Pre-facing simile vehicles in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnets

Style, Winter, 2005 by Ernest Fontana

Works Cited

Baum, Paul, ed. The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence. By Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1928.

Boos, Florence Saunders. The Poetry of Dante G. Rossetti: A Critical Reading and Source Study. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

Fontana, Ernest. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Interrogative Lyric." Philological Quarterly 80 (2000): 253-69.

--. "Tennyson's In Memoriam, 74." Explicator 50 (1992): 146-48.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose. Ed. W. H. Gardner. London: Penguin, 1985.

Johnson, Samuel. Selected Writings. Ed. Patrick Cruttwell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Kittay, Eva Feder. Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

McGann, Jerome, ed. Commentary, "After the French Liberation of Italy." The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive. Electronic Archive Edition 1. < http:// www.rosettiarchive.org/docs/1-1859.raw.html>.

Ortony, Andrew. "The Role of Similarity in Similes and Metaphors." Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Ortony. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. 342-56.

Richardson, James. Vanishing Lives: Style and Self in Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1988.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected .Writings. Ed. Jan Marsh. Chicago: Dee, 2000.

Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Booth. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

Soskice, Janet Martin. Metaphor and Religious Language. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.

Swinburne, Algernon. Letters. Ed. Cecil Lang. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959-1962.

Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longmans, 1969.

Vogel, Joseph F. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Versecraft. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1971

Notes

(1) Elsewhere I have identified and analyzed Rossetti's recurrent use of the interrogative as a stylistic device (Fontana, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti").

(2) From Hopkins's "God's Grandeur."

(3) Rossetti treats the experience of deja vu in his short lyric "Sudden Light."

(4) See Richardson's discussion of Rossetti's "drive for intensity and prolongation" in his sonnets (107-15).

(5) The situation is similar to that of Rossetti's dramatic monologue "Jenny." But there the speaker-client does not have intercourse with the prostitute.

(6) Many Pre-Raphaelite paintings deal with dramatic moments of perception, discovery, and recognition; for example, Rossetti's own incomplete Found, Holman Hunt's Awakening Conscience, and Millais's Blind Girl and Return of the Dove to the Ark.

(7) Vogel analyzes Rossetti's use of polysyllabic "stress heights" to slow his lines (27). He does not treat Rossetti's use of pre-facing similes.

(8) "Bridal Path" (#2) analogously opens with a reference to a mother' s first sight of her newborn child, though the child's face is not specifically cited.

(9) Baum observes that this is a reference to the "little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand" seen by Elijah's servant that augurs in I Kings 18 the coming of rain (158).

(10) The shifting perception of a friend's face is the opening simile of Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850): "As sometimes in a dead man's face, / To those that watch it more and more / A likeness hardly seen before / Comes out...." See Fontana, "Tennyson's In Memoriam."