Listening: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Persistence of Song

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, according to his brother, was never much attracted to music. On the contrary, this paper argues, Rossetti was quite interested in music—but in music as it offered possibilities for thinking about poetry. Scenes of attentive listening and imagined hearing haunt his early poems and pictures, as they do the work of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones during the years they were closest to Rossetti. Such scenes gesture toward "song" as poetry's distant horizon. They refer more immediately to the unconventional domestic musical life of a circle centered on Georgiana Burne-Jones, a gifted musician. Song's figures, in multiple senses, inform Pre-Raphaelite efforts to renew the poetry and art of mid-century Victorian Britain.