Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

wrote
The Ring and the Book
.
    In the next class I will discuss the great English poet of Italian origin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and I will begin by describing his tragic personal history. And then we will look at two or three of his poems, without excluding several of his sonnets, sonnets that are considered to be perhaps the most excellent in the English language.

CLASS 20

    THE LIFE OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. EVALUATION OF ROSSETTI AS A POET AND A PAINTER. THE THEME OF THE DOUBLE (FETCH). A BOOK OF EXHUMED POEMS. ROSSETTI'S POEMS. HISTORY CYCLICALLY REPEATED.

    FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1966
    Today we will talk about a poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who is quite different from Robert Browning, even though they were contemporaries, and even though Browning at first exercised a considerable influence over him. Rossetti’s dates are easy to remember, for we have 1828 for his birth, and 1882—the two digits inverted—for his death. Moreover, there is a link between the two, which is the profound love they both felt toward Italy. In general, it is typical for the northern nations to love the Mediterranean nations, a love that is not always returned, of course. In Rossetti’s case there is also the circumstance of his blood, which, except for that of one English grandmother, was Italian.
    Rossetti was born in London. His father was an Italian refugee, a liberal, who had devoted himself—for good reason, like so many other Italians—to the study of
The Divine Comedy
. 1 At home I have eleven or twelve annotated editions of the
Comedy
, from the most ancient to the most modern, let us say. But I have not been able to acquire the edition of
The Divine Comedy
done by Rossetti’s father. 2 Dante [Alighieri], in a letter to Cangrande della Scala, says his poem can be read in four ways. 3 We can read it as a fantasy tale of a journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. But also, as a son of Dante’s suggested, we can read it as a description of the life of a sinner, symbolized by hell; the life of a penitent, symbolized by purgatory; and the life of a righteous man, symbolized by the fortunate in paradise. 4 And now that I have said this, I recall that the great pantheistic and mystical Irishman, Johannes ScotusEriugena, said that the Holy Scriptures could contain an infinite number of interpretations, like the iridescent plumage of a peacock. And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past.
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s father’s interpretation was mystical. Rossetti’s biographers write that when Rossetti’s father said the book was “
sommamente mistico
,” this was the highest praise he could give it. Rossetti’s mother was related to Byron’s doctor, an Italian doctor whose name I now forget. 5 Rossetti’s home had an intellectual and political ambiance, for all the Italian refugees who went to London visited the Rossettis. Therefore, Rossetti grew up in a literary environment and was bilingual as a child. That is, he was equally familiar with the English of London and the Italian of his elders. From the time he was a child, Rossetti was raised in the cult of Dante and poets like Cavalcanti and others, and in addition he was drawn to the study of drawing and painting. His drawings are among the most delicate in England. As a
painter
… I confess I have done everything possible—and there are, I think, friends of mine who have also had this experience—I have tried to admire—in the Tate Gallery, I believe—Rossetti’s paintings; and I have always failed. It has been said as an all-too-obvious joke that as a painter he was a great poet, and as a poet he was a great painter. Or, asChesterton expresses it, he was too good a painter to be an entirely great poet, and too good a poet to be an entirely great painter. For my part, I understand very little about painting, but I think I understand something about poetry. And I am convinced—a conviction I am not sure the current literary fashions share—that Rossetti is one of the great English poets, that is, one of the world’s great poets.
    At first, Rossetti dedicated himself to drawing. His drawings were singularly delicate: there is that vibration in each of them, that beginning of movement that seems to be characteristic of great drawings. As