IN the mid-nineteenth century, a self styled brotherhood of London artists emerged. All young, these were the ones who united to resist current artistic conventions, and to create or re-create, art forms in use before the period of Raphael. These young guns expressed their voices in the magazine The Germ. The members of the group were John Everett, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Thomas Woolner. Their movement subsequently influenced the writers William Morris, Christiana Rossetti and Swinburne.
The pre-Raphaelite poetry showed a distinct liking for medievalism, 18th century ballads, archaic, diction, symbolism and sensuousness. The poets were considerably under the influence of Spenser, and Tennyson had already stimulated their interests in medievalism Rossetti, following which his followers were dubbed “the fleshly school of poetry”.
The interesting thing about the pre-Raphaelitism is that it showed a link between the realistic and the mediaeval literary aspects. In this way, pre-Raphaelite theory based the desire for naturalism and directness, on the need for truth and claims of science. But it was not really the interests of science, that the pre-Raphaelites were anxious to serve. The more interesting of them at least, were concerned to give to things as well as to characters and situations the kind of symbolic reality they had to the medieval mind.
For example, Rossetti’s work. He left painting for poetry. His mind nourished on Dante and the early Italian poets. His Italian heredity and background strongly felt. His work shows a good, but rare, amalgamation of medieval poetry, ecclesiastical history and the work of Tennyson and Ruskin. It can certainly be inferred, after reading his poetry, that the pre-Raphaelites identified the concretely physical with the permanently spiritual. This attitude of the pre-Raphalites led to pseudomedieval attitudinizing coy archaism and pictorial lushness.
The Blessed Damozel is a true example of this mode.
Rossetti removed the ascetism from mysticism, (with some exceptions). He did so without succumbing to mawkishness and this was a considerable achievement, particularly in his age. But it is not excess of sensuous imagery that disturbs us in his poetry. It is the way in which sensuousness is constantly dissipated into vague spirituality.
One can see this clearly in Troy Town
Heaven born, Sparta’s queen,
O troy town Had two breasts of heavenly sheen
The sun and moon of the heart’s deare
All love’s lordship lay between
O Troy’s down
Tall Troy’s on fire
The poetry of Christina Rossetti has less complex sources than her brother’s. Her religious imagination and her steady Anglican piety dominate her poetry, as it did her life. This limited her interests and even inhibited parts of her nature. But surprisingly enough she managed to give that combination of strength and simplicity, without affectation or verbal posturing, which pre-Raphaelities sought. There is nothing archaic or preudomedieval in her use of symbol and allegory. Her lyrical poems show at times a quietly luminous clarity that suggests the religious poetry of the metaphysicals.
William Morris began writing as a pre-Raphaelite under Rossetti’s influence. But he does not present his medieval world as a world of merely languorous beauty. And when he brings forward his sordid traitors and grim avengers, he can produce verse narrative of power and even horror.
I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose
Where I would wonder if I might
From dewy dawn to deny night
And have one with me wandering
Moris seems to be inexplicable mixture at first sight as he is a pre-Raphaelite, mediaevalist, romantic story-teller, lover of the fierce Norse legends, socialist worker and all the time a craftsman and propagandist for the arts.
