The poet employs a breathtaking kaleidoscope of techniques which betrays a versatility of a word artist of astounding brilliance, whose self-possession is so engrained that he neither needs to heed the conventionalities nor considers himself bound by them.
Thus we find the situation that whereas on the one hand he is plying the Blessed Virgin with incense, calling her one scarcely to be looked upon [20] and one whose splendour causes a need for angels to veil their eyes, on the other hand, he is firing rhetorical questions at her in an almost conversational tone of reminiscence:
Mind'st thou not [25] (when) . . . a voice/ spake to thee without any noise [43-44].
Ablaze with baroque splendour
To add brilliance to the composition, the remainder of the stanza is ablaze with baroque splendour and a gift of description that leaves the reader experiencing the heat of Nazareth.
The personification: June's heavy breath/ (which) warmed the long days in Nazareth [25-26] causes a sense of languidness to enfold the reader.
The visibility of the plight of the flowers which the poet reminds Mary she gave some drink, that they might live/One faint night more among the sands [28-29] displays the fact that the painter/poet plies his pen with the consummate artistry he would (and did) employ, while depicting the scene with his paint brush.
Coupled with the descriptions the trees . . . as dark wands/Against the fervid sky [30-31] and etched against the contrast of the peaceful background of the sea/Behind, reach(ing) on eternally/Like an old music soothing sleep [33-35], the poem lulls the reader, until the metaphor unexpectedly culminates in burning lines which seethe through the torpor-inducing climate of the setting:
It was to thee as though the cloud
Which shuts the inner shrine from view
Were molten, and that God burned through:
[38-40]
Effective in its threefold expression of compassion, empathy and query is the exclamation: Ah! [49] which introduces the third stanza.
The poet fires off a number of questions in this verse but keeps his reader alert by replying to some of these in his own musings, such as : Nay but I think the whisper crept [64] . . . Mid angels in the Temple-courts [66].
This has the effect of transporting the reader's mind to the time of Christ and make him/her one with the people of the time.
Mother-son relationship
There is a sense of familiarity, in the finest sense of the word, when Rossetti mentions the mother-son relationship Mary shares with the disciple John, which reveals an empathy and indicates that the poet had an easy relationship with his own mother.
Without bashfulness he describes how the Blessed Virgin and John sustained one another after Christ had consummated his human life and resurrection and had risen up to heaven.
Although from all accounts Dante Gabriel Rossetti had none of the spiritual fervour of his sister, which manifested itself in the observance of all the precepts of the Anglican Church, there was nothing lacking in his insight into the loneliness of Mary and John after Christ had quit their immediate presence.
Having been widowed young himself, his sigh:
How long, O Lord? [90], an expression which even today is repeated by many who may never have heard of the poet, may have been a groan which likewise came from his own heart.
It is this empathy as much as its Baroque splendour which makes Ave a great poem.
Varied length of stanzas
Rossetti varies the length of his stanzas in this version of the poem.
These consist of 24, 24, 15, 15, 22, 14 and 22 lines respectively.
The only explanation there appears to be for this disparity is that the poet may still have been experimenting when writing this, his second version, featured in this study and quoted from an unpublished doctoral thesis.
Alternatively, the verse lengths may have been affected by being written on new pages without marking the end and the beginning of the various stanzas, but this does not seem likely, as each stanza appears to be an entity in itself.
Human simplicity with celestial majesty
The tender reverence of Rossetti's tones and the juxtaposition of Mary's human simplicity with her celestial majesty, while taking nothing away from God nor bestowing undue praise on the Blessed Virgin, are vastly more uplifting than are Christina Rossetti's well-intentioned by apologetic Marian poems, since a canvas that spans the universe as does the corpus of poetry in honour of the Blessed Virgin can only be tarnished, never enhanced, by the use of an eraser, be it ever so figurative.
Dr Luky Whittle
No comments:
Post a Comment