There are two poems by my brother, unpublished as yet, which I am unable to include among his Collected Works. One of these is a grotesque ballad about a Dutchman, begun at a very early date, and finished in his last illness. The other is a brace of sonnets, interesting in subject and as being the very last thing that he wrote. These works were presented as a gift of love and gratitude to a friend, with whom it remains to publish them at his own discretion. I have also advisedly omitted three poems; two of them sonnets, the third a ballad of no great length. One of the sonnets is that entitled Nuptial Sleep. It appeared in the volume of Poems 1870 (2), but was objected to by Mr. Buchanan, and I suppose by some other censors, as being indelicate; and my brother excluded it from The House of Life in his third volume. I consider that there is nothing in the sonnet which need imperatively banish it from his Collected Works; but his own decision commands mine, and besides it could not now be reintroduced into The House of Life, which he moulded into a complete whole without it, and would be misplaced if isolated by itself, a point as to which his opinion is very plainly set forth in his prose-paper The Stealthy School of Criticism. The second sonnet, named On the French Liberation of Italy, was put into print by my brother while he was preparing his volume of 1870, but he resolved to leave it unpublished. Its title shows plainly enough that it relates. to a matter in which sexual morals have no part; but the subject is treated under the form of a vigorous and perhaps repulsive metaphor, and here again I follow his own lead. The ballad above referred to, Dennis Shand, is a skilful and really very harmless production; it was printed but not published, like the sonnet last-mentioned, and no writer other than one who took a grave view of questions of moral propriety would have preferred to suppress it. My brother's opinion is worded thus in a letter to Mr. Caine, which that gentleman has published: "The ballad . . . deals trivially with a base amour (it was written very early), and is therefore really reprehensible to some extent." I will not be less jealously scrupulous for him than he was for himself. Dante Rossetti was a very fastidious writer, and, I might add, a very fastidious painter. He did not indeed "cudgel his brains" for the idea of a poem or the structure or diction of a stanza. He wrote out of a large fund or reserve of thought and consideration, which would culminate in a clear Impulse or (as we say) an inspiration. In the execution he was always heedful and reflective from the first, and he spared no after-pains in clarifying and perfecting. He abhorred anything straggling, slipshod, profuse, or uncondensed. He often recurred to his old poems, and was reluctant to leave them merely as they were. A natural concomitant of this state of mind was a great repugnance to the notion of publishing, or of having published after his death, whatever he regarded as juvenile, petty, or inadequate. As editor of his Collected Works, I have had to regulate myself by these feelings of his, whether my own entirely correspond with them or not. The amount of unpublished work which he left behind him was by no means large; out of the moderate bulk I have been careful to select only such examples as I suppose that he would himself have approved for the purpose, or would, at any rate, not gravely have objected to. A list of the new items is given at page xxxix., and a few details regarding them will be found among my notes. Some projects or arguments of poems which he never executed are also printed among his prose-writings. These particular projects had, I think, been practically abandoned by him in all the later years of his life; but there was one subject which he had seriously at heart, and for which he had collected some materials, and he would perhaps have put it into shape had he lived a year or two longer, a ballad on the subject of Joan Darc, to match The White Ship and The King's Tragedy. I have not unfrequently heard my brother say that he considered himself more essentially a poet than a painter. To vary the form of expression, he thought that he had mastered the means of embodying poetical conceptions in the verbal and rhythmical vehicle more thoroughly than in form and design, perhaps more thoroughly than in color. I may take this opportunity of observing that I hope to publish at an early date a substantial selection from the family-letters written by my brother, to be preceded by a Memoir drawn up by Mr. Theodore Watts, who will be able to express more freely and more impartially than myself some of the things most apposite to be said about Dante Gabriel Rossetti. LONDON, June, 1886. WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI. NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. THIS Volume contains all the poems published by Mr. Rossetti during his lifetime (Poems 1881, and Ballads and Sonnets 1881), and those published since his death and included in the Collected Works. |