One of my courses this semester is knee-deep in Victorian poetry. One way that I’ve been trying to dig in with my students as they try and tackle what is often very difficult work, is to focus the actual experience of reading poetry. I’ve always pushed students to read poetry aloud (“Do it! It’ll freak out your roommates!”) and this semester I’m really trying to hone in on the actual physical process of speaking and hearing the works as they are read aloud. What this has done has demonstrated the way in which the form of a poem, including diction, usages of assonance, consonance, meter, and numerous other formal elements actually physically effect the reading of the poem in a way that can mirror the poem’s content. I’m going to touch on a few poems that do this over the next few blog posts, but for today I’ll focus on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith” also known as “Body’s Beauty.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1868, 1872)

“Lady Lilith,” or “Body’s Beauty” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

This is a fascinating poem for a lot of reasons. It is one of the works (alongside Rossetti’s Eden Bower) responsible for bringing Lilith, a figure from Jewish mythology, to the attention of Anglo-Christian writers and artists. There’s a lot that can be said about it, especially its representation of gender, and for some excellent work on Rossetti and the Lilith mythology, I’d urge you to check out Amy Scerba’s excellent Master’s thesis Changing Literary Representations of Lilith and the Evolution of a Mythical Heroine. For the purpose of this blog post I’d like to focus for a moment on the sonnet’s sestet, specifically lines 9-11 “for where / Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent / And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?” When I teach this poem I always ask students to read it aloud. And then I ask several others to read the sestet aloud.It is always an awkward, somewhat amusing process as students stumble over the syntax and try and piece together the lines. And then I ask them what exactly it feels like to read those lines aloud: what was the experience like? What physically did it make you do? These are the answers I usually get:

“It’s hard!”

“It trips you up!”

And my students are right. It is difficult and it does trip you up. Then we turn to the question of why? Why does Rossetti construct these lines this way? Why does he choose to give us these tongue-twisters of lines? The reason the poem does this is not because Rossetti is a bad poet, of course, but rather because he wants the poem to trip us up here. This is a place where the language of the poem, the specific choices to rely on this difficult syntax and the repetition of sibilants, directly mirrors the content. What it does to the reader connects to what the poem is actually seeking to discuss. This sestet, describing the way in which Lilith beguiles and ensnares the men she seeks to conquer, actually beguiles and ensnares the reader. This is a forceful example of the actually experience of reading the poem connecting directly the poem’s actual content. In my next post on this topic, I’m going to take a look at Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue “Circe.”