Christina Rossetti, Amy Levy, and the Composition of Roundels in Late-Victorian Bloomsbury: Poetic Snapshots of Urban Subjects

In exploring how Christina Rossetti and Amy Levy utilize the properties of the roundel that Algernon Charles Swinburne develops as a variation of the French medieval roundeux, this article situates their poetry of the late 1880s and early 1890s alongside the spatial and temporal dynamics of the snapshot photograph. Their deployment of the poetic form resonates with the changing visual epistemology of late-Victorian Bloomsbury and participates in the formation of the "new nineteenth-century modernist consciousness" that Ivan Kreilkamp identifies.¹ Combining Jonathan Crary's insistence that the "photography effect" of the late nineteenth century is a component of various cultural shifts in the status of the observing subject with Isobel Armstrong's recognition of the effect on literature of "those technologies of vision that introduced virtuality into Rossetti's culture," this discussion offers a reevaluation of late-Victorian lyric subjectivity.² After detailing how Rossetti and Levy deploy the roundel's affective potential and engage with the spatial dynamics of Bloomsbury, the argument explains how their lyric impressionism coincides with both Swinburne's concern with French aestheticism and the emergence of European modernity. By investigating the dialogical properties of the roundel insights are gleaned from a comparative study of the two writers who were living in close proximity and moving in the same social and professional circles.

The Punctum of Absence

Highlighting the prominence of the sonnet and sonnet sequence, Valentine Cunningham describes the late-Victorian era as "a time of dinky poems, in a period of intense imaginative and cultural shrinkage or dinkification."³ This description is anticipated by Marion Thain's recognition of the "growing dominance of the short lyric poem," alongside a "fashion for intricate, compact forms of verse, owing much to the influence from France."⁴ Considering how the late 1880s saw Rossetti and Levy move away from the dramatic monologues that characterise their earlier volumes and toward concise first-person lyrics, their literary development is symptomatic of the changing poetic landscape in its engagement with emerging visual technologies. The roundel form in particular expresses life in flux and invokes a punctum beyond the frame of perception. According to Roland Barthes, a photograph's punctum is "that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."⁵ In endowing the photograph with a "blind spot," he defines the punctum as the sting of the unknown, for "what I can name cannot really prick me."⁶ This assessment emerges from a consideration of photography "not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and think."⁷ Using the theory of punctum as a springboard, we see that Rossetti and Levy use the roundel to confront and diagnose the new aesthetic models of late-Victorian Bloomsbury and offer snapshot glimpses of passing moments, thereby invoking wounds of lost identity and lost time.

In the second of the three roundels that she includes in A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889), Levy articulates a poignant memory of momentary recognition:

Between the showers I went my way,   The glistening street was bright with flowers;It seemed that March had turned to May   Between the showers.

Above the shining roofs and towers   The blue broke forth athwart the grey;Birds carolled in their leafless bowers.

Hither and thither, swift and gay,   The people chased the changeful hours;And you, you passed and smiled that day,   Between the showers.⁸

The final two lines position both observer and lover in the snapshot moment of a smile. The sudden pause of "you, you," figured by the comma, disrupts the kinetic gaze of the urban wanderer. By deploying the halting repetition characteristic of Swinburne's roundels, Levy brings to the fore the instantaneous sting of punctum. The disturbance lies in the elusive existence of the subject who has her being beyond the frame of the poem. She passes in and out of focus so briefly that the pain of her absence is suggestive of a wound. While the "people chased the changeful...