
with Rossetti's own border narrative, "Love from the North," in which the
hero is himself a spell-binder who saps the rescued woman's will:
He made me fast with book and bell,
With links of love he makes me stay;
Till now I've neither heart nor power
Nor will nor wish to say him nay.
(Crump, 1:29-30)
With typical Rossettian caginess, the "links of love" transform the rescue -
narrative into an ambiguous critique of erotic victimization.
The spell of frigidity is common in Pre-Raphaelite poetry but the tim-
ing of its onset seems to be gender- specific. William Morris, whose "De-
fence of Guenevere" is memorable for the urgent sexuality of Lancelot's
galloping arrival "at good need" (1. 295), is more often fascinated by erotic
failure and, in one instance, uses the Minstrelsy motif of detention by en-
chantment to explore a lover's plight.48 In "Spell-bound," Morris' male
speaker finds himself wound in "silken chains" (1. 73) which he fantasizes
will be broken by the lady:
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 457
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458 I VICTORIAN POETRY
But with the turn of the stanza, desire collapses into memory and the "new
face" proves to be a dream "shadow" of the long-absent first love:
Still it is but the memory
Of something I have seen
In the dreamy summer weather
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 459
back to her sole self. And it brings to the reader the familiar possibility of "a
poetry of poetry" in which a song of failed love figures itself through a dis-
tortion of song. In traditional ballads, as Keats and Siddal both well knew,
birdsong, like that of the Minstrelsy's goshawk, is a traditional medium of
love's messages. A ballad heroine will always greet a "bonny bird" for she
knows full well "by your sweet singing, / Ye are frae my true love sen" (Min-
strels}', p. 406, stanza 16). But with love's failure, there is only song's arrest
or dissonance.
Without the dreamed "new face" or the dream's dispelling, William
Michael's published version of "A Year and a Day" (WMR, Family Letters,
1:176-177) expresses a simplified emotion and sounds a note that he char-
acterized, with some embarrassment, as a "wail of pang and pathos" (WMR,
Reminiscences, 1:196). But even in its short form, the poem found an exu-
berant admirer in Swinburne. It was new to him (Siddal's only published
piece at the time) and he wrote to William Michael Rossetti of its showing
"the same note of originality in discipleship which distinguishes her work in
art - Gabriel's influence and example not more perceptible than her own
independence and freshness of inspiration."52 Had he seen the fuller ver-
sion, he might have noticed its affinities with another poet he admired:
Christina Rossetti. She too likes the word "clang" ("I heard his hundred
pinions clang," Crump, 1:64); but more importantly, in "Mirage" - the very
title a reminder of the near-hallucination in Siddal's poem - Rossetti's
speaker wakes to erotic disillusionment:
The hope I dreamed of was a dream,
Was but a dream; and now I wake
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,
For a dream's sake.
(Crump, 1:55-56)
Feeling "worn" and "old," Rossetti's speaker chooses, as Siddal's do, a con-
dition of "comfortless" disillusionment instead of fantasy.
There was once a possibility, when Christina Rossetti was assembling
material for her Princes Progress (1866), that she might include some of
Siddal's work, none of which had seen publication. And while the plan
"did not come to effect," the very suggestion of co -publication brings cer-
tain formal similarities between the women's work into prominence.53 Both
are stanzaic poets, of course, and both prefer understatement and tersely,
almost deceptively, quiet closure. Rossetti, for example, who is fond of the
Persephone myth, ends "Life and Death" with a rhythmically smoothed and
buried allusion to her sublime remoteness, "Asleep from risk, asleep from
pain" (Crump, 1:155). Siddal, with equal compression, provides the emo-
tionally bruised speaker of "A Year and a Day" a rhythmically stiffened self-
comparison; mere chaff, she is "empty of all love / Like beaten corn of grain"
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460 I VICTORIAN POETRY
(Lewis, Poems, p. 17). Depletion is the point and SiddaFs inversion of the
final phrase hushes the poem with the firm anticlimax of misplaced (miss-
ing) "grain." The subtlety of SiddaPs way of closing a poem was not lost on
Rossetti whose impressions survive in a brief but telling letter responding to
the Siddal transcriptions Gabriel had sent for her perusal.54 Among the
poems Gabriel selected, SiddaPs "Gone," with its concluding reliance on
the unreturning dove of Genesis 8.12 as a type of immortality, achieves
precisely the understated fusion of grief and consolation that Christina ad-
mired:
Even the rhythmic slowing caused by the shortened last line would
have registered with Christina whose preference for a final, isolated trimeter
is something of a prosodic hallmark.55 In writing to Gabriel, himself adept
at the rhythms of biblical allusion, Christina hardly needs to explicate SiddaPs
typological restraint. Instead, using the name-dropping code of one poet to
another, she observes that the poem "reminds me of Tom Hood at his high-
est" (WMR, Rossetti Papers, p. 76). Modern readers know Thomas Hood as
the author of "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs," poems of
social protest, and perhaps of such comic ballads as "Faithless Nelly Gray"
(Friedman, p. 262), but the Rossettis also knew and respected him as the
author of "the beautiful lines named 'The Deathbed,'"56 a poem that offers
last-line consolation by means of a single word, the reticent "Another":
"Her quiet eyelids closed - she had / Another morn than ours!" (Clubbe, p.
64). By her reference to Tom Hood's "highest," Christina registers and ap-
proves the restraint in SiddaPs (far better) conclusion.
But the subdued tonalities of elegy and restraint are not the only modes
Christina shares with and approves in her artist-author sister-in-law. In
Rossetti's "A Pause of Thought," a poem that appeared in The Germ and
was in all probability known to Siddal - although direct influence is not the
issue here - the speaker chides herself with an abrasiveness that belies
Rossetti's early reputation (like SiddaPs own) for tonal pallor and monotony:
"Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit / For healthy joy and salutary pain"
(Crump, 1:51-52). In SiddaPs "The Passing of Love," the speaker is simi-
larly self-indicting: "O God, forgive me that I merged / My life into a dream
of love!" (WMR, Reminiscences, 1:199). And when Siddal moves beyond
this roiled impatience and outside the lyric to create an experienced speaker
for her dramatic lyric "Dead Love," the result is brisk-voiced savvy:
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT 1 461
With all the confidence that trochaic superlatives can supply, "Dead Love"
scorns the courtship decorums that require women (and Pre-Raphaelitism's
models) to present themselves as lovingAovely icons. It bolsters its anti-
advice on blushing subordination and "to -be -looked- at-ness"51 with a casu-
ally jaded epigram, "love is seldom true" (the adverb is devastating), and an
ironically conclusive echo of the earlier superlatives: "If the merest dream
of love were true /Then, sweet, we should be in heaven." Christina Rossetti
found Siddal's poem "piquant" and was delighted with its "cool bitter sar-
casm" (WMR, Rossetti Papers, p. 76). In resisting docility, Siddal's poem
shows a wariness that extends gender relations to the practice of poetry,
and Rossetti might have seen this as clearly as we now do. In an implicit
critique of her women contemporaries, Siddal rejects a poetry of appropri-
ate sentiments. She resists the advice genre as practiced by "the admired
and popular poetess" Felicia Hemans whose work the Rossettis knew well.58
As Angela Leighton has shown in her astute remarks on Hemans' "No
More," it is possible to convey "grief for life's betrayals" in a poetry that
blandly censors any "sexual application" and "keeps to an impersonal tone
of consolatory orthodoxy." It is precisely Hemans' "constraining sense" of
the poetess' obligation to edify that Siddal's "piquant" advice -giver sub-
verts (Leighton, pp. 17-18).
Probably the least constrained or edifying of Siddal's poems, and one
that might also be read as an instance of literary criticism, is the dramatic
lyric "The Lust of the Eyes." Written in a voice "not mine" as Browning
says of his early pieces,59 Siddal creates a male lover who moves callously
between blazoning and abandoning sentiments:
Low sit I down at my Lady's feet
Gazing through her wild eyes,
Smiling to think how my love will fleet
When their starlike beauty dies.
(WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 155)
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462 / VICTORIAN POETRY
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 463
If the poem were merely about careworn beauty, it might be possible for
Siddal to recuperate her speaker's weariness in the manner of Hardy's "Wives
in the Sere"61 or Tennyson's "June Bracken and Heather" (Ricks, 3:234-
235). But sentimentality is out of the question since her fading is symbolic
of other vanishings, of her awareness that something lost was never found,
not even in the first fabled instance. Love's inception, as she now remem-
bers it, was an assault: "love . . . turned and struck me down." The recollec-
tion mounts a protest against her own sexual desire, against love as a viola-
tion of the self. Love's consequence is a kind of damaged, restless living;
henceforth she is "a startled thing." Disabled for love or flight, "a bird
whose broken wing / Must fly away from thee," the woman grieves
partnership's illusions and the desolation of enclosure: "Thy strong arms
are around me, love, / . . . / My soul is not at rest." The strength of her
lover's metonymic "strong arms" may be real enough, unlike the ambigu-
ously stipulated firmness in Robert Browning's "A Woman's Last Word":
"Be a man and fold me / With thine arm!" (Pettigrew, Poems, 1:539). But
for Siddal's speaker, however much her lover's strength corresponds to a
reliably strong will, a powerful mind, or a vigorous libido, it is no more
valuable to her than the rescuer's "strong heart" to the bespelled heroine of
the "Fragment of a Ballad." Masculinity provides no stay against the ero-
sion of her emblematically distressed beauty or the debilitation that consti-
tutes love in the first place. And so, with a classic ending for a dramatic
monologue, Siddal has her speaker dismiss her comforter: "leave me - say-
ing no good-bye, / Lest I might fall and weep." The poem indulges in no
compromised fantasy of getting beyond love's dulling limitations. Dropping
into sleep, the speaker will soon be more remote than her bespelled coun-
terpart who had lost interest in her would-be rescuer. The woman who
"cannot give" her love will slip into the condition of the dead and almost
dead. Like the Rossettian insensate who "cannot feel the rain" and cannot
"sigh that spring is fleet and summer fleet" (Crump, 1:27, 155), she chooses
retreat. The reader should not be misled into thinking of sleep naturalisti-
cally as feeble drowsiness and evasion. This is not "real" sleep, but the mask
of sleep, chosen and worn for the occasion of this poem like the mask of
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464 I VICTORIAN POETRY
Notes
1 See Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions,
1990), p. 189, for the "yeux glauques" that might well belong to Elizabeth Siddal,
although she was not the model (despite the note in The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
4th. ed. [New York: Norton, 1996], p. 1194, n. 8) for Burne-Jones's King Cophetua
and the Beggar Maid. See also Mollie Hardwick, The Dreaming Damozel (New York:
Fawcett, 1990), p. 25. In Stephen Wildman's more accurate account of this episode,
Siddal develops a "severe cold"; see his catalog entry no. 22 on Millais' "Elizabeth
Siddal: study for 'Ophelia,'" in Visions of Love and Life: Pre-Raphaelite Art from the
Birmingham Collection, England (Alexandria, Virginia: Art Services International,
1995), p. 118.
2 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p.
27. In his clinical account of cellular death, Sherwin B. Nuland asserts emphatically
that "the supposedly well-known fact that hair and nails will keep growing for vary-
ing periods of time after death is not a fact at all - no such thing happens" (How We
Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter [New York: Knopf, 1994], p. 123).
3 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New
York: Routledge, 1992), p. 170. Throughout her "Wife to Mr Rossetti- Elizabeth
Siddall (1829-1862)," Bronfen uses the Siddall family's spelling of their last name.
For the purpose of the present essay, I follow the adaptation Rossetti suggested and
that Siddal used as her signature.
4 Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal, ed. Roger C. Lewis and Mark Samuels Lasner
(Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Wombat Press, 1978). Hereafter cited as Lewis, Poems.
5 Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1988), p. 149.
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT 1 465
6 Violet Hunt, The Wife ofRossetti: Her Life and Death (New York: E. R Dutton, 1932) .
7 On the danger of reading poems as responses to specific events in a writer's life, see
Angela Leighton's useful reminder in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart
(Charlottes ville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1992) that Christina Rossetti "was writing
melancholy poems about dead or unrequited women long before her own broken
engagement" to James Collinson (p. 141). Tennyson was writing "He will not come
. . . Oh God, that I were dead!" ("Mariana," 11. 82-84) and other bereaved poems
prior to the death of Arthur Hallam. See The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher
Ricks (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 1:205.
8 Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989: London: Quartet, 1992), p. 195.
9 Stanley Weintraub, Four Rossettis: A Victorian Biography (New York: Weybright and
Talley, 1977), p. 108.
10 Griselda Pollock and Deborah Cherry's collaborative piece, "Woman as sign in Pre-
Raphaelite literature: The representation of Elizabeth Siddall" (1984), is reprinted
in Pollock's Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London:
Routledge, 1988), pp. 91-114.
1 1 See Cherry's entries on Siddal's drawing of "The Lady of Shalott" and her water-
color "Lady Clare" in The Pre-Raphaelites (London: The Tate Gallery, 1984), Nos.
198, 222.
12 William Michael Rossetti published Siddal's poems in the following: Dante Gabriel
Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir, 2 vols. (Boston, 1895) which includes "A
Year and a Day" (1:176-177); Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism: Papers 1854 to 1862
(London, 1899) with eight poems: "True Love" (pp. 150-151), "Dead Love" (pp.
151-152), "Shepherd Turned Sailor" (pp. 152-153), "Gone" (p. 153), "Speechless"
(p. 154), "The Lust of the Eyes" (p. 155), "Worn Out" (p. 156), "At Last" (pp. 241-
242); "Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal," Burlington Magazine 1 (1903): 273-
295, with only "A Silent Wood" (pp. 291-292); and Some Reminiscences of William
Michael Rossetti, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1906) including five new poems:
"Early Death" (1:196-197). "He and She and Angels Three" (1:197), "Love and
Hate" (1:198), "The Passing of Love" (1:199), "Lord May I Come?" (1:199-200) and
a reprint of "Silent Wood" (1: 197-198). Texts of Siddal's poems, except where noted,
are taken from William Michael Rossetti's four publications; in the interest of
economy, these will be referred to hereinafter as WMR, Family Letters, Pre-
Raphaelitism, Burlington, and Reminiscences.
13 See William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (Lon-
don, 1889), p. 22.
14 The quoted phrases are Leighton's, p. 64, in regard to Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
15 Virginia Blain uses these phrases of the authors she discusses in "Letitia Elizabeth
Landon, Eliza Mary Hamilton, and the Genealogy of the Victorian Poetess," VP 33
(1995): 33.
16 But see the inclusion of Siddal's "The Lust of the Eyes" and "At Last" in Victorian
Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995), pp. 345-346.
17 These assessments are by Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (London:
Duckworth, 1928), p. 56, and Hunt, p. 65.
18 Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Frederick
Muller, 1949), p. 291.
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466 I VICTORIAN POETRY
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 467
28 For the text of "Clerk Saunders," see Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bor-
der, ed. T. F. Henderson (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1931), p. 417. The Scottish
ballads are hereafter cited by page as Minstrelsy, with a stanza number given as needed.
29 See Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal, No. 32, where Siddal's title, The Gay Goshawk, differs
in spelling from Scott's.
30 "One Word More," Robert Browning: The Poems, ed., John Pettigrew and Thomas ].
Collins, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press), 2:739.
31 Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature,
ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p.
303.
32 According to Buchan, the ballad maker "may carry in the mind a stripped- down
version of the story"; but he or she also makes use of "patterned rhythms" which
permit expansion and elaboration of the story "while yet maintaining control over
it." These "binary, trinary, and annular patternings" permit organization of the bal-
lad "by pervasively grouping its units through balancing, tripling, and framing ar-
rangement" (p. 88).
33 Gabriel Rossetti developed an interest in Malory at the same time that he and Siddal
became engrossed with the Minstrelsy (William Michael Rossetti, "Preface," The
Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2 vols. [Boston, 1899], l:xvii). In Malory,
the mother's final words are tender and ironically martial: "A, my lytyll son, thou
haste murtherd thy modir! And therefore I suppose thou that arte a murtherer so
yonge, thow arte full lykly to be a manly man in thyne ayge; and bycause I shall dye
of the byrth of the, I charge my jantyllwoman that she pray my lorde, the kynge
Melyodas, that whan he is crystened let calle hym Trystrams, that is as muche to say
as a sorowfull byrth." See Malory: Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1971), p. 230).
34 For "The Unquiet Grave," see Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904) , No. 78 and The Norton
Anthology of Poetry, pp. 88-89. In this ballad the dead woman denies her mourning
lover the kiss that might cause his death: "If you have one kiss of my clay- cold lips,
/ Your time will not be long." The lovers in "Clerk Saunders" surmount this same
difficulty: though Saunders at first resists kissing Margaret,
"My mouth it is full cold, Margaret,
It has the smell, now, of the ground;
And if I kiss thy comely mouth,
Thy days of life will not be lang,"
(Minstrelsy, p. 419, stanza 20),
that resourceful maiden, in the stanza Siddal illustrated, conveys her kiss on "a
crystal wand" (stanza 25). In Siddal's poems, however, the heroines are more with-
holding and male lovers are variously fended off.
35 See Roger deV. Renwick, English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning (Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), p. 91. Less commonly, a married woman dies in
childbirth while under the malevolent eye of her mother or mother-in-law (Buchan,
p. 85), as in Mrs. Brown's "The Bonny Earl of Livingston," a ballad that Scott did
not include in the Minstrelsy. For a variant of this tale, see Child No. 91, "Fair Mary
of Wallington."
36 Buchan discusses the tendency in folk ballads to underline a heroine's sorrow through
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468 I VICTORIAN POETRY
"specific, concrete" actions or "doings" and to group these in threes (pp. 82-83, 90).
37 Scott, for example, expounds the traces in "Young Benjie" of the lykewake supersti-
tion that "the disembodied spirit" hovers "around its mortal habitation" (Minstrelsy,
p. 342).
38 See Jerome McGann's discussion of "non- symbolic" symbolism in "Rossetti's Signifi-
cant Details," VP 7 (1969): 41-54.
39 Henderson provides this rationale for what otherwise might appear to be a super-
naturally motivated grave-site ritual in "Clerk Saunders" (Minstrelsy, p. 421). In
stanza 31, the revenant directs Margaret to "plait a wand o' bonnie birk, / And lay it
on my breast" to insure "my saul gude rest" (3:229).
40 See Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal, No. 33, for SiddaPs The Maid of Lochroyan. On the
rebuff motif in folk ballads, see Buchan, p. 121.
41 Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisti-
cated Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 269.
42 In a rare surviving letter to Rossetti, Siddal alludes to the death in childbirth of
Joanna Boyce Wells, the artist- sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter George Price
Boyce: "It is indeed a dreadful thing about poor Mrs. Wells. All people who are at all
happy or useful seem to be taken away" (Janet Camp Troxell, ed., Three Rossettis:
Unpublished Letters to and from Dante Gabriel, Christina, William [Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1937], p. 8). In December 1866 (a few years after Siddal's death),
Fanny Waugh, Holman Hunt's first wife, died "of miliary fever" following the birth
of a son on October 26 (Pre-Raphaelites, p. 216). Lewis and Lasner comment that
"biographers agree in linking" the ballad "At Last" with "Siddal's first pregnancy" in
part because of the extant holograph on stationery bearing the EER monogram that
Rossetti designed for her in May 1860 (Poems, p. 24).
43 The grieving William Godwin attributed the symptoms of Mary Wollstonecraft's
death from septicaemia to a "decided mortification, occasioned by the part of the
placenta that remained in the womb" after giving birth on August 30; Wolls tone craft
died September 10, 1797 (Memoirs of the author of A vindication of the rights of woman
[1798; reprint, New York: Woodstock, 1990], p. 182).
44 Edward Shorter (A History of Women's Bodies [New York: Basic Books, 1982]) notes
that only after the 1870s did maternal death from puerperal or childbed fever, now
called "post- delivery sepsis" (p. 103), begin to decline "as a result of the wave of
medical progress that started with Joseph Lister's discovery in 1867 of antisepsis" (p.
100) . See also Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in
England, 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). While Moscucci is
wary of the way social and economic motives prompted the emergence of gynaecology
as a medical specialism in the nineteenth century (p. 6), she notes that maternal
death was a cited reason for the founding in 1859 of the Obstetrical Society of
London (p. 66).
45 The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Crump
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979-90), 1:37-38. All citations of
Rossetti's poems are from this edition, hereinafter cited by volume and page. The
poetic affinities of the Rossetti sisters-in-law are discussed later in this essay.
46 For present purposes, I use Lewis and Lasner's title, "Fragment of a Ballad," and cite
the four quatrains they print on the authority of "AshM incomplete draft by EER"
(p. 13 and note on p. 23) . The reader should be aware, however, that William Michael
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CONSTANCE W. HASSETT 1 469
Rossetti originally printed "Many a mile over land and sea" as an 18-line poem
without stanza breaks; in his version lines 11*18 are as follows:
Marsh supplies the same quatrains as Lewis and Lasner while retaining William
Michael's appealing title "Speechless" (Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal, p. 33).
The modern editors are right, I think, in reproducing Siddal's short, vivid, and
memorable quatrains. In this form, the poem is complete in its imagery, narrative,
and its statement that male gallantry is no substitute for female vitality.
47 The Minstrelsy volume in which Siddall found "The Gay Goss-Hawk," "Clerk
Saunders," and "The Lass of Lochroyan" includes the ballad "Kempion" (p. 444)
which represents both the bespelling of a "gaye ladye" (stanza 1) and the erotic
conditions for her unspelling: "And relieved sail ye never be, / Till Kempion" come
and "thrice kiss thee" (stanza 3). For analyses of the bespelling and unspelling epi-
sodes in various other ballads, see Buchan, p. 114.
48 The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1975), p. 170.
49 The phrase is Martin A. Danahay's; see his "Mirrors of Masculine Desire: Narcissus
and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation," VP 32 (1994): 44.
50 See James Richardson and Constance W. Hassett, "Looking at Elaine: Keats,
Tennyson, and the Directions of the Poetic Gaze," Arthurian Women: A Casebook,
ed. Thelma Fenster (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 298.
51 Had Siddal chosen different verbs the lines would have lost their gliding ease. A
hypothetical revision shows how a fully realized stress-pattern would have destroyed
the original lines' buoyancy: "Love interfused the mists of morn, / And glanced
along the sunset's rays."
52 The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959-62),
6:94.
53 "When Christina was putting together in 1865 her volume The Prince's Progress
and other Poems,' she raised a suggestion that she might perhaps include two or
three specimens of Lizzie's verse, giving, of course, the authoress's name. Christina
then, for the first time, read the compositions sent to her by Dante Gabriel and she
wrote, 'How full of beauty they are, but how painful!' She thought them 'almost too
hopelessly sad for publication en masse1" (WMR, Burlington, p. 292) . William Michael
agreed about the effect of Siddal's poems en masse, eventually bringing them out in
four installments over an eleven-year period (see note 12).
54 For Christina Rossetti's letter to Gabriel concerning Siddal's poems, see Rossetti
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470 I VICTORIAN POETRY
Papers: 1862 to 1870, ed. William Michael Rossetti (New York: Scribner, 1903), p.
76.
55 For discussion of Rossetti's rhythms see my "Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of
Reticence," PQ 65 (1986): 495-514.
56 The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1880),
p. xiv. The poem's obvious thematic affinity with Dante Gabriel's "My Sister's Sleep"
might have caused it to linger favorably in the family imagination. The appeal of
"The Death-Bed" is tracked in John Clubbe's Selected Poems of Thomas Hood
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970); first published in Englishman s Magazine,
August 1831, then republished in the posthumous Poems (1846), it was reprinted as
two (not four) stanzas in Palgrave's The Golden Treasury, inserted into Stowe's Dred,
and "set to music as one of the 'Songs from Dred, by Mrs. Beecher Stowe'" (p. 339).
57 See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press,
1989), p. 19.
58 The characterization is from William Michael Rossetti's lengthy "Prefatory Notice"
to The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans, ed. William Michael Rossetti (New
York: Crowell, 1890), p. 15. Rossetti writes guardedly of Hemans' achievement:
"She is a leader in that very modern phalanx of poets who persistently co-ordinate
the impulse of sentiment with the guiding power of morals or religion. Everything
must convey its 'lesson,' and is indeed set forth for the sake of its lesson: but must at
the same time have the emotional gush of a spontaneous sentiment" (p. 24).
59 See footnote to "Cavalier Tunes" from Dramatic Lyrics, 1842, in Pettigrew and Collins,
Poems, 1:347.
60 John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1959), p. 206.
6 1 The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1982), 1:182-183.
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