Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Siddal's Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions
Author(s): Constance W. Hassett

Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 443-470
Published by: West Virginia University Press
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Elizabeth SiddaPs Poetry:
A Problem and Some Suggestions
CONSTANCE W. HASSETT
ARE SELECTIVE. THOUGH ELIZABETH SlDDAL HAS SINCE 1862 HAUNTED

us as the face of Ophelia, of Beatrice, of Princess Sabra, it would prob-
ably come as a surprise to most viewers of these Pre-Raphaelite icons that
she painted, drew, and was a poet of some skill and poignancy. Famous
faces, it may be, do not need souls and Siddal's fame as the Brotherhood's
and then exclusively Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model has perhaps contrib-
uted to her obscurity as an author. Some find allusions to her lovely eyes
and unhappy marriage in Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" while others
chance upon her misadventure as a model for John Everett Millais' Ophelia
(1851-52) in the conversation that enlivens Molly Hardwick's recent mur-
der mystery The Dreaming Damozel:
"Millais' Ophelia, wasn't she? . . . Floating in that stream, singing snatches of old songs as
she dies." "Not a stream, though. A bath in Millais' studio, and the water heated by a
lamp underneath - until wretched Millais went out and forgot, and the lamp went out
too. Lizzie in that heavily embroidered dress, lying there obediently and getting icier and
icier. She got pneumonia." (p. 25) [
For the many readers of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic,
the memorably impossible information about Siddal concerns her hair. When
her grave was opened seven years after her death to retrieve Gabriel's manu-
script poems, "literary London buzzed" with the rumor (based on a persis-
tent non-fact of biology) "that her hair had 'continued to grow after her
death, to grow so long, so beautiful, so luxuriantly as to fill the coffin with
its gold!'"2 The disinterment story takes on a vivid life of its own in Elisabeth
Bronfen's grim "Case Study" where it culminates an account of Siddal's
lifelong "deanimation" as sickly woman and artist's cipher.3 Bronfen seems
to resent that Siddal was "so readily transformed into legend" (p. 177) but
does not hesitate to offer the jarringly morbid suggestion that Siddal ail-
but- willed the tragic end of her first pregnancy (May 2, 1861): "As if to find
an acme to her courtship with death, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter"
(p. 176).
From Pound to Hardwick, these authors show no awareness of the
poetry Siddal wrote in the 1850s, of its posthumous publication in the 1890s,
443
444 I VICTORIAN POETRY
and its availability since 1978 in a modern edition.4 The critics who do
know of Siddal's poetry find biographical inference irresistible. Some take
her 1862 death by a laudanum overdose to be almost certainly a suicide
and allow this not- quite -fact to introduce a certain amount of moire distor-
tion into their reading of the poems. Barbara T. Gates, for example, in Vic-
torian Suicide (1988) cites Siddal's "A Year and a Day" to suggest (with a
misleading plural) that the poetry is "haunted by images of watery death."5
Siddal, in Gates's view, "seems finally to have become obsessed with Ophelia's
lot, to have decided to live - and die - a fiction" (p. 149).
The most thoroughgoing biographical reading of Siddal's poetry is
Violet Hunt's The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death.6 The paucity of
verifiable facts and the scanty number of poems permit Hunt (better known
for her 1920s novels) to treat Siddal's texts like rumors. Assuming that
Lizzie "is the protagonist throughout" (p. 65), Hunt snips and cuts freely,
wrenching lines from their context and sometimes reversing stanzas to com-
pile an intimate expressive record of moods and wiles that Hunt herself
despises. Quoting every known poem, but not any poem in its entirety,
Hunt mixes undated stanzas with unfounded speculation about the Pre-
Raphaelite circle of painters. Thus "True Love" with its two knights and
one lady becomes a poem a clef showing that Lizzie was "using Walter
Deverell" in an attempt to persuade Gabriel to regularize their "situation"
by marrying her (p. 69). 7 Because there are not enough facts available to
completely confirm, modify, or refute such acute guesswork - even the most
assiduous biographer admits that "the documentary trail of Elizabeth Siddal's
life goes cold"8 in the crucial two years preceding her marriage - recent
critics who follow Hunt's biographical lead tend to proceed with rhetorical
caution. Stanley Weintraub, for example, describes what he takes to be an
especially melancholy passage of "Dead Love" - not every reader will agree
with him about the tone - as "almost a message" to Gabriel.9
Interestingly, Marxist art historians Griselda Pollock and Deborah
Cherry have registered the strongest theoretical protest against Gabriel-
centered critiques of Siddal's life and work. Their joint essay "Woman as
sign in Pre-Raphaelite literature" scrupulously unravels long-standing er-
rors about Siddal's name and age, and the oft-told tale of her discovery like
some new planet or continent.10 Biographical discrepancies, they contend,
represent Siddal as Gabriel's beloved, enigmatic young muse and, by ob-
scuring her working-class origin, serve to enhance the aura of his genius:
"His individuality and his stature as an artist are erected on the negation of
the female model." Elizabeth Siddal's appearance, in their view, was and
still is "appropriated as a signifier" of Gabriel Rossetti's artistry and person-
ality (p. 94). A close examination of Siddal's poems and paintings is beyond
the scope of Pollock and Cherry's ambitious essay, which aims at underwriting
CONSTANCE W. HASSETT / 445
a new, feminist practice of art history, but the emphatically argued point of
their work is to encourage attention to SiddaPs role as a producer of art (p.
91). n
The literary critic who turns to SiddaPs art, motivated perhaps by a
prior interest in Pre-Raphaelite or Victorian women's poetry, promptly en-
counters another obstacle to appreciation, one that proves even more for-
midable than the enticements and lacunae in the biography: blandly deni-
grating praise. The terms of remembrance for SiddaPs poetry were firmly
and discouragingly established in William Michael Rossetti's various edito-
rial apologies; in his view, his sister-in-law's work is meager, derivative, and
morbid. Eking out her material in four different installments,12 Rossetti dreads
"overrating her" (WMR, Burlington, p. 295) and repeatedly explains that
her "performances [were] restricted in both quantity and development"
(WMR, Burlington, p. 273) and that she possessed a "limited but refined
artistic faculty."13 Challenged by the untidiness of SiddaPs manuscript re-
mains, William Michael regrets that the verse is "scrappily jotted down."
Adding that the "amount" of material is "scanty," he insinuates the crite-
rion for assessment: quantity of production is the measure of creativity; and
he dismisses Elizabeth Siddal, even while promoting her, as a very slender
talent (WMR, Burlington, p. 291). Even without accepting Rossetti's aes-
thetic calculus, a modern critic might legitimately wish that the literary
remains were more abundant. A body of fifteen poems and some fragments,
all of uncertain date or sequence, precludes standard and welcome kinds of
critical narrative: it is impossible, for example, to write about SiddaPs "imagi-
native development" and her "eventual recognition" of features in her work14
or the ways in which her "productions were circulated, the kind of reviews
they received" and the regard in which she held herself as a "producer" of
poetry.15 The lack of material to give contour to SiddaPs life as a writer
might be the reason why so fine a critic as Angela Leighton alludes grump-
ily and without quotation to SiddaPs "generally meagre and underdevel-
oped" art (p. 130). 16
Critical interest in Siddal is further hampered by unchallenged ac-
ceptance of William Michael's description of the "wail of pang and pathos"
in certain of the poems (WMR, Reminiscences, 1:196). Expressions of dis-
may at the "unrelieved melancholy" of SiddaPs monotonously "frustrate"
verse are common;17 and in Doughty's still definitive biography of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti impatience with SiddaPs "sad and sentimental and self-
consciously pathetic broodings" reaches a kind of alliterative peak.18 In
one instance, Doughty patronizingly dismisses SiddaPs lines on "Holy Death"
(from "Lord, May I Come?" WMR, Reminiscences, 1:200) as the literal ex-
pression of her personal hope for a life beyond the grave: "To the hereafter
poor Lizzie had forwarded her soul's sentimental desires - a kind of spiritual
446 / VICTORIAN POETRY
luggage in advance" (Doughty, p. 299). The sarcasm of this assessment

would, as A. H. Harrison remarks apropos of some early criticism of Chris-
tina Rossetti, "strike most Victorianists today as unjust."19 But to reclaim
SiddaPs work for Victorianists by showing the remark's inaccuracy is an-
other matter. Fortunately, there is the evidence of death-loving lines in a
poem that Siddal is known to have especially admired: "My breath to heaven
like vapour goes: / May my soul follow soon!" The party sending on her
"luggage" in these lines by that other melancholic, Alfred Tennyson, is St.
Agnes (Ricks, 1:606). Siddal did a watercolor of "St. Agnes Eve" which
became a prized possession of Christina Rossetti,20 herself once regarded as
overly melancholy. Guided by information of this sort, that is to say, by the
evidence of Siddal's drawings and watercolors and her reading of past and
contemporary poetry, the reader comes to see that what has passed as a
strictly autobiographical element in Siddal's work is, in fact, a typically Vic-
torian tonality.
In the essay that follows I hope to modify the perception that Siddal's
poetry is merely personal and gloomily repetitious by examining the con-
text of her work, the "local or personal culture" that forms "the web of
circumstance out of which poems get written."21 As I direct attention to
the style of her poetry, I will rely more than once on Jan Marsh's account of
Siddal's work in the visual arts.22 In her catalogue to the 1991 Siddal ex-
hibit at the Ruskin Gallery, Marsh specifies when Siddal began various
sketches, completed key paintings, exhibited and sold her work. Siddal's
drawings and known pieces in oil or watercolor are, like most Pre-Raphaelite
art, literary in origin, taking their narratives from such sources as Sir Walter
Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and various poems of Keats and
Tennyson. My thesis is that Siddal was prompted to write - as all writers
are - by other writings. This assumption calls for interesting and yet untold
stories about her poems, stories of their intertextuality, of the structuration
of their meanings, of their representation of gender, and their literary value.
Given the historical denigration of Siddal's poetry, to undertake a critical
study without offering aesthetic assurances makes little sense and so I would
like to affirm at the outset that Siddal is a good poet. Moreover, I hope to
account here for the details and the Tightness of Siddal's poetic moves, for
the skill and the pleasure afforded by her texts - regardless of her undeni-
ably sad life.
Let us begin by noticing one of those contradictory moments when a

poem itself announces, or invites us to remember, that authorial presence is
an illusion:
Ope not thy lips, thou foolish one,

Nor turn to me thy face:
The blasts of heaven shall strike me down
Ere I will give thee grace.
Take thou thy shadow from my path,

Nor turn to me and pray:
The wild, wild winds thy dirge may sing
Ere I will bid thee stay.
Lift up thy false brow from the dust,

Nor wild thine hands entwine
Among the golden summer-leaves
To mock the gay sunshine.
And turn away thy false dark eyes,

Nor gaze into my face:
Great love I bore thee; now great hate
Sits grimly in its place.
All changes pass me like a dream,

I neither sing nor pray;
And thou art like the poisonous tree
That stole my life away.
(WMR, Reminiscences, 1:198)
The poem's title, "Love and Hate," was supplied by William Michael Ros-
setti at the time of publication and commentary ever since has attempted
to locate the exact provocation for its emotion, an anger that is taken
unproblematically to be SiddaPs very own. Hunt points to Gabriel's flirta-
tion with the model Annie Miller (p. 190), Weintraub to his scheme to
move to Algeria (p. 91), and Marsh, somewhat more speculatively, men-
tions his hypothetical breaking off of their "unofficial engagement" in 1858. 23
The legitimate reason for positioning Gabriel as a kind of obnoxious muse is
the hope that his various offenses might provide clues to the date of compo-
sition and the sequence of the poems. But amidst the highly engaging and
resourceful guesswork, the generative core of the poem has been ignored,
namely, the cunning phrase "I neither sing nor pray." A denial that is a
literal impossibility in a poem, this pseudo- statement plays upon the differ-
ence between a speaker disinclined to use words and the artist who makes a
poem out of rhymed ballad stanzas. Clearly, the emotion that drives Siddal
to authorship is not the emotion that prompts the speaker's argument and
silences. Fascinated with the verbal decorums that underwrite her medium,
Siddal creates with "Love and Hate" a poem that, by its demands for the
addressee's silence and averted gaze, flaunts its own outspokenness.24
Elsewhere Siddal takes up the challenge of representing withheld speech

and even muteness and, as I will show, goes to traditional ballads to find
ways to write of what her speakers do not or cannot say.
Coaxed by such indications of her poetry's concern with poetry, we
might pause briefly over the physical evidence of SiddaFs interest in her
literary medium: the surviving copies, inscribed Elizth. E. Siddall, of the third
and fourth volumes of an edition of Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy (Marsh,
Elizabeth Siddal, Nos. 32 and 33). 25 One would like to think, on the basis of
her studies of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," that Siddal also owned a now-
lost personal copy of Keats and that, as illustrator of "The Lady of Shalott,"
she had more demonstrably textual acquaintance with Tennyson's poems
than anecdote suggests: she is reported, improbably, to have encountered
her first Tennyson poem as the wrapping for a pat of butter and to have
owned a replica of Gabriel's ink-sketch of Tennyson Reading "Maud" on Sep-
tember 27, 1855.26 The inscribed Minstrelsy volumes are a sufficient re-
minder, however, that in the 1850s Siddal was immersed in poetry. Through-
out 1854, for example, she was involved with Gabriel as illustrator for a
ballad book that William Allingham hoped to edit for Routledge.27 Given
the over- abundance of Pre-Raphaelite plans and projects, this one "lapsed"
as William Michael tactfully says (WMR, Burlington, p. 277) but not before
Siddal had done considerable work on four Minstrelsy ballads including de-
signs for "The Lass of Lochroyan" and "The Gay Goss-Hawk" and the stud-
ies which led to watercolors of "Sir Patrick Spens" and "Clerk Saunders."
The extant versions of Clerk Saunders are truly lovely depictions of the
exchange of troth between Margaret and her ghostly clerk (Marsh, Eliza-
beth Siddal, No. 38). 28 William Michael Rossetti was pleased to mention
that this highly finished watercolor (which Dante Gabriel may have col-
laborated on) was "purchased by the American scholar Professor Eliot
Norton" (WMR, Burlington, p. 277). But even the unfinished and unsold
studies are important for what they reveal of Siddal's writerly response to
the Minstrelsy, that is, for her particularly deft appreciation of the structure
of the folk ballad.
Her drawing for Scott's "The Gay Goss-Hawk" is an illuminating in-
stance; a less attuned reader than Siddal might have chosen to illustrate
the climactic moment when the wily heroine is awakened from simulated
death by her intended husband's touch. The lovers' reunion, which occurs
at the bier and flushes the maiden's face, is pictorial enough to tempt a
visual artist:
"Set down, set down the bier," he said;

"Let me look her upon":
But as soon as Lord William touched her hand,
Her colour began to come.
CONSTANCE W. HASSETT 1 449
She brightened like the lily flower,

Till her pale colour was gone;
With rosy cheek, and ruby lip,
She smiled her love upon.
(Minstrels}', p. 408, stanzas 34-35)
But Siddal's literary tact leads her to a different passage in the narrative,
one that bears the poem's most profound meaning and, because it is re-
ferred to later in typically recursive ballad fashion, is the means of structur-
ing the entire piece. In The Gay Goshawk,19 Siddal draws attention to the
moment when the maiden's father and stepmother examine her sleeping
"corpse" and conduct a scarring trial:
Then spak her cruel step-minnie,
"Take ye the burning lead,
And drap a drap on her bosome,
To try if she be dead."
They took a drap o' boiling lead,

They drapp'd it on her breast;
"Alas! alas!" . . .
(Minstrelsy, p. 407, stanzas 27-28)
For the first- time reader (or listener) the dismayed exclamation "Alas! alas!"
seems to be the maiden's response to the searing lead. In folk-logic, this
burning test of the sleeping draught's efficacy marks (literally) the cost to
the maiden of her pursuit of love. When the cry turns out to be her father's -
"Alas! alas!" her father cried, / "She's dead without the priest" - the
daughter's scheme is assured. Death is a ruse, silence a triumph, and both
are poetic stratagems for narrating a complex tale of a daughter's defiance.
If the drop on her breast henceforth proves her devotion to Lord William, it
also testifies - and this is the crucial point - to the fact that no resourceful,
family- defying, and successful lady-lover goes completely unpunished. This
traditional understanding of feminine risk is codified at the ballad's ending
when the wedded and safely distant daughter rounds off her adventure
with words for her family:
"Commend me to my grey father,

That wish'd my saul gude rest;
But wae be to my cruel step-dame,
Garr'd burn me on the breast."
(Minstrels)', p. 408, stanza 38)
It would be only a slight exaggeration to claim that the burning moment in

"The Gay Goss-Hawk" makes a poet of Siddal, that it prompts not only a
drawing, but her various imagings of sleep as a strategic muteness, of silence
as a form of defiance ("I neither sing nor pray"), and of the momentary
indistinguishability of fainting, sleeping, or dying as a sign of elusiveness.

When the woman of "True Love," for example, promises to return to her
lover's gravesite and threatens that she will be found there "Watching or
fainting, / Sleeping or dead" (WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 151), her discov-
erers will, as in "The Gay Goss-Hawk," finally read her condition as resis-
tance. And in some of SiddaPs poems it is the male lover who is eluded and
the reader who is left to discover the difference between death and living
death and the significance, for SiddaFs poetry, of their indistinguishability.
But before pursuing SiddaPs representation of swooning, dying, and
sleeping, her poetry's distinctive withdrawals and reticences, it is necessary
to stress that her depiction of the scene of the daughter's burning indicates
precisely the literary response that prompted her own ballads. Far from be-
ing an effusively expressive act, as biographical critics tend to assume, SiddaPs
move to write a "professedly modern-antique" poem (as Gabriel says) came
as a result of her self- distracting and astutely formal engagement with the
Minstrelsy's precursor texts (Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, p. 73). On the
one hand, Scott's volumes provide her a rich collection of variously and
impersonally gloomy motifs: the burial preparations of "The Gay Goss-
Hawk"; the "long, long" wait in "Sir Patrick Spens"; the dread of fatal child-
birth in "Clerk Saunders"; the bespelling of a lover and the abandonment
of a young son of "The Lass of Lochroyan." These traditionally constitutive
elements all come to figure in her "Fragment of a Ballad" and "At Last."
On the other hand, and just as important for SiddaPs art, the Minstrelsy
ballads' structure provides the deeply formal motivation that Robert Brown-
ing once approved as "Using nature that's an art to others."30 Roman
Jakobson's well-known discussion of poetic structuration is relevant here:
his account of the poetic process as the projection of equivalence onto the
axis of combination is ordinarily and rightly understood to refer to the lin-
ear arrangement of acoustic features (stress, rhyme, anaphora, etc.).31 But
his notion of "combination" also includes, with the structural repetitions,
the annular, binary, and trinary arrangements that scholars of ballads loosely
refer to as the "adding style."32 These narrative rhythms, these repetitive
orderings that bring folk ballads into anonymous, communal existence,
become the method of SiddaPs poems as well.
To see how a response to folk narrative informs not only SiddaPs draw-
ing of the Gary Goshawk but her poetry as well, we need only turn to her
finely original "At Last" where seemingly traditional details and triplings
echo and modify anonymous ballad precedents. At the very outset of SiddaPs
poem, a dying woman revises the patriarchal concern of yet another Min-
strelsy ballad, "The Lass of Lochroyan." Instead of wondering as Fair Annie
does, "wha will father my young son /Till Lord Gregory come name?" (Min-
strelsy y 3:255, stanza 2), SiddaPs heroine asks her mother to nurture the
orphan:
O mother, open the window wide
And let the daylight in;
The hills grow darker to my sight,
And thoughts begin to swim.
And, mother dear, take my young son,

(since I was born of thee) ,
And care for all his little ways,
And nurse him on thy knee.
And, mother, wash my pale, pale hands,

And then bind up my feet;
My body may no longer rest
Out of its winding- sheet.
And, mother dear, take a sapling twig

And green grass newly mown,
And lay them on my empty bed,
That my sorrow be not known.
And, mother, find three berries red

And pluck them from the stalk,
And burn them at the first cockcrow,
That my spirit may not walk.
And, mother dear, break a willow wand,

And if the sap be even,
Then save it for my lover's sake,
And he'll know my soul's in heaven.
And, mother, when the big tears fall,

(And fall, God knows, they may)
Tell him I died of my great love,
And my dying heart was gay.
And, mother dear, when the sun has set

And the pale church grass waves,
Then carry me through the dim twilight
And hide me among the graves.
(WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, pp. 241-242)
By enforcing the mother- child bond across three generations, Siddal's young
mother may perhaps fend off or qualify the lifelong sorrow of that famous
son, the Tristram (whose name means "sad birth") of Malory's Le Morte
D Arthur and Scott's own "Sir Tristrem" (1804).33 To die of "great love" might
well mean to die the traditional death of the lovelorn, but it might alterna-
tively (and also) mean to die as a consequence of being "great" with child.
This latter possibility is enforced not only by the Tristram analogy, but by
the speaker's expressed anxiety about her own ghostly restlessness. The
dread that one's spirit will "walk" can be variously motivated; and modern
readers may well recall "The Unquiet Grave," an anthology favorite in which
a revenant reproves her survivor whose grieving attendance at the gravesite
lasts disquietingly beyond "a twelvemonth and a day."34 As we shall see,
this traditional measure of male fidelity becomes an issue in Siddal's own
"A Year and a Day" and, in a startling appropriation of the revenant ballad's
anti- elegiac sentiment, Siddal's metaphorically dying women repeatedly
suggest the irrelevance of male fidelity. But in "At Last," the perishing
woman's anxiety is best read in the context suggested by "Clerk Saunders."
When Saunders comes to claim Margaret's "faith and troth again," she
hesitates a moment to ask about the ultimate fate of women who die in
child-birth:
"Thy faith and troth thou sail na get,

And our true love shall never twin,
Until ye tell what comes of women,
I wot, who die in strong traivelling?"
(Minstrelsy, p. 419, stanza 22)
Margaret's question is in keeping with the traditional ballads' understand-

ing, as Roger deV. Renwick puts it, of the "normatively tragic pregnancy" as
punishment for sexual transgression.35 Were Margaret suitably wed, she
would perhaps not need Clerk Saunder's assurance of a dying mother's fu-
ture as a blessed damozel "in the heavens high" (Minstrels}', p. 419, stanza
23). Nor perhaps would Siddal's speaker, whose burial is to occur in the
"dim twilight," be so concerned to "hide" the event and to arrange for a
sign to show the absent lover that her departed "soul's in heaven." What-
ever conclusion the individual reader reaches (or co- conceives) about the
cause of death or the protest that her "dying heart was gay," the reason why
her sorrow should "be not known" is all the more poignant for comprising,
without specifying, some combination of abandonment, disgrace, and bio-
logical/procreative misfortune.
Thus it also falls to the speaker's mother to provide the solace of at-
tendance at the daughter's deathbed. Siddal combines the lykewake im-
perative of "Lord Randall": "mother, make my bed soon, / For I'm sick at
the heart, and I fain wald lie down" (Minstrelsy, p. 359, stanza 5), the burial
preparations of "The Gay Goss-Hawk" (Minstrelsy, p. 408, stanzas 30-31),
and the affectionate watching of "The Wife of Usher's Well" who makes
her sons a bed:
She's made it large and wide;
And she's ta'en her mantle her about,
Sat down at the bed- side.
(Minstrelsy, p. 459, stanza 8)
As in many important ballad episodes, Siddal organizes the mother's sor-

rowful "doings" in three stanzas,36 each giving instruction about the ritual
manipulation of natural signs. The careful placement of a "sapling twig and
green grass" (1. 13), the timely burning of "three berries red" (1. 17), and the
breaking of a "willow wand" (1. 21) will mean that the dead woman is happy,
peaceful, and saved. So apparently authentic are these details that the
modern reader might readily assume that Siddal borrows "real" Minstrelsy
details, making judicious selection of what Renwick calls the "signifiers that
are peculiar to the genre" (p. 15). But while it is tempting to accept these
directives as denotative of the traditional beliefs that are expounded by
antiquarians like Walter Scott,37 they are, in part, Siddal's own invention.
Not only do they work brilliantly to create the atmosphere of lykewake
superstition and fear, their unfamiliarity is consistent with the lost origin or
culturally forgotten "meaning" of many ballad details. The ballad, in other
words, provided Siddal - as it did Dante Gabriel Rossetti - the model for
non- symbolic Pre-Raphaelite details.38 As any Minstrelsy reader knows, ballad
signifiers are often cannily unfamiliar. And yet few actually remember, if
indeed many ever knew, that the plaited birch wands stipulated by Clerk
Saunders were once placed on newly sodded graves (metonymically, on the
breast) to "protect the turf from injury" by animals grazing the churchyard.39
The suggestive unfamiliarity and resulting eeriness that the traces of such
customs carry are perfectly realized in Siddal's newly invented "supersti-
tious" rituals. Thus it emerges that the true purpose of the set of impera-
tives, while appearing to refer to unremembered burial customs, is in fact
connotative. Presented in the triple form and with the authentic unfamil-
iarity of the traditional ballad, they make a claim for the poem's engage-
ment with literary tradition. At the same time, they display Siddal's artistic
confidence and announce her originality.
Arguing as I have been for the literary sources of Siddal's "anony-
mous" style, and the occasioning of her revivalist poetry by her reading of
the Minstrelsy, I want also to stress that her poems do not exist "for the sake
of" their models (Bromwich, p. 334). For Siddal, the Minstrelsy poems pro-
vide the inducement to write ballads that aim, not at the success of a near-
forgery, but at innovative expansions of the tradition. In the case of "At
Last," the tripled lykewake imperatives are a way of emphasizing the conti-
nuity of the "modern-antique" concern with tragic pregnancy but with a
distinctly new emphasis. Siddal's matriarchal revision insures, as we have
seen, the affectionate nurture of the orphan son but it also isolates and
focuses on maternal death. In the Minstrelsy source, "The Lass of Lochroyan,"
Fair Annie and her son die together. And in her illustration of the ballad,
Siddal depicts the moment of cruel rebuff that sends the mother and son to
their double death:
Fair Annie turned her round about -

"Weel! since that it be sae,
May never a woman, that has born a son,
Hae a heart sae fou o' wae!"
(Minstrelsy, p. 430, stanza 24)40
But in her own ballad, Siddal manages, in perfect keeping with the original's
"dry- eyed acceptance" of bitter reality,41 to offer her own controlled re-
sponse to exclusively maternal jeopardy. We will probably never know
whether Siddal wrote "At Last" before or after the death in childbirth of
her acquaintance Joanna Boyce Wells or whether as Lewis and Lasner sug-
gest, it was composed during her own pregnancy of 1861-62.42 But such
information is not really necessary. The facts about fatal pregnancies, in-
cluding the published details of Mary Wollstonecraft's death after the deliv-
ery of her second child, the future Mary Shelley,43 and grimly rumored "facts"
were enough to warrant anxiety. Medical historian Edward Shorter writes
sweepingly but reliably of the period before 1900 that "if a woman knew ten
or fifteen other women, she probably knew someone who had died giving
birth, or who would later die. Risks of this magnitude create a collective
sense of fearfulness" (p. 69). 44
Interestingly, in this context, Dante Gabriel Rossetti also responded
to the "The Lass of Lochroyan" and he too changed the ending. In his
"Stratton Water," Lord Sands rescues and weds the pregnant Janet just in
time for the birth of a legitimate son: "the night the mother should have
died / The young son shall be born" (Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
1:157). Siddal, for her part, fends off Gabriel's happy ending and at the
same time avoids the stark plotting that the ballad model prescribes. As
one astute observer has noted, in traditional materials it is rare for maidens
to "have as their lot an indeterminate position on the scale running from
despair to delight"; ballad heroines "are fated almost inevitably either to
the ecstasy of a marital union or to the agony" of separation and death
(Renwick, p. 32). SiddaPs originality lies in locating her heroine in a some-
what more "indeterminate" position. With her externalized and trinary
narrative, Siddal provides an old-style but wholly new tale in which an
affectionate mother, linked to her own mother and concerned for her sur-
viving child's well-being, dies of her "great love."
Organic death is not Siddal's only way of representing the risk inher-
ent in romantic relationships; there is another kind of fatality, the "living
death" portrayed in the "Fragment of a Ballad." Siddal's narrative presents
CONSTANCE W. HASSETT I 455
a suffering woman whose verbal unresponsiveness prompted William Michael

Rossetti to entitle the poem "Speechless" (WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 154).
From the far side of her silence, the speaker wonders how the few words
that pass her "frozen lips" will be construed by the great-hearted lover who
has come to her rescue:
Many a mile over land and sea

Unsummoned my love returned to me;
I remember not the words he said
But only the trees moaning overhead.
And he came ready to take and bear

The cross I had carried for many a year,
But words came slowly one by one
From frozen lips shut still and dumb.
("Fragment of a Ballad," Lewis, Poems, p. 13)
The adroitness of Siddal's mimetically impeded rhythm ("words came

slowly" and "lips shut still") solicits attention here, as the next stanza urges
with its solemnly witty question, "How sounded my words." The impres-
sion of unenthusiastically dragged syllables registers strongly against the
anapestic energy of the lover so "ready to take" her cross. The "cross" of
suffering is suggestive of a grave marker, and the reader may wonder if Siddal's
speaker is not, in fact, another of the ghostly presences who persistently
haunt both folk and revival ballads and such Pre-Raphaelite poems as Chris-
tina Rossetti's "After Death." In Rossetti's sonnet, it will be remembered,
the literally unfeeling woman watches (and perhaps faults) the response of
the man who attends her wake: "He did not love me living; but once dead
/ He pitied me."45 Secure in her silence, this woman and other of Rossetti's
unresponsive heroines are icons of composure, their unresponsiveness em-
blematizing a range of conditions from "passionless sadness" to serene au-
tonomy (Crump, 3:94). The momentary uncertainty about the dramatic
situation of Siddal's "still and dumb" heroine suggests an affinity with
Rossettian strategies of reticence and serves as a reminder that literal death
in a poem is always, in the last analysis, a mask of death. Real, feigned, or
metaphorical, a woman's dying is a richly symbolic way to explore life's be-
trayals, losses, or paralyzing ambiguities. Attuned as recent scholarship has
made us to the sophistication of Rossetti's preference for death-loving and
mute heroines, we might see in Siddal's blending of these same elements a
covert portrayal of feminine resistance:
How sounded my words so still and slow

To the great strong heart that loved me so,
Who came to save me from pain and wrong
And to comfort me with his love so strong?
I felt the wind strike chill and cold

And vapours rise from the red-brown mould;
I felt the spell that held my breath
Bending me down to a living death.
("Fragment of a Ballad," Lewis, Poems, p. 13)46
A Minstrelsy reader will observe that the unspecified "spell" in Siddal's final
stanza shows the poem's indebtedness (though in a different way from "At
Last") to the "Lass of Lochroyan"; there a lover suffers detention by en-
chantment (p. 428): "'Now break, now break, ye Fairy charms, / And set
my true love free!'" (Minstrels}', p. 429, stanza 13). 47 But because Siddal's
spell is a magical given that stifles the "breath" rather than a malevolent
intervention by a cruel mother-in-law or other spell-binder, her lovers' dif-
ficulties should be construed - as they are in Rossetti's poems - as internal
to the erotic relationship. Some degree of romantic estrangement is explic-
itly, if ambiguously, intimated by the poem's inaugural negative:
"Unsummoned my love returned to me." If the lover's unbidden return
means that he did not or could not come when formerly entreated, perhaps
desire for his coming has waned, slowly "consum'd with that which it was
nourish'd by."
The "Fragment of a Ballad" does not, however, specify or assign blame.
It doles out none of the ironic censure found in Christina Rossetti's The
Prince s Progress where a "strong" lover arrives belatedly, "Too late for love,
too late for joy" (Crump, 1:95-110, 11. 47, 481). It has more in common
with Rossetti's own border narrative, "Love from the North," in which the
hero is himself a spell-binder who saps the rescued woman's will:
He made me fast with book and bell,
With links of love he makes me stay;
Till now I've neither heart nor power
Nor will nor wish to say him nay.
(Crump, 1:29-30)
With typical Rossettian caginess, the "links of love" transform the rescue -
narrative into an ambiguous critique of erotic victimization.
The spell of frigidity is common in Pre-Raphaelite poetry but the tim-
ing of its onset seems to be gender- specific. William Morris, whose "De-
fence of Guenevere" is memorable for the urgent sexuality of Lancelot's
galloping arrival "at good need" (1. 295), is more often fascinated by erotic
failure and, in one instance, uses the Minstrelsy motif of detention by en-
chantment to explore a lover's plight.48 In "Spell-bound," Morris' male
speaker finds himself wound in "silken chains" (1. 73) which he fantasizes
will be broken by the lady:
But I shall die unless you stand,

- Half lying now, you are so weak, -
Within my arms, unless your hand

Pass to and fro across my cheek.
(Lang, p. 249, 11. 81-84)
Victimized by the "wizard" of sexual inhibition, Morris' anti-hero measures

his enfeeblement against the lady's own and summons her to release him
into the freedom of desire.
Neither Christina Rossetti nor Elizabeth Siddal allow their victims to
summon help in such haplessly ardent fashion and their heroines' bespelling
coincides with their rescue. In Siddal's "Fragment," moreover, the woman's
aphonia is compounded by amnesia: "I remember not the words he said /
But only the trees moaning overhead." Well might the reader wonder if
this inability to remember her lover's words implies their ultimate meaning-
lessness, for she does not even desire (as another of Rossetti's heroine's
does) to recall his endearments: "I wish I could remember" (Crump, 2:87).
Siddal's bespelled victim seems punningly "disenchanted" with the unspelling
rescue. Or maybe disenchantment is the form her enchantment takes, a
narrative embodiment of reluctance to love one's lover. In any case, Siddal's
rejection of the rescue solution is both subtle and drastic; she refuses a
literary fantasy as ancient as the returning Odysseus' rescue of Penelope
from the besieging suitors, and as familiar to Minstrelsy readers as the lover's
touch that dispels the Lady's simulated death in "The Gay Goss-Hawk"
(Minstrelsy, p. 405). When Siddal's lovers meet, she provides an acoustic
metonym for her speaker's aphonia. The moaning trees convey in all but
words the message she cannot or will not tell: the chivalric lover's effort is
irrelevant; he cannot provide what is wanted.
Siddal's poem subscribes, in other words, to a reluctant disbelief in
heterosexual love, a withholding of faith in the bond so often represented
as the rescue of a "naturally monogamous, passive [woman] . . . reliant
upon masculine sexual activity."49 The prospect of life as one of the reliant/
rescued is benumbing and the heroine's enfeeblement exposes conjugal
partnering as a literally baffling ideal. In the "Fragment of a Ballad," the
promise of such love is mutely enraging and fails to make for joy. Siddal, it
seems, has written the poem that Keats intimates in "The Eve of St. Agnes"
when Madeline wakes to Porphyro and disillusionment, to momentary alarm
when "the infinity of fantasy and desire collapses" and she sees "the mortal
who is really there."50 Unlike Madeline, Siddal's heroine is defined by her
reluctance - it takes her breath away - and remains fixed at the site of her
"living death" instead of going off into a storm with her lover.
On occasion, Siddal creates a lover who is less diffident, one who
celebrates before she mourns in "The Passing of Love." As she tells of how
"Love" light-heartedly "floated on the mists of morn, / And rested on the
sunset's rays," Siddal subdues the middle stresses to lighten the rhythm as
well (WMR, Reminiscences, 1:199).51 Against this delicate buoyancy, time

and tempo work their dire effects and disillusionment sets in with emphatic
lines that alliterate their transitive verbs; time "dragged my idol from its
place / And shattered all its shrine!" It is almost as if gravity were the en-
emy. On one occasion, the lover mourns her abandonment and, surpris-
ingly in a woman's lament, anticipates the possibility of new involvement.
In the present tense of "A Year and a Day," the speaker clasps a new lover:
A shadow falls along the grass
And lingers at my feet;
A new face lies between my hands.
(Lewis, Poems, p. 16)
But with the turn of the stanza, desire collapses into memory and the "new
face" proves to be a dream "shadow" of the long-absent first love:
Still it is but the memory
Of something I have seen
In the dreamy summer weather
The shadow of my dear love's face.

Located in the strange moment of confused recognition, SiddaPs poem

trembles between emotions and genres, between a three -figured narrative
of love's succession and a solo lyric. Such adroit formal instability teases the
reader into fleeting misprisions that mime the speaker's erotic confusion
about whom to love. It is curious that William Michael Rossetti seems to
have missed or misliked the three stanzas that negotiate this transition from
delusion to memory, for he does not print them. He could hardly have
misunderstood them; he had, after all, sifted the erotic layerings of Gabriel's
House of Life sonnets in his notorious paraphrases. Of sonnet 36, "Life-in-
Love," he writes that the male lover contemplates one "lady's lips and hands
and eyes" while thinking of "the poor tress . . . of hair from a different head
once so dear" (WMR, Designer, pp. 206-207). Perhaps the incipiently non-
monogamous imaginings of Siddal's "A Year and a Day" struck William
Michael as unseemly or aesthetically incoherent. Certainly there is disrup-
tion in the stanza that dispels the fantasy:
The voices of a thousand birds
That clang above my head,
Shall bring to me a sadder dream
When this sad dream is dead."
A forlorn sound, an extraordinary allusion to another abandoned lover's

realization that "no birds sing," the "clang" of Siddal's birds brings the woman
back to her sole self. And it brings to the reader the familiar possibility of "a
poetry of poetry" in which a song of failed love figures itself through a dis-
tortion of song. In traditional ballads, as Keats and Siddal both well knew,
birdsong, like that of the Minstrelsy's goshawk, is a traditional medium of
love's messages. A ballad heroine will always greet a "bonny bird" for she
knows full well "by your sweet singing, / Ye are frae my true love sen" (Min-
strels}', p. 406, stanza 16). But with love's failure, there is only song's arrest
or dissonance.
Without the dreamed "new face" or the dream's dispelling, William
Michael's published version of "A Year and a Day" (WMR, Family Letters,
1:176-177) expresses a simplified emotion and sounds a note that he char-
acterized, with some embarrassment, as a "wail of pang and pathos" (WMR,
Reminiscences, 1:196). But even in its short form, the poem found an exu-
berant admirer in Swinburne. It was new to him (Siddal's only published
piece at the time) and he wrote to William Michael Rossetti of its showing
"the same note of originality in discipleship which distinguishes her work in
art - Gabriel's influence and example not more perceptible than her own
independence and freshness of inspiration."52 Had he seen the fuller ver-
sion, he might have noticed its affinities with another poet he admired:
Christina Rossetti. She too likes the word "clang" ("I heard his hundred
pinions clang," Crump, 1:64); but more importantly, in "Mirage" - the very
title a reminder of the near-hallucination in Siddal's poem - Rossetti's
speaker wakes to erotic disillusionment:
The hope I dreamed of was a dream,
Was but a dream; and now I wake
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,
For a dream's sake.
(Crump, 1:55-56)
Feeling "worn" and "old," Rossetti's speaker chooses, as Siddal's do, a con-
dition of "comfortless" disillusionment instead of fantasy.
There was once a possibility, when Christina Rossetti was assembling
material for her Princes Progress (1866), that she might include some of
Siddal's work, none of which had seen publication. And while the plan
"did not come to effect," the very suggestion of co -publication brings cer-
tain formal similarities between the women's work into prominence.53 Both
are stanzaic poets, of course, and both prefer understatement and tersely,
almost deceptively, quiet closure. Rossetti, for example, who is fond of the
Persephone myth, ends "Life and Death" with a rhythmically smoothed and
buried allusion to her sublime remoteness, "Asleep from risk, asleep from
pain" (Crump, 1:155). Siddal, with equal compression, provides the emo-
tionally bruised speaker of "A Year and a Day" a rhythmically stiffened self-
comparison; mere chaff, she is "empty of all love / Like beaten corn of grain"
(Lewis, Poems, p. 17). Depletion is the point and SiddaFs inversion of the
final phrase hushes the poem with the firm anticlimax of misplaced (miss-
ing) "grain." The subtlety of SiddaPs way of closing a poem was not lost on
Rossetti whose impressions survive in a brief but telling letter responding to
the Siddal transcriptions Gabriel had sent for her perusal.54 Among the
poems Gabriel selected, SiddaPs "Gone," with its concluding reliance on
the unreturning dove of Genesis 8.12 as a type of immortality, achieves
precisely the understated fusion of grief and consolation that Christina ad-
mired:
I watch the shadows gather round my heart,

I live to know that she is gone -
Gone, gone for ever, like the tender dove
That left the ark alone.
(WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 153)
Even the rhythmic slowing caused by the shortened last line would
have registered with Christina whose preference for a final, isolated trimeter
is something of a prosodic hallmark.55 In writing to Gabriel, himself adept
at the rhythms of biblical allusion, Christina hardly needs to explicate SiddaPs
typological restraint. Instead, using the name-dropping code of one poet to
another, she observes that the poem "reminds me of Tom Hood at his high-
est" (WMR, Rossetti Papers, p. 76). Modern readers know Thomas Hood as
the author of "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs," poems of
social protest, and perhaps of such comic ballads as "Faithless Nelly Gray"
(Friedman, p. 262), but the Rossettis also knew and respected him as the
author of "the beautiful lines named 'The Deathbed,'"56 a poem that offers
last-line consolation by means of a single word, the reticent "Another":
"Her quiet eyelids closed - she had / Another morn than ours!" (Clubbe, p.
64). By her reference to Tom Hood's "highest," Christina registers and ap-
proves the restraint in SiddaPs (far better) conclusion.
But the subdued tonalities of elegy and restraint are not the only modes
Christina shares with and approves in her artist-author sister-in-law. In
Rossetti's "A Pause of Thought," a poem that appeared in The Germ and
was in all probability known to Siddal - although direct influence is not the
issue here - the speaker chides herself with an abrasiveness that belies
Rossetti's early reputation (like SiddaPs own) for tonal pallor and monotony:
"Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit / For healthy joy and salutary pain"
(Crump, 1:51-52). In SiddaPs "The Passing of Love," the speaker is simi-
larly self-indicting: "O God, forgive me that I merged / My life into a dream
of love!" (WMR, Reminiscences, 1:199). And when Siddal moves beyond
this roiled impatience and outside the lyric to create an experienced speaker
for her dramatic lyric "Dead Love," the result is brisk-voiced savvy:
Then harbour no smile on your loving face

To win the deepest sigh;
The fairest words on truest lips
Pass off and surely die.
With all the confidence that trochaic superlatives can supply, "Dead Love"
scorns the courtship decorums that require women (and Pre-Raphaelitism's
models) to present themselves as lovingAovely icons. It bolsters its anti-
advice on blushing subordination and "to -be -looked- at-ness"51 with a casu-
ally jaded epigram, "love is seldom true" (the adverb is devastating), and an
ironically conclusive echo of the earlier superlatives: "If the merest dream
of love were true /Then, sweet, we should be in heaven." Christina Rossetti
found Siddal's poem "piquant" and was delighted with its "cool bitter sar-
casm" (WMR, Rossetti Papers, p. 76). In resisting docility, Siddal's poem
shows a wariness that extends gender relations to the practice of poetry,
and Rossetti might have seen this as clearly as we now do. In an implicit
critique of her women contemporaries, Siddal rejects a poetry of appropri-
ate sentiments. She resists the advice genre as practiced by "the admired
and popular poetess" Felicia Hemans whose work the Rossettis knew well.58
As Angela Leighton has shown in her astute remarks on Hemans' "No
More," it is possible to convey "grief for life's betrayals" in a poetry that
blandly censors any "sexual application" and "keeps to an impersonal tone
of consolatory orthodoxy." It is precisely Hemans' "constraining sense" of
the poetess' obligation to edify that Siddal's "piquant" advice -giver sub-
verts (Leighton, pp. 17-18).
Probably the least constrained or edifying of Siddal's poems, and one
that might also be read as an instance of literary criticism, is the dramatic
lyric "The Lust of the Eyes." Written in a voice "not mine" as Browning
says of his early pieces,59 Siddal creates a male lover who moves callously
between blazoning and abandoning sentiments:
Low sit I down at my Lady's feet
Gazing through her wild eyes,
Smiling to think how my love will fleet
When their starlike beauty dies.
His customarily fetishizing admiration of "wild" female eyes is not at all

inconsistent with the realization, indeed the anticipation, that such "star-
like beauty dies." The allusion to Keats's generalized lament that "Beauty
cannot keep her lustrous eyes, / Or new Love pine at them beyond to-
morrow" is unmistakable.60 But where Keats is elegiac, Siddal is in the
mood to contest the too-easy artistic appropriation of women's loss of come-
liness. Her poem, much like Christina Rossetti's "In an Artist's Studio,"
462 / VICTORIAN POETRY
scrutinizes high culture's implication in the oppression of the eye (Crump,

3:264). Rossetti represents art as a vampiric enterprise in which the imagi-
nation "feeds upon" a woman's face. Siddal takes and gives offense in a
slightly different way; in her poem, the viewing male indulges in a startling
flippancy that pushes, as in "Love and Hate," against the edges of literary
decorum. Planning to abandon this lady, he claims: "I care not if my Lady
pray / To our Father which is in Heaven" because, for the present, "to me
her love is given" (WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 155). Such scoffing is a sign
of his godless hedonism, but it also hints at a chilling insight on Siddal's
part: that patriarchal prayer is the opiate of helpless women and that prayers,
like literary genres, are gendered formulations.
But to read "The Lust of the Eyes" so explicitly in terms of gendered
discourse is to risk anachronism and nearly miss an important point about
Siddal's poetry: it is the representation, promise, and illusion of love - not
the faithless male lover - that principally engages her attention. For the
women in Siddal's poems, it is their own erotic desire that is the problem-
atical given and they cling to a version of the indifference spoken above by
a male. If her speakers are victims of betrayal, this is a narrative way of
indicating that they are not entirely unrequited and perhaps not erotically
inexperienced. None waits as a virginal bride, confined like Rossetti's prin-
cess to the "one white room" of her patience and chastity (Crump, 1:95).
Rather than the inanition of suffering purity, the women in Siddal's "Silent
Wood," "Love and Hate," "The Passing of Love," "A Year and a Day" suffer
as a consequence of their trysts in symbolically dark woods, amid clinging
ferns and long grass. The women have "wild eyes." Among these songs of
experience, the most arresting is the dramatic monologue "Worn Out." Here
a woman asks her partner for comfort: "keep thine arms around me, love, /
Until I drop to sleep," though she has little to give in return except "weary
eyes" and a "faded mouth":
Thy strong arms are around me, love,
My head is on thy breast:
Though words of comfort come from thee,
My soul is not at rest:
For I am but a startled thing,

Nor can I ever be
Aught save a bird whose broken wing
Must fly away from thee.
I cannot give to thee tbe love

I gave so long ago -
The love that turned and struck me down
Amid the blinding snow.
I can but give a sinking heart

And weary eyes of pain,
A faded mouth that cannot smile
And may not laugh again.
Yet keep thine arms around me, love,

Until I drop to sleep:
Then leave me - saying no good-bye,
Lest I might fall and weep.
(WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, pp. 156457)
If the poem were merely about careworn beauty, it might be possible for
Siddal to recuperate her speaker's weariness in the manner of Hardy's "Wives
in the Sere"61 or Tennyson's "June Bracken and Heather" (Ricks, 3:234-
235). But sentimentality is out of the question since her fading is symbolic
of other vanishings, of her awareness that something lost was never found,
not even in the first fabled instance. Love's inception, as she now remem-
bers it, was an assault: "love . . . turned and struck me down." The recollec-
tion mounts a protest against her own sexual desire, against love as a viola-
tion of the self. Love's consequence is a kind of damaged, restless living;
henceforth she is "a startled thing." Disabled for love or flight, "a bird
whose broken wing / Must fly away from thee," the woman grieves
partnership's illusions and the desolation of enclosure: "Thy strong arms
are around me, love, / . . . / My soul is not at rest." The strength of her
lover's metonymic "strong arms" may be real enough, unlike the ambigu-
ously stipulated firmness in Robert Browning's "A Woman's Last Word":
"Be a man and fold me / With thine arm!" (Pettigrew, Poems, 1:539). But
for Siddal's speaker, however much her lover's strength corresponds to a
reliably strong will, a powerful mind, or a vigorous libido, it is no more
valuable to her than the rescuer's "strong heart" to the bespelled heroine of
the "Fragment of a Ballad." Masculinity provides no stay against the ero-
sion of her emblematically distressed beauty or the debilitation that consti-
tutes love in the first place. And so, with a classic ending for a dramatic
monologue, Siddal has her speaker dismiss her comforter: "leave me - say-
ing no good-bye, / Lest I might fall and weep." The poem indulges in no
compromised fantasy of getting beyond love's dulling limitations. Dropping
into sleep, the speaker will soon be more remote than her bespelled coun-
terpart who had lost interest in her would-be rescuer. The woman who
"cannot give" her love will slip into the condition of the dead and almost
dead. Like the Rossettian insensate who "cannot feel the rain" and cannot
"sigh that spring is fleet and summer fleet" (Crump, 1:27, 155), she chooses
retreat. The reader should not be misled into thinking of sleep naturalisti-
cally as feeble drowsiness and evasion. This is not "real" sleep, but the mask
of sleep, chosen and worn for the occasion of this poem like the mask of
death. It is a variant of the same resistance that was angrily tendered in

"Love and Hate"; this sleeper, like that poem's grimly quarrelsome plain
speaker, goes to a place of refusal, a site where "changes pass me like a
dream" (WMR, Reminiscences, 1:198).
SiddaFs poetry ranges from the perfectly realized ballad narrative, to
its opposite, the overheard lyric, and to something in between, the made-
to-be heard monologue. The poetry moves too from the eerily "modern-
antique" to the disturbingly modern- candid. The sensibility of "Worn Out"
anticipates the mix of remorse and muffled cynicism of Hardy's "Poems of
1912-13." Like the ghostly wife of "The Voice," who admits having "changed
from the one who was all" to her husband (Hynes, 2:56), SiddaPs living
woman knows she has changed from what she was before she loved. In
giving her a voice, Siddal creates a mutability canto for the inadequately
attached. And if sometimes SiddaPs living cannot be distinguished from
the ghostly in her poems, that is her way of signaling the erasure that is
love's failure and the lover's fading.
Notes
1 See Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions,
1990), p. 189, for the "yeux glauques" that might well belong to Elizabeth Siddal,
although she was not the model (despite the note in The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
4th. ed. [New York: Norton, 1996], p. 1194, n. 8) for Burne-Jones's King Cophetua
and the Beggar Maid. See also Mollie Hardwick, The Dreaming Damozel (New York:
Fawcett, 1990), p. 25. In Stephen Wildman's more accurate account of this episode,
Siddal develops a "severe cold"; see his catalog entry no. 22 on Millais' "Elizabeth
Siddal: study for 'Ophelia,'" in Visions of Love and Life: Pre-Raphaelite Art from the
Birmingham Collection, England (Alexandria, Virginia: Art Services International,
1995), p. 118.
2 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p.
27. In his clinical account of cellular death, Sherwin B. Nuland asserts emphatically
that "the supposedly well-known fact that hair and nails will keep growing for vary-
ing periods of time after death is not a fact at all - no such thing happens" (How We
Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter [New York: Knopf, 1994], p. 123).
3 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New
York: Routledge, 1992), p. 170. Throughout her "Wife to Mr Rossetti- Elizabeth
Siddall (1829-1862)," Bronfen uses the Siddall family's spelling of their last name.
For the purpose of the present essay, I follow the adaptation Rossetti suggested and
that Siddal used as her signature.
4 Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal, ed. Roger C. Lewis and Mark Samuels Lasner
(Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Wombat Press, 1978). Hereafter cited as Lewis, Poems.
5 Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1988), p. 149.
6 Violet Hunt, The Wife ofRossetti: Her Life and Death (New York: E. R Dutton, 1932) .
7 On the danger of reading poems as responses to specific events in a writer's life, see
Angela Leighton's useful reminder in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart
(Charlottes ville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1992) that Christina Rossetti "was writing
melancholy poems about dead or unrequited women long before her own broken
engagement" to James Collinson (p. 141). Tennyson was writing "He will not come
. . . Oh God, that I were dead!" ("Mariana," 11. 82-84) and other bereaved poems
prior to the death of Arthur Hallam. See The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher
Ricks (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 1:205.
8 Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989: London: Quartet, 1992), p. 195.
9 Stanley Weintraub, Four Rossettis: A Victorian Biography (New York: Weybright and
Talley, 1977), p. 108.
10 Griselda Pollock and Deborah Cherry's collaborative piece, "Woman as sign in Pre-
Raphaelite literature: The representation of Elizabeth Siddall" (1984), is reprinted
in Pollock's Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London:
Routledge, 1988), pp. 91-114.
1 1 See Cherry's entries on Siddal's drawing of "The Lady of Shalott" and her water-
color "Lady Clare" in The Pre-Raphaelites (London: The Tate Gallery, 1984), Nos.
198, 222.
12 William Michael Rossetti published Siddal's poems in the following: Dante Gabriel
Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir, 2 vols. (Boston, 1895) which includes "A
Year and a Day" (1:176-177); Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism: Papers 1854 to 1862
(London, 1899) with eight poems: "True Love" (pp. 150-151), "Dead Love" (pp.
151-152), "Shepherd Turned Sailor" (pp. 152-153), "Gone" (p. 153), "Speechless"
(p. 154), "The Lust of the Eyes" (p. 155), "Worn Out" (p. 156), "At Last" (pp. 241-
242); "Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal," Burlington Magazine 1 (1903): 273-
295, with only "A Silent Wood" (pp. 291-292); and Some Reminiscences of William
Michael Rossetti, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1906) including five new poems:
"Early Death" (1:196-197). "He and She and Angels Three" (1:197), "Love and
Hate" (1:198), "The Passing of Love" (1:199), "Lord May I Come?" (1:199-200) and
a reprint of "Silent Wood" (1: 197-198). Texts of Siddal's poems, except where noted,
are taken from William Michael Rossetti's four publications; in the interest of
economy, these will be referred to hereinafter as WMR, Family Letters, Pre-
Raphaelitism, Burlington, and Reminiscences.
13 See William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (Lon-
don, 1889), p. 22.
14 The quoted phrases are Leighton's, p. 64, in regard to Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
15 Virginia Blain uses these phrases of the authors she discusses in "Letitia Elizabeth
Landon, Eliza Mary Hamilton, and the Genealogy of the Victorian Poetess," VP 33
(1995): 33.
16 But see the inclusion of Siddal's "The Lust of the Eyes" and "At Last" in Victorian
Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995), pp. 345-346.
17 These assessments are by Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (London:
Duckworth, 1928), p. 56, and Hunt, p. 65.
18 Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Frederick
Muller, 1949), p. 291.
19 See Harrison's "Introduction: Christina Rossetti in 1994" in the Rossetti centennial

issue of VP 32 (1994): 203.
20 Jan Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal 1829-1862: Pre-Raphaelite Artist (Sheffield: Ruskin Gal-
lery, 1991), No. 35. Hereafter cited as Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal
2 1 David Bromwich, "Parody, Pastiche, and Allusion," in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criti-
cism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p.
333. See also The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks (Ox-
ford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 356; to read Siddal's "Silent Wood" and "Dead
Love" in Ricks's anthology is to be reminded that melancholy is an essential feature
of the Victorian aesthetic, part of the nineteenth- century writer's inheritance of
Romantic loss.
22 Marsh's Elizabeth Siddal is an invaluable resource with 61 entries covering Siddal's

works in oil or watercolor (including a "Self Portrait") and her numerous drawings
and preliminary sketches.
23 Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity (New York: Harmony, 1987),
p. 139.
24 The Rossetti circle knew of William Blake's call for the honest expression of anger:
"I was angry with my friend / I told my wrath my wrath did end." Dante Gabriel
Rossetti had transcribed the first quatrain and ms title, "Christian forbearance," as
found in the Blake Notebook he acquired in 1847 (Mark L. Greenberg, "The Rossettis'
Transcription of Blake's Notebook," The Library 4 [1982]: 267). Rossetti had other
access to Songs of Innocence and of Experience and so it is possible that Siddal's refer-
ence to "the poisonous tree" echoes Blake's published title, "A Poison Tree." See
Books from the Libraries of Christina, Dante Gabriel, and William Michael Rossetti, ed.
W E. Fredeman (London: Rota, 1973), No. 145, for the listing of Songs of Innocence
and of Experience. The editor of this Blake volume, Garth Wilkinson, was also the
physician who attended Siddal in 1854 (Marsh, Legend, p. 62).
25 Scott, as is well known, compiled the Minstrelsy ballads from multiple sources so
there can be no question of a "pure" ballad text; but in the discussion below, my
emphasis is on the structure of the ballad as an oral genre. Two that attracted
Siddal, "The Gay Goss-Hawk" and "The Lass of Lochroyan," were gathered from
the performances of Anna Gordon, better known as Mrs. Brown of Falkland. For
discussion of her extensive oral repertoire, see David Buchan, The Ballad and the
Folk (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 62-86.
26 For the anecdote that Siddal had first come to read Tennyson "by finding one or two
of his poems on a piece of paper which she brought home to her mother, wrapped
round a pat of butter," see WMR, Burlington, p. 273. For Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
mention of a "sketch of Tennyson reading, which I ... afterwards duplicated ... for
Miss S," see Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham 1854-1870, ed.
George Birkbeck Hill (New York, 1898), p. 162. Virginia Surtees gives an account
of Tennyson Reading "Maud" in The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:198-
199 (No. 526R1).
27 Gabriel writes excitedly to Ford Maddox Brown on May 23, 1854, that he and Siddal
"are going to illustrate the old Scottish Ballads which Allingham is editing for
Routledge. She has just done her first block (from Clerk Saunders) and it is lovely"
(Rossetti's parenthesis) ; see The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty
and John R. Wahl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-67), 1:200.
28 For the text of "Clerk Saunders," see Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bor-
der, ed. T. F. Henderson (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1931), p. 417. The Scottish
ballads are hereafter cited by page as Minstrelsy, with a stanza number given as needed.
29 See Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal, No. 32, where Siddal's title, The Gay Goshawk, differs
in spelling from Scott's.
30 "One Word More," Robert Browning: The Poems, ed., John Pettigrew and Thomas ].
Collins, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press), 2:739.
31 Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature,
ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p.
303.
32 According to Buchan, the ballad maker "may carry in the mind a stripped- down
version of the story"; but he or she also makes use of "patterned rhythms" which
permit expansion and elaboration of the story "while yet maintaining control over
it." These "binary, trinary, and annular patternings" permit organization of the bal-
lad "by pervasively grouping its units through balancing, tripling, and framing ar-
rangement" (p. 88).
33 Gabriel Rossetti developed an interest in Malory at the same time that he and Siddal
became engrossed with the Minstrelsy (William Michael Rossetti, "Preface," The
Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2 vols. [Boston, 1899], l:xvii). In Malory,
the mother's final words are tender and ironically martial: "A, my lytyll son, thou
haste murtherd thy modir! And therefore I suppose thou that arte a murtherer so
yonge, thow arte full lykly to be a manly man in thyne ayge; and bycause I shall dye
of the byrth of the, I charge my jantyllwoman that she pray my lorde, the kynge
Melyodas, that whan he is crystened let calle hym Trystrams, that is as muche to say
as a sorowfull byrth." See Malory: Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1971), p. 230).
34 For "The Unquiet Grave," see Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904) , No. 78 and The Norton
Anthology of Poetry, pp. 88-89. In this ballad the dead woman denies her mourning
lover the kiss that might cause his death: "If you have one kiss of my clay- cold lips,
/ Your time will not be long." The lovers in "Clerk Saunders" surmount this same
difficulty: though Saunders at first resists kissing Margaret,
"My mouth it is full cold, Margaret,
It has the smell, now, of the ground;
And if I kiss thy comely mouth,
Thy days of life will not be lang,"
(Minstrelsy, p. 419, stanza 20),
that resourceful maiden, in the stanza Siddal illustrated, conveys her kiss on "a
crystal wand" (stanza 25). In Siddal's poems, however, the heroines are more with-
holding and male lovers are variously fended off.
35 See Roger deV. Renwick, English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning (Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), p. 91. Less commonly, a married woman dies in
childbirth while under the malevolent eye of her mother or mother-in-law (Buchan,
p. 85), as in Mrs. Brown's "The Bonny Earl of Livingston," a ballad that Scott did
not include in the Minstrelsy. For a variant of this tale, see Child No. 91, "Fair Mary
of Wallington."
36 Buchan discusses the tendency in folk ballads to underline a heroine's sorrow through
"specific, concrete" actions or "doings" and to group these in threes (pp. 82-83, 90).
37 Scott, for example, expounds the traces in "Young Benjie" of the lykewake supersti-
tion that "the disembodied spirit" hovers "around its mortal habitation" (Minstrelsy,
p. 342).
38 See Jerome McGann's discussion of "non- symbolic" symbolism in "Rossetti's Signifi-
cant Details," VP 7 (1969): 41-54.
39 Henderson provides this rationale for what otherwise might appear to be a super-
naturally motivated grave-site ritual in "Clerk Saunders" (Minstrelsy, p. 421). In
stanza 31, the revenant directs Margaret to "plait a wand o' bonnie birk, / And lay it
on my breast" to insure "my saul gude rest" (3:229).
40 See Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal, No. 33, for SiddaPs The Maid of Lochroyan. On the
rebuff motif in folk ballads, see Buchan, p. 121.
41 Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisti-
cated Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 269.
42 In a rare surviving letter to Rossetti, Siddal alludes to the death in childbirth of
Joanna Boyce Wells, the artist- sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter George Price
Boyce: "It is indeed a dreadful thing about poor Mrs. Wells. All people who are at all
happy or useful seem to be taken away" (Janet Camp Troxell, ed., Three Rossettis:
Unpublished Letters to and from Dante Gabriel, Christina, William [Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1937], p. 8). In December 1866 (a few years after Siddal's death),
Fanny Waugh, Holman Hunt's first wife, died "of miliary fever" following the birth
of a son on October 26 (Pre-Raphaelites, p. 216). Lewis and Lasner comment that
"biographers agree in linking" the ballad "At Last" with "Siddal's first pregnancy" in
part because of the extant holograph on stationery bearing the EER monogram that
Rossetti designed for her in May 1860 (Poems, p. 24).
43 The grieving William Godwin attributed the symptoms of Mary Wollstonecraft's
death from septicaemia to a "decided mortification, occasioned by the part of the
placenta that remained in the womb" after giving birth on August 30; Wolls tone craft
died September 10, 1797 (Memoirs of the author of A vindication of the rights of woman
[1798; reprint, New York: Woodstock, 1990], p. 182).
44 Edward Shorter (A History of Women's Bodies [New York: Basic Books, 1982]) notes
that only after the 1870s did maternal death from puerperal or childbed fever, now
called "post- delivery sepsis" (p. 103), begin to decline "as a result of the wave of
medical progress that started with Joseph Lister's discovery in 1867 of antisepsis" (p.
100) . See also Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in
England, 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). While Moscucci is
wary of the way social and economic motives prompted the emergence of gynaecology
as a medical specialism in the nineteenth century (p. 6), she notes that maternal
death was a cited reason for the founding in 1859 of the Obstetrical Society of
London (p. 66).
45 The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Crump
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979-90), 1:37-38. All citations of
Rossetti's poems are from this edition, hereinafter cited by volume and page. The
poetic affinities of the Rossetti sisters-in-law are discussed later in this essay.
46 For present purposes, I use Lewis and Lasner's title, "Fragment of a Ballad," and cite
the four quatrains they print on the authority of "AshM incomplete draft by EER"
(p. 13 and note on p. 23) . The reader should be aware, however, that William Michael
Rossetti originally printed "Many a mile over land and sea" as an 18-line poem
without stanza breaks; in his version lines 11*18 are as follows:
Ah I remember, my God, so well,

How my brain lay dumb in a frozen spell;
And I leaned away from my lover's face
To watch the dead leaves that were running a race,
I felt the spell that held my breath,
Bending me down to a living death -
As if hope lay buried when he had come
Who knew my sorrows all and some.
(WMR, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1899, p. 154).
Marsh supplies the same quatrains as Lewis and Lasner while retaining William
Michael's appealing title "Speechless" (Marsh, Elizabeth Siddal, p. 33).
The modern editors are right, I think, in reproducing Siddal's short, vivid, and
memorable quatrains. In this form, the poem is complete in its imagery, narrative,
and its statement that male gallantry is no substitute for female vitality.
47 The Minstrelsy volume in which Siddall found "The Gay Goss-Hawk," "Clerk
Saunders," and "The Lass of Lochroyan" includes the ballad "Kempion" (p. 444)
which represents both the bespelling of a "gaye ladye" (stanza 1) and the erotic
conditions for her unspelling: "And relieved sail ye never be, / Till Kempion" come
and "thrice kiss thee" (stanza 3). For analyses of the bespelling and unspelling epi-
sodes in various other ballads, see Buchan, p. 114.
48 The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1975), p. 170.
49 The phrase is Martin A. Danahay's; see his "Mirrors of Masculine Desire: Narcissus
and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation," VP 32 (1994): 44.
50 See James Richardson and Constance W. Hassett, "Looking at Elaine: Keats,
Tennyson, and the Directions of the Poetic Gaze," Arthurian Women: A Casebook,
ed. Thelma Fenster (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 298.
51 Had Siddal chosen different verbs the lines would have lost their gliding ease. A
hypothetical revision shows how a fully realized stress-pattern would have destroyed
the original lines' buoyancy: "Love interfused the mists of morn, / And glanced
along the sunset's rays."
52 The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959-62),
6:94.
53 "When Christina was putting together in 1865 her volume The Prince's Progress
and other Poems,' she raised a suggestion that she might perhaps include two or
three specimens of Lizzie's verse, giving, of course, the authoress's name. Christina
then, for the first time, read the compositions sent to her by Dante Gabriel and she
wrote, 'How full of beauty they are, but how painful!' She thought them 'almost too
hopelessly sad for publication en masse1" (WMR, Burlington, p. 292) . William Michael
agreed about the effect of Siddal's poems en masse, eventually bringing them out in
four installments over an eleven-year period (see note 12).
54 For Christina Rossetti's letter to Gabriel concerning Siddal's poems, see Rossetti
Papers: 1862 to 1870, ed. William Michael Rossetti (New York: Scribner, 1903), p.
76.
55 For discussion of Rossetti's rhythms see my "Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of
Reticence," PQ 65 (1986): 495-514.
56 The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1880),
p. xiv. The poem's obvious thematic affinity with Dante Gabriel's "My Sister's Sleep"
might have caused it to linger favorably in the family imagination. The appeal of
"The Death-Bed" is tracked in John Clubbe's Selected Poems of Thomas Hood
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970); first published in Englishman s Magazine,
August 1831, then republished in the posthumous Poems (1846), it was reprinted as
two (not four) stanzas in Palgrave's The Golden Treasury, inserted into Stowe's Dred,
and "set to music as one of the 'Songs from Dred, by Mrs. Beecher Stowe'" (p. 339).
57 See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press,
1989), p. 19.
58 The characterization is from William Michael Rossetti's lengthy "Prefatory Notice"
to The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans, ed. William Michael Rossetti (New
York: Crowell, 1890), p. 15. Rossetti writes guardedly of Hemans' achievement:
"She is a leader in that very modern phalanx of poets who persistently co-ordinate
the impulse of sentiment with the guiding power of morals or religion. Everything
must convey its 'lesson,' and is indeed set forth for the sake of its lesson: but must at
the same time have the emotional gush of a spontaneous sentiment" (p. 24).
59 See footnote to "Cavalier Tunes" from Dramatic Lyrics, 1842, in Pettigrew and Collins,
Poems, 1:347.
60 John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1959), p. 206.
6 1 The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1982), 1:182-183.

Elizabeth Siddal

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Elizabeth Siddal's Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions

Author(s): Constance W. Hassett

ARE SELECTIVE. THOUGH ELIZABETH SlDDAL HAS SINCE 1862 HAUNTED

luggage in advance" (Doughty, p. 299). The sarcasm of this assessment

Let us begin by noticing one of those contradictory moments when a

Ope not thy lips, thou foolish one,

Take thou thy shadow from my path,

Lift up thy false brow from the dust,

And turn away thy false dark eyes,

All changes pass me like a dream,

Elsewhere Siddal takes up the challenge of representing withheld speech

"Set down, set down the bier," he said;

She brightened like the lily flower,

They took a drap o' boiling lead,

"Commend me to my grey father,

It would be only a slight exaggeration to claim that the burning moment in

indistinguishability of fainting, sleeping, or dying as a sign of elusiveness.

And, mother dear, take my young son,

And, mother, wash my pale, pale hands,

And, mother dear, take a sapling twig

And, mother, find three berries red

And, mother dear, break a willow wand,

And, mother, when the big tears fall,

And, mother dear, when the sun has set

"Thy faith and troth thou sail na get,

Margaret's question is in keeping with the traditional ballads' understand-

As in many important ballad episodes, Siddal organizes the mother's sor-

Fair Annie turned her round about -

a suffering woman whose verbal unresponsiveness prompted William Michael

Many a mile over land and sea

And he came ready to take and bear

The adroitness of Siddal's mimetically impeded rhythm ("words came

How sounded my words so still and slow

I felt the wind strike chill and cold

But I shall die unless you stand,

Within my arms, unless your hand

Victimized by the "wizard" of sexual inhibition, Morris' anti-hero measures

well (WMR, Reminiscences, 1:199).51 Against this delicate buoyancy, time

The shadow of my dear love's face.

Located in the strange moment of confused recognition, SiddaPs poem

A forlorn sound, an extraordinary allusion to another abandoned lover's

I watch the shadows gather round my heart,

Then harbour no smile on your loving face

His customarily fetishizing admiration of "wild" female eyes is not at all

scrutinizes high culture's implication in the oppression of the eye (Crump,

For I am but a startled thing,

I cannot give to thee tbe love

I can but give a sinking heart

Yet keep thine arms around me, love,

death. It is a variant of the same resistance that was angrily tendered in

19 See Harrison's "Introduction: Christina Rossetti in 1994" in the Rossetti centennial

22 Marsh's Elizabeth Siddal is an invaluable resource with 61 entries covering Siddal's

Ah I remember, my God, so well,

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