The eternal mysteries and sanctities of sexual love, conceived in its highest aspects and known as a revelation and a sacrament, afford the theme of nearly all Rossetti’s autobiographic poetry. The conditions of its production were ordained by the stern fate that linked him afar off to Dante among his countrymen, and near at hand to two brother-mourners among minor English bards—James Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston—in the sad fraternity of poets whom death has prematurely robbed of the beloved object that once inspired their song. The exalted spirituality which marks Rossetti’s treatment of this theme was doubtless largely due to the influence of Dante, and especially to the fruitful inspiration and discipline of the great literary task of his youth—the translation of the “Vita Nuova” and kindred examples of the early Italian poets—than which Rossetti could have hardly found a better preparation for his work that was to come.
Into his great sonnet-sequence, “The House of Life,” Rossetti poured the full passion of his mystic love,—partially inherent in his own sensuous, imaginative, and introspective nature, partially instilled at the feet of Dante; and learned—a bitter and a costly lesson—at the school of experience also; fraught with inestimable joy and sorrow to his own soul. “At an age,” says one writing of that hard probation, “when most men have outlived the romances of their youth, Rossetti was laying, in ‘The House of Life,’ the foundations of a new school of love-poetry.” He was in fact re-creating the æsthetic life of a nation; restoring to it, through the alembic of mediæval and Renaissance thought, the lost glory of all that was abidingly precious in the Platonic world. For in this wondrous cycle of sonnets is re-coined the whole language of ideal love. From the last echo of the “Vita Nuova” it takes up the same pure strain, and sings again the song of Dante for the Blessed Beatrice; hymning the very apotheosis of spiritual passion, and harmonizing once more in English poetry the intellectual with the sensuous world. Never, in the superb visions of “The House of Life”—in which the soul of man is pictured sojourning awhile during its solemn and fateful passage through eternity—never does the physical love become the stumbling-block to the spiritual, but always the key to it. The “body’s beauty” is only precious as the witness of the “soul’s beauty;” the physical bond is nothing if not the symbol of a spiritual affinity, a sacred kinship, fore-ordained, if not eternal, sealed in Heaven and consecrated to the divinest purposes; the sensuous rapture is but a symbolic worship,—“the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” which to reject or betray is to profane the inmost sanctuary of the God of Love: