A cipher of man's changeless sum
Of lust past, present, and to come
Is left. A riddle that one shrinks
To challenge from the scornful sphinx.'
Exactly. So this profound philosopher, whose somewhat particular reflections on the charms of the sleeper have brought him at last face to face with the mystery of evil, coolly remarks:—
'Come, come, what good in thoughts like this?'
packs some gold in the girl's hair, and takes his leave. What good indeed? But why in that case, and if Mr. Rossetti had no power to deal otherwise with so painful a theme, could he not have spared us an useless display of affected sentiment and impotent philosophy?
"The style of the poem is as bad as the matter. Descriptions repulsively realistic are mixed up with imagery like that in Solomon's Song; the most familiar objects are described by the most unusual paraphrases; a London schoolboy, for instance, being called 'a wise unchildish elf,' while the similes are painfully far-fetched. The heart of the woman is said to be—
'Like a rose shut in a book
In which pure women may not look,
For its base pages claim control
To crush the flower within the soul;
Where through each dead rose-leaf that clings,
Pale as transparent Psyche wings,
To the vile text, are traced such things
As might make lady's cheeks indeed
More than a living rose to read;
So nought save foolish foulness may
Watch with hard eyes the sure decay;
And so the life-blood of this rose,
Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows
Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose.'
Affectation and obscurity make the application of this difficult enough. It will not, however, escape notice that the simile is radically false, for whereas the point is that the woman's heart is alive in the midst of corruption, the rose in the book, to which the heart is compared, is dried and dead."
