lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYsonnets of the first part of the above collection, andin a number of lyrical poems, whether elaborate likeThe Stream's Secret and Love's Nocturn (with its echoingrhymes) or simpler, if as heavily laden, The Song of theBower, andA little while a little loveThe hour yet bears for thee and me,and Love-Lily and Insomnia, as well as in ballads likeTroy Town and Eden Bower, Rossetti revived thetense, single-minded passion, spiritual or sensuous orboth, of Mediaeval and Renaissance love-poetry. InRossetti the sensuous predominates, and there is, afterall, a world of difference between Rossetti's sonnetsand those of Dante or Petrarch or Shakespeare or theSongs and Sonets of John Donne. He is closer akin toBoccaccio and to Chaucer in his version of // Filostrato.For the object of Rossetti's devotion is his wife, andthere is no room in this strain of mutual love, heartpressed to heart, for the conflict and interchange ofmoods—adoration, eulogy, impatience, reproach—which agitate the older sequences. No conflict entersto sharpen the warm, heavy atmosphere of Rossetti'svoluptuous passion till Death begins to loom upon thehorizon, when the thought and imagery do grow clearerand more poignant:Cling heart to heart; nor of this hour demandWhether in very truth, when we are dead,Our hearts shall wake to know Love's golden headSole sunshine of the imperishable land ;Or but discern, through night's unfeatured scope,Scorn-fixed at length the illusive eyes of hope.But perhaps the most arresting, the most purelyRossettian, are those in which statement yields place106