The King James of _The King’s Tragedy_ is of a righteous and fearless
nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of
powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that
death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,
tender, loving, devoted--meet spouse for a poet and king. The incidents
too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of them, and
the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being the sum
of the author’s contribution. And those incidents are in the highest
degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more vivid
pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from his
pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing more
clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in _The
White Ship_, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the
morning dawning over the dim sea-sky--
At last the morning rose on the sea
Like an angel’s wing that beat towards me--
and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down
the court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher
pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned
Parliament in _The King’s Tragedy_, of the journey to the Charterhouse
of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the Scottish
sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while immured by
Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer gate,
of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in _The Pit
of Fortune’s Wheel_. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our
regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists
in these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author’s works. Natural
portents are here first employed as factors of poetic creation.
Presentiment, foreboding, omen become the essential tissue of works
that are lifted by them into the higher realm of imagination. These
supernatural constituents penetrate and pervade _The White Ship_; and
_The King’s Tragedy_ is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak
of the incidents associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but
of the less palpable touches which convey the scarce explicable
sense of a change of voice when the king sings of the pit that is under
fortune’s wheel:
And under the wheel, beheld I there
An ugly Pit as deep as hell,
That to behold I quaked for fear:
And this I heard, that who therein fell
Came no more up, tidings to tell:
Whereat, astound of the fearful sight,
I wot not what to do for fright.
(The King’s Quair.)