"He and I": Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Other Man

Abstract

Toward the largely despondent close of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life stands "He and I": a "representation," as David G. Riede observes, "of some sort of self-division and self-alienation" that appears rather "enigmatic." 1 Composed in 1870, this intriguing sonnet--which results in a distressing physical encounter between the male poetic voice and his masculine other--may well look puzzling in a long two-part series whose reflections on heterosexual manhood have in any case seemed obscure to many scholars. "Biographers and critics alike," writes William E. Fredeman, "have been tantalized by Rossetti's poem; it challenges their imaginations and taxes their ingenuities." 2 Try as they might, most readers cannot make these one hundred and one sonnets--several of which express feverish eroticism--fit neatly within a framework that either allegorizes Rossetti's turbulent love affairs with Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal or expounds a systematic philosophy of love. 3 Even the subtitle, "A Sonnet-Sequence," sits oddly in a work that offers comparatively little narrative cohesion. Instead, Algernon Charles Swinburne's comment that The House of Life aims to "embrace and express all sorrow and all joy of passion in union, of outer love and inner, triumphant or dejected or piteous or at peace" 4 remains one of the most accurate--because open-ended--descriptions of the work. The only (seemingly obvious) qualification to be made to Swinburne's statement is that the expression of such joy and sorrow belongs to a man who remains, according to C. M. Bowra, "a ready victim to the beauty of women." 5 Here femininity allures the frequently tormented poetic voice in a variety of ethereal and fiendish guises. On the one hand, the poet-speaker remains in awe of female "Beauty enthroned." 6 On the other hand, he bears terrified witness to how a figure such as Lilith (with her "enchanted hair") "left . . . / One strangling golden hair" around the "heart" of a young man exhausted with passion ("Body's Beauty," p. 314). What, then, might "He and I"--where "some sort of self-division" involves one man's body momentarily touching that of another male figure--disclose about the enduring struggle of this sequence, in its desperate closing moments, to celebrate how "Life" is truly [End Page 365] "the lady of all bliss" ("Newborn Death," p. 325)? Might this haunting sonnet elucidate why the insistent heteroeroticism of The House of Life grows more and more bleak in "Change and Fate": the apt subtitle for the sequence's disconsolate second part?