Mnemosyne. This unsettling image of the Goddess of Memory, painted by Rossetti in 1881, joined Lady Lilith on the walls of the collection of his friend Leyland. The model is Jane Morris, whose stylized face and figure haunted Rossetti's later pictures. (Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum)

ossetti begins "The House of Life" by imagining not the book but the poem itself as a material presence. The octet of the introductory Sonnet on The Sonnet reads:

A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
     Memorial from the Soul's eternity
     To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
     Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
     As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

The sonnets that make up this house-poem are invoked as objects strong enough to halt the flow of time--monuments--yet richly and uniquely ornamental, to honor its elusive moments. The poet is enjoined to a work of difficult making for high stakes. The sestet proposes a different object as the sonnet's material analogue:

A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--
Whether for tribute to the August appeals
     Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

This figure is more complicated. The sonnet as art-object reveres "its own arduous fulness" (its content, the moment it memorializes) through the preciousness of materials and the artfulness of design. The sonnet-as-coin, on the other hand, bears symbolic images that point to the source, and ultimate owner, of its value ("to what Power 'tis due") and that signify its particular worth (revealed on its "face"). The coin can serve as the sign of other things beyond its value as material object--which is why it is currency. What Rossetti's sonnet-coin is emphatically not, however, is money in the ordinary sense: it owes its value to Life or Love or Death, and that is measured not as a shilling or a pound but as a soul. Unlike the material objects with which Victorians increasingly surrounded themselves, Rossetti maintains, the special virtues of the poem, like those of his paintings, are not revealed when they circulate in the art market.

Rossetti's curious metaphors for the objectness of the sonnet introduce the sobering reflections we find in his poem on the role of art in the workings of desire. "The House of Life," like The Earthly Paradise, is born of a poet's fascination with the culture of objects as they mediate between longing and its anticipated satisfaction, but the poem depicts the art-object as one with powers to be feared. Morris is at ease with such objects; Rossetti is not. In "The House of Life" poems are not the works of modest craft that Morris gives us, but extremes of artful elaboration deployed in projects to which we are passionately, even desperately committed. We need them: they arrest the destructive movement of time, memorialize the moment, testify to its value, propitiate the life and love we long for and the death we fear. They deserve to be exalted. But such objects are not easy to possess or live with.

There is certainly nothing modest about Rossetti's conception of the sonnet as object or the art required of the artist to create and use it to furnish a poem. Unlike Morris, Rossetti adopts a style that foregrounds elaborate and extended verbal figures, and a verse form that is demanding and intricate--the sonnet on sonnets is an indicative example. He is not looking for the unimpeded flow of rhythmic repetition, regularly marked by rhyme--a craft whose pleasures are widely accessible. One pays attention to the figures of his verse because they are difficult, demanding, convoluted. Verbal ornament verges on the grotesque. The author insists that the extended conceits, the similes built on similes, are more than decorative embellishments, that they signify the presence of "powers" that govern human life--powers that the art of the sonnet summons, names, and encloses in forms the artist-poet can collect, arrange, and display at his will.

The governing conceit for the sequence is the house, the setting for the captured moments of a life and the collected sonnet-objects that memorialize them. The house of the title is a built structure, an organized, enclosed, domesticated space that contains the poet's emotional life. The progress of this life is related through a genealogy: the family tree of Life and her descendants, Love and Death, the powers under whose reign the poet's emotional life is successively lived. In the first sonnet, "Bridal Birth," Life gives birth to Love, who grows until he becomes the presiding and protecting figure for the poet-speaker and his Lady in the sonnets celebrating their love and mourning their parting. By the poem's end, Life gives birth to Death who when full grown will claim the poet-speaker. At first all goes well: Life and Love are benevolent figures who obey the poet's wishes. With their help he paints the Lady's picture in a sonnet titled "The Portrait":

O Lord of all compassionate control,
     O Love! Let this my lady's picture glow
     Under my hand to praise her name, and show
Even of her inner self the perfect whole. . .

The sestet concludes triumphantly:

Lo! It is done. Above the long lithe throat
     The mouth's mould testifies of voice and kiss,
        The shadowed eyes remember and foresee.

Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note
     That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!)
        They that would look on her must come to me.

Sonnet and portrait capture the look of the lady and make them the artist's possessions, pictures on the walls of his studio, testimonies to the poet's and the painter's art no less than to the Lady's beauty, memorials to their moments together but also to those moments' monumentalized recreation through his art.

But very soon the illusion of possession is shattered. The House of Life is a haunted house. At every turn the speaker encounters the moments he has tried to fix as sonnet-objects gazing back at him. Wandering the place of despair he calls "Willowwood" he meets "hollow faces burning white," "a dumb throng . . . All mournful forms, for each was I or she,/The shades of those our days that had no tongue./They looked on us, and knew us and were known." This is the horror of lived time, not at all a sequence of arrested moments, obedient to the order in which they are arranged in a house or a poem, but looping unpredictably to confront him with what has been: "that dead face, bowered in the furthest years," the "passionate portraitures" by which "Memory's art/Parades the Past before thy face." At night alone with these images he finds the sheltering grove he has conjured for his love turned to "A thicket hung with masks of mockery."

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
   I am also called No-more, Too-late,
     Farewell . . .

Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart
   One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
   Of that winged Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,--
Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
   Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.

The memorial sonnets with which Rossetti furnishes his House of Life awaken into hostile presences he cannot avoid. Like the fetishistic paintings of women with which his rooms were hung, these images are and are not his. Enshrined in sonnet-objects meant to decorate his house of life, they exert a power of their own, appearing like unsummoned ghosts to confront the poet-speaker with what once was and what might have been. The art he has fashioned and arranged, on whose unique aura in a world of mundane objects Rossetti has insisted, comes alive. The collector's dream, the spectatorial hall of delight, the Crystal Palace of material culture refined into a domestic Palace of Art, dissolve into nightmare. The final sonnet of the sequence, titled "The One Hope," is a cry of despair that ought to have resounded in Victorian houses, but did not:

When vain desire at last and vain regret
     Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
     What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget? . . .

In the final lines the poet banishes from the new world he hopes to see the elaborate sonnet-objects that have turned against him.

Ah! Let none other written spell soe'er
But only the one Hope's one name be there,--
   Not less nor more but even that word alone.

But "the one Hope," in a cruel pun, is wan hope.

he Pre-Raphaelites were not opposed to a culture of objects, however much they may have shuddered at the particular objects displayed at the Crystal Palace or the Royal Academy. Morris and Rossetti were eager consumers. That is why they became inventive designers and enterprising merchants. It is also why they could be perceptive critics of the hunger of acquisition they experienced and the Victorian markets for art and artful objects that had arisen to meet and feed it. Red House and Tudor House, the laboratories where they tried out their different ideas for making and selling aesthetically satisfying objects, stimulated the poets' imaginative engagements with what it could be like to live with such art. The Earthly Paradise and "The House of Life" are the fruits of those imaginative engagements. Morris concludes that artful objects that anyone can make and all can use open a new kind of earthly paradise--where labor will be pleasure--for which he will willingly work. His poetry, however, belongs to the meantime, when repetition--impoverishing when it is mass production--offers compensatory pleasures when practiced as craft. The poet of "The House of Life" claims far more for life constructed now through the objects of art: that the aesthetic object can memorialize the elusive moments of deepest pleasure or pain that make life worth living. Yet the poem enacts all too clearly the dangers of such reification: the collector who surrounds himself with the artful objects of his desires has invested them with a power it may be difficult to escape. In the convoluted intricacies of Rossetti's elaborated sonnet-objects, the house of life becomes a house of death.

These poems have no successors. Each poet takes to an extreme what one might call the logic of a culture in which Art is identified with its object forms. One poet imagines the objects of art becoming objects of everyday life, shorn of their peculiar power to focus consuming desires. The other sees the same objects absorb and dominate the life of their possessors. At those extremes the work of art is no longer recognizable: it is repetitive craft-work, or it is a terrifying gallery one would hesitate to enter. These are not necessarily bleak visions (Morris at least embraced the future he foresaw with his usual energy and enthusiasm). But they are certainly object-lessons, sobering reflections on a world not so very unlike our own.