Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/23

— 23 — In another Sonnet, "Heart's Compass", we find Blake's idea of a composite individual (the Grand Man). Dante Gabriel Rossetti identifies this supreme being with Love "the evident heart of all life sown and mown". He is awed and impressed when this inner relation of things to each other show him his beloved not as herself alone, but "as the meaning of all things that are." "What," does he ask of himself, "is this power?" and the answer comes: "it is love, love in its best form, with all sensuousness fallen off from it."

In the sonnet "Lost Days" Dante Gabriel Rossetti sees innumerable "states" pass before his eyes, they are those in which, when he passed through them, he did not use the opportunities they brought; he mourns over them and wonders whether they are but "golden coins squandered and still to pay" or "drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet." God knows how after death he will find them back "each one a murdered self", and eternal, while everything on earth is eternal.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pictures he even more than in his poems expresses his mystical feelings by symbolism. Sometimes symbolical figures are heaped in paintings and drawings and charge these with a wealth of feelings not always easily understood. As a typical example of this a small drawing can serve, which Rossetti made as a headpiece for his sonnets in 1880. The drawing represents the floating figure of an angel with an hourglass in one hand and a harp in the other, her hair crowned with laurels, near her a rose tree, at her side a serpent, a butterfly, and medals with the alpha and omega. Over the angel the word "Anima" is written. Dante G. Rossetti gives an explanation that the soul is instituting a memorial of one dead deathless hour by putting a winged hourglass in a rosebush and at the same time touching the 14-stringed harp. To me however this explanation does not make the drawing more clear.

There are also pictures in which we find too much symbolism, for instance "Sibylla Palmifera", an oil painting; here the butterflies (emblems of the soul) are symbolical, the palm in her