Saturday, March 8th, 2014

From Sparkling Eaves When All The Storm Has Fled

Sotheby’s are trailing a portrait of William Morris’s wife Jane, painted by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who it seems knew the lady rather well. According to Sotheby’s, the auction estimate is in the region of £7m. Another painting of the same muse by Rosetti was sold last year for £3.3m. Now I like this current painting, mainly because of the artist’s accomplishment in transforming her long-faced beauty into a kind of Bride of Dracula pastiche, but I’ll be hanging on to my £7m in case I need to buy a house in London.

In the years after the death of his wife, Rosetti spent his time knocking off the wives of his best mates, then painting them with the kind of misty, swooning sadness only a fully fledged Pre-Raphaelite shagger could muster. But if his paintings are imbued with fetishised sexuality, they seem positively coy in comparison to his poetry. So grief-stricken was he upon her death, he buried most of it with his wife, but later changed his mind and allowed it to be exhumed, eventually publishing it in several collections. One piece, found in the middle of his sonnet cycle The House of Life, is Nuptial Sleep, an erotic remembrance of extraordinary power:

At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:
And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on each other where they lay apart.

Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,
And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.
Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams
Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.