is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement of
the normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is as
satisfying to the ear as the more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and
'move.' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythms
which had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety of
rhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he has
produced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found but
rarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry.
Like Baudelaire and like Mallarme in France, Rossetti was not only a
wholly original poet, but a new personal force in literature. That he
stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of
Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not
true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the
greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on
those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an
unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one
is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything
said; and, when Rossetti speaks, no other voice, for the moment, seems
worth listening to. Even after one has listened, not very much seems to
have been said; but the world is not quite the same. He has stimulated a
new sense, by which a new mood of beauty can be apprehended.
Dreams are precise; it is only when we awake, when we go outside, that
they become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, with all his keen
practical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outside
that house of dreams in which the only real things were the things of
the imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind of
existence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world,
and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but one
world, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contented
prisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy.
The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energy
of beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis;
for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life,
that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which the
senses are messengers from the outer world, from which they can but
bring disquieting tidings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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