ABSTRACT
Victorian poets, including Symonds himself, who wanted to give voice to their own 'unreconciled antagonisms'. To speak of Rossetti reviving the sonnet sequence in 1870, when the first unfinished text of The House of Life was published, may seem parochial, bizarre or even mendacious. Mary Robinson had already done so in Sappho to Phaon in 1796, William Wordsworth in The River Duddon and Ecclesiastical Sketches in the 1820s, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850 and, with an adjustment to the verse form, George Meredith in Modem Love in 1862. Yet in a number of ways Rossetti did reinvent the Petrarchan sonnet sequence for his generation. Firstly, he pared down the narrative element which had characterised the earlier revivals, in doing so decreasing both the text's and the reader's dependence on structural linearity. In Rossetti's sequence the movement from one sonnet to another, the relationship between them and their relative importance is left much more in the hands of the reader. Secondly, Rossetti extended the thematic breadth of the form, which in English had tended to prioritise either sexual love or religion rather than according equal centrality to both. As Rossetti himself put it in an unpublished note addressed to the reader of The House of Life, 'The "life" involved is neither my life nor your life, but life representative, as tripled with love and death' (1911, p.638). In Rossetti's metonymy, 'love' stands for the relations of sexuality and gender, 'death' for the condition of mortality and the anxieties of belief and unbelief which it raises. Thirdly, as Rossetti suggests, The House of Life is not limited, as Sappho to Phaon, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modem Love largely are, to the fictionalisation of the poet's own experience. Instead it invites the reader to trace aspects of his/her own self-perceptions in the sequence as it develops.
