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...his oeuvre of numerous "double works of art" (1) such as Lady Lilith and Sibylla Palmifera and their accompanying sonnets, "Body's Beauty" and "Soul's Beauty." (2) A recurring point of reference in critical discussions of the complex "textual configurations" (Hill 17) constituted by Rossetti's "double works" is the combination of visual and literary media in the illuminated books of William Blake, but scant attention has been paid to a genre that provided Blake himself with a point of departure: the emblem. This is particularly surprising in view of the fact that in his reviews of Thomas Gordon Hake's Madeline, with Other Poems (1871) and Parables and Tales (1872) Rossetti not only likens his friend's poetry to the work of Francis Quarles in its "extreme homeliness," (3) but also reveals his awareness of the tradition to which Quarles's Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638) belong by suggesting that one of Hake's poems "produc[e]s much the same impression as the old verse-inscribed Emblem's of a whole school of Dutch and English moralists" (Works 627, 633). (4) By the early eighteen seventies when he made these observations, Rossetti was less sympathetic to "homeliness" and "moralists" than his tone suggests, but evidently he was quite aware of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch genre that may well have helped him, as it did Blake, to appreciate the ways in which visual and literary material might "accompany and 'interpret'" one another (McGann 21).
When Rossetti's "double works" are placed against the backdrop of the Anglo-Dutch emblem tradition, one of the first things to become apparent is their diversity. Whereas Quarles and many other English practitioners of the emblem genre such as George Withers wrote poems to accompany images created largely by Dutch and other European artists, Rossetti's work in a parallel mode--the sonnets for pictures that he wrote near the beginning and end of his artistic career--accounts for only about a third of the works that he produced in one medium in response to works in another. That the majority of Rossetti's poems for pictures by other artists--"For an Annunciation, Early German" ("Filii Filia" [1]) (1847), "The Card-Dealer" (1849), "For Our Lady of the Rocks, by Leonardo da Vinci" (1851 or 1854), (5) and the four sonnets that he wrote for paintings by or attributed to Ingres, Mantegna, and Memling during his visit to France and Belgium in 1849--date from early in his career suggests that such poems may have helped him to recognize the potential of poetic interpretation as a method of clarifying or supplementing the meaning of works of art. There is no evidence that by 1847 Rossetti was familiar with any Anglo-Dutch emblem books, (6) but given the religious tone of the Rossetti household and the various inexpensive editions of Quarles that were published in the eighteen twenties, 'thirties and 'forties it would be surprising if he were not. (7) Certainly, the confidence with which he explicates the Early German Annunciation that he saw in 1847 could stem in part from familiarity with, for example, the 1839 edition of Quarles's Emblems, Divine and Moral. "[T]here she kneels to pray / Who wafts our prayers to God," he writes of "Mary the Queen," in "For an Annunciation, Early German," "She was Faith's Present, parting what had been / From what began with her.... On either side, God's twofold system lay" (Collected Poetry and Prose 343). The fact that when Rossetti travelled to northern France and Belgium with William Holman Hunt in 1849 he responded very tentatively and speculatively to paintings of classical subjects (such as Ruggiero and Angelica by Ingres) but with explicatory and explanatory confidence to Christian works (such as The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by Memling) (see Collected Poetry and Prose 183-85 and 344-45) may also be the result of knowledge and experience gained from the Anglo-Dutch emblem tradition.
Much the same confidence that is evident in "For an Annunciation, Early German" and other sonnets for Christian works of the late 'forties is present in the two sonnets that Rossetti wrote in 1848 to "accompany and 'interpret'" the Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849-50). The first of these is devoted to the life and character of the Virgin herself, but the sestet and part of the octave provide an interpretation of key elements of the painting that mirrors the relationship between poem and picture in an emblem:
These are the symbols. On that cloth of red I' the centre is the Tripoint: perfect each, Except the second of its points, to teach That Christ is not yet born. The books--whose head Is golden Charity, as Paul hath said-- Those virtues are wherein the soul is rich: Therefore on them the lily standeth, which Is Innocence, being interpreted. (8) The seven-thorn'd briar and the palm seven-leaved Are her great sorrow and her great reward. (Collected Poetry and Prose 186)
These are some of the most didactic lines that Rossetti wrote, and they bespeak an assured sense not just of the meaning and function of emblems, but also of the relationship between pictures and words, representation and explanation, and pictorial and verbal communication that is strongly reminiscent of Quarles, Withers, and other emblematists.
Although the subject-matter of another early poem, "The Card-Dealer" (1847-48), differs radically from that of...
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