The Sun’s Shame (Sonnets XCII and XCIII)

I
Beholding youth and hope in mockery caught
From life; and mocking pulses that remain
When the soul’s death of bodily death is fain;
Honour unknown, and honour known unsought;
And penury’s sedulous self-torturing thought
On gold, whose master therewith buys his bane;
And longed-for woman longing all in vain
For lonely man with love’s desire distraught;
And wealth, and strength, and power, and pleasantness,
Given unto bodies of whose souls men say,
None poor and weak, slavish and foul, as they:—
Beholding these things, I behold no less
The blushing morn and blushing eve confess
The shame that loads the intolerable day.

II
As some true chief of men, bowed down with stress
Of life’s disastrous eld, on blossoming youth
May gaze, and murmur with self-pity and ruth,—
“Might I thy fruitless treasure but possess,
Such blessing of mine all coming years should bless;”—
Then sends one sigh forth to the unknown goal,
And bitterly feels breathe against his soul
The hour swift-winged of nearer nothingness:—
Even so the World’s grey Soul to the green World
Perchance one hour must cry: “Woe’s me, for whom
Inveteracy of ill portends the doom,—
Whose heart’s old fire in shadow of shame is furl’d:
While thou even as of yore art journeying,
All soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti divided the 101 sonnets forming the body of The House of Life into two parts. The first, Youth and Change, is bright with reflections of Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova and visions of ecstatic but earthly love. Shadows soon intervene, and they deepen in the second part of the sequence, Change and Fate, where Rossetti traces the spiralling disillusion of maturity and age. He revised the sonnets tirelessly over an extended period: his brother William, who edited The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, dates the composition of the sequence from 1847 to 1881.

The Sun’s Shame is placed towards the end of the second part, and is unique in the collection in its structure as a double sonnet.

The first sonnet was drafted in 1869, and the second added in 1873 during a period of recovery from illness when the poet stayed with Jane Morris and her children at Kelmscott Manor.

Rossetti’s contemporaries criticised his work on various grounds. He was attacked by Robert Buchanan for representing the “fleshly school” of poetry: others charged him with overcomplication. Contemporary readers may find the conflict between the sensuous and the cerebral works to Rossetti’s advantage. In fact, it supplies an invigorating strategy for the current poem. The antagonism takes various forms and symbols, and is entwined in the very diction. Rossetti’s rhythms bring out the contrast, for instance, between the intellectual armoury of the Latinate word forms (“sedulous”, “intolerable”, “inveteracy,” etc) and the “fleshly” nudge of Germanic monosyllables (“fain”, “eld” (old age), “wealth” and “bane”).

Rossetti’s epigraph to The House of Life, also a sonnet, famously refers to the form as “a moment’s monument”. The first sonnet of The Sun’s Shame is itself monumental, and comprises a lifetime of “moments”. It’s not until the 12th line that we find out the subject of the accumulated object clauses: “beholding these things, I behold no less …” First, we must tease out the meaning of “youth and hope in mockery caught / From life”. The veiled metaphor may be that of William Blake’s How Sweet I Roam’d from Field to Field. Youth and hope are “caught / From life” in the sense that they are snatched away from life, not necessarily by death but by lesser forms of coercion. They are thus mocked, and there’s further mockery in store: that of the errant “pulses” which override the soul’s desire for bodily death. Rossetti summons, with admirable conciseness, the disappointments of reputation (line four), the compromises enforced by “penury” (lines five and six), and the marred opportunity for love (lines seven and eight). In this last context, it’s unavoidable that we should think of his wife, Lizzie Siddal.

The poet plays artfully with paradox and polyptoton: he is is adept at turning complex personal unhappiness into rhetorical agility. His long, eloquent sentence reaches its climax of moral dismay in lines nine to 12, where pleasing, privileged bodies are contrasted with their degenerate souls, recalling the earlier corruption of youth and hope. The brilliant stroke of the conclusion transforms the romantic cliches of the “blushing morn” and “blushing eve” to the uniquely human blush of shame.

In the second sonnet, Rossetti reintroduces the “… ess” rhyme sound of the first sonnet’s sestet. This helps form a bridge, and softens the edges of their separation. The character introduced in the octet, now detached from the sestet, might be from some chivalric legend. This “true chief of men”, facing decline and death, yearns impotently for lost youth, and proposes a feeble bargain. The characterisation shifts in the sestet, heralded by that vivid antithesis of the grey Soul and the green World. It’s the grey Soul who speaks the concluding lines, revealing the internalised agony of one “whose heart’s old fire in shadow of shame is furl’d …” This shadowed figure, hard to separate from the figure of the poet, internalises the strange, haunting and original image of the abashed sun. It fixes the shame to its true, dark, human place.

The promise of the green World is also false – “All soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!” – and therefore seems directly related to the handsome bodies of the first sonnet, whose souls were “poor and weak, slavish and foul …” But the realist in Rossetti understands that the journey to renewal remains natural, inevitable and still painfully desirable. Like many in the sequence, this poem earns its intellectual and emotional vitality from a tortuous refusal of absolute despair.