"Any reader may bring any artistic charge he pleases against the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than the soul. For here all the passionate and just delights of the body are declared—somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably—to be as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times. (!)[1] Moreover, nearly one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do with love, but treats of quite other life-influences.I would defy any one to couple with fair quotation of Sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 41, 43, or others, the slander that their author was not impressed, like all other thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life; while Sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled 'The Choice,' sum up the general view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus much for 'The House of Life,' of which the Sonnet 'Nuptial Sleep' is one stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have shown that it is not here) to the exclusion of those other highest things of which it is the harmonious concomitant."[2]
Thus far Mr. Rossetti; and although it is rather hard to have to refer again to poems so unsavoury, I have no option but to accept the challenge, and judge Mr. Rossetti by "The House of Life" as an uncompleted whole. A reference to this poem, so far from changing my opinion, makes me wonder at the writer's misconception of its true character. It is flooded with sensualism from the first line to the last; it is a very hotbed of nasty phrases; but its nastiness—or its unwholesomeness—goes far deeper than any phraseology. It opens with a sonnet entitled "Bridal Love," wherein we are told that "Love,"
"Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst
And exquisite hunger,"
