E. WARWICK SLINNelegiacs, that open and close each canto. These lyrics disperse the
authority of Claude's central consciousness, since they refer both out-
wardly to the indeterminate continuities of lyric convention and internally
to the content of the poem. For example, the apostrophe at the end of
Canto I to Alba, the hills outside Rome, transforms the hills into a realm
of cultural and lyrical abstraction while at the same time making a direct
reference to the immediate Roman context: "Beautiful can I not call thee,
and yet thou has power to o'ermaster, / Power of mere beauty" (I.
281-82). That is to say, the structural arrangement of the intervening
lyrics reverses the usual referential pattern for poetic formalism. In these
elegiacs, intrinsic reference, which is conventionally self-enclosed, points
instead to the historically contextualizing narrative of Claude's letters. By
contrast, extrinsic reference, which is normally historical, points to the
formalist conventions of lyricism: namely, the detached timelessness
experienced by unspecified poetic voices. In Amours de Voyage, then, the
combination of elegiacs and letters produces a double level of indetermi-
nacy and lack of closure. At the narrative level of the letters, Claude
experiences no closure of resolution or decision, only a moving on to
Egypt. For him the epistolary act is one of differentiation: the production
of a divided self-consciousness and a subject-in-process, a self that is never
complete or fixed. At the lyrical level of the elegiacs, the poem is released
into the instabilities of textual production: acknowledged artifice ("Go,
little book!" [V. 218], which echoes Geoffrey Chaucer's directive in
Troilus and Criseyde [1385]); historical reference ("writ in a Roman
chamber" [V. 223]); and ambiguous readings ("flitting about many years
from brain unto brain" [V. 221]). By combining an array of formal
methods in this manner, the poem displays a complex interrelationship of
cultural and subjective practices.
Moreover, the kind of dialectical intertwining of social action and
subjective process that is evident in Amours de Voyage emerges in hybrid
forms that combine lyric and narrative. One lyric may embody a frozen
moment of emotional intensity but a series of lyrics may produce a shifting
temporalized narrative. As a consequence, we find a growing experimenta-
tion among Victorian poets with relationships between smaller discrete
units - such as couplets, sonnets, or stanzas - and extended, often loosely
constructed, narrative sequences. Tennyson's In Memoriam and Maud
(1855); Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850); Arnold's
"Empedocles on Etna" (1852); Clough's Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus;
George Meredith's Modern Love (1862); Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The
House of Life (1881); and Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata"
(1881): all of these poems provide diversified forms constructed from
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