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Still more distinctly the personification of an abtract idea is seen in "Vain Virtues".[1]
"What is the sorriest thing that enters Hell?
None of the sins, but this and that fair deed
Which a soul's sin at length could supersede.
These yet are virgins, whom death's timely knell
Might once have sainted; whom the fiends compel
Together now, in snake-bound shuddering sheaves
Of anguish, while the pit's pollution leaves
Their refuse maidenhood abominable.
Night sucks them down, the tribute of the pit,
Whose names, half entered in the book of Life,
Where God's desire at noon. And as their hair
And eyes sink last, the Torturer deigns no whit
To gaze, but, yearning, waits his destined wife,
The Sin still blithe on earth that sent them there."
Here Rossetti follows Blake in representing the good part of the emotion as a female (In one more instance we find this in his works, viz. in the mystic story "Hand and Soul", where the "emanation" of the human body, the soul, visits a young painter in the form of a woman). The sonnet has a double meaning (William M. Rossetti),
I. an ethical meditation.
II. a spiritual impersonation.
The first means that the condemnation of sin is not so dreadful a thing to reflect upon, as the fact that a sinful soul may have started as a virtuous one and that when the soul is condemned, its virtue as well as its sins are so.
The second meaning indicates, that a virtuous deed, the offspring of a human soul, is a fair virgin, who, were the soul to pass from earthly life, would become a saint in Heaven. But the soul commits a dreadful sin and is married to the devil, but even while sin is still blithe on earth, the fair virgin forfeits her sainthood and is drowned in the pit of doom.
- ↑ ibid. I, 219.
