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Pre-facing simile vehicles in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnets
Style, Winter, 2005 by Ernest Fontana
"After the French Liberation of Italy" reveals a signature stylistic gesture of Rossetti: the placement at the outset of the sonnet of an elaborately detailed simile vehicle and the maximal domain incongruity between this vehicle and its deferred simile topic. This elaborated vehicle is here as elsewhere in Rossetti a short narrative, its action unfolding in a duration that corresponds to the duration of the reader's apprehension of the octet text. (4) In "After the French Liberation of Italy" the opening "As when" designates the duration of a coital act and its brief aftermath. It presents the coming and going of the male orgasm and the "one minute" of "satiate bliss" which follows as the male becomes aware that he is no longer urged by "those long throes of longing."(5) The brief moments that elapse for both the male "client" and the reader of the sonnet contrast with the remembered duration of unsatisfied desire, "those long throes of longing" that preceded the brief intense moments of coition, the subject of the sonnet octet and the textual focus of the octet's reader who stands above the sonnet as the male client above his prostitute. As we shall see, this practice of an elaborated narrative prefacing simile vehicle is characteristic of some of Rossetti's strongest and most original sonnets. Those prefacing sonnet vehicles are often domain incongruent, to the point of perversity, to their deferred topics. Furthermore, these simile vehicles often involve the narratizing of an extended moment of recognition, a slow, gradual unfolding of perception that parallels the reader's gradual elucidation of the complexities of the simile vehicle. In "After the French Liberation of Italy" the perceptual process narratized is somatic; in the sonnets I shall analyze from The House of Life, the perceptual process is inward and mental as in Tennyson's sonnet "As When We Muse and Brood."(6)
"Transfigured Life" (#60), the sonnet that opens part 2, "Change and Fate," of The House of Life (1881), is constructed around a domain divergent modeling simile. The octet, one long suspended subordinate as clause, contrasts the "momentary glance" of a child's face in which the viewer suddenly sees the combined faces of the child's parents, with the second quatrain, in which the viewer sees, "as childhood's years and youth's advance," "the blended likeness" of the parents, that individualizes the adult as "separate" and distinctive. This elusive perceptual process that unfolds over several years is narratized in the slow, polysyllabic octet. (7) As in two other sonnets from The House of Life, which I shall soon consider (#80 and #91), the face or "pre-face" of this sonnet presents an elaborate simile vehicle that focuses on a human face. (8) The divergent simile topic of "Transfigured Life," as is the case in many of Rossetti's as/so sonnets, is somewhat anticlimactic or as in "On the French Liberation of Italy," an "afterthought." Just as time blends the traces of the parents' faces in the child into a distinctive and individualized adult face, so too Joy and Pain, the parents of these sonnets, are blended by Art into a distinctive and singular form, signified by the overwrought Biblical metaphor of a prophetic "song-cloud shaped as a man's hand." (9) The topic of this domain divergent simile is abstract, tortuous, and abstruse, whereas the opening simile vehicle presents a vivid perceptual experience that is both familiar and uncanny, in language that is commensurate to the slow unfolding of this experience in time.
