Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!
’Mid city noise, not, as with thee of yore,
Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.- Then through the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar,
Let in thy voice a whisper often come,
To chase fatigue and fear:
Why faintest thou? I wandered till I died,
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Ourtree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.
Arthur Hugh Clough
‘Thyrsis’ is Arthur Hugh Clough(1819–1861). Clough’s squibs are often quoted to
illustrate Victorian Doubt, but his long poems now hold our attention. In Amours de
Voyage and Dipsychus, his frankness, irony, conversational texture and play of mood
seem ver y modern. His most perfect work is the early verse-novel,The Bothie of
Tober-na-Vuolich, a high-spirited mock-epic romance, in Homeric hexameters, of
the adventures of a ‘reading party’ of Oxford men in the Highlands.Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti
In 1848 Dante Gabriel Rossetti(1828–1882),son of an Italian political refugee,
founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists including John
Millais and Holman Hunt, sworn to an anti-academic realism, a simple directness
unmodified by classical norms, and therefore ‘medieval’. The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood lasted five years, but Rossetti later worked with an older painter, Ford
Madox Brown, and with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, younger men,
J. M. Whistler and A. C. Swinburne stayed with Rossetti in Chelsea.
Rossetti’s often unfinished paintings and uneven poems have a willed emotional
intensity. An admirer of Keats, he had at 18 written ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in which
a beauty ‘leaned out / From the gold bar of Heaven’, longing to be reunited with her
earthly lover. The poem jumbles sensuous with spiritual imagery; the Damozel leans
‘until her bosom must have made / The bar of heaven warm.’ Rossetti’s symbolism,
and his association of erotic love with death, anticipate Aestheticism and Decadence.
When his wife,a former model, committed suicide, he buried with her a book of
poems, which he later exhumed. His bohemian lifestyle gave scandal, and his verse
was attacked in a pamphlet,The Fleshly School of Poetry.
His sister Christina Rossetti(1830–1894) retained a Pre-Raphaelite truth to
nature, with bright colours and clear edges. A devout Anglo-Catholic, she renounced
two engagements on religious grounds, cared for her family, and wrote poetry. For
te n years she did voluntary work to help ex-prostitutes. Her poem ‘In An Artist’s
Studio’ shows a deep comprehension of her brother’s doomed world: ‘One face looks
out from all his canvases, / One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans ... Not as she
is,but was when hope shone bright; / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.’ Her
early masterpiece,Goblin Market,is a richly charged fairy story of forbidden fruit, of
two sisters, of innocence lost and redeemed. Its adult themes, close to her brother’s,
are managed with a tact and discipline beyond him, and with a sensuous verbal and
rhythmic energy, and an intellectual control. Delicacy and fancy are not allowed to
get out of hand. She could write well for children, though her ‘An Apple-Gathering’280 9 · POETRY