NARCISSISM AND D. G. ROSSETTI'S

THE HOUSE OF LIFE

BY

ARTHUR CYRUS JOHNSTON

© Copyright by Arthur Cyrus Johnston 1977, 2006

All Rights Reserved

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Figures

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I:

                                    The Soul and the House of Love

CHAPTER II:

                                    Darkened Love and Wild Images of Death

CHAPTER III:

                                    The Soul's Sphere of Infinite Images 

CHAPTER IV:              

                                    Belated Worshiper of the Sun 

CHAPTER V:               

                                    Youth and Fate

CHAPTER VI:              

                                    Sathana, Sirens, Newborn Death and Hope

CHAPTER VII:             

                                    Personifications of the Self and

                                    The Year's Turning Wheel

BIBLIOGRAPHY

TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure  1:    Zodiac: Yearly Cycle and Sonnets of                             

The House of Life

Figure  2:    Theme of the World: Planets and Their Houses

Figure  3:    Planets in Two Houses Each

Figure  4:    Planets in Two Houses Each

Figure  5:    Aspects of the Planets to the Sun and Moon

Figure  6:    Four Functions of the Mind

Figure  7:    Aspects of Planets to the Sun in the House of Leo

Figure  8:    Air Triplicity

Figure 9:    Water Triplicity

Figure  10:   Fire Triplicity

Figure  11:   Houses Where Planets Are in Exaltation

Figure  12:   Qualities of the Planets

Figure  13:   The Planets: Their Humors, Qualities and Personality Types 

Figure  14:   Earth Triplicity

Figure  15:   Daily Cycle: Horoscope: Numbered Houses and Signs

Figure  16:   Quadruplicities of Cardinal Houses

Figure  17:   The Seasons and the Life of Man

Figure  18:   Quadruplicity of Fixed Houses

Figure  19:   Quadruplicity of Bicorporeal Houses

Figure  20:   Planets and the Seven Ages of Man

Figure  21:   Three Stages of Development and Experience:

Triads of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

Figure  22:   The 4th Triad: Soul, Self, Spirit

Figure  23:   The Divine Anthropos

Figure  24:   Astrological Organization of The House of Life

Introduction

The Willowwood sonnets appear at the center of The House of Life and are crucial for any reading of the meaning and structure of the sonnet sequence. The critic Douglas J. Robillard sees the Willowwood sonnets not only central to the pattern of the work but "a pivot on which the whole structure turns.¹ A close examination of these pivotal sonnets will reveal many parallels with the Narcissus myth as narrated by Ovid in Metamorphoses. The basic situation in the Willowwood sonnets is that of Narcissus. The narrator of the sonnets and Love are sitting beside a "woodside well" and are "Leaning across the water."² Soon their "mirrored eyes" meet "silently in the low wave." The narrator is in a state of grief because he is separated from his second Beloved, who was first specifically mentioned in "Life in Love" (XXXVI), and because his first Beloved had died. In grief and sadness, the narrator sheds tears and beneath his eyes and Love's appear those of his Beloved on whom all his love is centered. Narcissus, too, focused all his love on one person in the form of an image of himself and aggressively repulsed the advances of all girls, boys, and particularly Echo who desperately loved him.

Both the setting of the isolated grove with its pool deep as a well and silver-clear and the place where Love and the narrator lean over a well have an unearthly quality. In Ovid's account, there are no shepherds, shegoats, cattle, birds, or beasts; not even a leaf ever ruffles the surface of the pool: and the sun never burns hotly on the shadowed spot.³ In the opening Willowwood sonnet, no animate forms of life other than the narrator and Love appear. The only sounds are those of Love's voice and his lute; Love's song promises to reveal a secret. A sense of strangeness and mystery pervades the atmospheres of both settings. In his defense of his poetry from Robert Buchanan's attack, Rossetti drew attention to the essential quality of the opening Willowwood sonnet by calling it "a dream or trance."⁴

In another version of the Narcissus myth, the image in the pool is not Narcissus' but that of his identical twin sister who had died. Pausanias presented this version in his A Description of Greece.⁵ He rejects the self-love theme and adopts a more realistic attitude toward the myth. After his twin sister died, Narcissus found relief from his loss by loving his reflected image, which reminded him of his sister. Pausanias however does not quite explain the strangeness involved in this grief leading to Narcissus' death or the possible implications of an incestuous love.

The narrator of the Willowwood sonnets, like this Narcissus, is grieving over his separation from his Beloved and ultimate loss of her. Willowwood as depicted by Love in his trance-like song is a place where the narrator and his Beloved's former selves of past days stand mournfully like a "dumb throng" (L). Willowwood in this way parallels Narcissus' isolated grove which becomes the site where he dies. Paull Franklin Baum in his edition of The House of Life defines Willowwood as being "a grave, with a well or fountain, sacred to those who have loved and lost and cannot forget." ⁶ Narcissus, too, can not abandon his love or forget even though he consciously desires to: "If I could only / Escape from my own body! if I could only-- / How curious a prayer from any lover-- / Be parted from my love!" (Ovid 72).

Unlike the narrator of the Willowwood sonnets, Narcissus dies from his longing and his love. He may have even committed suicide by either refusing to eat or by drowning himself in the pool. Narcissus' grove became his grave, and he was mourned by all his sisters of the river, by the sisters of the forest, and, most of all, by Echo. Narcissus will never be forgotten because of his myth and because of his becoming immortalized as the Narcissus flower (Ovid 72-73). Echo, too, has an immortality. Her body fades away completely, leaving her voice, which continues to exist as an echo that responds to voices of living things. Echo is similar to the first Beloved in that she and her love are also rejected for another by the one whom she loved. Narcissus never loved her at all, whereas the narrator of The House of Life loved his first Beloved intensely.

The myth of Narcissus involves as much violence, aggression, betrayals, and death as it does love and worship of beauty. Narcissus' very being came about through violence. His father, who was the river God Cephisus, raped Liriope after he dragged her into his river. Narcissus violently rejects all suitors. When Echo confessed her love for him, Narcissus repulses her embraces: "'Keep your hands off,' he cried, 'and do not touch me! / I would die before I give you a chance at me"' (Ovid 69). Outward violence like that in the Narcissus myth is rarely present in Rossetti's sonnet sequence; however, betrayal and death appear frequently. In "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII), the narrator shows some traces of guilt over his finding a new love so soon after the death of the first Beloved. Death appears in the introductory sonnet in the image of Charon being paid his coin for his ferrying a dead soul across the river Styx and in the first sonnet "Love Enthroned" where Life wreathes "flowers for Death to wear." Though absent for a time, Death reappears constantly and finally asserts his domination of all in the final sonnets.

Equally important for the Narcissus myth and The House of Life is Fate. After being raped by Cephisus, Liriope, Narcissus' mother, consults Tiresias about the fate of her newborn because he is a man who has experienced being both sexes, knows the truth and can foretell the future. She wants to know how long her child will live. Tiresias' answer is that Narcissus will live a long time "if he never knows himself" (Ovid 68). Tiresias' prophesy did come true. Fate and self-knowledge assume as important roles as do love and death in Narcissus' life. Nemesis, the goddess of Fate, answered a prayer by a rejected boy suitor of Narcissus by granting the boy's wish that Narcissus would "Love one day, so, himself and not win over / The creature whom he loves!" (Ovid 70). It was Nemesis who prepared the isolated grove and the pool that held the fateful attraction for Narcissus (Ovid 70). Rossetti entitled Part II of the sonnet sequence "Change and Fate." The very title of The House of Life suggests an astrological association and a concomitant involvement of fate. Numerous references to fate appear throughout the sonnets. Fate reaps a harvest in "Supreme Surrender" (VII); the moon is "the journeying face of Fate" in "Secret Parting" (XLV); and "o'ershadowed Troy with fate" appears in "Death's Songsters" (LXXXVII). Fate plays a larger role in the narrator's life than just these references indicate.

Other close connections exist between the Narcissus myth and the Willowwood sonnets. These parallels and links of similar motifs and themes are not limited to the Willowwood sonnets but radiate throughout the whole sonnet sequence. Many critics do not find any organizing principle within The House of Life, whereas others see the biographical elements as the only unifying forces. Some critics recognize an organizing principle for Part I but despair at the task of finding this or some other unifying principle for Part II. A few critics find a definite unity in the sonnet sequence. ⁷ The concept of narcissism which stems from the myth of Narcissus offers an organizing principle on all levels such as themes, motifs, and structural patterns. Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, and others have supplied psychological meanings to the Narcissus myth, and Carl Jung and his followers have added archetypal meanings to it. Narcissism has many complex facets and even the psychoanalysts are not in complete agreement about its precise definition and psychological applications on clinical and theoretical levels. ⁸ Literary men and the average man have both adopted the term narcissism and applied it in the overall meaning of "self-love." Specific core elements of the concept and the myth, however, do exist and will prove useful in exploring the themes, motifs, images, content and structural patterns of The House of Life. The astrological implications of the title of the sonnet sequence will have to be considered also as a possible source for an organizing principle, particularly if there are strong links between astrology and narcissism.

NOTES

¹"Rossetti's 'Willowwood' Sonnets and the Structure of The House of Life," Victorian Newsletter, #22 (1962), 6.

²Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life, A Sonnet Sequence, ed. Paull Franklin Baum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 138. This edition follows that in The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911); henceforth all references to the sonnets in The House of Life will be from Baum's edition and will be cited in the text by Roman numerals.

³Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), p. 70. Henceforth all citations will be in the text.

⁴The Stealthy School of Criticism," The Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Jerome H. Buckley (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 465.

⁵Pausanias's Description of Greece, trans. J. G. Frazer (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965), 1, p. 483.

⁶Baum, The House of Life, p. 141.

⁷Clyde de L. Ryles in his essay "The Narrative Unity of The House of Life," (Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69 (1970], 241 257) has summarized the basic important scholarship on the unity or disunity of the sonnet sequence up to 1970. Frederic E. Faverty in The Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research (2nd ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968] gives more details on basically the same critics and their works.

The prominent exponents of biographical reading as a means of organizing Rossetti's sonnet sequence are Frederick M. Tisdel ("Rossetti's 'The House of Life,"' Modern Philology, 15 (1917], 257-276); Ruth C. Wallerstein ("Personal Experience in Rossetti's House of Life," PMLA, 42 [19271, 492-504); and Oswald Doughty (A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti [London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1949]).

In 1962, Douglas J. Robillard ("Rossetti's 'Willowwood' Sonnets and the Structure of The House of Life") saw the Willowwood sonnets as the central organizing element of Rossetti's 1870 and 1881 versions, although Robillard did not think the final work was successful. Robillard, however, abandoned the biographical method.

William E. Fredeman ("Rossetti's 'In Memoriam': An Elegiac Reading of The House of Life," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 47 [1965), 298-341) saw no chronological or biographical reading possible. The work has all the organizing elements of an elegy.

Other critics have pursued other organizing principles such as J. L. Kendall's "infinite moment" as theme ("The Concept of the Infinite Moment in The House of Life," Victorian Newsletter, #28 [Fall, 19651, 4-8); Robert D. Hume's inorganic form as later practiced by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound ("Inorganic Structure in The House of Life," Papers on Language and Literature, 5 [1969], 282-295) ; and Henri Talon's symbolism ("Dante Gabriel Rossetti, peintre-poèite dans La Maison de Vie," Études Anglaises, 19 [1966], 1-14; D. G. Rossetti: THE HOUSE OF LIFE: Quelques aspects de l'art, des thèmes.et du symbolisme [Archivès des Lettres Modernes, Minard, 1966]).

Clyde de L. Ryals in "The Narrative Unity of The House of Life" presents the organizing principle of Rossetti's work as a complete dramatis personae of the soul, specifically the soul's pilgrimage through life in a journey of "logical discontinuity" or in the form of "the symbolist technique of juxtaposing without links."

Dissertations that deal specifically with organization of The House of Life are: Maja Zakrezewska, "Untersuchungen zur Konstrucktion und Komposition von DGRs Sonnettenzyklus The House of Life" (Freiburg, 1922); Stephen Joel Spector, "The Centripetal Journey: The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti" (University of Pennsylvania, 1969)--this explores the Victorian consciousness in Rossetti's work and the centripetal journey into the self in The House of Life; Roger Carlisie Lewis, "The Poetic Integrity of D. G. Rossetti's Sonnet Sequence, The House of Life" (University of Toronto, 1969)--Lewis sees The House of Life as similar to the structure of Tennyson's In Memoriam but differing in that Rossetti's work is cyclical rather than linear; Rufus Allen Pridgen, "Apocalyptic Imagery in Dante Rossetti's The House of Life" (The Florida State University, 1975)--for Pridgen, the apocalyptic imagery in Rossetti's work creates a unified vision, showing the experiences of an individual soul.

⁸Sydney E. Pulver, "Narcissism: The Term and the Concept," Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 18 (1970), 319-341.

CHAPTER I

The Soul and the House of Love

The Willowwood sonnets are the culmination of two love affairs of the narrator. Specifically, the image in the well water is that of the second Beloved shown as one of memory's figures that Love sings about in the second Willowwood sonnet. Generally, though, the image of the second Beloved has the characteristics of the first Beloved superimposed on it. Both in the Narcissus myth and in Rossetti's sonnet sequence, the emotion of love and the object of that love are central. In the Narcissus myth, the isolated grove and the mirror like pool assume great importance for the working out of Narcissus' love. The Narcissus myth, too, concentrates on Narcissus' overwhelming love for his own image to the exclusion of all external reality beyond the grove. Only his death brings about a separation from his beloved image, and even on the River Styx, Narcissus, for the last time, looks longingly at his image.¹ In the form of the Narcissus flower, too, he leans over the water as he did in human form. ² Through Echo are revealed the sufferings of complete separation of a lover from her object of love.

In Rossetti's sonnet sequence, the story of the narrator's love for his first Beloved matches the intense love and devotion of Narcissus, and like Narcissus' love, the narrator's love is ended by death, not his own as in the situation of Narcissus but in his Beloved's. The first thirty-six sonnets portray the narrator's love of his first Beloved and explicitly her death in the last sonnet of this division, "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI). The narrator's love for his first Beloved has many links with the mythical, psychological, and archetypal aspects of narcissism.

The narrator's attitudes toward his Beloved have irritated some of Dante Rossetti's critics, especially his first harsh critic, Robert Buchanan, who objected to Rossetti's mixing the spiritual with the material, or sensual. On specific occasions, Rossetti does blend the two. In "Lovesight" (IV), the narrator asks, "When do I see thee most, beloved one?" As part of a second rhetorical question, the narrator ends the question with the implied answer, "And my soul only sees thy soul its own?" The narrator's and the Beloved's souls, at this point, are fused into one. In the next sonnet, "Heart's Hope" (V), the narrator expands this oneness of soul to include her body, and by implication his too, and connects their love to God: "Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God."

The same union of the narrator's soul and his Beloved's appears again in several other sonnets of this first thirty-six sonnet group. In "The Love-Letter" (XI), the narrator wishes he had been present--when his Beloved wrote the love-letter--for a particular moment: "When, through eyes raised an instant, her soul sought / My soul and from the sudden confluence caught / The words that made her love the loveliest." Since confluence means etymologically the flowing together of two streams, their two souls flow together to become one. The same confluence appears in "The Kiss" (VI) in the realm of emotions. The narrator feels himself a god when he kisses his Beloved, and their "life-breath" meets to fan their "life-blood, till love's emulous ardours" run "Fire within fire, desire in deity." The "Fire within fire," the mutual "life-breath," and their "life-blood"--all have flowed together to become one.

In Greek, the original term for soul is psyche. Etymologically, psyche means breath, principle of life, and life. The narrator's use of "life-breath" and "life-blood" in "The Kiss" (VI) touches upon this simplest definition of soul as an "immortal animating life force" that enters the body at the moment of conception or during pregnancy and that leaves the body at death. .³ Biologically, the genes carry this immortal substance, which does continue as long as offspring of the parents survive and reproduce in an unbroken chain. In "Love's Testament" (III), the narrator uses the word life to signify the union of both souls and bodies. The narrator tells his Beloved that following the will of Love, "thy life with mine hast blent," and then he murmurs, "I am thine, thou'rt one with me!" To be one with his Beloved means that both the souls and the bodies merge into one as was his desire in "The Kiss." Physically and on a purely rationalistic plane, bodies can not merge. Other concepts will be necessary then to explain the narrator's union with the Beloved. In "Youth's Antiphony" (XIII), the blending of the two souls and, again possibly, the bodies of the two lovers occurs while they talked to each other and Love "breathed in sighs and silences / Through" their "two blent souls one rapturous undersong." The verb breathed intensifies the meaning of "two blent souls" and implies the blending of the two bodies as happened in "The Kiss," where their "life-breath" was one.

Rarely in the first group of thirty-six sonnets do the body and the soul definitely separate from one another. In "Bridal Birth" (II), after death, the "bodiless souls" of the lovers become Death's children in a marriage of their souls in eternity. This view of the soul echoes the basic meaning of the soul as "an immortal animating life force" which leaves the body at death. It also points to a Gnostic view of the soul which will become important later in coming to understand fully Rossetti's concepts of the soul, body, and love.

Rossetti left no doubt about the importance of the soul for his sonnet sequence. Rossetti's introductory sonnet announces that the basic function of a sonnet is to reveal the soul: "A Sonnet" is a "Memorial from the Soul's eternity" and "A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals / The soul." The word soul appears not only in this group of thirty-six sonnets but constantly throughout the whole sonnet sequence right up to the last sonnet where the soul prepares for death. Some critics have suggested that the sonnet sequence be renamed The House of Love. ⁴ Equally, the sonnet sequence could be called The House of Soul. In "The Orchard Pit," Rossetti used the phrase "the house of the soul" when the narrator of the story asks about the dead and the dead men's bodies, "Have they [i.e., the dead who surround the bodies] any souls out of those bodies? Or are the bodies still the house of the soul, the Siren's prey till the day of judgment?" ⁵

Since the introductory sonnet identifies the sonnet form with the soul and since the narrator of The House of Life believes his Beloved's soul is his very own when they are united in love, the Jungian concept of the anima becomes immediately apparent to a modern reader. The biographers and critics using the biographical approach to interpret the sonnet sequence and Rossetti's other poetry have extensively analyzed the three women of Lizzie Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Burden. They are the women who naturally would receive Rossetti's anima projections. ⁶ In her article "The Image of the Anima in the Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi explores the anima as it appears in several of his works. Clyde K. Hyder in "Rossetti's Rose Mary: A Study in the Occult" makes a passing reference to the anima figure. ⁷ Other critics may have used the anima term but not in any extensive manner.

Rossetti himself presents an anima figure in his short story "Hand and Soul." She appears to Chiaro in his own room at a time when he was deeply depressed over the course of his life. His room took on a mysterious atmosphere and a beautiful woman, wearing a green and grey dress, and with golden hair, appeared. Chiaro senses her to "be as much with him as his breath." Breath, as already indicated, has close associations with soul. Then the woman identifies herself as an anima figure, when she says, "I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee. See me, and know me as I am." The woman as his soul then discusses Chiaro's relationship to God and the role of his painting in respect to God's demands. Only when Chiaro is above God, she believes, can he commune with God; she uses a narcissistic-like setting to describe this communion: "Only by making thyself his (i.e., God's] equal can he learn to hold communion with thee, and at last own thee above him. Not till thou lean over the water shalt thou see thine image therein: stand erect, and it shall slope from thy feet and be lost." To emphasize that she is only an image and not the soul itself, the woman asks Chiaro to paint a picture of her, and this portrait will relieve him of anxiety: "Do this (i.e., paint her picture]; so shall thy soul stand before thee always, and perplex thee no more."⁸

Carl Jung would agree with Rossetti's conception of a man's soul as an image. The anima and all archetypes are universal images. They stem from the "collective unconscious," which is the realm of religions, myths, rituals of cultures, or are répresentations collectives in Lévy-Bruhl's terminology.⁹ A Freudian interpretation of Rossetti's woman as a soul figure, however, would indicate that the woman was an incestuous love object which Chiaro had repressed into his personal unconscious and which has now returned to him because of the weakening of-his ego's unconscious power of repression. Jung broke away from Freud over this very question of whether an incestuous figure like the anima can have spiritual, or universal, meaning as opposed to the purely personal. ¹⁰ Jung's attachment of spiritual meaning to all archetypes-which represent the collective spiritual patterns and wisdom of all past generations--and to incestuous relationships such as mother and son, father and daughter, and brother and sister is important for understanding Jung's concept of the anima and for its application to the narrator's views of his anima figure, the Beloved, in The House of Life.

As the woman asserted in "Hand and Soul," she is only an image of the soul. Jung makes it very clear that the anima is not the soul but is a symbolic representation of it in the unconscious of a man. Since the man's conscious mind is masculine, anything that represents his unknown self, which is the unconscious, is feminine. The reverse is true for the woman; a male animus represents her unconscious as her conscious mind is feminine. The anima is not the pure divine soul which the Gnostics call "pneuma," "spirit," "Light," or "Logos" or what Jung calls "anima rationalis." Jung believes this definition of the soul to be dogmatic as it is a purely philosophical conception.

Jung reviewed the definitions of the soul in the past and completely rejected the Gnostic definition of the spiritual soul; this does not mean that he rejects the concept of a masculine spirit. Jung accepts the German word Seele, which means "quick-moving," "changeful of hue," "twinkling" and the Greek word psyche which means, besides soul, also butterfly, "which reels drunkenly from flower to flower and lives on honey and love." Jung thinks that primitives' belief that the soul is "the magic breath of life" or anima, and a flame is close to the real meaning of the anima figure. Jung's final definition which embraces all these definitions is that since the soul is a living being, it is thus "the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life." The anima, too, like life, has a positive and a negative side. ¹¹ Jung sums up his concept of the anima as an image of the soul by calling it "the archetype of life itself." ¹² This Jungian concept of the soul closely matches the early Greeks' concept of the soul in that they too believed that the soul was life and, thus, was something that left the body upon death but was also intimately connected with the body. ¹³ Jung's anima concept, too, matches the narrator's in The House of Life, except that the negative side of the anima is excluded from his Beloved in this group of thirty-six sonnets. A negative side of the anima will make its presence felt in later sonnets.

The concept of the anima, however, is useless unless the process by which the anima becomes involved with the woman that a man loves is known clearly. Freud discovered this process in his psychoanalysis of his first patients. He called it transference. The patient has had an incestuous love and/or hate for a parent, brother, or sister as a child, particularly in the oedipal stage of development. This incestuous love was repressed into the personal unconscious. But as an adult, the patient projects the parent, brother, or sister image upon that of the psychoanalyst and then acts as if the psychoanalyst were the original incestuous object. Transference, or essentially projection, only works with unconscious contents. Therefore, to Freud all the contents of the unconscious that are eventually projected were originally introjected, or drawn, into the unconscious from the outside by the child in his family surroundings.

Jung agrees completely with Freud that a transference between two people occurs because of projections from the unconscious. Jung's work led him, however, to the discovery of a second source of projection, the collective unconscious. All that is of "a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals" belongs to the collective unconscious. Jung does not find this strange since he links the archetypes to instincts, which pursue their own goals. In fact, the "archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words they are patterns of instinctual behavior." ¹⁴ Jung reasons that the original personal incestuous objects of mother and father for the child could not be actively and continuously conscious in the first few years of life; it is impossible for the child, thus, to repress the mother-father sexual union and his oedipal desires. There must, therefore, have been an archetypal mother and father, or anima and animus, and their union, or syzygy, preexisting in the child's mind. The union of anima and animus can not be reduced to the personal mother and father. Behind the Freudian personal mother and father is a more ancient anima and animus that transcend the personal parents. ¹⁵

Jung considered the transference, or the projection, of the anima and animus onto people, ideas, and objects of such importance that he wrote his long article "Psychology of the Transference" to explain it. To Jung, the male alchemist was an excellent example of transference, for he projected his anima into the alchemical process so freely. Jung bases the transference on the archetype of the "mystic marriage" or "coniunctio," which is a union of the anima and animus; in paganism, it is called the hieros gamos. In the transference between the doctor and his patient, the archetype is activated and includes an incestuous relationship of father and daughter, mother and son, and brother and sister. Once the projection of the archetype of the divine pair is withdrawn from the personal parents, the transference, or projection, still exists between the patient and the doctor.¹⁶ In the alchemical process, which is Jung's model for the transference, the male alchemist can only project his anima, or feminine image of his soul, upon the Queen, who is in sexual union with the King, who in turn is an animus projection out of the unconscious of a female alchemist. ¹⁷ In The House of Life, the Beloveds would each receive an anima projection from the narrator's unconscious.

Jung states that the archetype of the sacred marriage of anima and animus is always linked to incest and to the family. In the most primitive situations between a man and a woman, the man projects his anima upon her and psychologically marries it. The live woman can be essentially ignored; the same can happen with a woman and her animus. The woman or man who is a stranger in the sense of not being of the same family as the one projecting is excluded from the union as much as possible. The libido, or love, consequently, is kept connected with the unconscious and in this way approximates the first situation where the archetype of sexual union of male and female was projected from the collective unconscious onto the personal family.

Jung drew upon a sociological study by a Jungian analyst for the terms "kinship libido" and "endogamous" relationships to describe the incestuous, or family, element of the spiritual union of male and female. ¹⁸ The incest taboo in a predominately matriarchal society is directed toward the brother and sister, whereas in a basically patriarchal society, the incest taboo, as Freud has outlined it in Totem and Taboo, is directed against mother and son. In a matriarchal society, kinship libido in the endogamous relationship may be combined with the libido directed toward strangers and thus an exogamous relationship. A brother and a sister in this system do not marry, but they each marry a cousin: a man marries his mother's brother's daughter, and he in turn gives his sister to his wife's brother. The exogamous element is maintained since every man belongs to his father's patrilineal family and can only take a wife from his mother's matrilineal family. This marriage system results in two brother and sister marriages crossing each other. The close cousin relationship of the man and woman satisfies the kinship libido, and the fact that they are strangers and not purely brother and sister satisfies the patriarchal exogamous system.

In the transference situation, Jung recognizes the reappearance of this cross-cousin situation where the doctor's anima is in an incestuous--or kinship, or endogamous--relationship with his patient's animus while they are also participating in an exogamous relationship as strangers, or non-blood related persons. Jung sees this situation not as a regression to the situation of group marriages but as a looking forward to an integration, or individuation, of the male and female components of the personality. Christianity promotes the exogamous form of relationship between man and woman, so they must marry strangers. In this situation, they project their anima and animus upon each other to satisfy their kinship or incestuous longings. The church provides the archetype of the mystic marriage of bride and bridegroom, but as this is pure dogma and not a vital component of life, the kinship, spiritual, and incestuous libido finds little satisfaction. ¹⁹

The narrator in The House of Life portrays the kinship libido of the endogamous relationship on both the family and spiritual planes in "The Birth-Bond" (XV). This sonnet appears after the height of the love experience in the first twelve sonnets and particularly those grouped around "The Kiss" (VI). In "The Birth-Bond" the narrator is in a reflective mood. A brother and sister were "born of a first marriage-bed" and subsequently the mother dies and the father remarries. Although the brother and sister act friendly to the children born of the second marriage, they have no real spiritual affinity with them. For each other, however, they have a "complete community" and a "silence speech." The narrator thinks that his love for his Beloved rests not only on a similar experience but was "One nearer kindred than life hinted of." The narrator felt this at his first sight of her. He exclaims, "0 born with me somewhere that men forget, / And though in years of sight and sound unmet, / Known for my soul's birth-partner well enough!" This concept of their relationship suggests both reincarnation and a strong spiritual kinship. The word "birth-partner" suggests, too, that they were twins. In a rationalistic interpretation of the spiritual affinity of the narrator for his Beloved, reincarnation is immediately rejected. Jung's concept of the anima, however, would be a realistic assessment of the narrator's instant recognition of his Beloved as being part of himself, both on the family relation of brother and sister and on the spiritual, or symbolic, level of archetypes. Indeed, this almost magical event would have the trappings of the ancient doctrine of reincarnation. All the numerous references to the narrator's and the Beloved's becoming one in soul and body in these first thirty-six sonnets receives another aspect in their "Birth-Bond," which is kinship on a spiritual level. The narrator's concept of his Beloved has moved quite close to Jung's anima concept through this additional emphasis on kinship of brother and sister. The same kinship of two kindred spirits appear in "Love-Sweetness" (XXI), where the two spirits of the lovers meet and feel "The breath of kindred plumes."

This theme of a spiritual kinship extending into past ages between a lover and his Beloved is not the only instance in Rossetti's works. In "Saint Agnes of Intercession," a young painter, the same age of nineteen as Chiaro in "Hand and Soul," saw when he was a child a picture of a beautiful woman named Saint Agnes painted by Bucciuolo d'Orli Angiolieri. This picture inspires him to learn to read well and stirs his interest in painting. As a young man, the painter meets a young woman named Mary Arden, whom he falls in love with because of her beauty and promises to marry her. To make himself famous, he decides to paint a serious subject that will "be wrought out of the age itself, as well as out of the soul of its producer, which needs be a soul of the age. ²⁰ Mary, his Beloved, sat for the principal female figure. The painter as narrator quickly hints that this is an image of his soul, for he was submitting "his naked soul" to the public in his painting. At the exhibition of the picture, the painter meets a poet who is also a critic. Upon viewing the painter's picture, the poet-critic informs him that Mary Arden's picture matches exactly that of Angiolieri's St. Agnes.        I

Unable to find the book with this picture, the painter eventually goes to Italy and finds the original painting which confirms the poet's words. Mary Arden and St. Agnes were identical. Even the painting styles of the young painter and Angiolieri were alike. Angiolieri had been in love with the beautiful woman who posed for his St. Agnes. Like Poe's "The Oval Portrait," Angiolieri painted his Beloved's picture as she was dying. Then to make the identity complete, the young painter looks at a self-portrait of Angiolieri and discovers that he and the four-hundred year old painter are identical in their facial features and form. This face-to-face confrontation with what his soul suspected made him reel. Rossetti still keeps the soul and the body closely connected; the painter as narrator writes, "I was as one who, coming after a wilderness to some city dead since the first world, should find among the tombs a human body in his own exact image, embalmed." ²¹

The young painter falls into a fever and that night dreamed that he met Mary before Angiolieri's picture of St. Agnes. She had a man beside her, who had his back to the young painter. The man was, of course, Angiolieri, who was holding a portrait of the young painter in the dress of four-hundred years ago. Angiolieri told the young painter that the picture was of neither of them and then his own face "fell in like a dead face." ²² After returning to England and falling seriously ill, the young painter does not know that Mary, like St. Agnes before her, has died, and at the end of the story, he goes to see her.

In this story, Rossetti presents the idea of reincarnation centered on an anima figure. The continuous use of images in paintings heightens the anima presence, as it did with Chiaro's beautiful soul image. The confrontation of the young painter and Mary Arden with their doubles in the paintings evokes the situation of transference described by Jung. There are two live people who project respectively their anima and animus onto paintings and people. In the young painter's dream, images were doubled as if between two sets of mirrors. The young painter's experience with his Beloved parallels Angiolieri's and in both cases the Beloved died as happened to Dante's Beatrice and to the narrator s first Beloved in The House of Life.

After Rossetti married Lizzie Siddal, he took her on a short trip to Paris, where he completed a drawing called "How they met Themselves." Lizzie Siddal was the model for the two women in the picture, who were identical to each other. The basic situation is like that in "The Birth-Bond" (XV) and "St. Agnes of Intercession" in that two twins confront each other. The meeting of these doubles signifies death for the couple according to the legend that if one meets his double he will die. ²³ The young painter's and his Beloved's meeting of themselves in his dream was a forecast of her future death, although not his. In the light of Lizzie Siddal's early death after her marriage to Rossetti, his drawing this picture on their wedding trip was a strange occurrence. According to all the critics using a biographical interpretation of The House of Life, Lizzie Siddal is the narrator's first Beloved.

In many ways Lizzie Siddal was an anima figure for Rossetti. He pictured her as a Beatrice figure and painted her in this role, culminating in "Beata Beatrix," Rossetti's memorial picture for her. ²⁴ Rossetti's anima figure of Lizzie Siddal has the features of a "Birth-bond" and the spiritual reincarnation in "Saint Agnes of Intercession." Rossetti wanted Lizzie to marry him on his birthday of May 12, as if to stress their kinship. ²⁵ She was ill however and this did not happen. William Rossetti reported that Rossetti's first picture of Lizzie was a water-color called "Rossovestita," meaning "Red-clad." ²⁶ Even this first picture has red and resembles the rose color present in the derivation of the family name of Rossetti. Rossetti had Lizzie to take up painting, drawing, and water coloring and even writing poetry. This made her identity closer to his. When they married and returned eventually to Chatham Place in London, they continued to live as before their marriage, and she followed his habits of painting all day and dining out at night. Rossetti's marriage changed his bachelor lifestyle very little. ²⁷

Rossetti's relationship to Lizzie Siddal points to a more narcissistic kind of love than an ordinary object-centered love. In 1914, Sigmund Freud in his paper "On Narcissism: An Introduction" distinguished between the choice of an object on the basis of narcissistic libido or object libido. ²⁸ Freud concluded that a person "may love:

(1)     According to the narcissistic type:      

(a) What he is himself (actually himself).       

(b) What he once was.    

(c) What he would like to be.    

(d) Someone who was once part of himself." ²⁹

This kind of love is a form of identification and involves narcissistic libido.

Freud calls the other kind of love which entails object libido "anaclitic type," meaning object love where the two objects are perceived as separate beings. Thus a person "may love

(2)     According to the anaclitic type:

(a) The woman who tends.       

(b) The man who protects." ³⁰

The basic characteristic of anaclitic type of love is that the person who is loved is conceived as separate, whole, and individual. The person loved has both good and bad features; in this sense, they are whole. But in narcissistic love objects, the person loved is never complete in the sense of being both good and bad or imperfect and perfect at the same time. ³¹ In narcissistic love, the persons who are loved are not whole objects but are parts or functions of the self. Heinz Kohut, who is leading the investigation of narcissism in Freudian psychoanalysis, calls narcissistically chosen love objects, self-objects. ³² All the listings under Freud's narcissistic choices for a person to love are parts of the person's own self.

The narrator of The House of Life has identified completely with his Beloved, calling her soul his own and being one with her in body and soul. He even feels a kinship like a brother and sister relationship and a spiritual kinship that evokes concepts of reincarnation. All these relationships of union and identity suggest an equality between them. But very soon in the first thirty-six sonnets it becomes clear that most of the time there is no equality between the two lovers. "The Lamp's Shrine" (XXXV), the next to the last of the thirty-six sonnets, presents their basic relationship most clearly and shows the narcissistic aspects of the narrator's love. The narrator states, "Sometimes I fain would find in thee some fault" but then he asks rhetorically, "Yet how should our Lord Love curtail one whit / Thy perfect praise whom most he would exalt?" The narrator finds his Lady perfect and thus idealizes her completely, much as did Petrarch his Laura and as did the renaissance sonneteers their ladies at high moments. The title of the sonnet indicates that the narrator's Beloved is a lamp giving forth light and that he is creating a shrine for it. He becomes her worshiper as he was in "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI) where her gaze absorbed his "worshiping face." As light from a lamp in "The Lamp Shrine," she lights his "heart's low vault." The narrator, as worshiper, is in the subservient position and feels unworthy when contrasted to her. She is like "fiery chrysoprase" and he like "deep basalt." Her heart is a "flashing jewel" and his a "dull chamber" where her jewel will shine. The narrator-sums up his attitude in the last line when he says, "My heart takes pride to show how poor it is." The Beloved, however, is under the power of Love.

She is "Love's shrine" ultimately. By worshiping her, the narrator pays homage to Love. The "Lord Love" would not wish to "curtail one whit" the Beloved's "perfect praise" because he wishes to "exalt" her. "Love's Testament" (III) proclaims the same idea. The narrator's Beloved is "clothed with his [i.e., Love's] fire"; her heart is "his testament." Her breath is "the inmost incense of his sanctuary." She receives "grace"; the narrator "the prize" of his Beloved; but Love obtains "the glory." In the following "Lovesight" (IV), the narrator continues his worship of Love. He ends a question with "the spirits of mine eyes / Before thy face, their altar, solemnize / The worship of that Love through thee made known?" The emotion of love is more important than the individual object of that love.

At other times, the Beloved becomes not only equal to Love but Love himself and even beyond him to the essence of the universe itself. In "Heart's Compass" (XXVII), the narrator opens the sonnet with "Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone, / But as the meaning of all things that are / A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar / Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon." He concludes the octave with saying that she is "the evident heart of all life sown and mown." For the narrator she gives significance and meaning to everything, and she is the source, or the emotional center, of all life. These concepts closely fit the general definition of the soul as being life itself and life cannot move without the impetus of the emotions, particularly love. In western culture, dominated by patriarchal, or masculine, values, the emotions--the feeling function in Jung's four-functions concept--are dominated by the mother or anima archetypes. ³³ Since a man's unconscious is basically feminine to offset his predominately masculine consciousness, this is not surprising. The narrator of "Heart's Compass" (XXVII) wonders that since his Beloved has all the characteristics of Love which he has already enumerated, "is not thy [i.e., his Beloved's] name Love?" and immediately affirms it is.

In this sonnet, the Beloved is considered his "Heart's Compass" to guide him through life and all its meanings. In "Gracious Moonlight" (XX), his Beloved is also a dominating force and guide in his life. He wonders:

                                                               Of that face

What shall be said,--which, like a governing star,

Gathers and garners from all things that are

Their silent penetrative loveliness?

Her attributes of beauty dominates the narrator's attitude in this sonnet. In "Her Gifts" (XXXI), the narrator gives a litany of praise of her "High grace," "sweet simplicity," her glance, her "thrilling pallor of cheek," her mouth, her neck, which is "meet column of Love's shrine / To cling to when the heart takes sanctuary," her hands, and her feet. Her name is like the sacred name of Yahweh in the Old Testament or other gods whose names must not be spoken except by the elect. For primitives and now for man in general to possess a name is to possess power over the object. ³⁴ For this reason, the narrator admonishes, "Breathe low her name, my soul." The narrator's attitude toward her name further shows his worshiping attitude toward her and Love.

No matter whether his Beloved is subservient to, or equal to, or the same as, or superior to Love, the narrator is apparently the humble worshiper who has no gifts of his own. In "Equal Troth" (XXXII), the narrator expresses his inequality to his Beloved, despite the title which means equal faithfulness. He asks, "how should I be loved as I love thee?" and describes himself as "graceless, joyless, lacking absolutely / All gifts that with thy queenship best behove." As in the other sonnets, she is "throned in every heart's elect alcove, / And crowned with garlands, culled from every tree." In essence, by "Love's decree," her garland crowns have "All beauties and all mysteries interwove" among them. She rebukes the narrator, accusing him of saying her love is not equal to his. But the narrator tips the scales again and puts her "heart's transcendence" over his "heart's excess"--that is, quality over quantity--and makes her love more than a "thousandfold" his.

The narrator continues the same attitude of deference and lowliness in comparison to her in "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV). He says, "Not I myself know all my love for thee." His love is of such excess that it is beyond comprehension. Then in the sestet he asks, "Lo! what am I to Love, the lord of all?" Already the Beloved and Love have been equated as one in "Heart's Compass" (XXVII). The narrator compares himself to "One murmuring shell," an image that will again appear in later sonnets to signify lowliness, and "One little heart-flame." A key image in the sonnets, and particularly in this one, is the sea. It represents the vastness of life, the unknown, the immortality beyond life. The emotion of love itself in this sonnet is considered "the last relay / And ultimate outpost of eternity" which by implication is beyond the "loud sea." Love gathers the narrator up as he would a small sea-shell on the shore of life.

Paradoxically, the narrator at other times feels equal to the Beloved and at one with her. This is seen in their union where he states typically in "Heart's Hope" (V), "Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor / Thee from myself, neither our love from God." And at times as in "The Kiss" (VI), he feels like a god under her spell.

These extremes in the narrator's attitudes toward his Beloved and himself can basically be understood as manifestations of narcissistic love as outlined by Freudian psychoanalysts and by other schools, including the Jungians. Heinz Kohut, following Freud's analysis of narcissistic object choices in love as outlined in "On Narcissism: An Introduction," states that contrary to the general belief that a narcissistic personality does not love persons, or objects, "some of the most intense narcissistic experiences relate to objects." Kohut emphasizes that these objects of love are, however, serving functions for the person that most normal people have performed internally by a well-organized self or that the loved persons are experienced as parts of the self. For this last reason, Kohut calls the beloved persons "self-objects" in order to distinguish this kind of object from a more mature love where the other has a wholeness and integrity of its own. ³⁵

The most generally accepted meaning of narcissism is "self-love," and Kohut creates two poles of self-love on the model of two kinds of perfection. One can say, "I am perfect" or "You are perfect, but I am part of you." From the first narcissistic perfection, Kohut derives the "grandiose self," which is both grandiose and exhibitionistic, and from the second, "the omnipotent object," or "the idealized parent imago." These are often the two extremes of narcissistic love and its objects of love. ³⁶ The narrator's love for his Beloved predominately is at the "omnipotent object" pole of narcissistic love choice, for he completely idealizes his Beloved. Kohut calls this love an "idealizing transference." ³⁷

This idealizing transference and the narrator's making his Beloved all powerful, perfect, and goddess-like, match greatly Jung's analysis of the transference in psychoanalysis and alchemy and Jung's use of the terms kinship libido and endogamous relationships. The foundation for Freud's, Jung's, and Kohut's ideas about transference, or the intense love (and often hate) that appears between the doctor and his patient or those in the most intense love relationship, is projection. The person projects his internal contents such as the anima onto another person who acts as a screen for the projection.

Lipot Szondi, a prominent European analyst, has examined extensively the process of projection as an unconscious ego function. He does not dispute the basic findings of Freud and Jung but tries to correlate them into his own systematic analysis of human drives and ego defenses against them. There are basically three models for the transference situation. One is the collective model of the primitives' relationships to objects, which has been most extensively examined by Lévy-Bruhl and which he calls participation mystique. ³⁸ A second model is the state of the ego in childhood just after the period at which the child realizes he is separate from the mother. Szondi calls this the "Autistic Ego." ³⁹ This parallels Freud's personal unconscious, just as the first model comes from Jung's collective unconscious. A third model's source is from Szondi's Familial Unconscious which does not greatly concern us here. ⁴⁰ The point of Szondi's third model is that Szondi removes the word mystique from Lévy-Bruhl's participation mystique and replaces it with the word real. To retain the word mystique in an analysis of Rossetti's sonnets would introject mysticism into the interpretation of his sonnets; this is far from the case. Jung's concepts are not mystical either, since he bases the archetypes on the instincts.

Lévy-Bruhl's analysis of participation mystique, however, is important for understanding the narcissistic implications of the participation, or union. In the primitives' world, two heterogeneous things, such as subject and object of any kind, have to be joined together by some mysterious power. Thus, a union is formed and each separate object participates, or shares, in the other. The subject and object may not be distinguished from one another. Subject and object have the same identity. Yet this is also a partial identity, for each has his separate existence. Lévy-Bruhl finds an aprioristic union of subject and object, much like Jung's concept of archetypes and Wordsworth's concept of the soul in "Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood." In participation mystique kinship relationships are all important, and the group is more important than the individual. All the primitives' own powers are projected onto his objects in his world; they are omnipotent. A twist occurs in this participation, or union, with the omnipotent object. The primitive's own power is expanded by his participation with the powerful other, be it a totem animal, an inanimate object, a medicine man, a chief, or god. ⁴¹ The most basic model of all participation is the union of mother and child, where the mother has all power and the child is powerless. In Kohut's terms, the child would try to maintain a continuous union with its "omnipotent object," or "idealized parent imago. ⁴² Jung would see the situation as a man's fascination with his own anima, and, thus, the power of life and the unconscious. Szondi calls the original participation "the dual union"--a concept he adopted from the psychoanalyst Imre Hermann. ⁴³

The narrator of The House of Life has the same attitudes as these toward his Beloved. As has been shown, the first thirty-six sonnets portray the union of the narrator and his Beloved. The first twelve sonnets portray the union at its height, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. "The Kiss" (VI) is the focal point for this heightened union of mind, body, and soul. During this segment, the narrator and his Beloved merge together and are one. The next twelve sonnets from thirteen through twenty-four show a gradual withdrawal from this oneness to a series of comparisons between their own situations or the Beloved's and the external world. In "Youth's Antiphony" (XIII), their closeness as lovers in the octave is contrasted in the sestet with "the world's throng, / Work, contest, fame, all life's confederate pleas." "Youth's Spring-Tribute" (XIV) contrasts their love in spring with the possibility of threats to their love that will appear in the winter. As we have seen, "The Birth-Bond" (XV) contrasts kindred in blood and spirit with strangers or non-kindred. The contrasts continue, noting places that do and do not contain the Beloved, nature's beauty opposing his Beloved's beauty, this present time and another time, the Beloved's optimism with his pessimism, sensuous love versus spiritual love and so on. The series conclude with a contrast in "Pride of Youth" (XXIV) between "Old Love" and "New Love." The last twelve sonnets from twenty-five through thirty-six emphasize the ideal aspects of the narrator's Beloved. Cosmic, universal, and cultural images such as "Soul-Light," "Moonstar," "Last Fire" are numerous.

Throughout all phases of the idealized union of narrator and his Beloved, one set of related images occurs constantly. In the Narcissus myth, Nemesis prepared an isolated grove for Narcissus and his own image. This place was separated from the rest of the world and had a mysterious stillness about it. Love's throne as depicted in the first sonnet "Love Enthroned" was in such a place: "Love's throne was not with these [i.e. "all kindred Powers"]; but far above / All passionate wind of welcome and farewell / He sat in breathless bowers they dream not of." In a union of participation, the united are separated from the world outside. In "Bridal Birth" (II) the narrator tells of Love's preparations of a special place for them, "Now, shadowed by his wings, our faces yearn / Together, as his full-grown feet now range / The grove, and his warm hands our couch prepare." Love does the same in "Love's Lovers" (VIII) and prepares "His bower of unimagined flowers and tree" for the Beloved. In "Passion and Worship" (IX), it is "Love's Worship" who is to be found "where wan water trembles in the grove," whereas "Passion of Love" walks "the sunlit sea." The excessive idealization of Love's Worship belongs in a narcissistic-like grove. "Silent Noon" (XIX) portrays the lovers in an open field, yet it is their "nest" since time has essentially stopped for them because of their love. This is one of the "moment's" monuments mentioned in the introductory sonnet. The title of "Heart's Haven" (XXII) gives another image of the isolated quality of their love for each other. An hour is like a bird that passes "The rustling covert" of the narrator's soul in "Winged Hours" (XXV). Sanctuary and "alcove" appear in "Her Gifts" (XXXI) and "Equal Troth" (XXXII). In "Lamp's Shrine" (XXXV), the narrator's heart becomes a "low vault" for his Beloved's "flashing jewel."

Within the narrow circle of their love, the narrator sometimes undergoes a transformation from his role as admiring but undeserving lover into an equal to the Beloved, Love, and the gods. In "The Kiss" (VI), the narrator experiences a climb from the mental state of a child through man and spirit to that of a god. A similar transformation occurs in "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV), where the narrator first compares himself to a lowly "murmuring shell" and a "little heart-flame." Then a great source of power is opened to him by the gaze of his Beloved's eyes: "Yet through thine eyes he [i.e., Love] grants me clearest call and veriest touch of powers primordial / That any hour-girt life may understand." He is touched by primordial powers of an absolute, or universal, nature. At the height of their union, the narrator does not feel anything but ecstasy, and as in "Nuptial Sleep" (VIa) both lovers sink deeper than "the tide of dreams" and are merged into a silent and imageless world. In "The Kiss" (VI) they merge together in their passion as "Fire within fire." Once beyond this state, the narrator stands off and contemplates his Beloved or her image as he does in "The Portrait" (X) or even admires another kind of image, or symbol, her handwriting, in "The Love-Letter" (XI).

Then he passes on to a stage of seeing himself mirrored in her some way in a manner quite similar to Narcissus gazing at his own image in a pool. In "The Lovers' Walk" (XII), the narrator indicates that both lovers are "mirrored eyes in eyes." The moments of this awareness of the mirror image of himself is rare in his great participation and union with his Beloved. In "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI), the narrator reaches a peak of adoration of his Beloved and as part of a question sees himself mirrored in his Beloved's eyes:

What word can answer to thy word,--what gaze

To thine, which now absorbs within its sphere

My worshiping face, till I am mirrored there

Light-circled in a heaven of deep-drawn rays?

At this moment, the narrator is aware that he participates in his Beloved's nature and being. The mirroring of the image indicates, too, the basic identity of the two personalities and the projecting of his own qualities, particularly his anima, upon the Beloved.

The mirror image has always had close associations with the double and the soul. ⁴⁴ As Lévy-Bruhl has demonstrated, primitives project their own powers onto the objects, persons, and gods and thus at this stage feel powerless. But once the primitive realizes he is separate, as the narrator does when he sees the mirror image of himself in his Beloved's eyes or contemplates her at a distance in space and time, then he can become aware of his sharing in the powers of the other. This is the situation in "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV), as earlier indicated, where the narrator feels the "veriest touch of powers primordial." Through participation--for the primitives it is a participation mystique--the narrator shares in the powers and perfections of his Beloved. He is in a dual-union with her. In this state all his incompleteness, imperfections, and separateness are perfectly complemented by the missing half of his nature, which the Beloved supplies. Lipot Szondi describes this whole process of participation as the striving to be one and the same with the person. ⁴⁵

To share in the other's powers and perfections, however, calls for the opposite of projection. The projected contents must be reincorporated, or introjected, by the unconscious ego. The primitive who has projected his powers onto another, thus, gets back the same powers. The most primitive example is the cannibal who only devours his most formidable enemies in order to absorb their fighting strength and power. This process can occur simultaneously and thus is called introprojection. Lipot Szondi has named this state of the ego both the "Autistic Ego" and the "cosmodualistic Ego." Ironically, this mental state of the ego is a condition of the ego's feeling absolute omnipotence over the whole universe. The ego incorporates, or introjects, all the objects of the universe, which have already received all his projections of his own powers from the unconscious. And in the unconscious, powers are limitless. The ego is a cosmodualistic ego since it participates in a dual union with the cosmos and feels as powerful as the universe.

A key factor in this ego state and Lévy-Bruhl's participation mystique is that there must be a feeling of an aprioristic union of subject and object. ⁴⁶ In the narrator's situation in The House of Life he feels a spiritual "Birth-Bond" to his Beloved. In Jung's transference, the archetype of the anima-animus sexual union, or syzygy, is the aprioristic element." In Freud's transference, it is the oedipal complex of childhood that causes the transference. And Lipot Szondi's "Autistic Ego" state is based on the aprioristic presence of mutual family-type members carried in the genes of each member united in a "real" participation.

Heinz Kohut's two self-objects of omnipotent object, or idealized parent imago, and the grandiose self belong to the same process. Kohut indicates that the two self-objects can quickly change positions; thus, a narcissistic personality can idealize an object completely and then ignore it absolutely by taking back all the perfections given to the object back to himself, becoming a grandiose self. ⁴⁷ In the case of primitives, their cultural and religious beliefs keep them from consciously becoming aware of their projections and ultimately the omnipotent feelings that they personally have. They only see their power as coming from outside. Kohut states that the idealization of the superego is based on narcissistic libido rather than object libido. For this reason, the superego has an aura of absolute perfection of values. ⁴⁸ However, in the case of those who like primitives at the participation mystique stage have not developed a strong internal superego, persons, objects, gods, and things can serve as self-objects in the sense of being the receiver of all perfection and powers. The period of the omnipotent object and the grandiose self is the same and occurs after a cohesive self image is formed and before a permanent superego is formed. ⁴⁹

The separation of the lovers from the rest of the world into some "breathless" bower, field, grove, or nest, their union together, and the complete domination by the emotion of love--all these point to a paradise-like setting and situation. These first thirty-six sonnets have many features of a Garden of Eden. Lacking, however, in these sonnets is the sense of sin and guilt. Even the death of the first Beloved announced in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI) offers no sense of punishment as a reason for the narrator's expulsion out of his Garden of Eden. The presence of Love, or Eros, and Rossetti's strong emphasis upon the soul points to a Greek source for an equivalent paradise. The Greek word for soul is psyche, and the Greek myth about the meaning of the soul is "Amor and Psyche" in Apuleius's book The Golden Ass. (This same tale also appears at a significant point in the development of the main character in Walter Pater's Marius, the Epicurean.)

When Psyche became a young woman, she was so beautiful that crowds of people neglected their worship of Venus to view Psyche's beauty. Venus became so angry that she sent her son Eros to punish Psyche. The curse was that Psyche would be "consumed with passion for the vilest of men. ⁵⁰ This has parallels with the young men who cursed Narcissus, wanting him to be consumed with self-love that was to be frustrated. In this case Eros is carrying out Nemesis's role of preparing a place for the curse to be carried out; Venus is the real Nemesis, however. No man proposes marriage to Psyche, so her parents consult Apollo, who says that she must prepare for both death and a marriage with an immortal who is a dragon. This oracle is carried out, and in a wedding-funeral march, Psyche is led to a cliff and thrown over. But winds glide her to earth. Then she finds a "transparent fountain of glassy water" and in the heart of a grove a palace. This becomes a paradise when Eros disguised by the darkness of night comes to her couch and makes her his bride. His one admonition is that she must not strike a light. At night they are in perfect union as are the lovers in The House of Life. Every wish of Psyche's is granted--food, wealth, music, pleasure, sensual love. She is happy until she hears that her family is grieving over her supposed death. Then she wants to go to them and tell them she is alive. She even threatens suicide if she can not go. ⁵¹

Death was ever present so far in Psyche's tale of love and paradise. In The House of Life, death is present too from the very beginning. In the introductory sonnet, Death is an equal power on the other side of the coin that represents the soul. The underground world of death is evoked in Charon's image. In "Love Enthroned" (I) Life is "wreathing flowers for Death to wear." In the next sonnet "Bridal Birth," there is "Death's nuptial change." After the worshiping song of praise in the octave of "Lovesight" (IV), the narrator fears he will no longer see "the shadow of thee [i.e., the Beloved], Nor image of thine eyes in any spring." "Death's imperishable wing" is nearby. Even in "The Kiss" (VI) the thought of "death's sick delay" and the image of Orpheus coming out of the region of death with his Beloved behind him precedes the ecstasy of the kiss. The thirty-six sonnets close with the death of the first Beloved in "Life-in-Love" and the introduction of the second Beloved. Death has appeared at or close to the moments of greatest pleasure and ecstasy of love. The significance of the close relationship of death and love in connection to the character of Love and narcissism will not be clear until Death's full appearance in "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII) and his pervasiveness in the Willowwood sonnets. The paradise-like union between the narrator and his first Beloved that has a narcissistic underpinning is over and a new transformation awaits him.

NOTES

¹Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), p. 73.

²Hyman Spotnitz and Philip Resnikoff, "The Myths of Narcissus," Psychoanalytic Review, 41 (1954), 177.

³Robert Stein, Incest and Human Love (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974), p. xiii.

⁴Arthur C. Benson, Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 129; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence, ed. Paull Franklin Baum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 35. "Stillborn Love" (LV) contains the phrase "the house of Love."

⁵The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), p. 608.

⁶Oswald Doughty in A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Frederick Muller, 1949) and David Sonstroem in Rossetti and the Fair Lady (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1970) particularly explore the women in Rossetti's life as means to interpret his poetry.

⁷Gelpi, "The Image of the Anima in the Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," The Victorian Newsletter, #45 (1974), 1; Hyder, "Rossetti's Rose Mary: A Study in the Occult," Victorian Poetry, 1 (1963), 197.

⁸The Collected Works of D. G. Rossetti, p. 555.

⁹Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), pp. 3-5.

¹⁰Jung's first book in 1912 then entitled Psychology of the Unconscious and later in 1952 entitled Symbols of Transformation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956) introduced his concepts that the libido was not primarily sexual as Freud contended but was general psychic energy and that this unconscious energy appeared in consciousness as symbols. Jung further established the spiritual significance of incest figures such as the hero returning to the mother symbolically by entering the whale, or womb, and then fighting his way out to a higher state of consciousness. Jung thus interpreted Frobenus's "night sea journey" in spiritual and symbolic terms rather than as a Freudian personal unconscious manifestation of an incestuous sexual union with the mother. pp. 210-212.

¹¹Jung, The Archetypes, pp. 26-28.

¹²Ibid., p. 32.

¹³E. R. Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 15-16.

¹⁴Jung, The Archetypes, pp. 43-44.

¹⁵Ibid., pp. 65-66. Lipot Szondi [Experimental Diagnostics of Drives, trans. Gertrude Aull (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1952)] is the founder of Schicksalsanalyse (or Fate-Analysis) and believes, as Jung does ultimately, in the existence of both the Freudian personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Szondi, however, sees the archetypes as a rational and symbolic representation of the instincts or drives and adds another layer to the unconscious which he calls the Familial Unconscious. This is the source for particular drives that are passed on by the genes of particular family members to their offspring. His work traces the transformations of instincts into sexual areas, mental pathologies, archetypes, and cultural forms.

¹⁶Carl Jung, "Psychology of the Transference," The Practice of Psychotherapy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), pp. 167-175.

¹⁷Ibid., pp. 219-220.

¹⁸Ibid., pp. 224-225.

¹⁹Ibid., pp. 226-231.

²⁰The Collected Works of D. G. Rossetti, p. 558.

²¹Ibid., p. 417.

²²Ibid., p. 420.

²³Benson, Rossetti, p. 47; Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 74 and Plate 182.

²⁴Surtees, Paintings and Drawings, pp. 93-94 and Plate 238; Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters: With a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti (1895; rpt. New York: Ams Press, 1970), 1, p. 173.

²⁵Doughty, A Victorian Romantic, p. 265.

²⁶Family Letters, I, p. 173.

²⁷Doughty, A Victorian Romantic, p. 270; Family Letters, I, p. 208.

²⁸Sydney E. Pulver ("Narcissism: The Term and the Concept," Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 18 [1970], 320-323) presents the history of the evolution of the term narcissism from general usage to Freud's specific definition in his 1914 essay on narcissism.

²⁹Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," Collected Papers, 4 (1914; rpt. New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 47.

³⁰Ibid.

³¹John E. Gedo and Arnold Goldberg, Models of the Mind: A Psychoanalytic Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 67. These authors give psychoanalytical models of the mind which include both a narcissistic love and an object love development on the model of Eric H. Erikson's "epigenetic schema" in his book Childhood and Society but confined to the internal structure of the mind.

³²Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), p. 33.

³³James Hillman, "The Feeling Function," Lectures on Jung's Typology (New York: Spring Publications, 1971), pp. 113-129.

³⁴Ernest Cassirier, Language and Myth (1946; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1953), pp. 33-36.

³⁵Kohut, Analysis of Self, p. xiv.

³⁶Ibid., pp. 9-27; Grace Stuart in Narcissus: A Psychological Study of Self-Love (New York: Macmillan, 1955) presents a psychoanalytical study of the Narcissus myth without the clinical emphasis of Kohut's works. She uses literary sources to support her concepts. She and Kohut agree on all major points.

³⁷Kohut, Analysis of Self, p. 37.

³⁸Lipot Szondi, Ich-Analyse: Die Grundlage zur Vereinigung der Tiefenpsychologie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1956), p. 166.

³⁹Szondi, Experimental Diagnostics of Drives, pp. 127-130.

⁴⁰Szondi, Ich-Analyse, pp. 172-174; Schicksalsanalyse: Wahl in Liebe, Freundschaft, Beruf Krankheit und Tod, 3rd ed. (1944; rpt. Basil: Schwabe, 1965), pp. 15-18.

⁴¹Szondi, Ich-Analyse, pp. 166-170; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The "Soul" of the Primitive (1927; rpt. Chicago, Henry Regnery, 1966).

⁴²Kohut, Analysis of Self, p. 37.

⁴³Lipot Szondi, Triebpathologie: Elemente der exakten Triebpsychologie und Triebpsychiatrie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1952), p. 419.

⁴⁴Paula Elkisch, "The Psychological Significance of the Mirror," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 5 (1957), 235.

⁴⁵Szondi, Ich-Analyse, p. 172.

⁴⁶Szondi, Experimental Diagnostics of Drives, pp. 127-130.

⁴⁷Kohut, Analysis of Self, p. 92.

⁴⁸Ibid., pp. 41-42.

⁴⁹Gedo and Goldberg, Models of the Mind, pp. 81-86.

⁵⁰Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius (Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 5. This book is divided into one part as the original tale and one part as commentary.

⁵¹Ibid., pp. 3-13.

CHAPTER II

Darkened Love and Wild Images of Death

In "Pride of Youth" (XXIV), which is two-thirds the way through the first group of thirty-six sonnets, the narrator glimpses a view of life that contradicts his absolute faithfulness to his Beloved and his glorification of her. The narrator compares a child who reacts indifferently to someone's death to a "New Love" who quickly forgets an "Old Love." The comparison is extended to the "proud Youth" who is the bearer of this New Love. The Youth goes from one love to another as rapidly as a devout person counts the beads of a rosary while saying his prayers. The religious image of a rosary links the fickle Youth to the narrator's own religious devotion toward his Beloved and his idealization of her. The narrator particularly displayed his veneration of her in "Love's Testament" (III), "Lovesight" (IV), "Passion and Worship" (IX), and "The Lamp's Shrine" (XXXV).

This devotion to the Beloved ends when the narrator announces both the death of his first Beloved, or Old Love, and the presence of his second Beloved, or New Love, in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI). Unlike the child in "Pride of Youth" (XXIV), who gives the death of another person little thought, the narrator has greatly suffered from the death of his first Beloved. His own life has, in a sense, departed from him, and he only finds it in his new Beloved. He says to himself, "Not in thy body is thy life at all, / But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes." Before, he has been "sorrow's servant and death's thrall." Yet the narrator reacts like the proud Youth in that he has found a new Beloved. The brief span of the new love affair which is fully presented in the twelve sonnets after "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI) from sonnets thirty-seven through forty-eight strongly suggests that this process of replacing one Beloved by another might continue in the rapid manner of a worshiper counting the beads of his rosary. During his second love affair, the narrator will dimly begin to perceive the narcissistic nature of his love that will create emotional turmoil for him. Only in the Willowwood sequence will there be offered a possible way out of this potentially relentless exchange of one Beloved for another.

Death completely surrounds and pervades these twelve sonnets portraying the narrator's love for his second Beloved. The title of the sonnet "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI), which precedes this group of sonnets, is matched by this section's concluding sonnet entitled "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII). In essence, Death has been substituted for Life. The Willowwood sonnets immediately following the experience of the New Love deal explicitly with death. Love whom the narrator worshiped in the first thirty-six sonnets through his love for his first Beloved has somehow become transformed by the end of his second love into Death itself. This strange development has close ties to the intimate connection of death and love in the Narcissus myth and the psychology and archetypes associated with it. From the very introductory sonnet, Death has always been present, sometimes explicitly and at other times only indirectly or in a metaphoric sense. Death, however, completely permeates these last twelve sonnets before the Willowwood sonnets in which is achieved a climax for Part I of The House of Life.

"Pride of Youth" (XXIV) accurately forecasted the events of the narrator's relationship with his first Beloved. Similarly, this sonnet hinted at the close identity of the New Love to the Old Love. The loves that the proud Youth "lets fall" were compared to the beads of a rosary that are dropped after each portion of a prayer. Since the beads are quite similar or even identical, this suggests a close identity between the two Beloveds. In "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII), Love infers such an identity in his question to the narrator about his inconstancy. Love asks,

How canst thou gaze into these eyes of hers

Whom now thy heart delights in, and not see    

Within each orb Love's philtred euphrasy

Make them of buried troth remembrancers?

In his commentary on this sonnet, Paull Franklin Baum explains that euphrasy refers to a common eyebright that was used as a remedy for diseases of the eye.¹ By using this magic-like potion, Love will cause the narrator to see his Old Love in the eyes of his New Love and to remember his old faithfulness to her. In this sense Love will merge the two loves into one. Earlier, in "The Lovers' Walk" (XII), which ended the series of sonnets portraying the height of the lovers' intimate sensual and spiritual love, the narrator and his Beloved were "mirrored eyes in eyes." In the midst of their clinging hand and hand and their two souls forming a rainbow arch, the narrator saw his image in the reflecting surface of his Beloved's eyes. The narrator was not conscious at that point of the full significance of this reflected image, which was a reflection of the unconscious feminine nature of himself, now identified as the anima. Soon, in the first Willowwood sonnet (XLIX), the narrator's eyes will again be mirrored in another's eyes; this time he and Love's "mirrored eyes" will meet "silently / In the low wave." But right after the narrator's tears fall onto the image of the eyes, the eyes of his Beloved will appear. Whereas this scene will make explicit the true situation of the Beloved being a projected anima, only a subtle hint of this appeared in "The Lovers' Walk" (XII). Love, however, in "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII) makes it more explicit than previously that the narrator always projects his anima image onto his love objects. This anima image as already indicated, has predominately narcissistic characteristics.

In "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII), the narrator answers Love's charge of unfaithfulness and inconstancy by uniting the two loves under one great power: "Well / Thou knowest that in these twain I have confess'd / Two very voices of thy summoning bell." Throughout the narrator has declared his devotion to Love as the highest power, greater than the vessel of this love, which is each of his Beloveds. At times the Beloved and Love become one. Previously, in "Heart's Compass" (XXVII), after making his first Beloved become "the meaning of all things that are," the narrator asked a rhetorical question emphasizing the oneness of the Beloved and Love, "and is not thy name Love?" Later, in the Willowwood sonnet (XLIX) the oneness of Love and the Beloved will be demonstrated by the merging of the eyes of the two on the reflecting surface of the well. By that time the Beloveds will be one. Just as in participation mystique and in transference in psychoanalysis, there is a third overpowering force that unites two objects into a strong emotional relationship, so Love is this third overriding element for the narrator. In "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII) the narrator asks a rhetorical question, "Nay, Master, shall not Death make manifest / In these [i.e., the two loves] the culminant changes which approve / The love-moon that must light my soul to Love?" The narrator manifestly believes that he is developing in his love like the maturing change from a new moon to a full moon and that consequently he is not unfaithful to Love who counts the most, since the God of Love is more important than any form in which he appears. By evoking the "love-moon" as his guiding light for his soul, the narrator betrays his own ultimate changeable nature which is like that of the Youth who appeared in "Pride of Youth" (XXIV).

The moon will continue its cycle of change as long as it exists; the title of "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII), therefore, appropriately sets the stage for the themes of mutability and inconstancy. In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance particularly, the moon was the planet that ruled the world of earth and change. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Juliet recognized the true nature of the moon by cautioning Romeo not to swear his devotion to her by the inconstant moon. The whole Western tradition in religion and literature equates the moon with mutability.² The narrator's choice of images ultimately reveals his real motivation despite his strong outward protests to the contrary.

Unlike the fickle, proud Youth and the child who will not linger over the death of another, the narrator reacts strongly in the hidden depths of his emotions to separation from his Beloved. In "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII), Love wonders at first how the narrator can avoid having "a little spray of tears" cast on his soul by the memory of the "dead face" of his Beloved, who at one time was his very life. Love's speculation that the Old Love must have greatly affected the soul of the narrator is sound since both the narrator's relationship to his New Love and his own mental state is in depressed conditions and since he is on the verge of suicide. Just a glance at some of the titles of this group of twelve sonnets suggests the narrator's low mood and divided nature: "Sleepless Dreams" (XXXIX), "Severed Selves" (XL), "Secret Parting" (XLV), "Parted Love" (XLVI), "Broken Music" (XLVII), and "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII). The sonnets "Through Death to Love" (XLI), "Hope Overtaken" (XLII), and "Love and Hope" (XLIII) present love and hope amid desolation, gloom, suicidal thoughts, and images of death.

In contrast to his relationship to the Old Love, the narrator completely neglects any devotion and idealization of the New Love. Instead, the lovers' relationship is predominately like the one described in "Heart's Haven" (XXII) as part of his relationship to his Old Love. Each became a haven for the other in times of trouble. Usually, the narrator comforted his first Beloved when she was "filled with faint alarms." But his pains were of greater magnitude since she comforted his "spirit's hurtling harms." In his idealization of his first Beloved, the narrator transferred to her his own power and she became a strong heart's haven; he said, "I crave the refuge of her deep embrace,-- / Against all ills the fortified strong place / And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms."

In "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI), which immediately precedes the twelve sonnets depicting the narrator's New Love, the narrator has found a new "Heart's Haven" and "fortified strong place" in his New Love, for he finds life not in his body but in hers. By transferring his life to her, the narrator has figuratively placed his soul in her keeping. The soul in Jungian terms is the Archetype of Life, for the soul is the animating force in man. In his present situation, the narrator feels a close identity between himself and his new Beloved, but since his soul is in turmoil, the new Beloved equally shares in this. Whereas in the first love affair the narrator constantly praised Love and the Beloved and drew strength and power from her through a participation mystique, the narrator with his New Love has focused a great part of his attention upon his own mental state of gloom and intimately involved his new Beloved in it. It is as if she now has become him and has taken over the same emotions. Whereas the narrator's love of his first Beloved occurred in quiet fields, groves, harbors amid bright sunlight or soft moonlight as typified by the bright noon-day Love of "Silent Noon" (XIX) and by the "wan moon" in the grove provided by "Love's Worship" in "Passion and Worship" (IX), the narrator's love has entered a realm of darkness.

In "Severed Selves" (XL), the narrator is dejected at being separated from his new Beloved. He asks himself, "Ah! may our hope forecast / Indeed one hour again, when on this stream / Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam?" Indeed, the narrator's love for his new Beloved has been darkened. The ostensible reason for this darkening is that the two lovers are constantly being separated. Instead of images of union, the opposite images of separation dominate. In "Severed Selves," the narrator feels that he and his new Beloved are "Two souls, the shores wave-mocked of sundering seas." The images of separation in this sonnet such as "Two separate divided silences" and stars "lost" "beyond dark trees" contrast markedly with the images of the "hand that clings in hand," "meeting faces," and "two souls softly spann'd / With one o'erarching heaven of smiles and sighs" that earlier in "The Lovers' Walk" (XII) depicted the relationship of the narrator to his first Beloved. Then a rainbow arch united the two, and still earlier in "The Kiss" (VI) they blended together "Fire within fire," whereas now in this second love, the lovers are like two continents sundered by vast seas.

The narrator's transference of his own pessimistic concerns to his new Beloved overshadows any possible idealization and glorification of her. Instead, the new Beloved shares equally his darkness. In "Cloud and Wind" (XLIV), the narrator brings to his New Love his own thoughts of death that were revealed earlier in "The Morrow's Message" (XXXVIII), where he begs Mother Earth to receive him. He asks, "Love, should I fear death most for you or me?" He then contemplates the consequences of each dying before the other. Far different was his relationship with his first Beloved. Formerly, in "Gracious Moonlight" (XX) when he felt extremely pessimistic about life, his "drear soul" desired his first Beloved and her optimistic view of the universe despite the rising of clouds and wind to disturb the stillness and peace. His first Beloved then was the moon which grew "queenlier in mid-space / When the sky" darkened. Then his first Beloved was a "cloud-rapt car" thrilled "with intenser radiance from afar" and "a governing star" that gathered and garnered "from all things that are / Their silent penetrative loveliness." However, now when the narrator confronts the adversities represented by cloud and wind, symbols of change in "Cloud and Wind" (XLIV), the narrator thinks of suicide by "Forcing the straits of change," if his new Beloved should die, and by trying to "wrest a bond from night's inveteracy." Instead of the first Beloved's optimism of gathering "silent penetrative loveliness" from this world, the pessimistic narrator now foresees death and "unsunned gyres of waste eternity." Instead of a harvest of "loveliness," his new Beloved will learn that "Hope sows what Love shall never reap."

The narrator essentially dislikes change and images that mirror it. Unlike Wordsworth who loved the wind, which represented to him the stirring of the spirit and imagination, as shown in the opening of The Prelude, Rossetti basically dislikes the wind that brings change and is a symbol of pure spirit--a pneuma--which disturbs the soul, or psyche, whose concern is union, not separation. Jung calls the masculine element in man the spirit, or Logos, and the feminine element the soul, or Eros, even though Eros is still masculine. Logos' purpose is to discriminate, to judge, to analyze, and, ultimately, to divide; whereas Eros' purpose is to relate.³ This function of Eros links him to the feminine. Love in The House of Life is the Roman Cupid and the Greek Eros. Love in his role as uniter--and he has other roles as we shall see--conflicts with pneuma, or spirit, or Logos, who wishes to divide. This is clearly announced in the first sonnet "Love Enthroned": "Love's throne was not with these [i.e., the Powers]; but far above / All passionate wind of welcome and farewell / He sat in breathless bowers they dream not of".

Clouds, too, can represent change, but are perfectly innocent for the narrator when only part of a larger landscape in the distance. In "Silent Noon" (XIX), "billowing skies that scatter and amass" and in "The Lovers' Walk" (XII) the "cloud-foaming firmamental blue" are non-threatening as they are far from the actual place of the lovers, just as in "Love Enthroned" (I) Love's "bowers" are above "passionate wind." Clouds in an obscuring role can be threatening, however, as they are in "cloud-rapt car" in "Gracious Moonlight" (XX), in "cloudgirt wayfaring" in "Love-Sweetness" (XXI), and "gathering clouds of Night's ambiguous art" which through the Beloved's hand the "Love-god rends apart" in "Heart's Compass" (XXVII). Later after the Willowwood sonnets, in "Without Her" (LIII). the narrator will express his grief for the loss of his Beloved, who is the moon for him, by describing the space which she vacates as "The tossed empty space / Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away." The rack image appears frequently with the cloud image to stress the tortures involved for the narrator by the appearance of clouds.

After expressing his pessimistic views concerning the possible deaths of himself and his new Beloved in "Cloud and Wind" (XLIV), the narrator continues the theme of threatening change in the next sonnet "Secret Parting" by bringing in the images of cloud, moon, and wandering: "Because our talk was of cloud-control / And moon-track of the journeying face of Fate, / Her tremulous kisses faltered at love's gate." The narrator's own pessimistic concerns probably initiate these kinds of conversation and instill similar apprehensions in his new Love. In the first thirty-six sonnets centered on the narrator's blissful union with his first Beloved in an Eden-like world, or in the palatial-like realm of a Psyche or Eros, all the places of love were still, "breathless," and basically unchanging. Any winds or clouds of change were part of a distant horizon or were only a contrast to the static world of a "Silent Noon." Wandering, or aimless movement, was alien to this static world of idyllic union. Thoughts of death and change initiate images both of movement, wayfaring, and wandering and of Fate which means a controlled journey, the very antithesis of aimless wandering. Fate's role becomes more clear and significant in Part II, which is entitled "Change and Fate," but the death of the first Beloved has brought Fate more toward the foreground.

As a protection against change and wandering, the narrator and his new Beloved in "Secret Parting" (XLV) try to build a sheltered grove like the earlier ones that served the narrator and his first Beloved so well:

Thence in what ways we wandered, and how strove

     To build with fire-tried vows the piteous home

     Which memory haunts and whither sleep may roam,--

They only know for whom the roof of Love

Is the still-seated secret of the grove,

     Nor spire may rise nor bell be heard therefrom.

This grove is a place filled with images and is isolated from the sights and sounds of the outside world. It is quite similar to Willowwood, to Eros' palace for Psyche, and to Narcissus' own grove. It is a world for memory and sleep.

Why is there such a sharp contrast between the experiences of the Old Love and the New Love? Ostensively, the narrator has told Love in "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII) that these loves are "Two very voices" of Love's "summoning bell" and that they are just like the maturing phases of the moon. Yet the stream of the New Love has "darkened." The two Beloveds are closely identified in the narrator's mind and yet, as has been indicated, the glorification and idealization that was part of the Old Love is absent in the New Love. If the narrator followed the philosophy of the proud Youth, he would repeat all the happy moments of his first love in the second. Yet this does not happen. The great event that occurred before the new love was the death of the first Beloved. Although the narrator claims that he has recovered from this loss through finding a new love, the real key to his emotional state of mind is the death of his first Beloved. There rests also the overwhelming narcissistic nature of the narrator that has come forth again in his love affair with the new Beloved.

Sigmund Freud following some basic concepts of Karl Abraham gave the first clear analysis of a person's normal and abnormal reaction to the loss of a beloved person in his essay "Mourning and Melancholia."⁴ In melancholia, which represents an extreme reaction to a loss, the person loses all interest in the world, his self-esteem falls, and self-reproaches abound. In normal grief self-esteem does not fall (p. 153). The narrator's situation does not exactly fulfill these conditions although many aspects are present. Love's accusation that the narrator was unfaithful in "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII) is one instance of self-reproach, since Love is the narrator's personified emotion. The narrator's interest in the outside world has always been minimal, except for his love for his Beloveds. But his range of interests in the love affair with his new Beloved has narrowed considerably from that of his first love affair to topics and themes of separation, death, sleeplessness, and suicide, moderated by the themes of Hope and Love. Self-esteem means confidence in oneself, and this certainly is lacking in the narrator. Before with his first Beloved, the narrator shared the power and optimism of the Beloved through a kind of participation. This is not true of his relationship with the new Beloved.

Freud also indicates that in melancholia and mourning, the person loses the capacity to adopt a new love object and centers his thoughts on the lost dead person (p. 153). This apparently is not the situation with the narrator, for he seems to have found a new replacement for the lost object. His interest, however, centers on death and separation; consequently these interests come within the realm of melancholia on this score. Apparently, in some ways the narrator does not fulfill the requirements of the most severe form of mourning--melancholia, which may become a form of psychosis.

Another pioneer in the diagnosis of melancholia, Sándor Radó, concentrates on the developments that occur within the ego in melancholia and its more moderate form depression. Radó amplified Freud's and Abraham's concepts and introduced new ones. Whereas in melancholia, as Freud noted, the person vociferously accuses himself of all kinds of wrong-doings, the depressive conceals his disturbance.⁵ The processes in both melancholia and depression are predominately unconscious (p. 155). Only the symptoms appear on the conscious level. The narrator does not conceal his unhappiness from his new Beloved, but he does refrain from any continual clamorous self-accusations. The narrator in "The Morrow's Message" (XXXVIII) shows his dark pessimistic outlook on the future. The narrator asks a "Ghost" of today if the future will be as "pale" as he. The Ghost answers, "Yea, / Henceforth our issue is all grieved and gray." This illustrates one of the many instances of the narrator's melancholic or depressed state of mind of which he is consciously aware.

The process of depression working on deeper levels shows also in the narrator's symptom of not being able to sleep. In "Sleepless Dreams" (XXXIX), the narrator complains bitterly about not being able to sleep: "And why does Sleep, waved back by Joy and Ruth, / Tread softly round and gaze at me from far?" Sleeplessness is one of the outstanding signs for melancholia and depression (p. 156; p. 163). Equally prominent in both melancholia and depression are suicidal tendencies, which point to one of the core elements of the disorders (P. 162). In "Morrow's Message" (XXXVIII), after the gloomy prognosis for the future given in the octave, the narrator calls upon Mother Earth: "Mother of many malisons, / 0 Earth, receive me to thy dusty bed!" This same thought of suicide appears again in "Cloud and Wind" (XLIV) when the narrator, upon contemplating his new Beloved's dying before him asks, "Yet if you die, can I not follow you, / Forcing the straits of change?"

The narrator in his suicidal and depressed state feels he is in a "night deep-leaved" as he has described it in "Sleepless Dreams" (XXXIX). Dead leaves and leafless trees describe his wintry state of mind. Dead leaves throughout the sonnets have been most often associated with evil, death, and unhappiness. In "The Morrow's Message" (XXXVIII) just before the narrator contemplates suicide, he compares the future to "old leaves": "And each beforehand makes such poor avow / As of old leaves beneath the budding bough / Or night-drift that the sundawn shreds away." Earlier in "Lovesight" (IV), the narrator contemplated the death of his first Beloved and asked how he could go on if he should not see her nor her "shadow" "on the earth" or "image" of her "eyes in any spring," and "How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope / The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, / The wind of Death's imperishable wing?" Both leaves and wind with their bad connotations are linked with death. In the grim "Winged Hours" (XXV), where the narrator earlier contemplated his first Beloved's death, Love's song trilled loudly "through leaves more deeply stirr'd," and if she were to die, he would be in a state of "wandering round" his "life unleaved."

The narrator's thoughts of suicide and death have involved his new Beloved as shown in "Cloud and Wind" (XLIV), but the most vivid confrontation with death appears in "Through Death to Life" (XLI). Many of the images associated with change and death appear:

Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee    

     From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,--

     Like multiform circumfluence manifold

Of night's flood-tide,--like terrors that agree

Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,--

     Even such, within some glass dimmed by our breath,

     Our hearts discern wild images of Death,

Shadows and shoals that edge eternity.

The glass, or mirror, with its "wild images of Death" that appear like forms of nature and like the "labour-laden moonclouds," was foreshadowed by "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV). Then the narrator contemplated the extent of his love for the first Beloved and evoked images of eternity, birth, and death. The overriding image was a house that had windows and doors barred to the external elements. In "Through Death to Love" (XLI) the narrator and his new Beloved contemplate the eternal aspects of Death through a mirror. Later, in Willowwood, the narrator will again look at a mirror-like surface at a time when he will be meditating on death and separation. The mirror image strongly suggests the reflections that go on within his own mind. If this is so, then the mirror which the narrator looks at reflects aspects of his own mind, and this offers some insight into his internal processes which are obsessed with "wild images of Death."

Freud was interested in discovering the underlying processes within the mind behind the self-reproaches and aggression against oneself as shown in suicidal tendencies. First Freud determined that the person suffering a loss of a beloved person had identified with the person who died (p. 159). Identification means that the person introjects the image of the Beloved into his own ego. Following a hint from Otto Rank, Freud states that the object-choice of the grieving person is effected on a narcissistic basis. The melancholic and depressed person has regressed to the condition of narcissism (p. 159). Depression, melancholia, and some forms of schizophrenia are all based on a regression of libido to the fixation points located first in the anal stage where ambivalence abounds and finally in the oral sphere. Narcissism belongs to this final stage particularly; narcissism and orality are synonymous. The basic mechanism of narcissism is the oral mechanism of introjection. Freud calls this introjecting stage of orality, which is the basis of identification, a "cannibalistic stage" (p. 160). Once a loss object has been introjected into the ego--that is, through a process of identification--then the course of the narcissistic process is mostly internal. Otto Fenichel in his highly regarded textbook The Psvchoanalytic Theory of Neurosis defines narcissistic regression as the giving up of external objects and replacing them with relations within the personality.⁶

Identifications can, however, occur in two ways: active identification and passive identification. In the first thirty-six sonnets, the narrator mostly employed passive identification. In passive identification, or projective identification, the person loses himself in the object by projecting himself into and merging with the other person. He abandons himself through the merger and keeps his object as a love object. The basic model for this passive identification is the original dual union of mother and child. Passive identification is necessary for love, empathy, and intuition. Active identification, or introjective identification, is a process which occurs when the person must give up the external object. Originally, this was a natural process and occurred early when the child realized it must be separated from his mother. Death of the mother or a loved one can initiate active identification as a solution to the unbearable loss.⁷

This form of identification is the one dominating the narrator during his second love affair. The narrator is actively identifying with the first Beloved and at the same time passively identifying with the second Beloved. The narrator identified both actively and passively with the first Beloved but the great difference between the form of active identification in the first thirty-six sonnets and those after her death is that the first active identification was positive and the second was negative. The narrator actively identified, or incorporated, the good qualities of the Beloved to himself as exemplified in "The Kiss" (VI) where he felt to be a god or in "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV) where he felt he gained the "veriest touch of powers primordial" through her. The passive form of identification is that operating in Lévy-Bruhl's participation mystique, in Heinz Kohut's narcissistic object-choice of "omnipotent object" and in Freud and Jung's transference.⁸

The passive form of identification is less narcissistic than the active form of identification since an external love-object is maintained and there can be a mixture of both object and narcissistic object choices. The reason that an ordinary person who is grieving for a beloved person who died does not go to the extremes of melancholia or deep depression is that his love object is chosen mostly on the basis of object love. The person is a whole object, both good and bad. In melancholia and depression, however, narcissistic object choice is involved; therefore, the person easily withdraws his projections of parts of himself--the self-objects in Kohut's terminology--and actively incorporates them into his own ego.⁹ Lipot Szondi explains the negative form of active identification, or introjection, by his concept of "Ad-hoc," or instant moment, introjection. In the case of melancholia, a person introjects the image of his lost object in a moment of hatred.¹⁰ In a narcissistically-inclined person, death by a Beloved or even a willful separation may be perceived by the narcissistic lover as abandonment with the result being a narcissistic rage against the offending loved-one. The original model for this narcissistic rage is a baby erupting into a violent rage when the mother is absent.¹¹

Both processes of positive and negative active identification and passive identification occur within the same person. Szondi has identified the type of ego that is present in the state of active identification (introjective identification) as the Autistic, or Cosmodualistic, or Intro-projective Ego; this ego both projects its own attributes to other people and things and introjects the same qualities again. In the case of someone acting like a primitive in a state of passive identification (projection) and a positive active identification (introjection), powers would flow from the idealized and exalted loved object back to the lover or worshiper.¹² The emphasis in this situation is upon the external. Szondi also identifies the same ego state as the ego's condition in melancholia, except that the active identification is negative and the process has reverted from an external process to purely a narcissistic internal drama. The love-object is introjected as a hate object within the person's own ego.¹³ Heinz Kohut's analysis of the ego's state in depression and melancholia coincides exactly with Szondi's.¹⁴ All analyses of melancholia and depression stem in one way or another from Freud's concepts given in his essay on melancholia and mourning and those in Karl Abraham's work.¹⁵

What happens to the hate and aggression that accompanies a loss is central to an understanding of melancholia and depression. Freud determined that the self-reproaches by a melancholic person turn out to be accusations and reproaches against the separating or departed loved person. Instead of love being directed toward the old beloved object, hate is concentrated against it. Now that the object is incorporated into the person's ego, the person's ego is split into two parts: a criticizing part and the former beloved object that is now hated. On the basis of this analysis, Freud conceived the concept of the Ego Ideal as the criticizing part of the ego; later he called it the Superego (p. 158). This ambivalence of love and hate and sadism directed against part of one's ego stems from the early anal and oral stages of libido development.¹⁶ Sándor Radó carefully explained how the baby at the oral stage tries to keep hate and love separated. He introjects a good mother and keeps her separate from the bad mother that he has also introjected. Later the superego takes over these two separate states of the good mother and the bad mother, and the ego assumes the position of the child who can be good or bad.¹⁷ In melancholia and depression, the ego ideal, or superego, criticizes and turns hate and aggression against the submissive ego that has identified with the lost object. In mature object relationships, good and bad are not kept separate; the loved object may be both good and bad at the same time or may alternate between these two states. But in the case of narcissistic love, relations are based on perfection--either the object is omnipotent and perfect or the subject is. In narcissistic love, the loved object is either all good or all bad. Just as there is a split within the ego, there is a split between good and bad, love and hate, and active and passive.

Carl Jung in his last great work Mysterium Coniunctionis, which is centered on the union of opposites, particularly male and female, emphasizes that although the power of love tends to bring a male and female together, there must be an equally strong resistance that keeps them apart to account for the vehement attraction that binds them.¹⁸ Love and hate belong together in any love relationship. Szondi bases all of his analyses of human drives and ego defenses on the dialectical interplay between opposites. If a person's conscious tendency to cling to a love object is intense, then an equally powerful drive to separate is within the unconscious. If one overidealizes a love object, there is an equally strong drive to tear down the object. Any extreme evokes an equal extreme. Jung and Freud also base their analyses of the human mind and emotions on the interplay of opposites.

Freud explains sleeplessness and suicide tendencies on the basis of the internal aggression and hate directed toward the once-loved object that now is part of the ego. The person can not easily go to sleep because of his inability to withdraw his libido from the destructive process exerted against his hated ex-love object (p. 163). Sleep requires a withdrawal of energy and libido from external objects or from internal objects when they are objects of intense interest. Suicide is only possible because the ego can treat itself as a hated object, which then becomes involved with the most primordial reactions of the ego to all objects in the outer world (p. 163). Radó and all the analysts after him take the conflicts of depression and melancholia back to the original conditions that reigned when the person was a baby in relationship to his mother. Here forces of all-or-nothing dominate.¹⁹

The narrator in The House of Life is certainly unaware consciously of his aggression and hatred directed toward his first Beloved, who from his purely narcissistic viewpoint has deserted him by dying. Yet the narrator still has enough good will and love left to project this onto his second Beloved somewhat similarly as he did with the first Beloved. The intensity of his internal processes however modifies the good and optimistic elements available for projection or actual conscious awareness. In "The Morrow's Message" (XXXVIII) after the narrator calls on Mother Earth to receive him, Love reminds him that his new Lady still exists and waits to greet him. He is not so far in the depths of despair that he can not still love, even if on a narcissistic basis. In "Sleepless Dreams" (XXXIX) the narrator fears that Love will deceive him about preparing "Some shadowy palpitating grove that bears / Rest for man's eyes and music for his ears." Even in the depths portrayed in "Through Death to Love" (XLI), above "Death's imminent shade" soars the power of Love, who is still greater than death. "Broken Music" (XLVII) evokes again the mother image that was present when he contemplated suicide in "The Morrow's Message" (XXXVIII). "Broken Music" sums up the narrator's efforts to maintain his love for the second Beloved and to keep up his hope. The narrator compares his situation to a mother who listens attentively for the second sound of her baby that may alert her to his real need. The only voice that his "soul if fain / To list" is the voice of his Beloved. "No breath of song" is left except his Beloved's voice.

By this time in the sonnet sequence, the narrator has been separated also from the second Beloved, not by death, but by unstated circumstances. In "Parted Love" (XLVI) the narrator stresses that his days and nights have become battlegrounds--a good analogy to the internal strife going on concerning the introjected first Beloved--and only memories of his second Beloved are left. There is a suggestion that a similar internal process that occurred after the death of the first Beloved may repeat itself concerning his second Beloved. Memory speaks to him and lures him to "her passionate portraitures: / Till the tempestuous tide-gates flung apart / Flood with wild will the hollows of thy heart, / And thy heart rends thee, and thy body endures." The rending of himself by his heart is a good description of the depressive and melancholic aggression turned into self-aggression, or masochism.

The sonnet "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI) precedes the twelve sonnets that develop the narrator's relationship to his New Love. "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII) concludes the sonnet group. In this last sonnet, the ambivalent nature of the narrator's love becomes more apparent than ever before:

There came an image in Life's retinue

     That had Love's wings and bore his gonfalon:

     Fair was the web, and nobly wrought thereon,

0 soul-sequestered face, thy form and hue!

The face that Love bears on his flag is that of the narrator's Beloved. Since the two Beloveds are narcissistically chosen as objects and represent the narrator's anima and since both Beloveds have become separated from him, they have become essentially fused into one. It would be difficult to separate the two at this point in the sonnet sequence. One could argue, however, that the "veiled woman" who follows and identifies herself as being one with Love and proclaims that both are Death could be the first Beloved. The image on the flag would then be that of the second Beloved. But as Love has now become Death, the second Beloved, now an image on his flag, would be associated with Death. The identities of the two Beloveds again merge. Death, Love, and the Beloveds have become as one. In "Parted Love" (XLVI), "Memory's art / Parades the Past" before the narrator's face "and lures" his "spirit to her passionate portraitures." In "Death-in-Life" (XLVIII) an image, not a person, appears in "Life's retinue." It is as if Memory's art is working within the narrator's mind. This new image has the same revolutionary and transforming effect that spring has:

Bewildering sounds, such as Spring wakens to,      

     Shook in its folds; and through my heart its power      

     Sped trackless as the immemorable hour

When birth's dark portal groaned and all was new.

The narrator is shaken to his foundations by this revelation and thus is somewhat prepared for the veiled woman's news that Love, she, and Death are all one. His own hidden internal conflicts reveal that Love involves hate and that love can lead to the rage to kill and to ultimate death of beloved objects that are part of one's most intimate being. The appearance of the image of Death who replaces Love represents the narrator's most explicit conscious recognition of the dual nature of his love so far in the sonnet sequence.

The narrator's experience of the death of his first Beloved--which played out its drama basically beyond his conscious awareness yet made its presence felt through his pessimism, depression, sleeplessness and suicidal thoughts--was essentially a psychic event. In the old terminology of religion the narrator's soul was in turmoil. In Jung's concepts, the narrator's anima was speaking to him even though he did not fully understand the message on an intellectual level.

The tale of Amor and Psvche has, as we have seen, left a story of the development of Psyche, or soul, which in Jungian concepts is represented by the anima. Like the narrator in the first thirty-six sonnets, Psyche was in an ideal Eden world where her love excluded all outside influences. Yet from the first, Psyche was involved in both a marriage of love and death. Apollo decreed that she must be given to a dragon who is a god and that her marriage procession was to be a funeral march as well. The encounter of Psyche with Eros, or Love as he is called in The House of Life, is strictly seen from within the feminine soul. Her story and ultimately myth is that of a Kore figure's, or daughter's, encounter with love. Erich Neumann, in his analysis of the tale, emphasizes that Psyche is the human soul; she is a daughter of the earth and has become a new earth Aphrodite, or Venus, who has rivaled the old Mother Goddess Aphrodite, who came from the sea and represents all the primordial powers and fertility that ignores human wishes. Psyche, however, represents and is the human soul.²⁰ Psyche is basically a daughter figure and her lover Eros a son figure. Brother-sister myths, twin myths, and meetings with the anima and animus dominate in son and daughter experiences more than the conflict with the mother. The focus of Psyche's tale is not on a hero or heroine finding liberation from an evil mother figure, as in the pattern of the ego as hero who opposes the mother dragon representing the unconscious. Rather it is on the reconciliation of Psyche to masculine nature as represented by Eros. She seeks her destiny in love and eventual submission and not in the violence of conquest and killing.²¹ Her fate begins and ends in love.

The narrator's relationship to his Beloveds, who are anima, or soul, figures, in The House of Life is similar to that of Psyche and Eros but strictly from the masculine viewpoint of the ego, which is the real hero in all the ancient epics and myths. The narrator submits himself to his Beloveds as a worshiper of them as manifestations of the god Love. Psyche plays the same role in relationship to Eros. Unlike the heroes in old epics who are in conflict with mother figures and who are ruled by Logos, or the powers of separation and discrimination, Rossetti's narrator, like Psyche, is dominated by Eros, or the desire to unite. Wordsworth's The Prelude, like the old epics, is concentrated more on Logos, the desire to separate, particularly in Wordsworth's poem the desire is to separate from the powers of Mother Nature.

Do hate and aggression play any role in Psyche's relationship to Eros as it did with the narrator's internal grieving reaction to his first Beloved's Death? Psyche's sisters who are married off to old men and feel no love for them continually bombard Psyche with suspicions and hatred against Psyche's lover who refuses to let himself be seen, since he visits only at night and permits no light to be present. In the ancient patriarchal and matriarchal systems, the model for a woman-and-man relationship was Hades' raping of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. Love was a rape and Persephone's marriage to Hades was a form of death.²² That is why Psyche's marriage was also a funeral. Finally Psyche took the advice of her sisters to light a lamp and to carry a razor to protect herself when she faced the dragon, or beast, who was her lover. This was an aggressive act on Psyche's part. The result on the surface was a disaster. She struck the light, nicked herself with the razor which serves as a symbol for Eros' arrow of love, and immediately fell passionately in love with Eros, who was revealed in the light in all his splendor of a god. Anger at her violation of his prohibition, Eros leaves, and thwarts her love, and promises that her child will be born a mortal not a god. This conscious act of a human Psyche has opened the way for love to enter the relationship between a man and a woman, but at this point all is disaster.²³ Psyche has destroyed her bliss in her Eden-like world. Separation, pain, and even death may await her. In the narrator's situation in The House of Life his first Beloved died and he has to confront death. Consciously he tries to drown his thoughts of death, but death, hate, and aggression are present in his soul.

Psyche does not realize it yet in her relationship with Eros that he is a dragon or beast. Neumann points out that Psyche's actions show that she "hated the beast and loved the husband." Because of this dual nature of her love, she permitted her sisters to persuade her to defy Eros' prohibition.²⁴ Eros is a dragon, a Hades figure of death, and the male who rapes; consequently in the feminine mysteries and matriarchy, the maiden is really sacrificed to a monster of death, just as this occurred with Persephone.²⁵ Separation and the presence of death are central to Psyche's transformation from being in complete unconsciousness and under the total domination of Eros to a higher stage of development and relationship to the male in love.

Psyche constantly resorts to thoughts of suicide. When Psyche first requested to visit her sisters, because she worried about them thinking she was dead, Eros at first opposed her. She threatened to slay herself.²⁶ Her aggression and hatred of Eros was turned inward as it happens in depression and melancholia. Her real effort at suicide, however, occurs typically after Eros flees away from her and deserts her. She follows him for a while and then in despair throws herself into a river in an act of suicide. The river saves her and Pan aids her.²⁷ Psyche feels both love and hate toward Eros, but the hate is buried inside and is turned against the part of her mind that now contains the image of the hated Eros. Consciously she loves him. Later in her trials, Psyche will constantly consider suicide.

Psyche and the narrator in The House of Life have both experienced an Eden-like bliss and an abrupt end to this state that brings forth thoughts of death and suicide. The narrator's first Beloved left him through death and the second Beloved through unexplained circumstances. In both cases the results were the same since the narrator was separated from his Beloved. Psyche's own actions instigated her separation from her loved one. The anima in all cases separated from the male and this appears to be crucial in the transformation and development of the soul in any love relationship.

Aggression, hate, death, and possible suicide are not absent either in the myth of Narcissus. Narcissus' father Cephisus followed exactly the old patriarchal pattern of man's relationship to a woman. Cephisus drew the maiden Liriope into the depths of the river and raped her. Cephisus is like Hades, who raped Persephone, and not only in being a rapist but being a god of an unconscious realm; in his case, he was a river god. Narcissus provides a link too with the Hades-Persephone myth. After his death, Narcissus became a flower and it was this flower that bloomed profusely in a field that lured Persephone away from her companions.²⁸ Narcissus connects ancient feminine mysteries of Kore and Demeter and the traditional masculine custom of rape. In the Pausanias version of the Narcissus myth, Narcissus' image in the pool is that of his identical twin sister who died. Like the narrator in The House of Life, he fell in love with an anima image that represents his dead sister's image. Unlike the narrator, Narcissus did not project any good anima image onto a living person; he did project his good internal feelings onto an external image with which he fell in love. Like the narrator and Psyche, however, he has undergone the process of depression and melancholia and actively identified with his dead sister by introjecting her image. This must have been done in anger, since Narcissus isolates himself at the behest of Nemesis and apparently commits a slow suicide by not eating or leaving the isolated grove. Not eating is a classic indication of introjection of a hated object.²⁹ Hyman Spotnitz and Philip Resnikoff in their psychoanalytic analysis of the Narcissus myth see the same self-aggression directed toward a hated part of the ego as described by Freud.³⁰ The same process occurs in the Ovid version of the myth, except that both love and hate are confined to Narcissus himself. He loves excessively his own self image that is external in the pool, and since love must also include its opposite hate, he internally hates a part of himself in his ego as much as he loves himself externally in the pool. Also since Narcissus' own parents hated each other in the ancient patriarchal and matriarchal manner where rape, hostility, death, and marriage all were one, any kind of identification with his parents would result in incorporating these two simultaneously erotic-provoking and hating parent figures into his own mind.³¹ The Ovid myth, however, raises more questions about the relationship of death and suicide to Narcissus' self-love and self-hatred than are supplied by a purely psychoanalytic viewpoint. The Narcissistic elements in the Willowwood sonnets will offer a broader standpoint than the psychoanalytic analysis.

An image that "had Love's wings and bore his gonfalon" has appeared "in Life's retinue" for the narrator in "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), and Death, Love, and the Beloveds are now all one. The same equation has appeared in the Psyche and Eros myth, the Narcissus myth, and in the Freudian interpretations of the extremes of love and hate appearing in melancholia and depression. The mysteries and paradoxes raised in these twelve sonnets where Death turns into Love await more development and transformation. The paradox of Love, Death, and the Beloveds being one needs further exploration. The forthcoming Willowwood sonnets offer a climax and the beginning of new transformations that will affect Love, Death, the narrator, and the Beloveds, who are now essentially one.

NOTES

¹The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence, ed. Paull Franklin Baum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 118.

²Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (1955; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 129-183.

³Ibid. , p. 179.

⁴"Mourning and Melancholia," Collected Papers, 4 (1917; rpt. New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 152-170. Henceforth all citations will be in the text. Karl Abraham, "Notes on the Psycho-Analytical Investigation and Treatment of Manic-Depressive Insanity and Allied Conditions," Selected Papers of Karl Abraham M. D., trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (1911; rpt. New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 137-156.

⁵Sándor Radó, "The Problem of Melancholia," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9 (1928), 421.

⁶The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), pp. 401-402.

⁷Lipot Szondi, Experimental Diagnostics of Drives, trans. Gertrude Aull (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1952), pp. 151-152.

⁸Lipot Szondi, Ich-Analyse: Die Grundlage zur Vereinigung der Tiefenpsychologie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1956), pp. 197-198.

⁹Heinz Kohut, "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 14 (1966), 246-247.

¹⁰Szondi, Ich-Analyse, p. 200.

¹¹Heinz Kohut, "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 27 (1972), 384-387; Radó, "The Problem of Melancholia," pp. 425-426.

¹²Szondi, Experimental Diagnostics, pp. 127-130; Lipot Szondi, Lehrbuch der experimentellen Triebdiagnostic, 3rd ed. (Bern: Hans Huber, 1972), pp. 158-160.

¹³Lipot Szondi, Triebpathologie: Elemente der exakten Triebpschologie und Triebpsychiatrie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1952), pp. 342-44.

¹⁴Kohut, "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism," pp. 246-247.

¹⁵Besides Karl Abraham's previously cited essay on manic-depressive insanity is his essay "A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders" written in 1924 and included in the same Selected Papers cited previously.

¹⁶Karl Abraham explores these aspects concerning libido in depth in his "A Short Study of the Development of Libido," pp. 418-470.

¹⁷Radó, "The Problem of Melancholia," pp. 432-436.

¹⁸Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 89.

¹⁹Two of the best summaries of the history of the development of the concepts of depression and melancholia that stem from those of Freud, Abraham, and Radó are in Otto Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (pp. 387-406) and Bertrand D. Lewin's The Psychoanalysis of Elation (New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1961), pp. 20-39.

²⁰Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius (Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 86-89. This work is divided into the two parts: "Amor and Psyche" from The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius and the commentary by Erich Neumann.

²¹Ibid., pp. 82-83.

²²Ibid., p. 62.

²³Ibid., p. 79.

²⁴Ibid., pp. 76-77.

²⁵Ibid., pp. 62-63.

²⁶Ibid., p. 13.

²⁷Ibid., p. 28.

²⁸Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1940), p. 86.

²⁹Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, p. 389.

³⁰Hyman Spotnitz and Philip Resnikoff, "The Myths of Narcissus," Psychoanalytic Review, 41 (1954), 174-176.

³¹Ibid., p. 176.

CHAPTER III

The Soul's Sphere of Infinite Images

At the time of the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator has fallen to the depths of despair and has reached a point of crisis in his life. He has lost his first Beloved through her death and has been separated from his second Beloved forever through a symbolic death since she only appears in the rest of the sonnets as a figure of memory. The narrator's reaction to the death of his first Beloved dramatically affected his relationship with the second Beloved. By the time of the Willowwood sonnets, the images of the two Beloveds are difficult to distinguish from each other and are essentially one. They both are identical in the sense of having separated from the narrator.

The Willowwood sonnets open with Love and the narrator alone in a setting, which as we have already seen, matches that of the Narcissus myth as narrated by Ovid. The appearance of the image of the Beloved's eyes in the woodside well indicates that the Pausanias version of the Narcissus myth, where Narcissus' identical twin sister appears imaged on the surface of the water, will dominate the foreground of the Willowwood sonnets. In the background, however, will be the Ovid version, where Narcissus tries to unite with his own identical male image. The Willowwood sonnets open with the narrator first seeing his and Love's "mirrored eyes" in the water; they close with "Love's face/ Pressed" on the narrator's neck and both of their heads in Love's "aureole." This union of Love and the narrator has as much significance for the whole sonnet sequence as does the narrator's confrontation with his Beloved's image in the well. Ovid's version portraying Narcissus facing his own identical male image will not be explored in depth until after we have seen how the narrator meets his problem of being separated from both his Beloveds, who have now coalesced into one image.

After the narrator's image appears in the well, Love begins to sing his song about Willowwood. The narrator can not concentrate fully on Love's song since his own memories of his past with his Beloveds constantly intrude. He feels like "souls disused in death's sterility" who are in a state of limbo awaiting for their "new birthday" into their final state. The narrator's memories of his and his Beloveds' past selves appear to him as "a dumb throng" and as "shades" "alive from the abyss." The narrator's own memories and Love's song are "meshed" so that the narrator's "half-remembrance" of his and his Beloveds' past selves blends with the Willowwood figures as depicted in Love's song. The narrator's own memory of all the "mournful forms" of himself and his Beloved as separated selves from his own present self matches the condition of both memory and dream where one's self appears as a character upon a stage with others. The narrator's comparing images of himself and his Beloved as "shades" arising from "the abyss" also evokes the image of the Greek Hades as depicted in Homer's The Odyssey, where Odysseus calls upon the shade Tiresias to give him essential information in order that he may end his long separation from his beloved wife Penelope. As indicated earlier, Willowwood is a place where a well is located near a grave; thus, images of lost people of one's memory or actual images of dead persons naturally appear in such a somber setting. Ovid's version of the Narcissus myth also shows such a limbo or death-like atmosphere as pervades both the setting for the narrator and Love and that for Willowwood itself as portrayed in Love's song. The real setting for Love and the narrator in the Willowwood sonnets is closely identified with that within both the narrator's memory and Willowwood. The emotional atmosphere is certainly identical in all the settings presented in the Willowwood sonnets. Love's depiction of the denizens of Willowwood aptly fits the narrator's own emotional condition:

What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood,

     What long, what longer hours, one lifelong night,

Ere ye again, who so in vain have wooed

     Your last hope lost, who so in vain invite

Your lips to that their unforgotten food,

     Ere ye, ere ye again shall see the light!

These images of suffering and despair already have appeared in the narrator's love affair with his second Beloved during which the death of the first Beloved darkened the second love. After a second loss, the narrator has reached the "fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood."

This phrase "soul-struck widowhood" has great importance both for the narrator's present condition and for his future transformation. Edward F. Edinger, a Jungian, in Ego and Archetype traces the etymology of widow to its meaning to part. The word widow as well as the word orphan, as Jung has indicated, point to what Jung calls the individuation process. Edinger observes that "prior to widowhood one is not yet an individual, indivisible, but is still subject to the parting process." In fact, individuality is "the son" of the widowhood experience. Until one is separated from the person or thing that he depends upon, he is not really aware that he is "unique and indivisible." Edinger concludes that for individuation to occur dependent projections must be broken.¹

When the narrator loved his first Beloved, he was in a state of participation mystique, or transference, where he projected all his powers onto his Beloved and worshiped her. Lipot Szondi calls this state Participation or Dual Union. When in addition to projection, the narrator takes back some of the first Beloved's powers to his own as in "The Kiss" (VI), then to Szondi this is "the Cosmodualistic Ego" or a condition of "intro-projection."² The narrator, for brief moments, became god-like and as perfect as the first Beloved. This latter ego state occurs less frequently than the first in the narrator's relationship with the first Beloved. Essentially his Beloved was a narcissistic love-object in Freud's terminology and a "self-object" in Heinz Kohut's nomenclature. The narrator's Beloved exerted the same power of fascination as did Eros over Psyche in the tale by Apuleius. In this first love affair, the narrator was in a state of bliss and innocence as was Adam in his Garden of Eden and Psyche in Eros' palace.

The first Beloved's death, however, ends this blissful state, and the narrator becomes a widow in actuality. Critics who interpret The House of Life biographically would say that the first Beloved was Lizzie Siddal and that the narrator as Rossetti was a real widow.³ The narrator, however, was not conscious of being in the "fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood" after the death of the first Beloved, although in reality he was suffering her death in the depths of his soul, despite all his attempts to love his new Beloved. The narrator's efforts to project his anima upon the second Beloved as a repetition of the process that created his blissful existence with the first Beloved proved futile. Quickly, he became separated from her and Love turned into an image of Death in "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII).

In Willowwood, the narrator no longer projects his image of his anima upon a live person; the anima image remains only as a projection upon the surface of the well water. The images of his Beloveds are also a part of his memory's "passionate portraitures" as was depicted in "Parted Love" (XLVI). Love sings of the narrator's Beloved as held "wandering" in "Willowwood" (LI). All these internal "portraitures" of the Beloved and the anima are images, and this very fact points to the essential nature of the soul or the psyche which the anima image represents. The anima archetype itself is an image or personification and not the psyche itself. The unconscious contains all opposites. As the anima image is feminine, it can not, thus, represent the whole psyche, which is both conscious and unconscious and both masculine and feminine. For the male, the anima, however, is the most prominent archetype that leads him to his full psyche and particularly to the collective unconscious. The Wise Old Man archetype plays the role of the psychopomp for the woman's conscious ego.⁴

The nature of the soul is to invoke the unconscious both as a real entity and as a reservoir of images residing in the collective unconscious. These images appear in the conscious mind constantly as images of the present and of memory and in dreams. This basic concept of the soul has actually more pagan than Christian ties. The New Testament consistently refers to the soul as a spirit or pneuma. Christianity has fused the feminine soul and the masculine spirit into the masculine form.⁵ This is not surprising since early Christianity was a masculine religion with the masculine trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Soul belongs within the pagan realm of feminine mysteries. As E. R. Dodds has demonstrated in his The Greeks and the Irrational, there are two kinds of souls: a feminine soul and a soul which is purely masculine and is strictly-speaking pneuma, or spirit. The earliest Greek concept of the soul was that it was life itself and was closely identified with thymos, or emotion, whose seat was the mid-rift region. This concept of the soul as an archetype of life was modified by the invasion of Eastern thought into the main body of Greek thought. The culmination of this thought about the nature of the soul and the cosmos occurred in Gnostic philosophy.⁶

Hans Jonas cites a corpus of Greek writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus as the longest known source for Gnostic thought. It was published in the sixteenth century and is a "remnant of an Egyptian Hellenistic literature of revelation called 'Hermetic' because of the syncretistic identification of the Egyptian god Thoth with the Greek Hermes." Hermes as the father of Eros, or Love, attains great importance in the union of likes that occurs in the Willowwood sonnets.⁷ Jonas further states that the first treatise of the work, which is called "Poimandres," is "a prime document of independent pagan Gnosticism," despite some Jewish influence.⁸ Many of the concepts concerning the soul and spirit can be traced to this important document since it gives both the full myth of the creation of the cosmos, the soul, and the spirit and the myth of the eventual redemption of the spirit. This work, too, shows the intimate connections between the soul and images and both the union of opposites and the union of likes.

The part of the myth of creation depicted in the "Poimandres" that directly concerns the soul begins after Nous, who is God and Light, first created Darkness from which arose moisture, earth, air, fire, and the Word, or Logos. Earth and water being feminine sink to the bottom of the cosmos. All this is in the thought of the Nous, or God. Love and beauty play key roles at every stage of this Gnostic version of creation. The feminine Will of Nous becomes enamored with the beautiful archetypal world created by Nous and wishes to create a sensible world which will contain her progeny souls. In essence, the Feminine Will joined with the son of Nous, who is Logos, or the Word, to create the material cosmos. Nous created another son called the Demiurge, who in turn created a material universe in the upper cosmos consisting solely of fire and air. Logos, or the Word, who had been joined with the natural world of earth and water then returned to the upper regions of the Demiurge. Out of fire and air, the Demiurge created the seven planets, which he called the Governors. These surround the sensible world and their government is called Heimarmene (or Destiny). They rotate around the earth.⁹ Although this upper cosmos is part of the material cosmos, it is the thinnest part and thus most spiritual. Fire and air thus become linked with spirit.

The final state of souls comes about when Anthropos, the Divine Man, enters upon the stage of the creation of Nature. This Anthropos, who is hermaphroditic as was his father Nous, sees the work of his brother Demiurge and asks to be allowed to be creative too. Love enters the myth again because the seven planets become enamored with the Anthropos. Each of the seven planets starting with Saturn as the most outer planet from earth gave the Anthropos part of its own nature.¹⁰ This part of the myth is the basis for the astrology belief that the planets determine one's character and astrology's concept of Fate, or Heimarmene, determining one's ultimate destiny at birth. Hans Jonas has noted that a narcissistic motif appears in this phase of the Gnostic creation concerning the Anthropos.¹¹ Actually, different characters, gods, and goddesses become enamored with beautiful images throughout every phase of the creation myth.

After traveling through the seven planets and being clothed with their individual characteristics, the Anthropos wishes to break through the periphery of the circles of the Governors and exert his power over lower Nature and her mortal beings and animals. Similar to Narcissus, the Anthropos leans over l'armature des sphères, or the vault of Harmony, and shows his image which has the same form as Nous to feminine Nature below. When Nature sees the image of the Anthropos, who now has inexhaustible beauty, all the energy of the Governors, and the form of Nous, she smiles with love, for she had seen the same features "se refléter dans l'eau et son ombre sur la terre." As water and earth, Nature receives the image and shadow of the Anthropos just as the water in the pool receives Narcissus' own image. Like Narcissus, the Anthropos, after perceiving this "forme à lui semblabe présente dans la Nature, reflétée dans l'eau," loved it and wished to dwell in it. Being divine, his wish was granted immediately, and he came to inhabit the form where reason had not resided before. Feminine Nature then receives him, embraces him, and unites sexually with him; they then burn with love. This union of the Anthropos, or Divine Man, and Nature explains the dual nature of man; one part of man is mortal through the body and immortal through the essential Anthropos. Although man has power over all things on earth, he is subject, being mortal, to Fate because even though a part of him came from above l'armature des sphères, he has now become "esclave dans cette armature." The iron braces of the spheres of the planets are like a suit of clothing enclosing the spiritual element of the Anthropos.¹²

"Love's Fatality" (LIV), which appears shortly after the Willowwood sonnets, expresses a similar idea in relationship to the dual nature of Love. Love is "Linked in gyves" with "dread Desire of Love Life-thwarted" and is "shackled with Vain-longing," which is another manifestation of Desire and Love. Images of Fate step in when Desire of Love bitterly complains:

         Alas 0 love, thus leashed with me!

     Wing-footed thou, wing-shouldered, once born free:

And I, thy cowering self, in chains grown tame,--

Bound to thy body and soul, named with thy name,--

     Life's iron heart, even Love's Fataliy.

Desire of Love has become an agent of Fate in relation to Love, has shackled Love with chains, and--like the iron braces of the circles of the planets which form an armature around all life on earth--has become "Life's iron heart." Youthful Love is similar to the immortal essential part of the Anthropos, and the other form of Love, who is Desire of Love, is like the Anthropos caught in a body on earth.

The moral given in the "Poimandres" just after the Anthropos unites in love with Nature is that he is now conquered by both love and sleep. Above the Heimarmene, the hermaphroditic Nous and his sons did not sleep. After a discussion of the elements that went into the creation of the seven first men, the male part of the Anthropos, which was light, became the intellect of these first men and the female portion, which was life, became man's soul.¹³ Thus, soul appears in its original Greek concept as animating life and becomes forever linked with the body, or soma.¹⁴ The physical hermaphroditic nature is ended when Nous separates all the hermaphroditic creatures on earth including man into separate male and female beings. Then Nous gives his final pronouncement, saying that man would know his immortality through his intellect and know that the cause of death is love. This fall of the immortal Anthropos is quite similar to Adam's fall in the Garden of Eden through the same cause of love. The light of the Anthropos goes to man's intellect and reason and becomes always associated with pnenuma (or breath or air) and sometimes with fire.¹⁵ Light, reason, pneuma are masculine and generally accepted to be spirit or Logos.¹⁶ As in this Gnostic myth of creation, soul is generally believed to be connected intimately with life and the body, particularly the mid-rift region, or thymos, to the material cosmos ruled by the seven planets, and to the lower realm of the cosmos which is the Greek Hades.¹⁷

James Hillman, a prominent Jungian, perceives the soul's most intimate nature as being linked with images. He calls the soul a "reflective perspective," meaning a moment of time between us and events.¹⁸ This view is quite similar to Rossetti's definition of a sonnet as "a moment's monument" and the stasis of "Silent Noon" (XIX). Hillman sees the soul also as "a reflection in a flowing mirror." The soul points to the imaginative--or image-making possibility of human nature and all experiences of man that go through "reflective speculation, dreams, image, and fantasy." The soul is that part of man, in Hillman's view, that recognizes realities as primarily symbolic or metaphoric. Fantasy for him consists of images that run through one's mind in day dreams and night dreams and constantly in one's unconscious. Like Jung, Hillman believes man's psychic life consists of images that have a life of their own and are "self-originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete and organized in archetypal patterns.¹⁹

Walter Pater's famous concluding chapter of The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry is, in essence, a paean of praise for the feminine soul as depicted by the Greeks and by Hillman. Man's "inward world of thought," for Pater, is a whirlpool, yet when man turns to outer objects the flow of objects intensifies. Still, "when reflection begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence." These objects become impressions which are confined to "the narrow chamber of the individual mind." Pater sees man imprisoned in a "thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced." Pater's wall of personality is quite similar to the iron braces of the planets' circles comprising the armature that give fateful characteristics to the soul of man. Impressions in the mind , for Pater, emphasize one's isolation and the concept of "each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."²⁰ Like Rossetti, Pater inclines to the pagan, or Hellenism, more than to the Christian form of Hebraism. Hillman calls this dream world of the mind the essential activity of the soul or psyche in its broadest meaning. Both Pater and Hillman derive their inspiration for their conception of the psyche as a stream of images and impressions from Heraclitus.²¹ Drawing upon Kant's philosophy, Ernest Cassirer, who rejects the concept of the unconscious (as his is a phenomenological approach), has a similar view, nevertheless, since he defines man as "an animal symbolicum."²²

Hillman would, however, disagree strongly with Cassirer's view that images are limited to the conscious mind. Hillman examined the imagery given by Sigmund Freud in his book The Interpretation of Dreams to describe the realm of the unconscious and concluded that Freud's description of the unconscious matched perfectly the Greek's description of their underworld of Hades. Simple parallels exist like Freud's censor who guards the entrance to the unconscious being like both Cerberus and Charon and the slips of everyday speech being like the crevices and holes that open to the underworld. There is a parallel, too, concerning images. Freud indicated that one comes closest to defining the Id as "images" and as "a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement." Death instincts, too, exert powerful forces over the Id in Freud's view. One comes greatly under the domination of the Id in sleep where dream images abound. Hades, a God of Death, and Hypnos, the God of Sleep, both are in the underworld.²³

Hillman links soul, image, and image-making in dreams with the Greek underworld by his distinction between the underground and the underworld. The Greeks originally had two words for under earth: Ge refers to the underground of the fertile Mother Earth, and Chthon refers to the underworld, or netherworld, which is the cold, dead world of ghosts, shades, and spirits. This chasm world of Hades is as far below earth as is Heaven above it.²⁴ In the early Greek view, soul has a double nature; it is life and after death it becomes a shade in Hades. The immortal part of the soul goes down to Hades and remains there as an eidolon, or image. Hillman notes that the three dimensional world of the material is reduced into the two dimensional world of the underworld, which is "an existence of immaterial mirrorlike images, eidola." Hillman extends the definition of images to any kind of metaphor.²⁵ Since Hillman links the soul to image-making, the movement of the feminine soul is always downward and inward. Conversely, the direction of the masculine spirit is also vertical but ascending.²⁶

Hillman made one final important connection between the soul, or psyche, and images in his analysis of Freud's concept of dreams as being the result of wish-fulfillment. Freud said that the dreamer produces images in his dreams to satisfy his sensual and sexual wishes. Hillman points out that the initial expressed wish is never actually satisfied in a dream. Since instincts produce the dreams, the only wish that is satisfied is seeing "the images made by dreams." The psyche is satisfied by the images that it produces spontaneously. Hillman perceives this fulfillment of the wish by the creation of images as being "narcissistic, or that which satisfies Narcissus, the image in which the psyche sees its reflection, the image by which the psyche is able to reflect." This process is wholly psychic, wholly internal, and narcissistic.²⁷ Hillman thus believes that dreaming is an instinct like sleeping or eating and "images are its satisfaction like sleep and food." Freud views sleep as a return to primary narcissism, but, according to Hillman, Freud did not carry his conclusions far enough to arrive at the concept of the imagistic world of-the collective unconscious. Hillman sees Freud's use of the myth of Narcissus as part of his analysis of the human mind as an indication of Freud's own poetic turn of mind since the myth of Narcissus is "one of the favorite mythologems of poetic consciousness.²⁸

One distinction is particularly important concerning Jungians' use of the terms anima and psyche. Both mean soul; psyche being a Greek word and anima a Roman word. Jungians exchange them freely. There is, however, a distinction between the anima which personifies the psyche and the psyche itself. The anima is the feminine half of the archetype of the psyche that as a whole [1] is the source for the production of all the images and archetypes of the collective unconscious, [2] is internal, [3] is both masculine and feminine, [4] may include both the conscious and the unconscious, and [5] ultimately becomes the self. In general, psyche's favorite archetype to represent its multiple nature is the anima. Through the anima, a man's ego, in particular, is introduced to the whole psyche, the collective unconscious, and, ultimately, to the self. The word psychology, which means knowledge of the soul, indicates the major role of psyche, or anima, as a guide to the whole self or psyche. Jung sets a scale of degrees of introduction to the self. One's conscious ego first becomes aware of the personification of one's evil, hated, or corrupt side of one's personality; this is the shadow. Then one meets the anima who can lead one to the self, the psyche, the collective unconscious, or one can encounter the Wise Old Man who can be a psychopomp to the self.²⁹ Even the conscious ego itself is a personification; it personifies the unconscious.³⁰ Just as the Gnostic Anthropos was hermaphroditic, so is the unconscious and the self. The feminine anima leads the conscious masculine ego downward and inward toward the collective unconscious, the psyche, and the self; the masculine spirit, which can be represented by either an eternal youth (the puer) or a Wise Old Man (the senex), can also lead to the self, but its direction is upward and outward from the unconscious toward a spiritualization of the psyche and the collective unconscious. The ultimate goal in both cases leads to the same: the immortal part of man's being. Both immortal parts lead to the realms of the dead, whether in the underworld of Hades or the upper world of Heaven. Hillman points out that Zeus, the ruler of the day world and Heaven, is the brother of Hades, the ruler of the night world and underworld. They are actually doppelgängers, and their worlds are identical--the only difference being their perspectives. One sees the universe from above and through light; the other from below and through darkness.³¹

The Willowwood sonnets involve both of these perspectives, but the foreground of the sonnets is dominated by the anima image. The narrator sees the image of his Beloved in the water of the well. As we have seen, the narrator's anima image is predominately narcissistic. As the soul, the anima has the characteristics of life, body, and an immortal element, as shown by Greek beliefs and the Greek Gnostic myth of the Anthropos. The narrator has withdrawn his projections of his anima by necessity from live women and now in the Willowwood sonnets faces only an image of his anima.

In his analysis of the doppelgänger, or double, Otto Rank stresses the immortal nature of the double, which frequently appears as a shadow or mirror image. This double is the immortal soul.³² All those who have studied the double phenomena in psychology and literature agree that the double, or second self, is the immortal part of man, whether soul or spirit, and that the double is connected in some way with death.³³ The connection with death is mandatory since the double is the immortal part of the self. In "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), Death appears as an image, and this appearance of Death heralded the emergence of the anima image in the Willowwood sonnets. The narcissistic setting and the connections of Willowwood to a graveyard reinforce the idea of death and immortality. As we have seen, the images of the dream world and images of memory relate directly to Death's realm and to the soul's. The narrator himself is identified with the conscious male ego. In the analyses of the double, the narrator, main character, or focal character, is closer to the reader than the double, or second self, since both the reader and the narrator, or focal character, represent the mortal, empiric, or conscious ego.³⁴ When the double appears, the conscious ego has to face its problems presented by the double and attempt to resolve them in some way. The appearance of the double is actually a criticism of the conscious ego's attitudes.³⁵

The narrator in The House of Life has met disaster two times in his relationship with his Beloveds and somehow has to resolve this problem. In the case of the first Beloved, the narrator tried to annul their separation by introjecting her image into his own ego--a process of active identification--but as he did this in a state of anger, he directed his own hatred and aggression against his own ego that now contained her image. His own gloom, pessimism, and suicidal tendencies grossly affected his love relations with his second Beloved. After this the narrator has to face the same problem of separation for a second time.

The appearance of the anima image on the surface of the water of the well indicates that the narrator has now become conscious of the anima, who can lead him inward to the psyche, the collective unconscious, and the self. The presence of the well in the Willowwood sonnets already points to the solution. In the first Willowwood sonnet, the narrator expresses his emotional thirst that the waters of the well promise to fulfill: "He [Love] swept the spring that watered" his "heart's drouth." Then the image of his Beloved appears in the water, and they kiss throughout Love's song about Willowwood. The kissing represents a union like that in "The Kiss" (VI) except that now the union is in the realm of soul, or psyche. The fact that the union is not portrayed in sexual terms as was done in "The Kiss" (VI) and "Nuptial Sleep" (VIa) emphasizes the spiritual, or more accurately, the soul aspects of the union.

Eros, or Love, who is presiding over this union has a dual nature just as does his father Hermes. Both Eros and Hermes are represented by the Herm, which is the phallus, and the Herm often appears in graveyards. This indicates Eros' and Hermes' connection to both love and death. Eros, however, in his later forms is a more idealized and dimmer version of the phallic and masculine qualities of his father Hermes.³⁶ Eros can, thus, lead to a union of opposites in the internal as well as the external world.

The last Willowwood sonnet (LII) emphasizes the union of the narrator and his Beloved in imagery that repeats that of the most sensual of Rossetti's sonnets "Nuptial Sleep" (VIa), which was excluded from the 1881 edition of The House of Life. In the Willowwood sonnet, the narrator and his anima image are like two roses that meet together and "cling through the wind's wellaway" and "near the end of day / The leaves drop loosened where the heart-stain glows." In "Nuptial Sleep," the lovers cling together after they stop kissing. When the lovers separated, they "sundered" like two "married flowers" "outspread" from one 'knit stem." The lovers' mouths still "burnt red" and "Fawned on each other where they lay apart." The "burnt red" mouths resemble the "heart-stain" that "glows" in the rose centers in the Willowwood sonnet. The drowning image appears in "Nuptial Sleep" as the two lovers sink deep into a blissful sleep together. In the Willowwood sonnet, however, the face of the anima "fell back drowned, and was as grey / As its grey eyes." The narrator remains fully conscious and aware after this union with the anima, and the anima sinks into the depths of the water.³⁷ Symbolically, by sinking, the anima has now withdrawn into the unconscious realm where she belongs. She will no longer be projected out of the unconscious onto a live woman as was done before. Jung indicates that in order for a person to become relatively free as an individual and start on the path to individuation--that is, to integrating the ego with the rest of the psyche--one has to withdraw his projections, particularly that of the shadow and the anima.³⁸ Water is the great symbol for the unconscious, and the anima has sunk back into it. Her face being "grey" is a representation of the symbolic death of the anima. Paradoxically, only through death can there be a renewal or new birth. The narrator concludes that he may never see his Beloved's image, or anima, again: "and if it [i.e., the image] ever may / Meet mine [i.e., his eyes] again I know not if Love knows." This indicates a conscious resignation of his anima as a projected image upon another woman. The cycle of repetitious love affairs of the narrator acting like the inconstant Proud Youth is broken.

The next action of the narrator is a climatic moment in his transformation. He says, "Only I know that I leaned low and drank / A long draught from the water where she sank, / Her breath and all her tears and all her soul." A primary function of the anima is to lead the conscious ego to the collective unconscious and ultimately to the self.³⁹ The conscious ego can never fully integrate the anima, which as an archetype personifies the psyche. Integration of some contents of the unconscious occurs only at moments of change and insight. Her task done, the anima had to return to the waters of the unconscious. She successfully led the narrator to drink deeply of the waters of the unconscious and in this way causes him to slack his "heart's drouth." His thirst was not only physical but spiritual.

Following John Layard, Jung has distinguished between exogamous marriages and endogamous marriages based on "kinship" libido. We have seen that transference phenomena, participation mystique, and forms of incest have been founded upon kinship, or incestuous relationships. The marriage or union of any relatives is incestuous. Freud's Oedipal complex is based on the projection of the mother and father images onto others. Jung, however, makes the distinction that incest can indicate a spiritual union. In fact, incest is always a spiritual problem. That which belongs within has become externalized. Jung sums up his view on incest with: "Incest symbolizes union with one's own being, it means individuation or becoming a self .... Incest is simply the union of like with like."⁴⁰ The "union of like with like" here signifies the union of related persons such as brother and sister as was exemplified in "The Birth-Bond" (XV). The most narcissistic union outside of the union of identical twins of the same sex is the union of identical brother and sister twins. Primitives fear the birth of a brother and sister as twins because they believe the two have copulated together in the womb and thus have broken the incest taboo.⁴¹ John Layard in his investigation of the marriage systems and taboos concerning incest concludes that the incest taboo forces a person to realize incestuous wishes on a spiritual plane of the gods and heroes; on a personal level incest taboos promote the spiritual realization of the anima within.⁴² Modern day Christianity promotes the projection of the anima onto an external woman; the narrator in Part I externalized his anima in this tradition.⁴³ The narrator has committed spiritual incest with his anima, and their prolonged kiss symbolizes their union.

The narrator has drawn from the unconscious certain elements that will now belong to him on a conscious level. He drank his anima's "breath," which signifies the pneuma, or masculine spirit. Since the anima represents the psyche as a whole, she can lead the ego to masculine elements. Much of the masculine spiritual powers that the narrator projected upon his Beloveds will now reside within him. In drinking "her tears," the narrator consciously recognizes all the emotional affects that go with separation from his Beloveds. No longer will Love, as he did in "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII), be able to ask the narrator whether he can "Cast on" his own soul "a little spray of tears." The narrator will fully remember his loss and his sad feelings that went with it. Tears will become a central part of his theory of poetry. The narrator finally drinks "all her soul." At the death of his first Beloved, the narrator psychologically drank all the soul of his Beloved by unconsciously incorporating her image into his own ego--a form of active identification. However, this was done in a negative emotional frame of mind, and he consequently had to contend with a negative anima. Here the situation is reversed, for the narrator is fully conscious of incorporating the image of his Beloved--at this point, really both Beloveds--into his ego, and, most important, he is doing it in a positive frame of mind. His identification is both active and positive.

Since he is introjecting the image in an unangry emotional state, he can react to the loss of his Beloved in a normal manner of grief, which is exactly the opposite of the extreme states of melancholia and depression as outlined by Freud in his essay on melancholia and grief. "Without Her" (LIII), the sonnet immediately following the Willowwood sonnets, portrays a normal grieving reaction to a loss. "Love's Fatality" (LIV) shows the narrator's recognition of his humanness with its consequent limitations by Fate. "Stillborn Love" (LV) expresses the narrator's regrets over hours of love that might have occurred but did not.

The Beloved will continue to appear throughout the rest of the sonnets but not in the personal manner of these last few sonnets or those preceding them in Part I. The three sonnets entitled "True Woman" (LVI, LVII, LVIII) indicate the end of a purely personal relationship with a Beloved. In these sonnets, the Beloved is universalized into a "True Woman," a kind of archetype of the woman for the narrator. In the later phases of his love for the first Beloved--particularly in the sonnets from twenty-five through thirty-five--the narrator tried to universalize his Beloved by moving her toward cosmic images. In the sonnets "True Woman" the universalization actually occurs.

In "Heart's Hope" (V), the narrator asked a rhetorical question:

By what word's power, the key of paths untrod,    

     Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,         

     Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore

Even as that sea which Israel crossed dryshod?

Part I so far has shown the depths of Love, and the Willowwood sonnets have indicated a crossing from a type of spiritual bondage--despite its Eden-like trappings--similar to that of an Egyptian-like captivity into a new land of promise and independence. Jung indicates that the Red Sea signifies a form of "healing and transforming baptism waters." For unconscious or unaware individuals like the Egyptians, the Red Sea is death, but for those who are truly conscious of their situation as the narrator is, the Red Sea is "a baptismal water of rebirth and transcendence.⁴⁴

In Willowwood, the narrator becomes conscious of his true condition during a state of inflation and with an absence of projections onto a Beloved. The well in the Willowwood sonnets has become a well of baptismal waters. The narrator's hope in "Heart's Hope" (V) was to universalize his love for his Beloved through his sonnets: "Yea, in God's name, and Love's, and thine, would I / Draw from one loving heart such evidence / As to all hearts all things shall signify." Drawing from his own heart evokes the image of drawing from the depths within his heart as one would draw water from a deep well.⁴⁵

In the first of the "True Woman" sonnets entitled "Herself" (LVI), the narrator praises the body of True Woman in the octave, calling her "the flower of life," and in the sestet, he observes that "Heaven's own screen / Hides her soul's purest depth and loveliest glow." After Willowwood, the narrator realizes that the soul, or anima, is truly within the depths of a person. Soul is a valuable thing hidden in depths, like the "wave-bowered pearl" and the "heart-shaped seal of green / That flecks the snowdrop underneath the snow." All the mirror images given before Willowwood were always somewhat indirect in implication, but in the second sonnet of "True Woman" entitled "Her Love" (LVII), the narrator's projection process that ruled earlier becomes quite direct in its imagery. The narrator, now taking an objective and more universal view, uses third person in discussing love. He states directly, "She loves him; for her infinite soul is Love, / And he her lodestar." With his first love, the narrator sometimes equated his Beloved with Love as in "Heart's Compass" (XXVII) where she is a compass that not only points to the North Star, or lodestar, but is "the meaning of all things that are" and is Love himself. In "Gracious Moonlight" (XX), his first Beloved is "like a governing star" that "Gathers and garners from all things that are / Their silent penetrative loveliness."

After Willowwood, the anima is internalized, is subordinate to Love, and takes its place among the universal archetypes of the unconscious. In "Her Love" (LVII), the narrator continues to describe man's relationship to True Woman in direct terms. His description fits his experiences with the anima image of his first Beloved. The narrator says, "Passion in her is / A glass facing his fire, where the bright bliss / Is mirrored, and the heat returned." This describes the narrator's projecting his own anima image and libido, or passion, symbolized by fire, onto the Beloved; the passion returns and is incorporated by the narrator. The second phase of True Woman's love is when a "stranger's amorous flame" is turned toward the True Woman's glass; then the flame turns to ice as if the glass became a cold unreflecting moon. When the first Beloved died and the narrator no longer loved his anima image, he became a symbolic stranger to this anima image; consequently any woman receiving his anima image would feel the negative quality of it as did the second Beloved. Despite all this, the True Woman remains faithful to her true love: "her pure fire to his / For whom it burns, clings close i' the heart's alcove."

In the last sonnet of "True Woman" entitled "Her Heaven" (LVIII), the narrator raises True Woman to the heights and calls her a heaven, for whom his "weak notes" are "sung." A note of reality comes in the last line, since the narrator has learned by this time that eventual separation is always a part of any union when viewed from a universal perspective that encompasses the beginning and the end:

                  Yet shall Heaven's promise clothe

Even yet those lovers who have cherished still

     This test for love:--in every kiss sealed fast

     To feel the first kiss and forebode the last.

Two results of the narrator's withdrawing his projections of his anima and incorporating it have been his acceptance of his loss of his Beloved in the flesh and his universalizing of women. Another result of his union with his anima and incorporating contents from the unconscious is the emergence of a burst of creativity. Rossetti, himself, in December of 1868 began writing poetry again after fifteen years of relative silence. He composed the four Willowwood sonnets and wrote his brother William that they were the finest thing he had done.⁴⁶ Afterwards, Rossetti wrote many more sonnets and gathered together his poetry for his first book of poetry Poems published in 1870.

The essential ingredient for creativity is a union of opposites in order to produce an "unknown and mysterious third" thing.⁴⁷ The biological union of male and female to produce a baby is a basic model for creativity. Out of two opposites is produced a third, a new, unique being. The artist must, therefore, be conscious of his bisexuality and through a psychic coitus, or syzygy, of the female and male components of his psyche produces his creation. To be able to create, an artist must become intimately aware of his inner anima, or feminine component.⁴⁸ Everyone possesses both feminine and masculine parts of his mind as Szondi has clearly demonstrated in his analysis of the foreground personality, which may be predominately feminine or masculine, and a background personality which is the exact opposite.⁴⁹ Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his concept of the secondary imagination in Biographia Literaria gave one half of his definition to the process of unifying, stressing all the while the biological aspect of vitality necessary to the imagination. Unless the conscious male ego unites with the soul as did the narrator in Willowwood, no image-making, or imagination, is possible. The masculine component of creativity is the Logos which discriminates, analyzes, takes apart; Coleridge included this aspect of creativity in his secondary imagination concept as the first half of imagination which "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates." Eros, or Love, however, is needed to bring the masculine and feminine opposites into a union.

Jungians speak of the place where Eros brings the opposites together as a metaxy, or intermediate region, which extends from the spiritual to the physical. This special region may be conceived as a kind of special psychic space between two realms of opposites. This inner vessel-like space impedes all outward action and focuses the person's attention on his inner space and the realm of images, or imagination. The moment of time at which Eros intervenes is called by K. Kerenyi das Moment des Unerklarlichen, meaning the moment of the inexplicable.⁵⁰

In religions, this place where the opposites unite and something new appears from the psyche or spiritual realm is called "the world navel." Among the features of the world navel spot is a spring or well, symbolic of the inexhaustible waters of the unconscious.⁵¹ The well in the Willowwood sonnets meets all the characteristics of a world navel spot. The male and female components of the narrator unite and a psychic space--a vessel-like space--is created. Love, or Eros, presides and evokes the dream world of Willowwood where shades come from the abyss of Hades or from memory. Jung in his analysis of the union of opposites in the transference uses a series of pictures from a Rosacrucian book Rosarium Philosophorum to prove his ideas. The central feature of this union of opposites is the Mercurial Fountain.         This fountain overflows into a well-like container below where the opposites are united, being in the form of a man and woman.⁵²

"Love's Last Gift" (LIX), the last sonnet of Part I and "Transfigured Life" (LX), the first sonnet of Part II, verify the fruits of the union of opposites in the Willowwood sonnets. In "Love's Last Gift," Love presents to the narrator, who is "his singer," "a glistening leaf." This is the laurel leaf, the plant sacred to the god Apollo. Love speaks of the blooms he gave the narrator in spring and summer but offers the laurel leaf as a protection against autumn and winter that are approaching. Love says, "Only this laurel dreads no wintry days: / Take my last gift; thy heart hath sung my praise." Apollo is a god of poetry, and Love's giving this god's sacred plant signifies the gift of Song to the narrator. Now that his anima is internalized, the narrator can unite with her in spiritual incest--a privilege granted to gods, heroes, and poets. Eros, or Love, will essentially disappear now and play no active external role in the rest of The House of Life. He too becomes internalized and performs his function of uniting within the mind of the narrator. Eros, thus, unites mental images and concepts as well as male and female in love.⁵³

The introductory sonnet of Part II "Transfigured Life" (LX) is an apt title to conclude the twelve sonnets that began with the Willowwood sonnets and that center on a dramatic transformation of the narrator into an artist and an individualist. The narrator evokes the opposite images of the mother and father and the third thing that they created in their union--their child. This child combines both "the father's" and "the mother's face," yet as the child grows into maturity this "blended likeness" changes into "a separate man's or woman's countenance." In mythology, the child is divine because he has united the opposites into a new being but particularly because he opens the possibility for some new spiritual idea or thing to come into being. Eros, or Love, is a divine child or puer aeternus.⁵⁴ The Youth in "Pride of Youth" (XXIV) belongs to the same classification.

In the sestet of "Transfigured Life" (LX), the narrator cites the art form of Song, which is the product of the union of the opposite emotions of "Joy and Pain." Out of this union, Song will give birth to passion in a mature state because Art, meaning craft and skill, will through its "transfiguring essence" subtly span passion like a harmonizing rainbow. The "one o'erarching heaven of smiles and sighs" that "softly spann'd" "two souls" in "The Lovers' Walk" (XII) is now replaced by an inner rainbow working in the service of creativity and poetry. The tears that the narrator shed out of sorrow in the first Willowwood sonnet now turns into an "abundant rain" which will revitalize the parched ground. The rain comes from a "song-cloud shaped as a man's hand." These images emphasize that creativity as from the Song and from the hand of a creator will quench the earth's thirst and end its drought. Tears and emotions will now be in the service of creativity and art.

The sources of poetry for the narrator are his passions of "Joy and Pain," and the twelve sonnets immediately following "Transfigured Life" (LX) focus on the making of Song and the memories, emotions, and inner life that are the sources for all his creativity. His anima is now within and all his love is centered on his inner world of images that belong to the realm of the soul.⁵⁵

"The Song-Throe" (LXI), the opening sonnet of those centered on the Song, presents the narrator's theory about the creation of poetry or his ars poetica. The narrator has stated in the preceding sonnet that passion is to be central to his creation of poetry. He restates this by saying, "By thine own tears thy song must tears beget, / 0 Singer!" The way the narrator will generate tears is quite similar to his description of True Woman's use of "A glass" in "Her Love" (LVII) to reflect her lover's "fire": "Passion in her is / A glass facing his fire, where the bright bliss / Is mirrored, and the heat returned." In "The Song-Throe" the narrator says, "Magic-mirror thou has none / Except thy manifest heart." Like the reflecting surface of True Woman's glass and the reflecting surface of the water of the well in the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator's heart will become manifest and reflect his emotions of "Joy and Pain." As a contrast to-his passionate sources for poetry, the narrator cites "the feathery jet / Of soulless air-flung fountains" which are "more dry / Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh." In the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator drank deep of the well waters containing soul. This slacked his "heart's drouth." The well that was in Willowwood was a living well and was no artificial container for holding rainwater and thus no source for verse "Cisterned in Pride." The narrator's inspiration is greatly drawn from the depths of his soul and the images appear on the surface of the water, the "Magic mirror," and his "manifest heart." These concepts of poetry if alone would give the impression of the narrator as being purely a spontaneous, Dionysian-like poet caught up in a manic display of emotions. This does not describe the sonnets in The House of Life.

"The Song-god," or "the Sun-god," is invoked in the sestet of "The Song-Throe." Apollo as the "Sun-god" is a hunter of the narrator's soul. The narrator's "skilled hand"--implying artistic control over his material--does not have any "august control" over Apollo's "quivered store" of arrows. The narrator has to depend on the inspiration given by Apollo to write his poetry; Apollo's arrow, like Love's arrow in the past, has to strike his heart and soul. Apollo as a god has connections with both the day world and the night world. As a sun god, he is connected to Mount Olympus and fosters the "clear, Olympian world of law and order," but he also is connected to vengeance, magic, and ecstasy.⁵⁶ He is the patron god of prophetic madness, as shown by his python priestesses at Delphi. In ecstasy, the person stands outside of himself and in enthusiasm, the god steps into him.⁵⁷ Both forms belong to Apollo's inspiration. Apollo has some qualities of Dionysus as the Apollo and Dionysus cults mingled by the 5th Century B. C.⁵⁸ Apollo's inspiring through enthusiasm and ecstasy, however, was limited to rare individuals such as his priestesses or devotees at his temple at Delphi. The purpose of a devotee going into a mediumistic trance in which the god Apollo would take over was for knowledge. Dionysus' inspiration was for a congregation and thus a public affair. Its purpose was for mental healing or just to be.⁵⁹ The narcissistic nature of the narrator would draw him more to a god who inspired individuals rather than the masses.

Apollo is also the patron of Orpheus, the lyre-god, who was mentioned in the key sonnet "The Kiss" (VI). Orpheus, in fact, was a messenger in Thrace proclaiming the spirit of Apollo to the worshipers of Dionysus.⁶⁰ In "The Kiss" the narrator compares his lady's playing upon his lips a "consonant interlude" to such "As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed / The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay." This situation of Orpheus at the moment of bringing his beloved Eurydice out of Hades and losing her because she looked back echoes the eventual separation of the narrator and his Beloved when her grey face fell back into the water of Willowwood well for the last time. Many of the early sonnets contain the seeds of later events.

In "The Song-Throe" (LXI), the narrator concludes his theory of poetry by using another reflection image. He speaks of himself, "But if thy lips' loud cry leap to his (i.e., Apollo's) smart, / The inspir'd recoil shall pierce thy brother's heart." Just like the glass of the True Woman reflecting passion back to her lover, the narrator as poet will reflect the arrow of Apollo from him onto the reader, who in turn will feel the same emotions as the poet.

Apollo not only inspires but demands hard effort of the conscious will since he represents male consciousness.⁶¹ In "The Heart of the Night" (LXVI), the narrator calls upon some Lords who are in sharp contrast to those who have been present in Part 1: "0 Lord of work and peace! 0 Lord of life! / 0 Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late, / Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath." Will and work are conscious attributes that must be applied to the inspiration coming through the soul and heart. The next sonnet "The Landmark" (LXVII) continues in this same line of self-accusation for not discovering his talents and applying his will sooner. The narrator asks if "the foolish well" was "the landmark" that marked his "point of turning." He thought that he could be passive and unaware and that "the stations of" his "course" would "rise unsought, / As altar-stone or ensigned citadel." In the Willowwood sonnets, he became conscious of his need and his situation and acted by drinking the water of the well. Here the narrator seems to be reflecting that he might have drunk earlier at this well which once he "stained" and "which since may have grown black." It is a true narcissistic setting since "no light" is left "nor bird" sings there. The narrator then turns and exclaims, "I'll thank God, hastening / That the same goal is still on the same track." This sonnet is a reminder that the narrator must continue to drink from the well of his unconscious and be in constant communication with the realm of the soul; otherwise, this living water will grow "black" from stagnation and disuse. No one can remain in a state of enthusiasm, ecstasy, or inflation for long, but once the path to these states are found, one can return again.

"The Soul's Sphere" (LXII) and "Inclusiveness" (LXIII) show both the sources of material for the narrator's poetry and paintings and the insecurity of any union of opposites. The image of "the soul's sphere" points to the realm of the self as well as the soul. Carl Jung listed many symbols for the self, which is a union of opposites into one being. The ultimate image for the self is God; in the natural realm it is often the sun. A circle and the sphere are the most perfect geometric symbols for the self. A square and cube also point to the self, but the antagonism of the two pairs or four pairs of opposites is emphasized more than it is in the case of the circle or sphere. By analogy to circles, spheres, squares, and cubes, "city, castle, church, house, room and vessel" can be symbols of the self. A wheel, whether static or in motion as an astrology wheel, can be a symbol of the self too.⁶² The appearance of these symbols of the self does not mean that one has united the opposites within oneself. Rather, they appear as a compensation for the confusion, disorder, and disorientation created by any confrontation of opposites.⁶³ Jung's patients drew mandalas during their process of individuation in which they tried to integrate the opposites within.

The number four is the number for the self, since the number four is the basis of the square. The Willowwood sonnets in which the narrator most dramatically tries to integrate the opposites within his being is the only group of four sonnets among those in the sonnet sequence specifically numbered. The Willowwood sonnets are also at the exact center of the whole sonnet sequence.

The octave of "The Soul's Sphere" (LXII) emphasizes the negative aspects of "the soul's sphere." The opposites of the moon and the sun are not united but are in a state of decay and imprisonment. The narrator describes them: "Some prisoned moon in steep cloudfastnesses,-- / Throned queen and thralled; some dying sun whose pyre / Blazed with momentous memorable fire." In Part 1, the Beloveds ruled the narrator's emotions and often he compared them to the moon as in the sonnets "Gracious Moonlight" (XX), "The Moonstar" (XXIX), and "The Love-Moon*' (XXXVII). After Willowwood, the narrator has come under the influence of the Sun-god Apollo and has taken on the masculine qualities of the sun. In "The Hill Summit" (LXX), the narrator will describe the setting of the sun as a "feast-day of the sun" and himself as "a belated worshipper." After receiving Love's last gift of the Song, the narrator has emerged in his own right as a poet and an individual, although one still struggling with his own inner conflicts. A creator of an imaginary world is like a god creating a cosmos and like the sun that sheds light and gives life to those planets surrounding it. The "prisoned moon" and "dying sun" in "The Soul's Sphere" aptly apply to his memories of his own "lamentable night" experienced after the death of his first Beloved. His heart has "fed" on these sights and thus becomes "Pain," one of the parents of Song mentioned earlier in "Transfigured Life" (LX). The ultimate source for his poetry is "the soul's sphere of infinite images." The sestet reveals that the other parent of Song, "Joy," is also present in the "soul's sphere." The joyful images reveals "Visions of golden futures" and the painful images: "that last / Wild pageant of the accumulated past / That clangs and flashes for a drowning man."

"Inclusiveness" (LXIII) also stresses the "infinite images" within the soul. Every "changeful" guest comes to the inn "each in a different mood." Each sits at a "roadside table" and eats, and each person's life is "a soul's board set daily with new food." The soul dines daily on its life experiences, which are different for everyone. The opposites of mother and father with the child are presented briefly. The narrator, then, speculates on another symbol of the self, a room. The narrator says that the room that he sits in can be in the memory of "separate living souls" and can represent "joy or pain" to each. A soul in Heaven may remember this room in joy or a soul in Hell remember it in pain. Each soul is thus unique, and as Walter Pater has said, "each mind" keeps "as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." "Inclusiveness" can also depict the "poetic consciousness" of Narcissus.

In concentrating on the gift of Song from Love, the narrator still plunges into his memory for the materials for his lyric sonnets. As William E. Fredeman has observed in his analysis of the whole structure of The House of Life, there is a "retrospective mood" for the entire sonnet sequence.⁶⁴ Just as William Wordsworth's The Prelude presents a mature narrator looking back over the development of his mind, the narrator in The House of Life surveys his life from the vantage point of a mature man. After the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator continually moves further and further away from the purely personal toward the universal, the collective, the cultural, and, thus, the world of the imagination. His personal experiences become transformed--or in the Freudian sense subliminated--into poetry and painting particularly but also briefly into other collective and artistic concerns such as philosophy as shown in the three sonnets entitled "The Choice" (LXXI, LXXII, LXXIII) and both music and philosophy in "The Monochord" (LXXIX).

The predominant interest of the narrator in the twelve sonnets from "The Choice" (LXXIII) through "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV) is Art in the form of painting. "Life, the lady of all bliss" in the second sonnet of "Newborn Death" (C) not only gave the narrator Love and Song as children to grow up with but also Art. After the narrator presents two philosophies in "The Choice," he gives the third that expresses the philosophy: "Think thou and act." The narrator surveys "Man's measured path" already "gone oer"; the narrator is the beneficiary of all these cultural achievements sown by those in the past. In the sestet, he realizes that the future is infinite: "And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,-- / Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea." In the next three sonnets entitled "Old and New Art" (LXXIV, LXXV, LXXVI), the narrator views the art of painting in the same broad-sweeping way as he did the cultural achievements of Man in general. "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII) and "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII), although they may stand alone as pure forms of sonnet poetry, are actually sonnets dedicated originally to paintings and, consequently, the details of the sonnets are intimately related to the paintings. "Soul's Beauty" was originally written for Rossetti's own picture "Sibylla Palmifera" and "Body's Beauty" for his "Lady Lilith" picture.

In both sets of twelve sonnets concentrated on Song and Art respectively are other sonnets not directly related to these personal gifts belonging to the narrator. Painting as an art form is not mentioned in the sonnets after "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII), yet the narrator's attitudes will shift in quite significant ways from those expressed in the earlier twelve sonnets revolving around Song. The introduction of Song and Art represents significant new transformations for the narrator. The last sonnet of the group of twelve initially associated with Art marks an end to even these still personal expressions of the narrator by means of Song and Art. This sonnet is entitled "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV).

Throughout Part I, bowers, nests, groves, coverts, secluded fields have sheltered the narrator and each of his Beloveds in turn. Willowwood was the most secluded and private of all. In Part II, groves, coverts, and bowers have given way to more cultural forms of secluded places such as a room, an inn, a house. A glen is a narrow valley, which still is a sheltered place. In "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), the narrator, however, feels that these kinds of natural shelters belong to children and youths: "And yet, farewell! Far better shalt thou fare / When children bathe sweet faces in thy flow / And happy lovers blend sweet shadows there / In hours to come." Some dramatic change has occurred within the narrator at this stage of his development, for he says to the glen:

Nay, do thou rather say "farewell" to me,

Who now fare forth in bitterer fantasy

     Than erst was mine where other shade might soothe

     By other streams, what while in fragrant youth

     The bliss of being sad made melancholy.

A "bitterer fantasy" has taken over the narrator now, and the glens, coverts, and groves of his youth are to be left behind for others younger than he. Youth and the prospect of old age and death that accompanies it are prominent in the narrator's thoughts; he concludes, again speaking to the glen: "Thine echoes had but one man's sighs to bear / And thy trees whispered what he feared to know." The suggestion is that the trees are whispering the word death.

Part Il of The House of Life is entitled "Change and Fate." The sonnets that have not so far been mentioned or discussed in any detail are linked with the theme of Fate. In the Willowwood sonnets, a union of opposites occurred that greatly transformed the narrator. There was also a union of likes in Willowwood, and this union is just as important for Part II as was the union of opposites. This union of likes promises to clarify the full meaning of the title of Part II, "Change and Fate," as well as the title of Part I, "Youth and Change," and also to show the Janus nature of both parts of the overall organization of The House of Life.

NOTES

¹Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 163; Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (1955; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 17-18.

²Lipot Szondi, Experimental Diagnostics of Drives, trans. Gertrude Aull (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1952), pp. 126-130; Szondi, Lehrbuch der experimentellen Triebdiagnostik, 3rd ed. (Bern: Hans Huber, 1972), p. 151.

³Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Frederick Muller, 1949), p. 367 and pp. 382-384.

⁴James Hillman, "On Psychological Creativity," Eranos Jahrbuch, 35 (1966), 371; Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), pp. 24-41.

⁵James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 68.

⁶E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 139-156.

⁷Rossetti's choice of the pagan god Eros, or Cupid, or Love, to rule Part I of The House of Life and his glorification of a Beloved as did Dante in his Vita Nuova link his work also more to a pagan than to a purely Christian tradition. The glorification of the woman from Petrarch on existed in great part outside the main stream of orthodox Christian thought and reached its peak in the earthly love of Lancelot and Guenevere. Jerome J. McGann in "Rossetti's Significant Details" [Victorian Poetry, 7 (Spring, 1969), 41-54] has pointed out Rossetti's basically decorative use of Christian symbols.

⁸Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd ed., rev. (Boston: 1958; rpt. Beacon Press, 1963), p. 41.

⁹Corpus Hermeticum, trans. A. J. Festugière, 1 (Paris: Societe d'Edition, 1945), pp. 7-9. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 150.

¹⁰Corpus Hermeticum, pp. 10-11.

¹¹Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 161.

¹²Corpus Hermeticum, pp. 10-12.

¹³Ibid., pp. 11-12.

¹⁴Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 138-139; Carl Jung calls the anima, or soul, the "archetype of life itself" in The Archetypes, p. 32.

¹⁵Corpus Hermeticum, p. 13.

¹⁶Walter Wili in "The History of the Spirit in Antiquity" [Spirit and Nature: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), pp. 77-89] shows that spirit was conceived in four different ways: (1) as air or pneuma according to Anaximenes' doctrines, (2) as logos or pure fire in Heraclitus' writings, (3) as spirit in the form of pure number according to Pythagorus, and (4) as a transcendent Nous as was taught by Anaxagoras.

¹⁷Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 159; James Hillman, "The Dream and the Underworld," Eranos Jahrbuch, 42 (1973), 260; Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139.

¹⁸Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xi.

¹⁹Ibid., pp. x-xi.

²⁰Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1959), pp. 156-157.

²¹Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xi

²²The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought, 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), pp. 10-11; An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 26.

²³Hillman, "The Dream and the Underworld," pp. 250-251.

²⁴Ibid., pp. 262-266.

²⁵Ibid., p. 272.

²⁶Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 68-69 and p. 94. This distinction between the movement direction of soul and spirit becomes crucial later in the contrast between union of opposites and union of likes.

²⁷Hillman, "The Dream and the Underworld," pp. 292-293; Freud defines narcissism largely in terms of this internalization process; "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Collected Papers, 4 (1915; rpt. New York: Basic Books), pp. 77-79.

²⁸Hillman, "The Dream and the Underworld," pp. 292-295; Louise Vinge in The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century [trans. Robert Dewsnap (Lund: Gleerups, 1967)] concludes that by the end of the Eighteenth Century in Europe, Narcissus was often regarded as a symbol for the artist and for an awareness of one's own soul and creative powers. In the romantic thought of the Nineteenth Century, Narcissus became a symbol for the poet and his relation to his soul and to his own poetic creations (pp. 303-307 and pp. 313-330). Vinge's book is the most extensive survey in existence of the literary uses of the Narcissus myth and of the evolvement of different interpretations of the myth by writers and non-literary men.

²⁹Carl Jung: Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 28.

³⁰Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, pp. 106-107.

³¹Hillman, "The Dream and the Underworld," p. 260.

³²Rank is using the term soul to include both the feminine soul and the masculine spirit: The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (1925; rpt. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 48 and p. 81. Rank expands on his concept of the double as the immortal soul in his chapter "The Double as Immortal Self" in Beyond Psychology (1941; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1958).

³³Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge, England: Bowes & Bowes, 1949), p. 17; Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), pp. 7-9; C. F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1972), p. 28 and p. 79.

³⁴Tymms, Doubles, p. 95 and p. 114. The other writers on the double follow Tymms line of interpretation. C. F. Keppler in his chapter "The Meaning of the Second Self" in Literature of the Second Self gives an excellent summary of all the basic interpretations of the double.

³⁵Tynns, Doubles, p. 114.

³⁶Karl Kerényi, Hermes der Sellenführer: das Mythologem vom Lepensursprung (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1944), pp. 68-70 and p. 85.

³⁷Inflation is the name Lipot Szondi gives to the ego state of conscious awareness of opposites that belong to one's nature such as in this case the male ego and the female anima. In this state, the ego resolves the conflict between opposites by being both at once. The ego becomes both the servant of God and God, both male and female, Christ and devil, lord and servant, angel and demon, mother and child, etc. Ich-Analyse: Die Grundlage zur Vereinigung der Tiefenpsychologie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1956), pp. 181-183 and p. 262.

³⁸Carl Jung, "Psychology of the Transference," The Practice of Psychotherapy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), pp. 233-234.

³⁹James Hillman, "The Feeling Function," Lectures on Jung's Typology (New York: Spring Publications, 1971), p. 129.

⁴⁰Jung, "Psychology of the Transference," pp. 215-218.

⁴¹Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self, p. 148.

⁴²John Layard, "The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype," Eranos-Jahrbuch, 12 (1945), 255 and 284.

⁴³Jung, "Psychology of the Transference," p. 232.

⁴⁴Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 199.

⁴⁵Robert Burton in his chapter on the remedies for heartbreaks in love in his book The 'Anatomy of Melancholy [eds. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (1621; rpt. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1927), p. 733 and p. 797] describes one source for a cure from the writing of Pliny: "there is a Well consecrated to Cupid, of which, if any Lover taste, his passion is mitigated."

⁴⁶Doughty, A Victorian Romantic, pp. 367-368.

⁴⁷Robert Stein, Incest and Human Love: The Betrayal of the Soul in Psychotherapy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 115.

⁴⁸Beatrice M. Hinkle, The Re-Creating of the Individual (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), pp. 343--351.

⁴⁹Szondi, Ich-Analyse, pp. 272-275.

⁵⁰James Hillman, "On Psychological Creativity," p. 380.

⁵¹Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949; rpt. New York: World Publishing, 1956), pp. 40-41.

⁵²Jung, "Psychology of the Transference," pp. 203-204.

⁵³In fact, Eros as a masculine spirit and as a divine child or puer aeternus can unite with the feminine soul, or anima, in a spiritual sexual incest as did many brother and sister gods and goddesses: Hinkle, The Re-Creating of the Individual, pp. 344-346. Although Jung does not recognize any unconscious ego, Freud and Szondi do. Consequently, psychic union of male and female components can occur unconsciously as can a union of the male conscious ego and the anima from the unconscious.

⁵⁴C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myths of the Divine Child and the Divine Maiden, trans. R. F. C. Hull (1949; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 25-69.

⁵⁵Szondi, Ich-Analyse, pp. 267-268.

⁵⁶W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 216 and p. 314.

⁵⁷In ecstasy, the flights of the spirit in psychic or spiritual realms is emphasized; the shamans from Siberian regions of the North practice these spiritual flights. Ecstasy, then, is essentially a masculine, spiritual phenomena. In enthusiasm, a god inhabits the body and mind of the person and speaks through him; this is basically feminine or soul-like since the person is passive and is a receptacle. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 70-71.

⁵⁸Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods, p. 194 and pp. 202-204.

⁵⁹Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 64-69.

⁶⁰Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods, p. 318.

⁶¹James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 250.

⁶²Jung, Aion, pp. 223-224.

⁶³Ibid., pp. 194-195.

⁶⁴"Rossetti's 'In Memoriam': An Elegiac Reading of The House of Life," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 47 (1965), 323.

CHAPTER IV

Belated Worshiper of the Sun

In "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), the narrator learns that Love and Death are one and that even his Beloved has an identity with Death. The Beloved's connection to death turns out to be basically her being the receiver of his anima, which as an archetype of the collective unconscious is immortal. Through his union with the image of his Beloved, the narrator gains the gifts of Song and Art. This internal union of the opposites of the male conscious ego and the female anima thus opened the door to a creative surge and to a sense of individuality that was essentially absent prior to the Willowwood sonnets. The narrator's union of the male and female components of his nature occupied the foreground of the Willowwood sonnets. The prolonged kiss between the narrator and the image of his Beloved emphasized this union.

Following this dramatic union was another union. In the first Willowwood sonnet (XLIX), the narrator and Love are alone beside a "woodside well" and both lean over the water where their "mirrored eyes" meet. Earlier, the narrator's and his first Beloved's eyes were "mirrored eyes in eyes" ["The Lovers' Walk" (XII)], and again in "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI) his first Beloved's gaze absorbed the narrator's "worshipping face," and thus he was "mirrored there." In all these situations, the union of eyes occurs in the context of love on an idealized or spiritualized plane. Earlier, too, in "Heart's Compass" (XXVII), the narrator described his first Beloved's eyes as "the sungate of the soul." Traditionally, eyes have been the main means for revealing the soul or spirit within. In "Lovesight" (IV), in depicting his worshipful love for his first Beloved, the narrator speaks of "the spirits" of his eyes that worship before "the altar" of her "face." The union of the narrator's and Love's eyes are, consequently, on a spiritual or mental plane. In the last Willowwood sonnet (LII), after the narrator has internalized the image of his Beloved by leaning low over the water and drinking "Her breath and all her tears and all her soul," he describes a kind of union with Love: "And as I leaned, I know I felt Love's face / Pressed on my neck with moan of pity and grace, / Till both our heads were in his aureole." Although not as prominent as the union of the opposites of the narrator's male ego and the feminine image of his Beloved, this union of likes between the narrator's male conscious ego and Love plays an important and dramatic role in the rest of the sonnets of The House of Life.

In the earlier sonnets where the narrator's and his Beloved's eyes were mirrored and their heads close together in rapt moments of love, the narrator was only dimly aware of the implications of their union, particularly of his narcissistic identity with his Beloved. In "The Lovers' Walk" (XII), the narrator's potential awareness was overcome by his deep emotion of love for his first Beloved on a beautiful summer day, and in "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI), the narrator showed his lack of conscious awareness by his placing his thoughts in question form. The narrator's awareness had begun to dawn but only at a low intensity.

In the climax in the last Willowwood sonnet (LII), the narrator has reached a higher state of consciousness. After his Beloved's face sank into the water, the narrator ponders whether he will meet her image again and whether "Love knows" this. In the sestet, however, the narrator has no doubts about his actions of internalizing his Beloved's "breath," "tears," and "soul" nor about Love's actions that united him and the narrator:

Only I know that I leaned low and drank

A long draught from the water where she sank,

     Her breath and all her tears and all her soul:

And as I leaned, I know I felt Love's face

Pressed on my neck with moan of pity and grace,  

     Till both our heads were in his aureole.¹

Prior to the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator either projected the image of his anima onto his Beloveds or introjected his anima image unconsciously--an act which darkened his love affair with the second Beloved. In these climactic moments of the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator knows consciously what he is doing. He knows that he is introjecting his Beloved's image and he knows that Love has pressed his head against his and that their heads are united in a halo of light.

Lipot Szondi would call this latter state of the ego inflation. In this ego state, a person is fully conscious of all the opposites that are contending within his own nature. In fact, inflation is a solution to the problem of the conflict between opposites or between any two split parts of one's nature. In inflation, the person retains the opposites within his conscious mind and refuses to project them. This ego state resolves the problem of an external double, or doppelgänger, since the projection of a split-off part of one's person is discontinued. Instead, in inflation, the person has internalized the double and himself becomes two opposites at once such as a God and mortal person, devil and angel, a Napoleon and common man, the Beloved and the lover, male and female, immortal self and mortal ego.² Such a state of heightened awareness can not last for long periods of time and, consequently, becomes limited to ecstatic, creative, and inspirational states.

As with the narrator's consciously drinking the image of his Beloved, introjection can occur simultaneously with inflation. Conscious awareness and acceptance of his feminine nature, or anima, in the form of a positive introjection, or identification, have replaced his unconscious projecting of his anima. As we have seen, this internal union of male and female can be the source of creativity and the products that are Song and Art.

The union of opposites and the union of likes are deeply interconnected. The narrator's head and Love's head appear in Love's "aureole." Etymologically, aureole is defined as a heavenly crown worn by saints or as a radiant light around the head of a sacred person. Carl Jung found relationships between this crown and the anima, or soul. As the feminine half in the union of opposites, the Queen, or moon, appears in the beginning of the alchemical process as the vessel that contains the king, or sun, and at the end appears as the "aureole of the king, i.e., as a crown."³ In another place Jung discusses the synthesis of opposites and cites an end result of the process from an alchemical text, which states that upon returning to the body, the soul brings the body a "wreath of victory." Jung calls this wreath of the soul a crown for the king, or the sun, and says that this crown is a symbol for the "kingly totality" and that "it stands for unity and is not subject to Heimarmene," or Fate. It is also called the "crown of Wisdom."⁴ In "Love's Last Gift" (LIX), Love gives the narrator a laurel leaf, which in Greek times is normally fashioned into a crown of laurel leaves as a symbol of victory. This laurel leaf symbolizes the gift of Song, and as shown in "The Song-Throe" (LXI), the god Apollo, to whom the laurel leaf is sacred, is the inspirer of the narrator's songs. Inspiration or ecstasy is an ego state created by Apollo when he takes possession of the person. This condition of inflation is identical to the union of the narrator's and Love's head in Love's aureole. Essential to the narrator's creativity are both the union of opposites of his male conscious ego and his anima, or soul, and the union of likes of his male conscious ego with the male gods of Love and Apollo, who as divine youths are spirits.

Jung calls the intra-psychic union of "intellect or reason with Eros, representing feeling" a unio mentalis. Alchemists, according to Jung, picture this union as "Father and Son" and symbolize it as a bird, the Dove, the classic symbol for the Holy Ghost. This unio mentalis precedes the union of opposites, or mysterium coniunctionis.⁵ In the Gnostic myth of creation as given in "The Poimandres," Logos is intellect, reason, spirit, and light. Logos, consequently, becomes identified with the conscious ego. Eros is a male spirit, too, but his role is closely allied to the soul since he is deeply involved with feeling and with uniting people and things. Logos, on the other hand, is a purely male spirit in the sense that he does not unite but only divides, discriminates, separates, and distinguishes. If Logos becomes too identified with the material world, then Eros can represent the eternal self within, which is normally conceived as God. Eros can also be the uniting force between Logos, or the conscious male ego, and the spiritual self. As the conscious male ego, Logos can usurp the powers of the self to its own by means of inflation, where the conscious ego then becomes the self. Logos is concerned with knowing and, consequently, is constantly susceptible to the dangers of inflation.

"Knowing" and particularly the state of inflation have played important roles in the union of opposites and in the union of likes in the Willowwood sonnets. In Ovid's version of the Narcissus myth, knowledge has a prominent place. Liriope, Narcissus' mother, asks Tiresias if her son would ever live to a ripe old age. Tiresias replies, "Yes, if he never knows himself." After being cursed by a youth and compelled by Nemesis, the goddess of Vengeance and Fate, to isolate himself in a secluded grove, Narcissus sees his image in a pool of water and falls in love with it. After many fruitless efforts to unite with his "reflection," Narcissus becomes aware of the apparent situation; he says, "I know / The truth at last. He is myself! I feel it, / I know my image now. I burn with love / Of my own self."⁶ His image is the self as an archetype. The self, however, is a male self only, or the exclusively spirit side of the self. Narcissus has, thus, sought to unite with his immortal self imaged in the pool. Jung has clearly indicated that the self is a union of all opposites, particularly the male spirit and the female soul.⁷

The narrator in The House of Life was in a similar situation in his worshipful love for his first Beloved. He projected his anima upon her and fell in love with it. As long as the narrator was in this Eden-like state of total happiness, he did not develop as a person. He projected all his qualities and talents upon his Beloved. The outside world hardly impinged on the narrator's and his Beloved's world during this paradisal state. As exemplified in "Silent Noon" (XIX), time stands still in this kind of world.

Narcissus exists in a similarly timeless realm where nothing--man, animal, bird, leaf, or sun-intrudes. Silence thus reigns as it did in "Silent Noon." Like the narrator, Narcissus projects his own nature--in this case his male spiritual image of the self--upon an inanimate object, the reflective water. The complete spiritual nature of Narcissus' longing is shown by his refusing to project either his anima or his spiritual male self upon any girl or youth. He totally rejects Echo's advances. Never does he, like the narrator, try to drink in, or introject, his own image as a form of active identification; rather he remains content with a passive, or projecting, form of identification. In this state, which is a passive form of unio mentalis, Narcissus stays a captive in a state of development, where he remains fascinated with images in general and with the image of his spiritual self in particular and where he becomes ultimately a captive of Mother Earth.

Narcissus was fascinated by beauty--his own physical and spiritual beauty--but fails ultimately to act upon his knowledge of his spiritual self within. His fate was to become a Narcissus flower. A flower can be an end in itself; it can exist for its beauty and not produce any seeds or fruit. The narcissus flower is a member of the lily family and although it can reproduce sexually, its basic means of propagation is the asexual mode of reproducing through increasing its number of bulbs. The root meaning of Narcissus is Narke, which means stupor and lethargy and that appears in English words like narcotic and narcolepsy.⁸ Narcissus' knowledge of his love of self--definitely a form of inflation--was combined with a passive identification, or projection.

Narcissus' psychological frame of mind is the model for the first phase of the phenomena of the double, or doppelgänger, in which the double appears for the first time. The empiric conscious male ego, which is within a physical body and thus bound to fate in the form of heredity and time and place of birth, longs for its opposite, an immortal self. The empiric male ego, as we have seen, can also long for the female anima, which then can appear as a narcissistically-chosen Beloved, who acts as a double.

A prior archetype for this phase of the double process as shown in the Narcissus myth is man's longing to unite with God, a universal image of the self. The close identity between God and self is shown in the Gnostic myth of the creation of the material cosmos and the Divine Anthropos as presented in "Poimandres." After the creation of the material cosmos, Nous, the hermaphroditic Father God of all the universe, becomes enamored with his own image in his own mind and creates the Divine Anthropos in his own form, a hermaphroditic being of life and light. Like Narcissus, God falls in love with the beauty of his own image.⁹ The Divine Anthropos himself, too, later falls in love with his own image and like Narcissus becomes a captive of Nature.

Narcissus has a double fate. As the Narcissus flower he remains in the realm of Nature and as an image, he acts out the fate prescribed by early Greek tradition prior to the rise of Gnostic thought and descends into the underworld of Hades. Narcissus, thus, ultimately follows the path of the soul whose final destination is downward toward the world of images. Never does Narcissus rise to the spirit world of the Nous, or Divine Father, or the spiritual self.

Unlike Narcissus, however, the divine element of the Anthropos, which is light (and thus Logos), eventually reunites with God after returning through the realm of the planets, or Governors. God, the Father. reunites with his son. The whole purpose of Gnostic teachings is to impart knowledge, or gnosis, of the spiritual and ultimately masculine nature of man's inner self so that man can escape the rule of Fate represented by the l'armature of the spheres and join in a union of likes with God.

Gnosis then ultimately is a knowledge of God, the divine realm of being, and the "order and history of the upper worlds." This knowledge can be obtained through a revelation as from a god like Apollo or through sacred religious teachings.¹⁰ Normally, knowledge comes through a visionary experience as in the case of the author of the "Poimandres," who receives a visitor who in turn imparts a vision of divine truth. This gnostic myth demonstrates on a cosmic scale what occurs in literature when two male doubles confront each other and in Jungian psychology when the conscious ego longs for the spiritual self. None of these unions of likes is possible without there first being knowledge of the existence of the spiritual self, which frequently takes the form of a double. As the Narcissus myth demonstrates, self-knowledge may end in stagnation and a passive fascination with images and particularly with an obsession with one's own image of the spiritual self.

If, however, the union of the conscious ego and self is to be fruitful in the material cosmos, then the conscious empiric ego, or Logos, must go beyond a passive identification with the self and try to materialize the spiritual self in some way in the ordinary realm of life. After his creation, the Divine Anthropos was seized by the desire to create as did his brother the Demiurge. The Anthropos then moved out of the paradisal spiritual realm of his Father Nous into the material cosmos ruled by the Governors. In moving to the material realm, the Anthropos left the pure narcissistic stage of contemplation toward an active phase of expression and involvement in human mortality.¹¹ Unlike the Divine Anthropos, Narcissus can be satisfied with images alone. The narrator in The House of Life makes his identity with self fruitful through his creation of Song and Art both through his union with his immortal anima by means of an active identification, or introjection, and through his union with Love and Apollo by means of inflation.

The second self, or double, always has a direct connection to death, whether it is the feminine soul or the masculine spirit. To possess immortality, one must die. Love, or Eros, in The House of Life is a god and thus immortal; and as a male, he is a spirit. Thus, Logos is not the only form that spirit may take. Eros as spirit alone would link him ultimately to the realm of death. In "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), Love became identified with the image of Death as did the Beloveds also. Love and Death, however, have been separated as brothers at the beginning and ending of the whole sonnet sequence. Like the twins in "The Birth-Bond" (XV), they have had a close communion. Their kinship is given explicitly in the two sonnets entitled "Newborn Death" (XCIX; C), which occur just prior to the last sonnet of the sonnet sequence. The first sonnet depicts Death as an infant child of "mother Life," who gave Death to the narrator as a playmate. Together the narrator and Death would grow up, and in this way the narrator would be reconciled to Death. Death might also grow up to be a helpful daughter to the narrator. The significance of Death being depicted here as a daughter becomes apparent in the last sonnet. In "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), the Beloveds have become identified also with death and as soul images they are immortal and lead downward to the realm of Hades and its infinite images, or shades. In the second sonnet of "Newborn Death" (C), the kinship of Death and Love is specified. The narrator looks back over his life and perceives that he and "Life, the lady of all bliss" have also been the parents of three other children, Love, Song, and Art. The anima as the archetype of Life, thus, is the mother of these children. Song and Art were born as a result of the union of the narrator's conscious male ego, or even possibly his unconscious spiritual nature, and his soul, or anima.

Death's birth is announced two sonnets from the end of the sonnet sequence, and the story of Love's birth is given in the second sonnet from the beginning in "Bridal Birth." Love is the "newborn child" of the narrator's Lady just as "Newborn Death" is the child of the narrator's Life. Soul as the archetype of Life and the anima is the common link between the Lady and Life. Love's rule remains essentially in tact through Part I, at the end of which Love gives the narrator his last gift, disappears from any apparent external realm, and yet remains active internally. Death makes a dramatic appearance in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI) and in "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII) and shares equally with Love in power in the Willowwood sonnets. Death's real emergence as a power appears just after the narrator's farewell speech to-the glen where youths can live happily ["Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV)]. Particularly the twelve sonnets from sonnet eighty-five through ninety-six show Death as the dominant ruler. Love, thus, rules exclusively at the beginning and Death predominately at the end of the sonnet sequence; just before and during the Willowwood sonnets they are either the same or they rule equally.

The phenomena of being two separate people and yet one is characteristic of the phenomena of the double. Inflation describes the situation where one person assumes both opposites within his own conscious ego. Introjection also draws in opposites and characteristics from others. Both of these are forms of doubling within and are integrative processes. Szondi calls the ego state where both introjection and inflation are present as the state of Total Narcissism.¹² The opposite process of transferring either one opposite such as maleness or both opposites such as maleness and femaleness to the other is projection. In psychoanalytic terminology this is a form of "dissociation" or "decomposition.'¹³ These processes may reach extreme points and result in forms of schizophrenia, or split minds, or split egos.¹⁴ Inflation, or the uniting of opposites into one, has dominated "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII) and along with introjection has predominated in the Willowwood sonnets. Either projection alone or projection with introjection has been most frequent in the sonnets prior to "Death-in-Love." All these processes concern efforts to deal with the dual nature of one's being. Archetypes also can follow a uniting of opposites into one and a separation into two or more parts. The anima archetype can be linked both with life and with death. All archetypes unite opposites into one as does the supreme archetype of the self. Archetypes, thus, have a close relationship to the phenomena of doubles that appears in literature and in any live person's psychology.

The sonnet form itself has affinities to the splitting into two parts and to the uniting into one. Williem E. Fredeman conceives the structural organization of The House of Life as based on the form of the sonnet. Since the whole sonnet sequence is introduced by a "sonnet on a sonnet," Fredeman reasons that Part I and Part II coincide approximately with the octave and sestet of a sonnet. Part I comprises roughly four-sevenths of the total number of sonnets and thus equals the eight lines of the octave. Fredeman points out, too, that Rossetti is unique among English sonnet writers in breaking each sonnet into two distinct parts. Fredeman sees the "larger" sonnet as a "frame, or house" in which the life of the narrator is lived. Finally, Fredeman notes that the theme of change that links Part I and II of The House of Life is characteristic of the Petrarchan sonnet, which is the sonnet form that Rossetti uses in almost every sonnet.¹⁵ The Petrarchan sonnet is based on the bipartite structure in which the sestet is usually a counter-statement or reversal to a statement in the octave; the sestet can also be a conclusion of the statement of the octave. In any case, a change or a different perspective is presented in the sestet.¹⁶ The bipartite structure of the individual sonnet and the whole sonnet sequence viewed as a larger sonnet can reflect both a union of opposites and even a union of likes, which may have apparently opposite natures, within one structure. Both opposites could, therefore, exist within a higher unity of sameness. In other words, two opposites could be united by a higher element; this occurs in participation mystique, transference, inflation, double phenomena, and archetypes.

Part I of The House of Life is called "Youth and Change" and Part II, "Change and Fate." Since Love, or Eros, basically rules Part I then Youth and Love may have the same identity. The same situation would exist for Part II, where Death presides as ruler; thus Death and Fate could be identical. Following this line of reasoning, we can conclude that the coming together of Love and Death as one in the middle of the sonnet sequence would mean that Youth and Fate were one also.

In Jungian psychology, there is an archetype called the puer-senex (or youth-old man) archetype, which has many connections to Youth, Love (Eros), Death, and Fate. It is most frequently a masculine archetype and thus is related to a masculine union of likes. A union of likes can occur in the feminine realm; this would be concerned essentially with mother-daughter unions as exemplified in the Demeter-Kore feminine mysteries. This union of likes belongs to the sphere of the feminine soul, not the realm of the masculine spirit. All divine children or divine youths are personifications of the puer aeternus. Eros, Hermes, Apollo, Hyacinthus, and Narcissus, among many others, are divine youths.¹⁷

Love in The House of Life is Eros in Greek mythology and Cupid in Roman mythology. Eros, as we have seen, is sometimes identified as Hermes, since both are represented by the Herm, which is a block of wood or stone representing the phallus.¹⁸ One of the primary characteristics of the puer is his predominately phallic nature.¹⁹ The herm stone has a connection to death, since it appeared in graveyards as well as gardens.²⁰ Cupids also appeared on gravestones in ancient Greece.²¹ Jung and C. Kerényi both emphasize the phallic nature of Hermes as the spiritual principle. Hermes as an intermediary between the spiritual realm and Earth or Hades also has links with the soul, Logos, and the body. According to Jung, Hermes was worshiped as a phallus--the herm--and Jung notes that the basic urge of the male organ is from "below upwards."²² In spiritual terms, this is the basic movement of Logos or any purely male spirit, whereas the feminine soul's movement is downward and inward. Kerényi analyzes Hermes in terms of the original phallic life urge and places Eros as an idealized form of this same phallic life urge.²³ Hermes as a shepherd of souls, or psychopomp, also leads souls downward to Hades.²⁴

Both spirit and soul move in vertical directions but the ultimate natural destination of spirit is upward and soul downward. This concept particularly ruled up through the first three hundred years of the Christian era.²⁵ The concept of sin in Christianity causes the basic upward direction of spirit to be reversed. In early patriarchal Christianity, women and soul led to the body and thus to sin; consequently, the erring spirit assumed the soul's direction downward rather than upward upon death of the body. Good spirits continued the upward movement. James Hillman makes the same distinction about the nature of the purely masculine or spiritual essence of man by noting that the direction of the spirit is vertical and ascending. Spirit is "arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic."²⁶ These phallic descriptions apply to the puer side of spirit.

Jung has followed some of the connections between Eros and Hermes in his study of alchemy. In alchemy, the Greek Hermes appears as the Roman Mercurius, who is a hermaphrodite and is identified as the Divine Anthropos.²⁷ Mercurius as a hermaphrodite and Divine Anthropos is an image of the self archetype. He is the beginning material of the alchemical process, which is prima materia and/or lead, and the end of the same process, which is the divine child, or gold, or the lapis (the stone). Mercurius is also both spirit and soul.²⁸ Most importantly for his relationship to Eros, Mercurius in alchemy is both puer and senex. Hermes plays a senex as well as a puer role.

Mercurius has a definite connection to astrology through the planet Mercury, which is a puer aspect, and the planet Saturn, which is his senex aspect.²⁹ Jung notes that Mercurius as Hermes has a dominant place in both Gnostic thought and astrology. Hermes is the guide in the Corpus Hermeticum and other texts that form the Hermetic tradition.³⁰ In the Hermetic tradition, which originated in Egypt, Hermes at first was identified as the god Thoth. Besides being the father of languages, Hermes was designated by the Greeks as the father of astrology retrospectively after they learned astrology from the Babylonians and the Egyptians.³¹ Mercurius, according to Jung, in his senex, or old man, form is the planet Saturn. Mercurius is associated with the metal quicksilver and Saturn with lead. Like Mercurius, Saturn, too, is hermaphroditic. He is called "an old man on the mountain." Since Mercurius lived in a cave, as did Hermes, Mercurius is-the son of Saturn.³² Jung discovered in the alchemical text Chymical Wedding by Rosencreutz that Mercurius appeared in the form of Cupid.³³ In his analysis of the puer-senex archetype, James Hillman uses Eros as one of the models of the puer and Saturn in his Saturn-Kronus form exclusively as the model for the senex. Hillman draws from Greek myths, Gnostic thought, alchemy, and particularly from astrology for his concepts of the senex.³⁴

Like the Divine Anthropos, Eros was linked with the creation of mankind and was hermaphroditic. In the Orphic tradition, a form of Gnostic thought, Eros was born as a hermaphrodite from an egg laid by Mother Night. Like the Gnostic Demiurge, Eros was the creator of the universe in Orphic myths. As Eros, this god was Love. As Phanes, he was "he who appears" and "he who reveals"; in this form he is quite like Hermes as a messenger from the gods and as Mercurial quicksilver. As Metis, he was "Wise Counsel." This latter form was female but yet carried the semen of the gods.³⁵ As Metis, Eros has come close to the senex form of the Wise Old Man. All these links among Eros, Hermes, Mercurius, Death, and Saturn show the basic connections that can exist among Love, Youth, and Death in The House of Life.

Saturn provides the link to Fate, which is the key word of Part II's title "Change and Fate." Saturn, which is the Roman name for the planet, only gradually became linked with the Greek god Kronos and with astrology. Originally the Greeks had no belief in astrology and in fate as being caused by the planets' and stars' influences. In the second century B. C., new doctrines about man and the gods came into being based on rational thought. This new cosmopolitan outlook on man, the world, and the gods undermined the ordinary Greeks' local gods and traditional beliefs. In the third century B. C., a flood of Eastern thought poured into Greek culture, creating philosophies such as Gnosticism and introducing the Babylonian doctrines of astrology and fate. ³⁶ By the time of the Romans, Greek philosophy, Eastern religions and astrology, and Greek religions and myths had amalgamated into a cosmic view of man. Originally before all this, Kronos was a Greek god who fathered the three rulers of the world, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. Saturn, then, was a benevolent Roman god of fields and crops.

When astrology came into Greek culture, Kronos was linked with Saturn. The Babylonians viewed each planet as a god of destiny; Saturn was their god Ninib, or Nergal. To the Greeks Ninib had to be their own god Kronos. Thus, mythology of the gods became combined with the Babylonian system of astrology and Fate. Greek Stoic philosophy had the concept of "Moira," or Fate, and the Greeks easily transferred this concept to the astrological Fate embodied in the planets and stars.³⁷ The "Poimandres" treatise of Corpus Hermeticum, a sixteenth century document, presents the basic thoughts of pagan Gnosticism, a mixture of Egyptian, Babylonian, Eastern, and Greek thought. The planets in the "Poimandres" are iron bands, forming l'armature des sphères and are the Governors who each in turn give their own characteristics to the spirit descending to earth. They are Destiny, or in Greek Heimarmene, universal Fate.³⁸

Saturn in the ancient world was the most distant planet from the sun and thus the coldest. Saturn was the seventh planet and was either the last or the first Governor for the spirit on its ascent from or descent to the earth. Kronos was a god of opposites, a creator and destroyer of men. Eventually, he was overthrown by his sons and cast into the nether world of Hades, the lowest part of the cosmos. He became a ruler of the nether gods and was a god of death and the dead. In his role as father of gods and men and as devourer of children and all materiality, he became associated with time itself. When Saturn fused with Kronos, he took on all these qualities. In astrology, Saturn, with Kronos's attributes and history, ruled from the lowest part of the universe and from the opposite end of the world's axis; from this perspective, Saturn has an inimical view of the world and an opposite view from that of the Heavens. He became the ruler of the fate of all fathers and old men. In astrology, he and Mars became evil planets; Venus and Jupiter good; and Mercury was neutral.³⁹ In the Chaldean system of astrology, the Moon, Mercury, and Venus occupied the upper realm over the sun, which was the center, and Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which was lowest, dwelled in the lower realm.⁴⁰ Saturn and Mercury even in this arrangement occupy opposite regions. Eventually, in Roman astrology, one did not speak in analogies and say, "Saturn signifies Time because Time devours temporal events as Saturn did his children," but: "Saturn, cast out from Olympus into Hades, rules the lowest region of the celestial globe"; or: "Saturn, himself an old man and a father, determines the fate of old men and fathers."⁴¹

The Willowwood sonnets have concerned both a union of opposites and a union of likes. The union of likes joins spirits or male elements of the conscious empiric male ego and the spiritual self. In the sense that the conscious ego is associated with mortality as well as with the spiritual Logos, a union of the mortal part of the ego with the immortal spiritual self is a union of opposites, which, however, are not sexual opposites. The Willowwood sonnets are the exact center of the sonnet sequence and here Love, or Eros as a divine youth, has become identified with Death. The common element uniting Love as a youth and Death has been change. After the death of his first Beloved--a dramatic element of change--the narrator adopts the philosophy of the Youth of "Pride of Youth" (XXIV) and falls in love with a second Beloved, who introduces more change by leaving him. In the Willowwood sonnets dramatic changes occur in his two unions, and after Willowwood, further significant changes are demonstrated in "Love's Last Gift" (LIX) and "Transfigured Life" (LX) where the narrator's creative talents come to flower. Later starting with the third sonnet of "The Choice" (LXXIII) and the sonnets on "Old and New Art," which immediately follow, the narrator discovers the power of Art in the form of painting. All these positive activities and attitudes originate from the unions in Willowwood.

The puer-senex archetype can appear in a united or a split form. The titles of Part I and II--"Youth and Change" and "Change and Fate"--indicate the common element uniting Youth, Change, and Fate is time. To become human means that one becomes a creature of time, that one has a set of genes that determines one's final biological destiny, and that one belongs to a definite place and time. James Hillman calls character one's fate.⁴² The puer-senex archetype essentially becomes an archetype of the two halves of life, the extremes of which are youth and old age. Hillman, too, sees this as a union of sames and a union of two sides of spirit.⁴³ In the early part of the first half of life, the puer, or youth, is, on the surface, separated from the senex, or old man, who belongs to the last part of the second half of life. Hillman points out that at the midpoint of life around the age of forty-five, the two opposites of puer and senex are closest together.⁴⁴ Rossetti at the age of forty in December, 1868 was at this normal midpoint of a man's life, although actually he was in his own last years of life. At this time, he wrote the Willowwood sonnets--a creative act that culminated in his first book of poetry in 1870.⁴⁵

Positive results can occur, Hillman indicates, if the connection between the two opposites are maintained; equally, negative results happen when the two halves of the archetype are separated.⁴⁶ As the narrator moves farther and farther away from the Willowwood sonnets and the positive union of the puer and senex, the more negative the archetype becomes. The values of individualism and self-expression in culture in the form of Song and Art is positive as long as the connection to the puer, which is the youthful immortal self personified by the male spirit and the anima, is maintained. Once this fruitful connection is broken and the paths to the immortal self provided by the masculine spirit of youth and the anima are closed, then only the husk of culture is left. Tradition acts like the iron braces of the l'armature of the spheres; Philistines' values rule; and all art, poetry, and culture turns soulless and spiritless, degenerating into mechanical hack work, craft, and techniques.

In "Without Her" (LIII), the sonnet immediately after the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator introduces the image of a "wayfarer" who walks through a depressing landscape and up a "labouring hill." Earlier amid his worshipful love for his first Beloved in "Lovesight" (IV), the narrator was gripped by the gloomy speculation that he might never see his Beloved's "shadow" on earth or the "image" of her "eyes in any spring." He then asks speculatively, "How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope / The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, / The wind of Death's imperishable wing?" In "Without Her," the narrator asks again, "What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart, / Of thee what word remain ere speech be still?" The narrator's answer pictures himself as a wanderer up a desolate hill:

     A wayfarer by barren ways and chill,

Steep ways and weary, without her thou art,

Where the long cloud, the long wood's counterpart,

     Sheds doubled darkness up the labouring hill.

At this stage of his normal grief for his Beloved, the narrator yields to his most pessimistic views of his future. Yet the obstacle that he faces is a "hill" and not a mountain. Later, too, at the end of this group of twelve sonnets beginning with the first Willowwood sonnet, the narrator's "long cloud" will be transfigured--as will be a great part of his emotional outlook and his attitudes--in "Transfigured Life" (LX) into a "song-cloud" that emphasizes equally Joy and Pain.

Through his union with his anima and his internalizing of her in the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator has gained the gift of Song from Love. The source for his poems, particularly his lyric sonnets, is memory for his love of the Beloveds and the emotions of Joy and Pain aroused by his love. The narrator will remain a wayfarer externally and internally amid his memories and his fears for the future until he reaches the moment of insight gained on "The Hill Summit" (LXX), a point near the end of the twelve sonnets that began with an emphasis on Song. His internal wanderings essentially cease at the end of the twelve sonnets begun with Art; at this time, the narrator says "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV). After this sonnet the mood of the narrator dramatically changes.

"The Hill Summit" (LXX) shows the great changes the narrator has undergone from his veneration of his first Beloved in "Lovesight" (IV) and from his grieving concern for his Beloved in "Without Her" (LIII). The reason for these changes is the narrator's gradually coming under the power of the senex archetype. The narrator meditates in "The Hill Summit" about his present, past, and future--a kind of mental wandering. He is much obsessed with thoughts about time. The puer-senex as an archetype of the two halves of life is equally an archetype of time; the Saturn-Kronos blendings emphasize the time elements of Kronos. Illustrations of Saturn picture him as Father Time, carrying a scythe.⁴⁷ The narrator says reflectively, "And now that I have climbed and won this height, / I must tread downward through the sloping shade / And travel the bewildering tracks till night." The narrator is conscious of his midpoint in life and accepts his human role as a traveler amid the confusions of his life; his wandering and traveling with more purpose will be henceforth more frequently in an external realm.

Prior to the Willowwood sonnets, the great aim of the narrator was rest, seclusion, and basically a static situation. Groves, coverts, glens, secluded fields, nests, and bowers were shelters for the narrator against change that traveling and wandering entail. In "Love Enthroned" (I), Love's throne was "far above / All passionate wind of welcome and farewell." Even walking was amid a still landscape as shown in "The Lovers' Walk" (XII), where the "hedgeflowers" were "wind-stirred in no wise" and where the glades were "still." In their walking, the lovers leaned on each other forming a stable rainbow-like arch of unity. "Silent Noon" (XIX) epitomized the lack of movement and change. The lovers' world together was as still and as suspended in time as the frozen moment at the midpoint of an "hourglass" portrayed in "Silent Noon." In the Ovid version of the Narcissus myth, Narcissus, too, had the same world of space and time in his total self-isolation of gazing and loving his reflected image.

James Hillman has pointed out the great danger for the person who becomes obsessed with or identified exclusively and passively with the puer archetype. Being separated from the senex, the person's puer turns negative. In this condition, there is no emotional, spiritual, or psychological development. The puer represents the divine child or youth; therefore, he contains all possibilities within himself. The puer is "primordially perfect," since he is an eternal spirit. The puer, consequently, has "self-perfection" and an "aura of knowing all and needing nothing," an attitude which leads to "self-containment and isolation.⁴⁸ Heinz Kohut's concept of the "omnipotent self," which sees itself in terms of the idea that "I am perfect" fits this part of the puer archetype. The puer in the phenomena of the double represents the second self, whether it be the masculine spirit as in Ovid's version of the Narcissus myth or the feminine anima as in the Pausanias version of the myth. The narrator's devotion to Love and thus to the attributes of Youth in Part I prior to Willowwood leads to a resistance to change and thus possible development. These sonnets in the first half of The House of Life concern more Being, eternity, and the Garden-of-Eden qualities than Becoming that destroys Eden-like worlds of Being and eternity.

The senex part of the archetype leads the person into the realm of time, fate, experience and the world, which can appear as a labyrinth and make one a wanderer in its "bewildered tracks." Saturn-Kronos rules the nether world and is often associated with the underground, the bowels of the earth. In terms of the universe being the body of a divine Anthropos, the earth is the bowels. Saturn is the "god of manure, privies, dirty linen, bad wind" and exhibits the opposite qualities as a "cleanser of souls." He governs "coins, minting, and wealth."⁴⁹ In many of these respects, Saturn merges with the god Pluto, who is an underworld god of wealth and the dead. All these attributes point to anality as outlined by Freud, since faeces can appear in subliminated form as coins or money.⁵⁰ Saturn is also the god that builds cities, which is a kind of labyrinth.⁵¹

Otto Rank in Art and Artist has traced the history of the symbolism of the labyrinth and links it to anality. A world navel is normally the entrance to the earth's belly or underground.⁵² In Babylonia, the place of the origin of astrology, a palace was called "palace of the entrails," and this represents microcosmically the whole cosmic material universe, or the macrocosm. Materiality and consequently the planet Earth became identified as the human interior of the abdomen. The underground, too, of the Earth was the belly of the cosmos. Houses and cities became associated with abdomen symbolism but on a subliminated and creative plane.⁵³ The whole material cosmos was viewed by the ancients as a body--a divine Anthropos--and each part of the cosmos could represent different parts of his body. This is the basis for astrology's dividing the heavens into twelve parts, each of which represents part of the divine Anthropos' body.⁵⁴

After the Willowwood sonnets, which is a symbolic world navel spot, the narrator becomes "a wayfarer," but in "The Hill Summit" (LXX) the prospect of becoming a wanderer in the "bewildered tracks till night" appears frighteningly real. In "Known in Vain" (LXV), the narrator--after expressing regret that he did not find Work and Will until too late--asks, "Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze / Thenceforth their [i.e., Work's and Will's] incommunicable ways / Follow the desultory feet of Death?" The senex is both Death and Fate, and the narrator increasingly in Part II recognizes the senex's spiritual force in his life and the bewildering maze-like nature of the world.

"The Hill Summit" (LXX) shows the association of the senex, or second half of life, with the last part of time in a day. The narrator prepares an altar for a setting sun:

This feast-day of the sun, his altar there        

     In the broad west has blazed for vesper-song;    

     And I have loitered in the vale too long

And gaze now a belated worshipper.

The sun symbolizes the masculine and the masculine spirit in Western culture.⁵⁵ The setting sun is the time of the senex, just as a rising sun is the time of the puer. By this point in the sonnet sequence, the narrator has recognized that he is a "belated worshipper" of the sun, or the masculine spirit. Earlier, in "Lovesight" (IV), the narrator worshiped before the "altar" of his first Beloved's "face." "Gracious Moonlight" (XX), "The Moonstar" (XXIX), and "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII) depict the first Beloved in images of the moon. In "Without Her" (LIII), the narrator asks,

What of her glass without her? The blank grey       

     There where the pool is blind of the moon's face.        

     ...The tossed empty space

Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away.

The moon is a symbol of the feminine in the forms of Beloved, wife, mother, daughter, and puer (divine child or young girl). Up to the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator was dominated by the moon's powers and the puer archetype. As a youth, Eros, too, was dominated by these same powers. By the time of "The Hill Summit" (LXX), the narrator recognizes the powers of the full masculine spirit in the forms of both the puer and the senex.

Night can be directly associated with death and thus become a realm ruled by the senex. Up to the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator was a worshiper of the moon in both its positive and negative forms. As long as the moon's light, or the "changeful light of infinite love" ["Soul-Light" (XXVIII)] from his first Beloved's soul, is present in the night, the narrator has no fear of night's powers. Normally night has strong connotations of death as compared to day, which is linked with life. Night, too, is normally associated with the feminine realm of soul, and day with the masculine spirit. Mother Night gave birth to Eros in the Orphic legends.⁵⁶ As we have seen, the world of dreams, fantasy, image-making, and the unconscious is a night world ruled over by the soul and death. Night is both the beginning and the end.

The puer, or divine youth, can rule the first half of the day, and the senex lords over the second half, particularly the time of sunset. The youth, or Love, before the Willowwood sonnets, however, opposes the tumult of ordinary daytime activities and favors an aloofness from regular human involvements beyond his union with his first Beloved. He is like Narcissus and the puer who desires perfection--a state of Being--rather than the development entailed in Becoming in a world of time. In "Heart's Haven" (XXII), Love becomes identified with the moon itself and thus fits the later equation of the first Beloved and Love being one as seen in "Heart's Compass" (XXVII). The narrator says in "Heart's Haven":

And Love, our light at night and shade at noon,

     Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away

     All shafts of shelterless tumultuous day.

Like the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune;

And as soft waters warble to the moon,

     Our answering spirits chime one roundelay.

In Part I, the narrator has at that stage passively identified with his first Beloved. Love, as both personified emotion and as the narrator's male spiritual side, becomes blended with the first Beloved and the narrator's own anima projected onto her. Thus, through the sonnets prior to the first Beloved's death, Love, as a puer, reigns over the early part of the day, which is sheltered and timeless where possible. This time excludes the senex who brings into a day world time, tumult, and restrictions of character and fate.

The soul, or anima, is also a puer, or divine child or youth.⁵⁷ In the tale by Apuleius, Psyche, as a puer, at first desires to remain in her static, unconscious-like relationship with Eros, but as Psyche, or human soul, wishes to develop--that is, to connect with the senex side of her nature--she separated from Eros.⁵⁸ The subtitle of Erich Neumann's book Amor and Psyche emphasizes the developmental aspect of Psyche's story: The Psychic Development of the Feminine.

Both Love and the narrator up to the death of the first Beloved are passively identified with the puer archetype in its masculine and feminine forms. In "The Birth-Bond" (XV), the narrator has speculated on the close kinship between brother and sister, who have an immortal identity since the sister is also the brother's "soul's birth partner." In "Heart's Compass" (XXVII), where the identity of Love and the Beloved is proclaimed by the narrator, all these associations among Love, the first Beloved, and the puer archetype appear again. The narrator speculates on the basic nature of the first Beloved:

Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone,

But as the meaning of all things that are;

A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar

Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon.

The word breathless identifies the Beloved with the "breathless bowers" of Love which were far above all the "kindred Powers" in "Love Enthroned" (I) and with the still landscapes of "The Lovers' Walk" (XII) and "Silent Noon" (XIX).

Etymologically solstice means the sun comes to a stop; this moment occurs at either of two points on the ecliptic path of the sun, one on June twenty-second, which is the midpoint between spring and summer, and the other on December twenty-second, the midpoint between autumn and winter. Since the puer archetype concerns the first half of life, spring and summer as the first half of the year is a puer aspect. This static moment--or "a moment's monument"--depicts perfectly in terms of yearly time the masculine eternal spirit's and the feminine soul's puer desire to remain in a world of Being, perfection and Eden.⁵⁹

The first Beloved becomes explicitly identified with Love, who is symbolized by the masculine sun, and is depicted, by implication, as a moon in the sestet of "Heart's Compass" (XXVII), where the narrator asks a question and answers it affirmatively:

Even such Love is; and is not thy name Love?

     Yea, by thy hand the Love-god rends apart

     All gathering clouds of Night's ambiguous art;

Flings them far down, and sets thine eyes above.

Night like day can have opposite natures. When the Beloved is present as the moon, night becomes harmless; night without the Beloved is ruled by Death and Fate and, consequently, by the senex archetype. Both the Beloved and Love, in their puer aspects, can conquer night and death through their making the world stand still.

The sonnets after the first Beloved's death until the appearance of Death as being both Love and the Beloved in "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII) is partially a night realm that has lost the "changeful light" of his Beloved's soul's "infinite love." In "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII), the "dead face" that is the first Beloved as a moon image apparently hardly affects the narrator's "tides of memory." The narrator's nights are filled with "Sleepless Dreams" (XXXIX). In "Through Death to Love" (XLI), the "terrors" of the senex as death dominate the narrator's winter and night world. Other sonnets continue the terrors of night without his Beloved as a moon to light his landscape.

"Heart's Compass" (XXVII), with its images of "solstice" and identity of Love and the Beloved as sun and moon, occurs exactly halfway between the beginning of the sonnet sequence and sonnet fifty-four "Love's Fatality," where the double of Love dramatically appears. "Desire of Love" is "Love's Fatality" and the senex part of the archetype. Clyde de L. Ryals has noted a similar splitting of sections of the sonnet sequence into halves as a means to emphasize dramatic changes. He observes that "Pride of Youth" (XXIV), which portrays the fickle Youth in a peak moment of change from an Old Love to a New Love, occurs exactly halfway to the collapse of the power of Love in general. This collapse happens in "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII).⁶⁰ At the time of "Pride of Youth" (XXIV), even the narrator's speculations about an inconstant Youth's change from an Old Love to a New Love portray the Youth as suspended between these loves at a crucial moment of change from night to day. The Old Love is confined to night and the New Love emerges at dawn and will be part of the puer's first half of the day. The narrator says:

Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive    

Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,  

Nor forward glorying, casts one look behind

Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.

The images of "night-rack" and "shrouds" link Old Love to the future fate of the first Beloved as portrayed in her death and in the night world depicted in the twelve sonnets just preceding the Willowwood sonnets.

The same kind of process happening with "Pride of Youth" (XXIV) and "Heart's Compass" (XXVII) is continued in other sonnets close to them, particularly "Heart's Compass." "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI), which just precedes "Heart's Compass," is another static moment like a solstice and occurs halfway between the beginning of the sonnet sequence and the last sonnet of the Willowwood sonnets (LII), in which the narrator internalizes the image of his Beloved. Earlier, in "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI) the narrator pictured his first Beloved as eternally fresh and possessing infinite possibilities as a puer does:

Thou lovely and beloved, thou my love;

     Whose kiss seems still the first; whose summoning eyes,

     Even now, as for our love-world's new sunrise,

Shed very dawn.

"Soul-Light" (XXVIII), which immediately follows "Heart's Compass," presents another image of a frozen moment of time for the sun and joins this with friendly images of the night world:

And as a traveller triumphs with the sun,

     Glorying in heat's mid-height, yet startide brings

     Wonder new-born, and still fresh transport springs

From limpid lambent hours of day begun;--

Even so, through eyes and voice, your soul doth move

My soul with changeful light of infinite love.

The companion piece to "Soul-Light" occurs twenty-eight sonnets later and is "Herself" (LVI), which is a universalization of the soul and the Beloved.

Even "Winged Hours" (XXV), which immediately follows "Pride of Youth" (XXIV), continues the narrator's obsession with time that is poised between two definite and significant time periods. The narrator contrasts his present hour with his first Beloved to a bird. In the octave, the bird's song rings through the "covert" of the narrator's "soul," and Love's song has an equally happy effect. In the sestet, the time is the future, and at this hour no bird or song is present and the narrator is "wandering round" his life "unleaved." The bird, as an hour, in this future time has its "bloodied feathers scattered in the brake." Exactly twenty-five sonnets later in the second sonnet of the Willowwood sonnets, Love sings again, and the narrator remembers his hours with his first Beloved and perceives himself and her as "a dumb throng," "mournful forms," and "shades."

This series of sonnets depicting the puer archetype in isolation from the senex centers on the theme of crucial moments of time, mainly frozen moments. These appear halfway between crucial sonnets toward the end of Part I beginning with sonnet forty-eight "Death-in-Love." This series started with "Pride of Youth" (XXIV), which introduces the dawn imagery that is continued in "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI), where his Beloved's "kiss seems still the first" and whose "summoning eyes" are for the lovers a "love-world's new sunrise." In between these two sonnets is "Winged Hours" (XXV), which involves an hour that can not be positively identified with any specific time of the day or year, except that in the octave, which depicts present time, leaves are on the trees--a fact which eliminates the time of winter. "Heart's Compass" (XXVII) contains the solstice time of the puer's season of spring and summer. "Soul-Light" (XXVIII) continues the day imagery of the sun's "mid-height" and introduces "startide" and a night illuminated by his first Beloved's love. "The Moonstar" (XXIX) again presents night time imagery, which has completely positive connotations.

"Last Fire" (XXX), as a conclusion to this group of sonnets on time ruled by the puer, shows the summer side of the solstice between spring and summer. Images like "this day's sun of rapture filled the west" emphasize the passing of the midpoint of love's passions and the entering into the last phases or last fires of love. Just as "Winged Hours" (XXV) contrasts the present happy time to a future mournful time, so "Last Fire" evokes images of winter and "sunless" days as a direct contrast to the delights of love that belongs to summer:

Many the days that Winter keeps in store,

Sunless throughout, or whose brief sun-glimpses

Scarce shed the heaped snow through the naked trees,

This day at least was Summer's paramour,

Sun-coloured to the imperishable core

With sweet well-being of love and full heart's ease.

"Last Fire" as sonnet thirty is halfway to the first sonnet of Part II, "Transfigured Life" (LX). By that time in the sonnet sequence, the Beloved's image is internalized and exists in a kind of "imperishable core" within his own being. After "Last Fire," the Beloved is no longer mentioned except in highly transfigured forms that are universals. Even the sonnets immediately following "Last Fire" (XXX)--from "Her Gifts" (XXXI) through "The Lamp's Shrine" (XXXV)--have few personal references to the first Beloved and concentrate instead on universalizing her.

The union of likes in Willowwood has created a positive relationship between the puer and the senex. Earlier, in the first thirty-six sonnets, the puer archetype was separated from the senex. From the perspective of the senex, who demands self-development in the context of time, the narrator's exclusive love for his first Beloved and his domination solely by the puer archetype was a negative and destructive situation. In the twelve sonnets preceding Willowwood, both the senex as death and the negative anima instituted changes that forced the narrator to recognize the perspective of the senex and the internal anima. In "The Hill Summit" (LXX), the narrator fully realized that he has become a "belated worshipper" of the sun. The narrator after the union of likes and the union of opposites has begun transformations that result in an increasing awareness of self and that initiate a process of individuation and self-expression. These positive results, particularly those stemming from the union of likes, will need to be explored in depth in the sonnets after Willowwood.

NOTES

¹ Italics mine.

² Lipot Szondi, Triebpathologie: Elemente der exakten Triebpsychologie und Triebpsychiatrie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1952), pp. 276-278.

³ Carl G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (1955; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), p. 378.

⁴ Ibid., p. 9.

⁵ Ibid., pp. 465-466.

⁶ Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1957), pp. 68-72.

⁷ Carl G. Jung, Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), pp. 62-65.

⁸ Hyman Spotnitz and Philip Resnikoff, "The Myths of Narcissus," Psychoanalytic Review, 41 (1954), 177-178.

⁹ Corpus Hermeticum, trans. A. J. Festugière, 1 (Paris: Société d'Édition, 1945), p. 10.

¹⁰ Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd ed. rev. (1958; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 34-35.

¹¹ Corpus Hermeticum, pp. 10-11.

¹² Lipot Szondi, Ich-Analyse: Die Grundlage zur Vereinigung der Tiefenpsychologie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1956), p. 278 and pp. 311-312.

¹³ Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), pp. 2-5.

¹⁴ Lipot Szondi, Experimental Diagnostics of Drives, trans. Gertrud Aull (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1952), pp. 8-16.

¹⁵ William E. Fredeman, "Rossetti's 'In Memoriam': An Elegiac Reading of The House of Life," Bulletin of the John Ryland Library, 47 (1965), 308-310; Paull Franklin Baum identifies only two sonnets in The House of Life as not being Petrarchan [Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 233].

¹⁶ John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 2.

¹⁷ C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myths of the Divine Child and the Divine Maiden, trans. R. F. C. Hull (1949; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 51-66 and p. 78; Marie-Luise von Franz, "Über religiöse Hintergründe des Puer-Aeternus-Problems," The Archetype, ed. Adolph Guggenbühl-Craig (New York: S. Karger, 1964), p. 149. Marie-Luise von Franz uses the feminine form puella aeterna; however, here the term puer will be used to indicate either sex.

¹⁸ Jung and Kerényi, Essays, p. 53.

¹⁹ James Hillman, "Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present," Eranos Jahrbuch, 36 (1967), 326.

²⁰ Karl Kerényi, Hermes der Sellenführer: das Mythologem vom männlichen Lebensursprung (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1944), p. 82.

²¹ Jung and Kerényi, Essays, p. 96.

²² Jung, Aion, pp. 201-202.

²³Kerényi, Hermes der Sellenführer, pp. 68-70.

²⁴ Jung and Kerényi, Essays, p. 69

²⁵ Marielene Putscher, Pneuma, Spiritus, Geist: Vorstellungen vom Lebensantrieb in ihren Geschichtlichen Wandlungen (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973), pp. 132-134.

²⁶ James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 68.

²⁷ Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 11.

²⁸ C. G. Jung, "The Spirit Mercurius," Alchemical Studies (Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 211-215.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 220.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 225.

³¹ R. P. Festugière, La Révélation d'Hermes Trismégiste, Vol. I: L'Astrologie et les Sciénces Occultés (Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, 1950), p. 67 and pp. 74-78.

³² Jung, "The Spirit Mercurius," pp. 226-227.

³³ Ibid., pp. 230-231.

³⁴ Hillman, "Senex and Puer," p. 316 and p. 325.

³⁵ C. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1951), pp. 16-17 and p. 114.

³⁶ E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 236-246.

³⁷ Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), pp. . 133-144. This book is the most extensive study of Saturn in existence.

³⁸ Corpus Hermeticum, pp. 10-11.

³⁹ Klibansky et. al., Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 136-141.

⁴⁰ Festugière, La Révélation, p. 97.

⁴¹ Klibansky et. al., Saturn and Melancholy, p. 142.

⁴² Hillman, "Senex and Puer," p. 317.

⁴³Ibid., pp. 334-338.

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 334-336.

⁴⁵ Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Frederick Muller, 1969), p. 367.

⁴⁶ Hillman, "Senex and Puer," pp. 335-336.

⁴⁷ Klibansky et. al., Saturn and Melancholy, illustrations 52-53.

⁴⁸ Hillman, "Senex and Puer," pp. 327-328.

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 318-339.

⁵⁰ Sigmund Freud, "On the Transformation of Instincts With Special Reference to Anal Instincts," Collected Papers, 2 (1916; rpt. New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 168-169; Sandor Ferenczi, "The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money," Sex in Psychoanalysis (1914; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 275.

⁵¹ Hillman, "Senex and Puer," p. 316.

⁵² Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (1932; rpt. New York: Agathon Press, 1968), p. 138.

⁵³ Ibid., pp. 138-145 and pp. 195-197.

⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 114-115.

⁵⁵ Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, pp. 359-360.

⁵⁶ Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks, pp. 16-17.

⁵⁷ Jung and Kerényi, Essays, p. 105.

⁵⁸Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius (1952; rpt. Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 73-74.

⁵⁹ J. L. Kendall, "The Concept of the Infinite Moment in The House of Life," Victorian Newsletter, #28 (Fall, 1965), 4-8.

⁶⁰ Clyde de L. Ryals, "The Narrative Unity of The House of Life," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69 (1970), 247.

CHAPTER V

Youth and Fate

In the Willowwood sonnets Love as the puer and Death as the senex both are equally prominent at first in the mind of the narrator. Being at the exact center of the whole sonnet sequence, the Willowwood sonnets have a Janus quality. Love looks back toward the past and the values of youth, and Death looks forward toward the future and the values of the old man. This Janus nature of the middle is maintained by each group of sonnets on either side of the Willowwood sonnets; the sonnets preceding Willowwood are dominated by Death, and the sonnets following Willowwood are ruled over by youth. Both realms of Death and Love, or Youth, consequently overlap the Willowwood sonnets. Death, however, prior to the Willowwood sonnets is in the sphere of the moon, or the negative anima, and after the Willowwood sonnets, Love, or Youth, is moving into the sphere of the sun, or the masculine. Basically positive results flow from the union of the puer and the senex and continue through the sonnet "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), which ends the three groups of twelve sonnets beginning after "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII). After "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), a dramatic change occurs that alters significantly the positive nature of the puer-senex archetype and even the anima itself. Many sonnets that follow the Willowwood sonnets through "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV) and that have not been discussed so far in detail or in relationship to the puer-senex archetype will now be explored.

The values of the eternal youth still prevail more than those of the senex in the twelve sonnets beginning with the first Willowwood sonnet and ending with the first sonnet of Part II, "Transfigured Life" (LX). In the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator has united with his Beloved's image, which represents the feminine puer of the psyche, or soul, and with Love, who is the masculine puer. Both Love and the anima image of the Beloved are the immortal essences of the narrator. Although these parts of the immortal self are united with a mortal self as is shown in "Love's Fatality" (LIV), where Love and Desire of Love are bound together "body and soul," the immortality of Love as the puer is strongly emphasized.

In "Stillborn Love" (LV), the "hour which might have been" is pictured as a child of a man and a woman who are in love. The image of a divine child as a unit of time that can exist throughout eternity points to all the basic characteristics of the puer aeternus, who can remain in a perfected state. This image of stasis is captured on a physical plane by the image of a "Stillborn" baby. The immortal hour waits beyond "Time's weary sea" before "The house of Love" for the two lovers. This same imagery of a house on a shore beside a sea appeared earlier in "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV). There, however, the house was on the shore of mortality and was a human habitation. Then the narrator had no extensive knowledge of his real psychic, emotional, and spiritual condition as he would later have in the Willowwood sonnets. His mind earlier was in a state of questioning; he asks,

Not I myself know all my love for thee:

     How should I reach so far, who cannot weigh

     To-morrow's dower my gage of yesterday?

Shall birth and death, and all dark names that be

As doors and windows bared to some loud sea,

     Lash deaf mine ears and blind my face with spray;

     And shall my sense pierce love,--the last relay

And ultimate outpost of eternity?

These images in this octave of "The Dark Glass" portray an opposite situation to that in "Stillborn Love." The sea is stormy in "The Dark Glass" and calm and still in "Stillborn Love" as befits the image of a stillborn baby. Choral music echoes from within "The house of Love" in "Stillborn Love" and a "loud sea" of cacophonous sounds prevails in "The Dark Glass." Both sonnets do have a negative connotation attached to eternity, even where Love is present as in "Stillborn Love," for the hour as a child did not appear in reality but only in the realm of death and eternity. This image of a child born to eternity and not to love, however, has links with the narrator's internal divine child, who is a creative product of the internal marriage of opposites and looks forward to Love's gift of Song in "Love's Last Gift" (LIX). Supreme joy reigns when the "wedded souls" of the lovers "now hand in hand" greet the "little outcast hour," who exclaims, "I am your child: 0 parents, ye have come!"

In "Bridal Birth" (II), a similar situation was portrayed by the narrator in the sestet after a real birth of the divine child Love. Here, however, the situation is reversed from "Stillborn Love," for Love as a grown young man through his song becomes a parent of the lovers, whereas in "Stillborn Love," the lovers are the parents of the stillborn hour. The same imagery occurs in "Bridal Birth" as appears in "Stillborn Love":

                  . . . and his [i.e., Love's] warm hands our couch prepare:

Till to his song our bodiless souls in turn

         Be born his children, when Death's nuptial change

                  Leaves us for light the halo of his hair.

In "Stillborn Love," "burning memory" serves as a light to bring love home to the stillborn hour, whereas in "Bridal Birth," the "light" from the "halo" of Love's "hair" serves as a light for the two lovers' souls.

Prior to the Willowwood sonnets, Love as a divine youth had a presence in reality, but after the Willowwood sonnets, Love begins more and more to exist in the realm of memory as his external power gives way to Death's power over external reality. Song and Art are creations belonging to the realm of eternity, universals, the collective, and culture; thus Love's rule shifts to an internal realm of the soul and the spiritual self. At this point of "Stillborn Love," yet quite close to the events of the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator is grieving in a normal manner over the loss of his Beloved and realizing that Fate now has power over his life. In this somewhat negative state, the narrator perceives the divine child in his most extreme form as a static perfection and, consequently, as a form of death similar to a "Stillborn" baby. The narrator, however, is resisting the emergence of the powers of the senex, who insists that the divine child take on human limitations and develop his perfection into some imperfect form--imperfect because it is material--such as the art forms of Song and Art.

The same imagery of "Stillborn Love" (IV) appears in the narrator's universalizing of his Beloved in the last sonnet of the sequence "True Woman" entitled "Her Heaven" (LVIII). The realm is eternal Heaven and there the "old" grow "young." In Heaven, the ultimate destiny for the purest element of both male and female that are, according to Gnostic teachings, the principles of the divine youth, or puer, or self, reign supreme. The "old," or the senex, belongs to the realm of the material cosmos that is ruled by fate and mortal death. The narrator, however, makes True Woman like a "house of Love" on earth. Unlike the "mute" "hour which might have been," in "Stillborn Love," the narrator sings True Woman's praises as he sang his own Beloved's praises in the past. "Choir-strains" came from True Woman's "tongue," just as the "choral consonancy" of the "hours elect" echoed from "The house of Love" in "Stillborn Love" (LV). Instead of the "sighs" of the stillborn hour, "sweet sighs" are fleeing "about her [i.e., True Woman's] soul's immediate sanctuary." True Woman like "The house of Love" becomes a "Paradise," except that her "Paradise" is on this mortal side of "Time's weary sea." In this sonnet of praise for True Woman, the narrator has given full credit to the beauty and power of the feminine immortal puer.

In this same sonnet "Her Heaven" (LVIII), the powers of the senex momentarily assert themselves in a dominant image of this group of twelve sonnets. In the sestet of "Her Heaven (LVIII), the narrator introduces the image of a flower merged with that of the sun: "The sunrise blooms and withers on the hill / Like any hillflower; and the noblest troth / Dies here to dust." The image of a flower is an ideal image for the moment of time that teeters between the period of youth, or the puer, and advanced age, or the senex. The flower is the peak of beauty for a plant; it is a narcissistic kind of self-contained beauty in that the flower is complete in itself, being hermaphroditic in the sense of containing both male and female sexual elements within its core. Yet once the flower is fertilized and the male and female opposites unite, then the potential seed or fruit is on the way to being developed and the flower's role of being beautiful for itself ends. The stage of youth and the prime state of manhood, which combines both puer and senex, is over; in the human cycle, the son becomes a father and the daughter becomes a mother. Narcissus remained a perpetual youth since he did not go into the sphere of fatherhood. As a narcissus flower, however, he was the lure to Persephone. Her seduction by the narcissus flower ended her status as a daughter and began her being dominated by the male Hades, by the institution of marriage, and by potential motherhood. In "Her Heaven" the sun as a "hillflower" combines the masculine image of the sun and the image of the flower, which being hermaphroditic can be an image of the immortal self in its totality of opposites such as male spirit and female soul.¹

The flower often traditionally has symbolized the woman. In "Herself" (LVI), the first sonnet of the three sonnets of "True Woman," the narrator summarizes all the great qualities of True Woman by calling her "the flower of life." In The Romance of the Rose, the woman is a rose flower. Mary in Christian lore is often associated with the rose. W. B. Yeats' poetry has many of these links of religion, woman, and the rose. The sun at its point of setting on the crest of a hill being like a flower unites the images of the puer to that of the senex. The female immortal self is united with the male spiritual self in both its puer and senex aspects. Death's and the senex's reign is shown in the flower's withering on the hill in "Her Heaven" (LVIII).     

Still, the picture of a balancing point is preserved in the hill image present in "Her Heaven" and in "The Hill Summit" (LXX). For the narrator, a valley of "bewildered tracks" is beyond "The Hill Summit" and leads to night. After sunrise, the sun sinks eventually into the darkness too. Despite this prospect of night ruled solely by Death and fate, the narrator at the point of the sonnet "Her Heaven" (LVIII) is optimistic since both the elements of youth and age are at a point of suspension. The narrator can look toward both and draw upon their strengths. He meditates,

                  Yet shall Heaven's promise clothe

Even yet those lovers who have cherished still

This test for love:--in every kiss sealed fast

To feel the first kiss and forebode the last.

The narrator even portrays the kiss, his great symbol of union, as a suspension point in time like a "Silent Noon" as uniting the first kiss, the time of the puer, and the last kiss, that of the senex. Earlier, too, in "Nuptial Sleep" (VIa) and in the last Willowwood sonnet both images of the flower and the kiss appear together and have many of the general concepts associated with the flower image.  

"Love's Last Gift" (LIX), the last sonnet of Part I, and "Transfigured Life" (LX), the first sonnet of Part II, contain many images pointing to the puer-senex archetype. In the octave of "Love's Last Gift," Love speaks exclusively of the season of summer, the last period when the puer reigns supreme. In the sestet, Love contrasts both the seasons of spring and summer to autumn and winter. Love declares that the laurel leaf, his last gift, does not dread the coming of winter as flowers and plants do. The reason, though not stated by Love, is that the laurel and the gift of Song that it represents belong to an immortal realm of literature and culture. Just as True Woman is a "Paradise" on earth, so art in the forms of Song and painting belongs to an immortal realm that is linked to this world. Even in his love for his Beloved, the narrator idealized his sexual union by portraying it as a kiss. In "Transfigured Life" (LX), the puer-senex archetype appears in the octave in imagery of parent and child. The emphasis, as is true of these twelve sonnets as a whole, is on the blending of the two archetypes of puer and senex and the emergence of the immortal aspect of the archetype, which is the puer, in some concrete external form such as Song and Art. The narrator comments on a universal process of the growth of a child whose "form or momentary glance" of his features recall the "father's with the mother's face combin'd." The unions of opposites and of likes in the Willowwood sonnets have indicated a new sense of individualism and of self for the narrator. This same recognition of the emergence of the self, which now contains within both the immortal feminine soul and the masculine spiritual self, appears in the narrator's conclusion to the octave:

And yet, as childhood's years and youth's advance,

     The gradual mouldings leave one stamp behind,

     Till in the blended likeness now we find

A separate man's or woman's countenance.

The narrator in the sestet makes an analogy between real parents of a child and the emotions of "Joy and Pain" that produce a "Song." The biological and earthly reproductive and growth processes have moved into the ideal and immortal realm of poetry and human culture.

These same images of parents and child appear a few sonnets later in "Inclusiveness" (LXIII). There the viewpoint, however, is more that of the senex as a father, who looks at his son as his own future and remembers his own attitudes as a son. The narrator asks two rhetorical questions that have universal meaning:

What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood    

     How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?--

     Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,

Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

There are Oedipal complex implications here. The Oedipal complex, as Freud has proven, is universal. The artist, however, as Otto Rank has shown, utilizes this complex as a motive in forming art, whereas the neurotic personalizes it and is overcome by it.² As is true for most of Part II, the narrator universalizes personal elements, even the Oedipus complex.

The twelve sonnets from "The Song-Throe" (LXI) through the second sonnet of "The Choice" (LXXII) are concerned with the narrator's gift of Song. Since the sources for his poetry are the inspiration given by the god Apollo in a moment of ecstasy--where the narrator unites with the god in a state of inflation--and experiences of his emotions of Joy and Pain in depth, the poet draws upon his "ardour," memory, and anticipations about the future. In "Ardour and Memory" (LXIV), the dual nature of these twelve sonnets appear prominently. The basic organization is between the two halves of the year; in the octave the narrator reflects upon spring and summer and in the sestet upon autumn and winter. The image of the rose appears as a culmination of spring--a moment like the sun's solstice: "The cuckoo-throb, the heartbeat of the Spring; / The rosebud's blush that leaves it as it grows / Into the full-eyed fair unblushing rose." In depicting the season of summer, the narrator introduces images of the parts of the day, particularly emphasizing dawn:

The summer clouds that visit every wing

With fires of sunrise and of sunsetting;

     The furtive flickering streams to light re-born

     'Mid airs new-fledged and valorous lusts of morn,

While all the daughters of the daybreak sing.

The narrator then states that "ardour" and "memory" love these times and these images. Except for the sunset image, which anticipates the winter imagery of the sestet and which indicates that times of Pain also can be in spring and summer, all the images relate to the times associated with the puer.

In "Heart's Hope" (V), the narrator promised to explore by "word's power" "the difficult deeps of Love" and to "Draw from one loving heart such evidence / As to all hearts shall signify." The narrator's passions in his youth for his Beloved have become memory and the sources for his songs. In the sestet of "Ardour and Memory" (LXIV), the narrator presents the other side of this joyful time of youth in the form of images that reflect the second half of the year and the Pain it brings:

                           . . . and when flown

     All joys, and through dark forest-boughs in flight

     The wind swoops onward brandishing the light,

Even yet the rose-tree's verdure left alone

Will flush all ruddy though the rose be gone;

     With ditties and with dirges infinite.

The wind brandishes the light, creating a sunset that gives a "ruddy" hue to the rose bush. This concept suggests that even in the time of the senex, who represents the second half of life, Death and fate, the youthful past will still be present as is the rose bush, despite the loss of its flowers. The wind may create "ditties and dirges infinite" as it goes through the rose bush and thus awake "the soul's sphere of infinite images" as depicted in the gloomy octave of "The Soul's Sphere" (LXII).

In the twelve sonnets on Song, the power of the senex and that of the puer are still somewhat equally balanced--even though the power of the senex is gradually increasing. Without a balance between the puer and the senex, the narrator would not have the inspiration of the divine youth Apollo nor the senex's will to externalize this inspiration. The narrator's "ardour" and "memory" are in the past; therefore, the puer at this time is looking to the past and thus internally into his "Soul's Sphere." The narrator, however, is now constantly aware of the future, which may appear at times hopeful and at other times frightful as it does in this sonnet of "Ardour and Memory" (LXIV). In "The Soul's Sphere" (LXII) the narrator perceives both aspects of the future, which is ruled by the senex.

The senex is never absent in these twelve sonnets concerning Song even if the season or day imagery is not used to depict the past of youth and the future of old age. In "The Song-Throe" (LXI), the narrator speaks of his "Magic mirror" of his "manifest heart" and of his "own / Anguish or ardour" as his only "amulet" or charm to create his songs. In contrast to these values of the puer centered in memory and passion, the narrator cites another kind of verse:

Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet

     Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry

     Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,

That song o'er which no singer's lids grew wet.

Apollo, who becomes the narrator's god of inspiration in the sestet, is a god of order as well of inspiration, enthusiasm, and ecstasy. As a divine youth, Apollo combines the good qualities of the puer, who has drive and passion, and the senex, who has order and control. In the verse "Cisterned in Pride," the senex is complete ruler and has separated himself completely from the puer portion of the puer-senex archetype. James Hillman characterizes the nature of the senex and Saturn in terms that fit verse "Cisterned in Pride." Like Saturn, the senex's temperament is cold. This coldness can be expressed as distance and thus as an objective cold view of reality, or "things just as they are." Since the senex, like Saturn,, views the world from the outside and from such depths, he sees everything "structurally and abstractly." The senex, consequently, represents the principle of order, "whether through time, or hierarchy, or exact science and system, or limits and borders, or power, or inwardness and reflection, or earth and the forms it gives."³ In essence, the senex is limitation and restriction without any reference to emotion or subjective elements. An image that depicts these traits is the "heart-hardened sick old king" in legends.⁴ He is the ruler of a land that is without water and fertility. In psychological terms, the senex is the empiric conscious ego that rules like the Romans, who tried by their laws to order their whole world and to conquer the barbarians.⁶ The senex alone would concern himself with cold techniques of poetry and could never contact the soul or draw from the waters of the fountain of the unconscious. The senex would easily embrace the pragmatic values of Bentham's utilitarianism where "push-pin" is as good as poetry. The soul may eventually end up in Hades, which is ruled by the senex, but in life, the soul, like Psyche, only falls in love with Eros, a puer.

Poetry or any creative activity can not be created by sheer enthusiasm or inspired ideas coming from the puer. These ideas must be taken over by the senex and put into the world of reality. James Hillman equates the puer with the beginning of creative activity and the senex with the end. Like the god Hermes, the divine puer brings messages, inspiration, or meanings from the spirit realm to the creator; this beginning is filled with the "excitement of Eros." The senex, however, imposes order upon these messages and ideas and brings them to a fruitful end.⁶ Creativity besides involving the union of opposites, which, in essence, produce the new ideas and forms, involves this union of likes of immortal inspiration, passion, activity, search and the ordering and bringing of these to earth and reality. When the puer and senex are joined together, they act positively; when separated, they become negative.

In "Known in Vain" (LXV) and "The Heart of the Night" (LXVI), the narrator evokes the powers of the senex and stresses the necessity for giving due respect to this aspect of life and creativity. In "Known in Vain," the narrator describes in the octave two lovers who discover that their "foolish" love widens to the point that their love "Knows suddenly... The Holy of holies." After this discovery, since they formerly scoffed at love, they do not "dare to cope / With the whole truth aloud"; instead they often sit together without speaking "within hopeless sight of hope." They are in the grips of the beginning of love, which was revealed to them in a moment of enlightenment like that occurring in the Willowwood sonnets. The puer values are in full sway even after a peak of insight has been reached. The lovers, however, lack the values of the senex to carry through their insights and love to its conclusion. They remain like Narcissus in his static perfection, gazing at his own image passionately. The narrator compares this situation of the two lovers whose enlightenment of their love is "Known in Vain" to the late emergence of "Work" and "Will" into one's life. The senex concludes matters through the application of his will and through work; he ends things in concrete ways. A person without Work and Will watches his life sail by. When the senex is separated from the puer, the senex reveals his negative aspects. He makes life a maze that appears to have no real purpose to the person who wanders aimlessly through it. The ultimate destination, however, is death, which is the ultimate form for the senex: "Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze / Thenceforth their incommunicable ways / Follow the desultory feet of Death?" The narrator may feel some regrets that he did not find the values of Work and Will sooner or had discovered a well of living water sooner as shown in "The Landmark" (LXVII), but his knowledge gained in the Willowwood sonnets, his union of the puer and senex aspects of his nature, and his new gift of Song show that he has not "Known in Vain."

In "The Heart of the Night" (LXVI), the narrator continues the same themes of "Known in Vain" (LXV). This time, the narrator uses the "swift cycle" of "change" of a person's life to portray a life without the powers of the senex:

From child to youth; from youth to arduous man;

     From lethargy to fever of the heart;

     From faithful life to dream-dowered days apart;

From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban.

This life is filled with lethargy, doubt, dreams, idleness, and sorrow. It is a life undirected except in the sense of proceeding biologically from youth to old age. The soul in this person's life can expect no development; it is trapped in a purely biological existence that has its model in Psyche's stay in Eros' palace of love. The soul can only look to death: "Alas, the soul!--how soon must she / Accept her primal immortality,-- / The flesh resume its dust whence it began?" In the sestet, the narrator becomes passionate in his exhortation of the senex in his many forms and sees salvation through him, even though it may be still late in life: "0 Lord of work and peace! 0 Lord of life! / 0 Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late, / Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath." The senex is a masculine spirit and thus can be associated with air and breath. The fact that it is "duteous breath" shows, as many of these Lords indicate, the senex part of the puer-senex archetype. Being renewed, the soul can face in confidence Death, for the soul has developed its potential just as the soul has participated in the narrator's creation of poetry. The narrator concludes these ideas with the final mention of Death as was done in the preceding sonnet "Known in Vain": "That when the peace is garnered in from strife, / The work retrieved, the will regenerate, / This soul may see thy face, 0 Lord of death!" The "Heart of the Night" is the ultimate place for Death, and although the soul is in this night, it does not experience the terrors in the night as depicted in the twelve sonnets preceding Willowwood. The narrator has consciously internalized the soul and is in a positive relationship to it, just as he has a positive relationship to his puer and senex.

-        Despite its title "A Dark Day" (LXVIII) is almost a companion piece to "The Heart of the Night" (LXVI) since they both portray a person traveling through life and at opposite times of a twenty-four hour period. In "A Dark Day" the-narrator describes a traveler, who as in "The Landmark" (LXVII), is on a life journey and perceives that he is at a point where the way is unclear and unmarked. The narrator says,

The gloom that breathes upon me with these airs   

     Is like the drops which strike the traveller's brow        

     Who knows not, darkling, if they bring him now

Fresh storm, or be old rain the covert bears.

The traveler looks both to the past of the "covert" and to the future with a possible "fresh storm." The narrator concludes the octave by repeating the same doubt as to whether memory of the past has put him in such a gloomy mood or intuition of some future disasters, which are indicated by images of sowing and harvesting:

Ah! bodes this hour some harvest of new tares,      

     Or hath but memory of the day whose plough  

     Sowed hunger once,--the night at length when thou,

0 prayer found vain, didst fall from out my prayers?

Such a night is the narrator's past as was described in such sonnets as "Sleepless Dreams" (XXXIX). Then a rain came not from a storm onto a covert but from the narrator's own tears; the narrator then asked, "0 lonely night! art thou not known to me, / A thicket hung with masks of mockery / And watered with the wasteful warmth of tears?" The time of sowing is that of the puer and harvesting that of the senex.

Despite all this gloomy mood and speculation in the octave of "A Dark Day," the narrator in the sestet recognizes the restorative powers of sleep and night. The "prickly" "growths" along the traveler's path will be transformed by "Time's grace" and be soothed by "night and sleep." In these twelve sonnets centered on Song, the narrator has been dwelling on his past memories; in a real sense he has been harvesting them. In the conclusion to this sonnet, the narrator presents the image of a girl who is gleaning in the fashion of a Ruth the "dead" "thistledown" from the "pathsides" at the time of autumn. The thistledown is the prickly plant mentioned at the beginning of the sestet. The narrator's own past experiences with his Beloveds were hurtful and had qualities of prickly plants such as rosebushes. The girl in her youth gleans the thistledown in the autumn when they are smooth and then "one new year" they make "soft her marriage-bed." Dead objects have become useful and comforting after a passage of time. Like the girl, the narrator is gleaning from "the soul's sphere of infinite images" and finding them valuable. His own normal grief and "Time's grace" have made possible their use in marriages of both opposites and likes.

In "Autumn Idleness" (LXIX), which immediately follows "A Dark Day," the narrator reverses the emphasis from the "gloom" of "A Dark Day" to the "sunlight" that "shames November." The narrator has been grieving in a normal manner in "A Dark Day," just as "November," as the time of the autumn senex, "grieves / In dead red leaves." The image of the dead leaves recalls many gloomy moments in the narrator's past. The sunlight, however, changes these leaves into objects of beauty since they become marks on deer:

     . . . while from hillock-eaves

The deer gaze calling, dappled white and dun,

As if, being foresters of old, the sun

Had marked them with the shade of forest-leaves.

In his dual nature, the senex can be fruitful and productive when in a positive connection with the puer or be death, restriction, limitation, stagnation when separated from the puer. The sunlight represents the puer aspect and is trying to revive the senex from turning inward completely as the narrator is tending to do more and more in these twelve sonnets. The title "Autumn Idleness" is the opposite state of "Work" and "Will" that are the strong qualities of a positive senex. The narrator in the sestet repeats the cycle of a day, which represents the journey of the sun around the earth: "Here dawn to-day unveiled her magic glass; / Here noon now gives the thirst and takes the dew; / Till eve bring rest when other good things pass." In Part I, the sonnets that are centered around "Heart's Compass" (XXVII) depict the time of the peak transition from one season to another or one part of the day to another. With the union of the puer-senex in this group of twelve sonnets focused on Song, the whole cycle of change and man's journey through life are stressed. Despite this union of the puer and the senex, the narrator has some doubts about what to do. This is not surprising since these twelve sonnets are directed inward to "The Soul's Sphere." In the sestet of "Autumn Idleness" (LXIX), the narrator expresses his doubts: "And here the lost hours the lost hours renew / While I still lead my shadow o'er the grass, / Nor know, for longing, that which I should do." The narrator has been looking to his past, the time of his love for his Beloveds. His "ardour" of "longing" as a form of Pain and grieving has kept him from acting decisively. In "The Hill Summit" (LXX), which follows immediately, the narrator gains a higher position and a better perspective on what he is to do with his life now that he faces the second half of it and has new powers from Love, Apollo, his internal anima, and the senex.

"The Choice" is a series of three sonnets that resolves the doubt of the narrator raised in "Autumn Idleness" (LXIX): "Nor know, for longing, that which I should do." In "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), the narrator learned that Love and Death were the same. In the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator consciously accepts this and unites with Love, who is also Death. Each of the three choices facing the narrator end with "to-morrow thou shalt die." The perfection of eternal youth and the Garden of Eden have been shattered earlier by this knowledge of mortality. In all three sonnets of "The Choice" the sphere and values of the puer and senex are present and conflict with each other.

The first choice (LXXI) contrasts the pure sensual values of a youth in love to the senex-oriented values of materialists seeking "Vain gold" or to those of idealists seeking "vain lore." The sensual puer's motto of "Eat thou and drink" wins out over philosophies in which people "die not,--for their life was death" and "round" whose "lips the mould falls close." Saturn, the model for the senex, governs coins, minting, and wealth.⁷ The puer rejects this "Vain gold" and seeks the gold in "golden wine" and in the Beloved's "fingers" that "glow like gold." This youth evokes the early sensual pleasures of love between the narrator and his first Beloved through the image of drowning in "We'll drown all hours." In "Nuptial Sleep" (VIa), the two lovers after sexual intercourse "sank" "lower than the tide of dreams" and eventually their "souls swam up again" "through gleams / Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day." Drowning implies death and the youth's philosophy of "Eat thou and drink" has an element of fear, for his Beloved's "song, while hours are toll'd, / Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky." The "changing sky" is the passage of time and leads eventually to death. In the sestet, youth's command to his Beloved to kiss him recalls the moments both of the sensual union of the narrator and his first Beloved in "The Kiss" (VI) and their final kiss in Willowwood. The drowning image, too, recalls the Beloved's image drowning after their kiss in the Willowwood sonnets and the later "Wild pageant of the accumulated past / That clangs and flashes for a drowning man" in "The Soul's Sphere" (LXII). The narrator has passed beyond this philosophy of extreme youth which only glorifies sensual love.

At the other extreme is the senex's sphere and values that are depicted in the second choice (LXXII). This religious-minded and ascetic man concentrates on death. He questions whether the sun in the sky can reach its goal of setting and envisions an imminent apocalypse: "God's breath / Even at this moment haply quickeneth / The air to a flame; till spirits, always nigh / Though screened and hid, shall walk the daytime here." Normally Rossetti indicates a definite break between the octave and the sestet in order to emphasize contrasts and changes. This religious fanatic's philosophy of "Watch thou and fear" allows no other opposing view to be present. He is an extreme form of the senex and being thus separated from the invigorating and life-pulsating puer turns completely negative and destructive. From his cosmic and apocalyptic views, it is foolish to "prate of all that man shall do." Since all is consumed by "plagues," how can one become interested in culture and action to build a better world in the future? Ultimately, God, like a vengeful god of fate, slays worm-like man in "Hell." This extreme philosophy paralyzes all action and hope, leaving man to "watch" and "fear." This philosophy is that of a negative senex who represents tyranny and destruction of all life. James Hillman calls this extreme form of the senex "the madness of lead-poison" because the person thus cuts himself off from life and the feminine, "inhibiting it and introverting it into an isolation."⁸

The third choice (LXXIII), which is "Think thou and act," introduces the twelve sonnets up through "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV) that initially stress Art, or painting. The narrator takes the broadest view of man's doing and thinking--actually all cultural activities--by presenting a survey of the past in the octave and a look into the future in the sestet. In the twelve sonnets on Song that have preceded this sonnet, the same process has occurred but on a more personal level, despite the fact that the narrator utilizes his longings for his happy past as a youth and his hopes and fears for the future as a senex for the creation of poetry. Song, however, is still quite subjective even if a part of culture. Even the preceding two philosophies represent extremely subjective reactions since both deny the value of any achievements in the past or the future. The pure sensualist and religious ascetic see little value in Art, Song, and cultural creations. In the octave of the third sonnet of "The Choice," the narrator presents a man's argument against thinking and doing and his own reaction:

     Thou say'st: "Man's measured path is all gone o'er:

Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,

Man clomb until he touched the truth; and I,

     Even I, am he whom it was destined for."         

     How should this be? Art thou then so much more

Than they who sowed, that thou shouldst reap thereby?

Puer-senex imagery appears in sowing and reaping, in the journey motif of climbing, and in destiny, and in "Man's measured path." Man at any moment, when considered from the viewpoint of the span of time covering human culture, is at the precise instant between a past and a present. Man is both at the end as a reaper and, as the sestet shows, is a sower, for though his "soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,-- / Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea." Like the peak moments of "Silent Noon" (XIX), "Mid-Rapture" (XXVI), "Heart's Compass" (XXVII) and the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator pictures man suspended between the two possibilities inherent in past and future. The future always contains emotional, spiritual, and physical death as the evoking of the drowning image shows in the sestet where "thought" is "drown'd." The narrator has chosen this positive philosophy of thinking and acting, which combines both the senex value of thinking and the puer value of acting, despite the ultimate fate of death given in the second part of the philosophy "to-morrow thou shalt die." In this connected form the puer-senex archetype works positively.

In these twelve sonnets beginning with the third choice (LXXIII) and focused initially on Art in the form of painting, the narrator depicts cultural and collective interests that have not appeared before. It is as if the narrator has replaced his Beloved with culture and particularly art in its broad meaning. In "St. Luke the Painter" (LXXIV), the first sonnet of "Old and New Art," Art is personified as a female. In the second sonnet of "Newborn Death" (C), Art's "eyes were worlds by God found fair," and Art and Song "o'er the book of Nature mixed their breath / With neck-twined arms." These references to Art suggest that Art was feminine and Song masculine. This love affair with culture will extend through "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII); these sonnets are concerned with paintings in some way. A change, however, will occur after this sonnet "Body's Beauty" and will prepare the way for the final sonnets of the whole sonnet sequence. By adopting the third choice of thinking and acting, the narrator culminates his self-development initiated in the Willowwood sonnets, where he united with Love, the representative of the immortal spiritual self, and with the anima, who as soul leads to the feminine part of the immortal self.

John Layard, who has shown how important kinship libido is in the union of opposites, which can occur both externally and internally, also has studied the union of likes in primitive societies. He stresses its significance for the cultural and spiritual life of the community. In some primitive societies, the adult members of the tribe remove a young boy from the influence of women in order to make the boy masculine. Primitives express this process of introducing the youth to the spiritual or masculine values of the culture in sexual manifestations, where the boy becomes a sister-substitute and wife-substitute for an adult male. A literal union of the older man, who represents the spiritual wisdom of the tribe, and the youth occurs in a homosexual union in the form of anal intercourse. The semen of the adult, which represents masculinity, is absorbed by the youth. In an initiation rite, which ends this literal sexual relationship between adult and youth, the same event occurs on a purely symbolic level. Then the male spirits of the ancestors, "who are the extensions in time (and psychic depth) of the initiating men" perform anal intercourse upon the youth.⁹

In spiritual terms, the archetype of the Wise Old Man, the senex, or psychopomp, is uniting the conscious empiric ego of the youth with the spiritual self, which is immortal, and in this case is only found through the spiritual world represented by the male adults of the community. However, the reverse is equally true; the wise men of the community are reuniting with potentially unknown spiritual values that may erupt through the youth who represents the immortal self for them. Culture achieved by male adults and old men can solidify and become tyrannical if the senex alone rules. Therefore, the renewal of culture through new spiritual values must come from the youths who overthrow the old yet depend on it at the same time. The adult male or the spiritual ancestors in anal intercourse with the youth come from behind and symbolically represent tradition and the set past.¹⁰ We have already seen the connection between Saturn as the senex and anality and all its symbols. The female can penetrate a youth's mouth with her nipple but nowhere else.¹¹ The oral stage of childhood represents the period where the mother dominates and the child is dependent upon her. This same stage can reappear if the anima alone rules as in a state of projection.

In primitive tribes the incest taboo applies to father and son relationships as well as it does between mother and son or father and daughter or between brother and sister. Thus this incest taboo between the father, who as symbol for the Father God, who is founder of the tribe, works to increase the spiritual longing of the conscious ego for God, or the self within, and tends to internalize the archetype of the self just as the incest taboo between brother and sister internalizes the anima.¹² In both cases, incest taboos promote spiritualization and, if there were such a word, soulization. The collective values are preserved and promoted by internalization by means of the union of opposites and the union of likes that are forbidden in external reality.

On the level of the gods, these prohibitions do not apply. Apollo, the patron god of the narrator's poetry, in his youth was bound in love to King Admetos in order to gain his wisdom. And as an adult god, Apollo fell in love with Hyacinthus, who resembled Apollo's youthful form. In these unions, both puer and senex were united. Later Apollo, under Fate's compulsion, killed Hyacinthus.¹³ The gods act out externally what happens internally on a spiritual level within a person. The narrator in The House of Life has emphasized the spiritual and soul nature of his union with both the anima and the immortal spiritual self by depicting the union as occurring at the head level in the forms of a kiss, oral drinking, and the uniting of the heads of Love and the narrator.¹⁴

The union of the conscious ego and the immortal self is essential for any spiritual or cultural achievement, since this union separates the male from a purely physical existence, which patriarchal societies equate with the feminine. However, this union may be sterile as far as creativity is concerned. Without a union of opposites internally between the male conscious ego--or his unconscious ego in the form of the spiritual side of the self--and the anima, no productive creations of Art, Song, or any culture is possible. Carl Jung found one example of a union of likes in alchemical literature. A King of the Sea ruled over a land where only likes paired with likes; the land, consequently, was unfruitful. Jung calls this land "a realm of innocent friendship, a kind of paradise or golden age." The King, however, ends this paradise by creating within his mind a son and a daughter and then imagines them in sexual union. This act of the imagination, which replaced the tabooed external physical sexual act, ended the sterility of the land, even though the elders of the land considered his deed sinful.¹⁵ The union of likes is necessary for externalizing the results of the spiritual union of opposites in the form of poetry, painting, and all culture. In matriarchal societies, the union of likes would be purely feminine between mother and daughter as occurs in feminine mystery religions such as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The anima has been an internal inspiration for the narrator in the twelve sonnets devoted to Song. She reappears strongly again in the external cultural form of Art. In "St. Luke the Painter" (LXXIV), the first sonnet of the three on "Old and New Art," the anima appears personified as Art. Luke Evangelist, as a Wise Old Man, or senex, taught Art "to fold her hands and pray." Soon, however, Art "dared to rend the mist /Of devious symbols" and saw these "symbols also in some deeper way." She saw God in them and became "God's priest." In this sense she was like the priestesses at Delphi who took religious insights from the god Apollo himself. Traditions as exemplified by the Fathers of a culture and official doctrines were not enough for either the priestesses or Art. But soon at a midpoint in development at "past noon," Art began "to irk" at her religious task and eventually turned to "soulless self-reflections of man's skill." Like "the soulless air-flung fountains" that were the source for soulless verse in "The Song-Throe" (LXI), these purely technical aspects of painting that had been divorced from religion were worthless. Art, however, had hope as the narrator presently has, since at "twilight," she may return to a natural state again of being religious in the broadest spiritual sense before death comes in the form of night. Otto Rank has traced this same development of art and has stressed that although art began with religion, the soul became humanized by freeing itself from religion and by devoting itself solely to art.¹⁶ In "St. Luke the Painter," Art frees herself both from religion as represented by orthodox culture and from strictly a utilitarian "soulless" form of art and returns to a spiritual, yet personal, form of art. Rossetti's own Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood turned against the "soulless" classic painting tradition, and returned to nature as portrayed by John Ruskin in Modern Painters and to an earlier and more spiritual period of art.

"Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII) and "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII) emphasize the anima in externalized forms, continue the theme of the development of Art, and reach a peak where Art and Song and Puer and Senex appear in a totality almost equal to that of the Willowwood sonnets. Rossetti wrote these two sonnets to celebrate his pictures "Sibylla Palmifera" and "Lady Lilith." At first, Rossetti intended to paint a picture entitled "The Queen of Beauty" for a client but changed his mind and painted "Sibylla Palmifera."¹⁷

The concept of a Queen of Beauty remains in "Soul's Beauty" since "Lady Beauty" is "Beauty enthroned." This description of Beauty as being "enthroned" is significant since it recognizes explicitly what has occurred since "Love's Last Gift" (LIX) and "Transfigured Life" (LX). In "Love Enthroned" (I), Love was enthroned over all powers, particularly through the first thirty-six sonnets. During this period and up through the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator had a worshipful attitude toward Love just as Art in "St. Luke the Painter" (LXXIV) was in the thrall of religion. By "Soul's Beauty," Love has been dethroned as an external god, and the god Apollo as the inspirer of Song has taken his place. But now "Lady Beauty," who is pictured as a Sibyl, has been placed on the throne. A Sibyl was a priestess for the god Apollo.¹⁸ The narrator's use of a sonnet, a form of Song, to celebrate a painting, or Art, thus unites the two art forms together in praise of the greater power of Beauty herself. Apollo, the god of poetry, or Song, and his Sibyl priestess are now no longer in their usual context of traditional religion but now are in a context of a religion of beauty in all art forms. In the sestet, the narrator describes "Lady Beauty" in terms of pursuit: "This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise / Thy [i.e., the narrator's] voice and hand shake still,--long known to thee / By flying hair and fluttering hem." The elusiveness of Beauty and at the same time her attraction reside in her manifest forms of Song and Art. In the second sonnet of "Newborn Death" (C), Song is depicted as a male in god-like Apollo form, and Art is a female beloved by God: "And Song, whose hair / Blew like a flame and blossomed like a wreath; / And Art, whose eyes were worlds by God found fair." These two are each like the narrator's "soul's birth-partner" described in "The Birth-Bond" (XV). In "Newborn Death" (C), like immortal twins, they "o'er the book of Nature mixed their breath / With neck-twined arms, as oft we [i.e., Life and the narrator] watched them there." In "Soul's Beauty," Song and Art are united in service of Lady Beauty and together produce a sonnet and a painting for her.

The puer-senex archetype appears prominently in this paean for "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII) and in the painting "Sibylla Palmifera." The narrator opens the sonnet with "Under the arch of Life, where love and death, / Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw / Beauty enthroned." The identity of love with the puer and Eros and of death with the senex is confirmed in the painting. To the left of the Arch of Life is a picture of the winged head of a blindfolded Cupid and to the right is a skull's head. To the left is the beginning, or the time of the puer, and to the right is the destination death, the period of the senex. Over Cupid's head are roses, which have been associated in the Willowwood sonnets and other sonnets with love and union, and over death's head are poppies, which are the flowers of sleep.¹⁹ The God of Sleep is from death's realm in Hades. Two butterflies are on death's side of the picture; the Greeks associated the butterfly with the soul, or psyche.²⁰ Just as in "St. Luke the Painter" (LXXIV), the senex, as a representative of all traditional values of a culture, appears as a backdrop for the worship of Beauty. The image of the Sibyl connects the narrator's present worship of Beauty to man's early religious worship in Greece and Rome. Death as the senex unites with love under the arch of Life, and the image of the soul in "Soul's Beauty" stresses the universal nature of the worship of Beauty.

Although "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII) is meant to be a contrast to "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII), both soul and body have close identities. Lilith, "Adam's first wife," has the "rose and the poppy" as "her flowers." These same flowers have appeared prominently in the "Sibylla Palmifera" painting. In "Lovesight" (IV), the narrator equated his first Beloved with his own soul. Further, in "Heart's Hope" (V), the narrator says, "Thy soul I know not from thy body." in "The Blessed Damozel," Rossetti shows the same mixture of soul and body of the Damozel in her leaning over the rampart of heaven: "Until her bosom must have made / The bar she leaned on warm." Lilith has the same golden colored hair as the first Beloved and both have had the power to enchant their lovers. In "Love Enthroned" (I), Youth, who later becomes identified with Love, is first described in relationship to a "single golden hair": "And Youth, with some single golden hair / Unto his shoulder clinging, since the last / Embrace wherein two sweet arms held him fast." The word fast evokes the same threat of entrapment that is part of Lilith's charm, for she "Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, / Till heart and body and life are in its hold." Thus from the beginning, the danger of the narrator remaining attracted to his first Beloved or to any physical Beloved could end in a spiritual and emotional stagnation. Like Lilith, who in her form of the snake in the Garden of Eden--according to legend--was the ultimate cause for Adam and Eve to gain knowledge and leave Eden in order to develop as human beings, the first Beloved, too, eventually instigated a dramatic change for the narrator. The opening passages on Youth in "Love Enthroned" (I) are echoed by the images of Youth and hair in the sestet of "Body's Beauty": "Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went / Thy [i.e., Lilith's] spell through him, and left his straight neck bent / And round his heart one strangling golden hair."

In early Greek concepts of the soul, the soul and the body are linked together. Even in later concepts of the Gnostics and Romans, the feminine soul remains in the realm of materiality and eventually dies on the moon rather than rising like the pure masculine spirit to the upper world.²¹ The artist loves both the soul and the body at once; therefore he can not separate the two for very long in his mind. Otto Rank points out that the artist makes the unreal--particularly the soul--concrete. The artist does not imitate nature; instead he imitates the unreal. He externalizes his soul in the work of art.²²

We have seen that the soul, or anima, is the immortal feminine part of the self and that it is, therefore, closely linked with the immortal puer. Lady Beauty as "Soul's Beauty" points to the puer, whereas Lilith as "Body's Beauty" indicates the senex aspect, or Death and Fate. The body belongs to the realm of materiality and within l'armature of the heavens. In the legends of Lilith, she has many connections with Hades and Death. Like Saturn, she is a devourer of children. As a personification of female will, she challenged God by disputing whether she or Adam should rule in the Garden of Eden. One meaning of her name is night; she married Satan and became the queen of the underworld. She has a special hate for children and youths, since she was deprived of the gift of life in childbearing. All her children were stillborn. In the Jewish tradition, Lilith represents sensuality that was the basic cause of Adam's fall.²³ Her equivalent in the Gnostic myth of creation depicted in the "Poimandres" is feminine Nature.

A key phrase of the sonnet "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII) is the narrator's description of Lilith as "subtly of herself contemplative." In the painting "Lady Lilith," the setting is a modern boudoir where Lilith stares with "cold dispassionateness" "at her face in a handheld mirror."²⁴ She is like Narcissus staring at himself in the pool, but she does not have his abandon. She is more like an extremely cool Apollo or a controlled sensualist like Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The artist can evolve from a worship of "Soul's Beauty" to a worship of "Body's Beauty." When religion lost its hold on humanity after the Renaissance, the artist no longer served religion, and art became a religion itself in the form of "art for art's sake" and in the doctrines of romantic genius.²⁵ Lilith contemplating her own beauty in a hand mirror in a bedroom is quite close to the spirit of decadent art. "Soul's Beauty" is enclosed in a temple, but "Body's Beauty" is in a potentially sensual room--the bedroom. The narcissistic nature of the narrator's love has appeared before in his love of his Beloveds, in the Willowwood sonnets, and now is imaged again externally in this portrait of Lilith.

The narrator has passed through different concepts of art and poetry during the first six sonnets of this group of twelve sonnets. In "St. Luke the Painter" (LXXIV), the narrator first saw Art as a handmaiden of religion, then as a "soulless" craft, and finally as an independent spiritual form of Art such as that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In "Not as These" (LXXV), the second sonnet of "Old and New Art," the narrator again evokes the puersenex contrast. In the sestet he associates the puer with the youth as poet or painter and the senex not only with craft-type artists who serve popular public taste but with the philistines who are enclosed in their "own frozen breath" and who never create poetry or paintings. The narrator looks to the great immortal painters and poets, the "lights of the great Past," and to the future greats; he can not identify either with the puer or the senex aspects of either time. In "The Husbandmen" (LXXVI), the third sonnet of "Old and New Art," the puer and senex elements of beginning and ending or first and last are combined with Art and religion. The narrator uses the Biblical parable of the Lord's vineyard to draw an analogy between an artist or group of artists coming late in the development of Art to that of a worker coming late to work in the Lord's vineyard. The narrator draws a moral for Art from the parable:

                  Because of this

Stand not ye idle in the market-place.

     Which of ye knoweth he is not that last

Who may be first by faith and will?

This concept of not being "idle in the market-place" exemplifies half of the philosophy of "Think thou and act." The narrator's hopeful attitude and his philosophy of acting negates the purely youthful inaction and skepticism of the previous sonnet "Not as These." The religious imagery of "The Husbandmen" (LXXVI) prepares the way for the idealization of Beauty and Art in "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII), which could easily be labeled "art for art's sake." "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII) depicts the idealization of the body and sensation, which, in turn, could easily become decadent forms of art. In these six sonnets, the narrator has covered the span of thinking from the beginning of Art to the narrator's present time. Images of the past such as the Sibyl, Adam, and Lilith are juxtaposed to those of the present in the forms of the philistine type of men and a modern woman in a boudoir.

After the peak revelations of "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII) and "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII), the narrator returns to the puer-senex archetype in the bitter philosophical speculations of "The Monochord" (LXXIX). The instrument of the monochord, with its single string, emphasizes the narrator's dwelling upon self and his journey through life:

Is it this sky's vast vault or ocean's sound     

     That is Life's self and draws any life from me,   

     And by instinct ineffable decree

Holds my breath quailing on the bitter bound?

The "sky's vast vault" is another image for "the arch of Life" in "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII). Life as depicted by both the puers of Love and the Beloveds as animas and the senex as Death and Fate appears both in "Soul's Beauty" and "The Monochord." The narrator is filled with doubts as to whether Life or Death is "thunder-crown'd," in a sense enthroned as have been Love and Lady Beauty or as to what road he is on or came on. In his final question, the narrator implies a leaning toward the senex: "What is this ... / That draws round me at last this wind-warm space, / And in regenerate rapture turns my face / Upon the devious coverts of dismay?

The cycles of nature reappear in all the final sonnets initially concerned with Art except for "Memorial Thresholds" (LXXXI), which brings back another image of a dwelling. The puer-senex archetype still retains a unity in these sonnets despite a sense of impending doom. In "From Dawn to Noon" (LXXX), the narrator presents the motif of a child growing up and being without knowledge at first about whether his "mother's face / Be fair." Then at noon, the child looks back and "as through a dream, / In things long past new features now can trace." In the sestet, the narrator compares a "thought" to the child in the octave. The thought, too, pauses and looks back like the child and "haply doubts" "Which most or least impelled its onward way,-- / Those unknown things or these things overknown." The "unknown things" belong to the realm of the puer and the "things overknown" to the senex.

Saturn is the Roman god of fields and crops, and Kronos, who became identified with Saturn, is the inventor of agriculture.²⁶ Saturn ultimately is a ruler of the harvest, but as James Hillman points out the harvest is a hoard.²⁷ This concept appears in "Hoarded Joy" (LXXXII), where within the narrator the senex's values conflict with the puer's sensualistic values. In the octave, the narrator advocated at some time in the past not plucking "the first fruit" of a tree but letting it "ripen still." The tree is like a Narcissus looking at his own youthful beauty: "The tree's bent head / Sees in the stream its own fecundity / And bides the day of fullness." Like Lilith staring at herself in a glass, the tree is satisfied with its state of perfection. But in the sestet, the narrator now laments, "Alas! our fruit hath wooed the sun / Too long,--'Tis fallen and floats adown the stream." The narrator then changes his mind and asserts a pure carpe diem philosophy worthy of the youths in the first sonnet of "The Choice" (LXXI) and "Pride of Youth" (XXIV): "Pluck them every one, / And let us sup with summer; ere the gleam / Of autumn set the year's pent sorrow free, / And the woods wail like echoes from the sea." In this sonnet, the narrator tries to hoard joy as the senex hoards his own fruits in nature as a god of the harvest. The puer and the senex are still united together.

In "Barren Spring" (LXXXIII), the "changed year's turning wheel returns." This time is a moment when neither spring or winter is completely dominant; they are united and looking both ways at once. It is the time of the vernal equinox. This time is compared to a girl "balanced in the wind," a "crocus" that is "a withering flame" and a "snowdrop" which is "snow." The narrator however begins to reject this union of the puer and the senex and to move toward a separate existence where the senex alone rules. The narrator says, "Nay, for these Spring-flowers, turn thy face from them, / Nor stay till on the year's last lily-stem / The white cup shrivels round the golden heart." The puer philosophy of "Hoarded Joy" (LXXXII) has been reversed in the immediately following sonnet "Barren Spring."

"Memorial Thresholds" (LXXXI) emphasizes the transitional states stressed in the first six sonnets concerning Art. Nature imagery appears in the octave briefly; the narrator asks:

What place so strange,--though unrevealed snow    

     With unimaginable fires arise         

     At the earth's end,--what passion of surprise

Like frost-bound fire-girt scenes of long ago?

The narrator contrasts this fire of an aurora borealis at one of the polar caps to the fire in a fireplace in a house in a city, most likely London. The narrator becomes aware of his selfhood that he has been expressing so much in his poetry and painting and feels utterly alone: "Lo! this is none but I this hour." The narrator then contrasts his existence in this "very place" to that "'Mid hurrying crowds." Time is on his mind as he reflects on the ultimate futility of preserving anything: "This is the very place which to mine eyes / Those mortal hours in vain immortalize." Thoughts of death become strong as the narrator speculates that "a single simple door" like the one to his house may be reduplicated by "some New Power" and thus become his "life-porch in eternity." Still the narrator hopes that the "one presence" will fill this "life-porch" as "once of yore." Immediately, however, the narrator evokes the opposite image of "mocking winds" that will "whirl round a chaff-strown floor / Thee [i.e., the narrator] and thy years" and his "words" and himself. At the end of the sonnet the viewpoint of the senex has prevailed over that of the puer. This sonnet and the final sonnets of this group of twelve sonnets initially concerned with Art prepare the way for dramatic changes in the last sonnets of the whole sonnet sequence.

In Part I, when the narrator and his Beloveds met, they normally were located in some setting of nature such as a bower, a grove, a field, a glen. Even the narrator's moments of despair such as shown in "Sleepless Dreams" (XXXIX), which contains a room, and the Willowwood sonnets have predominately nature settings and imagery. Part II, which moves toward culture, the collective, the spiritual, art, and the world of imagination, introduces more man-made settings such as inns, houses, temples, and rooms. Previous nature settings take on the qualities of a maze or become elevated to the heights of a hill in order to emphasize the broad perspective of the narrator in Part II; paradoxically, at the same time, the inns, houses, temples, and rooms indicate a narrowing of viewpoint. In several of the sonnets that precede "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV) intimate settings of nature that appeared frequently in Part I return. They are like the final burst of light, or life, or energy that appears just before a period of total darkness or death. This time, however, a Beloved is absent.

Part I has been ruled by Youth, or the puer in both masculine and feminine forms, and for a last time just before "Farewell to the Glen," Youth reasserts itself, bringing along with it the setting of nature so predominant in Part I. In Willowwood, both a union of likes and a union of opposites have been fruitful for the narrator in the realm of culture, art, and poetry. The puers of the immortal spiritual self and the anima have united with the narrator's conscious male empiric ego to produce poetry and paintings useful both to culture and to the narrator as an individual.

In "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), the narrator says farewell both to the glen and to the puers who lived and loved there. In a quite similar situation in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI), the narrator announced the death of his first Beloved but at the same time indicated the presence of a new Beloved. In "Farewell to the Glen," the narrator announces the symbolic death of his youth, since the narrator renounces youth forever and indicates the presence not of a new Beloved but of Death. The narrator hears the trees of the glen whisper "what he feared to know." The fruitful union of the narrator with his anima and his immortal spiritual self are over, and a new being is ready now to ascend to the throne vacated by Love, the Beloved, Apollo, and Lady Beauty.

NOTES

¹ Carl Jung, Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 226.

² Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (1932; rpt. New York: Agathon Press, 1968), pp. 63-64.

³ James Hillman, "Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present," Eranos Jahrbuch, 36 (1967), 318.

⁴ Ibid., p. 329.

⁵ James Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology [(New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 25-26] makes this analogy about the conscious ego that wishes to stifle all disorder and passions. The Logos can also be identified with the conscious ego, particularly in its youthful aspects. As reason and intellect, Logos naturally becomes linked with the conscious ego. Logos, however, turns into the senex when it totally identifies with the conscious ego and loses contact with the immortal self as represented by the puer.

⁶ Hillman, "Senex and Puer," p. 330.

⁷ lbid., p. 318.

⁸ Ibid., p. 323.

⁹ John Layard, "Homo-Eroticism in Primitive Society as a Function of the Self," Current Trends in Analytic Psychology: Proceedings of the First International Congress for Analytic Psychology, ed. Gerhard Adler (London: Tavistock Publications, 1961), p. 251.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 254; Marie-Luise von Franz, "Über religiöse Hintergründe des Puer-Aeternus Problems," The Archetype, ed. Adolph Guggenbühl-Craig (New York: S. Karger, 1964), p. 147.

¹¹ John Layard, "Homo-Eroticism," p. 254.

¹² Ibid., pp. 257-258; John Layard, "The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype," Eranos-Jahrbuch, 12 (1945), 255.

¹³ C. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1951), p. 139.

¹⁴ Rank in Art and Artist [pp. 155-156] speaks of the rise of man from a belly culture to a head culture.

¹⁵ Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (1955; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 89-90.

¹⁶ Rank, Art and Artist, p. 16.

¹⁷ H. C. Mariller, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of his Art and Life (London: George Bell & Sons, 1904), p. 99.

¹⁸ New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (London: Hamlyn House, 1959), p. 113.

¹⁹ Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 111-112 and Plate 285.

²⁰ Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 26.

²¹ This is Plutarch's concept depicted in "On the Face of the Moon" and was widely accepted in the ancient world; Walter Wili, "The History of the Spirit in Antiquity," Spirit and Nature: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), p. 95.

²² Rank, Art and Artist, p. 13; p. 96; pp. 109-110.

²³ Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (LaSalle: Open Court, 1931), pp. 94-104.

²⁴ Surtees, Paintings and Drawings, Plate 293; Mariller, An Illustrated Memorial, pp. 90-91.

²⁵ Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), pp. 239-254; Rank, Art and Artist, pp. 16-25.

²⁶ Klibansky et. al., Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 134-135.

²⁷ Hillman, "Senex and Puer," p. 318.

CHAPTER VI

Sathana, Sirens, Newborn Death, and Hope

The consequences of the narrator's renouncing his youth on a conscious level are as great as those created by the death of the first Beloved. In the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator finally overcame this loss by consciously incorporating his Beloved's image in his own mind. This union and his union with Love were possible because of his powerful emotion of love for both his Beloveds and the god Love, or Eros. In "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), the narrator has renounced youth and has, in a sense, become like his two Beloveds of Part I in that he now is the willful departing one.

A key factor in this change of roles and attitude is the meaning of youth for the narrator. Eros, or Love, has been a divine youth, or puer, througout for the narrator. Eros as a masculine spirit has the function of uniting opposites or likes in physical, emotional, or spiritual realms. After Love presented the narrator with the gift of Song in "Love's Last Gift" (LIX), Love gave up an active external role and took up the task of uniting opposites and likes in the narrator's mind in order to create Song and Art. Apollo as a youth played a prime role in the narrator's creation of poetry.

The narrator's conscious ego, however, also had the character of a youth. Logos is the word, the intellect, the "pneuma," either air or fire, the light, and the divine spark that becomes trapped in a physical universe. This Logos has a driving urge to rise upward toward the pure spiritual realm of his father Nous. As Jung has pointed out, the ego can take on all the qualities of the self.¹ Logos's home is in the realm beyond the material universe; this has been shown in the "Poimandres." However, Logos can be united to the physical and to the soul through the power of Eros. In Christian teachings as given in "St. John," Logos is the Word, the Son of God and God Himself; therefore, Logos belongs strictly to the masculine spirit world of a pure patriarchal religion that ultimately abhors the feminine in its physical or its soul aspects. As the "Poimandres" has shown, love overcame Logos's aversion to the physical and the feminine. Logos as a son of Nous, or God, can be identified with God. This is demonstrated in the gospel of "St. John": "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The son as puer can easily turn into the father, who can be either a spiritual God, like Nous, and be divorced from the physical universe or be a senex-type father who dwells in the physical cosmos. If, as in the Old Testament, the spiritual God becomes tyrannical and arbitrary, then He takes on the attributes of a senex, who represents the strict laws of religion and tradition.

So far in The House of Life, the narrator's conscious ego has been closely identified with Logos, the masculine spirit that discriminates, analyzes, and tears apart.² Rossetti himself described this intellectual aspect of creating poetry as "brainwork."³ Logos can appear as "Lord of work" and "Lord of will" as was shown in "The Heart of the Night" (LXVI) and "Known in Vain" (LXV). These are the positive aspects of Logos and were released by the union of opposites and likes in the Willowwood sonnets. The narrator's Logos as a puer was united to his soul; thus, the narrator did not create poetry "Cisterned in Pride" or verse from "soulless air-flung fountains" mentioned in "The Song-Throe" (LXI). This kind of verse is the result of pure intellect or "brainwork." Logos as "pneuma" is either air or fire and thus dry; Logos lacks the moisture of water and the solidity of earth.

Eros unites the higher regions of air and fire--Logos's sphere in the material cosmos--and the lower regions of water and earth, the sphere of the body. The soul ultimately has close identities with both the spiritual realm and the body as has been indicated in Gnostic teachings and in the sonnets "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII) and "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII). Eros and soul, consequently, are alike in that they work in a middle realm that unites the physical and the spiritual. Hillman calls Eros' realm "metaxy," which means intermediate space between two opposites.⁴ Logos in the spiritual realm has the masculine phallic powers that in the physical sphere can be expressed through Pan, Priapos, Dionysus and Satyrs.⁶ Eros, however, softens this one-sided masculine spirit and leads it to an idealized attitude toward the world, to women, and to the soul. As we have seen, Eros is a softer and more idealized version of Hermes. One reason for Eros' softer and more humane outlook is that he is closely connected to the feminine. Eros normally is intimately bound to Aphrodite and serves her; he is really the masculine component of Aphrodite and love. Hillman says, "Eros as son embodies and brings into action the feminine receptive need, lovingness, and beauty of the mother, and is in a sense forever her son."⁶ Logos, however, serves Nous, or God. Eros as a masculine spirit can operate freely in the masculine and feminine spheres; as Eros' Orphic history indicates, he was originally a hermaphrodite. At one point, Jung equates Eros with the feminine because of his uniting function and Logos with the masculine because of his separating, analyzing, and tearing apart functions.⁷ Eros, like Hermes, however has attributes of all extremes such as spiritual-physical, masculine-feminine, and spirit-soul.

As the divine spark, Logos has a dual nature too. The divine spark in the myth of creation as reported in the "Poimandres" was light, and when hermaphroditic man was divided into male and female, the light--the divine spark or Logos--went to the intellect of man. The divine spark, or Logos, consequently became identified with the conscious ego. However, in this condition, the Logos is trapped in a physical universe and is separated from the divine Father, or Nous, who in psychology represents the self. The conscious ego is the part of the mind most closely connected to the reality of a material universe; Logos, therefore, becomes intimately identified with the conscious ego, or intellect, and yet because of its divine spark aspect it longs for a reunion with the divine Father Nous, or the self. Eros as a male spirit who can travel between both spirit and material realms can represent the immortal spiritual self or the immortal feminine self and in this role can lead Logos to a union with the divine Father Nous or to the soul.

The twelve sonnets immediately following "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), starting with "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV) and ending with "Life the Beloved" (XCVI), show the results of the narrator's conscious ego's rejection of youth. Not only has the narrator rejected youth as Eros, who also represents the immortal self, he has renounced the anima, or soul, as well since she, too, is an immortal puer. This has immediate consequences. The union of opposites and the union of likes are ended, for now only separation can rule. Logos's masculine functions of distinguishing, analyzing, separating, and dividing remain. Eros's function of uniting, however, is gone. This means that Logos completely dominates the narrator's conscious ego and that the positive connection between Logos, who is a son and puer, is broken also from the immortal self, which is God the Father. In a sense, Logos is now grounded completely in the lower part of the physical cosmos, and because separation, not union, rules, the spiritual Father, or Nous, and Saturn, the most powerful rule of the physical cosmos, have both become negative like Logos himself.

Logos as the conscious male ego part of the human mind will always have a direct relationship with the puer-senex archetype since this archetype is the personification of human time. Logos may aspire to go beyond the last planet of Saturn and enter the ethereal region and the sphere of eternal time and pure spirit, but until actual death this does not happen. Moments of ecstasy and insights, however, may temporarily bridge eternity and mortality for Logos.

The most dramatic personification of negative Will and Work and of a negative son is Satan, the eldest son of God.⁸ Satan separates from God, the Father, and turns his love for his Father into hate. Since Satan can not rule in Heaven, he will rule over the material cosmos and humanity. In his negative state of separation, Satan reverses all of God's values.

"Vain Virtues" (LXXXV) illustrates the dramatic change that has occurred after the narrator has rejected youth and all the things it represents. The narrator projects all of his negativistic thinking onto objects and figures prominent in human culture. Hell is the literal and symbolic place of separation, alienation, torment, and suffering. In Hell, one is alienated from God, loved ones, and life. Logos as the negative puer appears as the "Torturer" and torments "virgins," each of whom is a "fair deed" of a soul. These virgins portray positive animas who "might once have" been "sainted" if they had died before their souls sinned. These virgins' "names" were "half entered in the book of Life" and "Were God's desire at noon." Their youthful aspect is emphasized. The Torturer's attitude toward the virgins' drowning in a pool of water is reminiscent of the narrator's own conscious attitude toward the death of his first Beloved as shown in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI):

                           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.

Like the narrator, the Torturer is cold toward the disappearance of the virgins and looks forward to his real love "Sin," who is his "destined wife." The imagery of eyes and hair sinking, too, evokes the period of transformation in the last Willowwood sonnet. The echoing of the same situation and imagery of the crucial transitions occurring in the sonnet "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI) and the Willowwood sonnet emphasizes the dramatic transition now happening to the narrator.

The twelve sonnets following "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI) concerned the narrator's new love affair and his unconscious grieving over the death of the first Beloved. In his depression and melancholy, the narrator hated and tormented his first Beloved, who had become part of his unconscious ego; consequently, he hated and tormented himself. James Hillman's concept that the unconscious and Hades, or Hell, are basically the same provides a link between the narrator's earlier depression and his attitudes as exhibited in "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV). The narrator's description of the Torturer's attitudes toward "fair deed" and "Sin," both of which appear as animas, is equal to the narrator's earlier unconscious processes and attitudes during the sonnets portraying his "darkened" love. Instead of acting like a lover, the narrator, like a devil, hated and tormented his first Beloved in his own mind and transferred some of his negative anima image onto his new Beloved. She was like "Sin," in the sense that the narrator unconsciously felt guilty for his cruel treatment of his first Beloved and his rejection of her so completely.

The great difference between the past narrator's attitudes and now is that he is projecting this whole process and his attitudes onto external cultural elements such as the religious and literary figure of Satan and his realm of Hell. Before the narrator unconsciously introjected his first Beloved's image in a moment of hate and then tended unconsciously to project this negative anima onto his second Beloved. The movement in Part II toward the collective, cultural, and the realm of imagination--in this case imagination's products of culture--continues unabated. Images of Hell later appear in "Lost Days" (LXXXVI) and "'Retro me, Sathana!"' (XC).

In the tale of Amor and Psyche as told by Apuleius, Psyche became separated from Eros after she lit a lamp to see whether or not her lover was a dragon. Immediately, Eros was enraged and left Psyche. Spiritually Eros had been a dragon who kept Psyche from developing. When Eros left Psyche, he went off to Mount Olympus and sulked. In order for Psyche to be reunited with Eros and to be able to have an immortal child, she had to perform several almost impossible tasks. For Psyche's last task, Aphrodite had her go down to Hades and get a casket containing beauty from Persephone, the Goddess of Hades. Psyche succeeded in so far as getting the casket, but on the way back she opened it; for her sin she fell into a deep sleep. Erich Neumann in his commentary on the tale points out that Psyche had to face death before she could be united with Eros. Apollo had prophesied that she must participate in a marriage of death. In her final confrontation with death, Psyche no longer is a naive girl but a woman who has learned about love and herself and has been tested by tasks.⁹ Eros finally takes the initiative, discovers Psyche, revives her, and takes her to Mount Olympus, where Zeus proclaims their marriage. Psyche, or the soul, had to journey downward to the realm of Hades in order to fulfill her development. Earlier, when Eros was angry and returned to Mount Olympus, he behaved like a pure Logos and refused to act in his role as uniter. During this period of separation, Psyche underwent her torments and her descent into Hades.

Eros' anger at Psyche's act of will, their separation, her sufferings, and her eventual descent into Hades are quite similar to the same series of events that happened to the narrator and his first Beloved's image in his own mind after his first Beloved died. To the primitive and child-like unconscious, a person's dying is perceived as a willful desertion. The narrator's soul also suffers the same fate as Psyche. In "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV), the same process is expressed in cultural and religious imagery. Each change for the Logos and the soul requires separation and suffering.

The narrator has suffered a loss in "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV) and elements of depression and melancholy appear in this last group of twelve sonnets. In depression the former Beloved is unconsciously hated. This same animosity toward the anima occurs in the narrator's attitude toward women depicted in literature and history. Since the narrator's love for poetry, art, and culture ruled throughout the sonnets following Willowwood and particularly those after "Love's Last Gift" (LIX), it is not surprising that he would turn against this love of culture if he felt he was losing his powers, which are symbolized by youth. His reaction would be quite similar to his unconscious rejection of his first Beloved when she left him through death.

Raymond Klibansky's, Erwin Panofsky's, and Fritz Saxl's long and thorough study of Saturn in the areas of myth, astrology, literature, and the theory of humors in medicine and characterology has linked Saturn with melancholy. He is, in fact, the god or planet that rules melancholy and depression.¹⁰ Saturn's element is earth and sometimes water; and in his negative state, he brings about depression and melancholy. Saturn's roles as ruler of Hades and death, the end phase of time, the last governing planet of the seven Governors in l'armature of the spheres, and Fate show his increasing power toward the end of Part II of The House of Life, which is entitled "Change and Fate." Logos' being trapped in the sphere of Saturn makes him as negative and destructive as the negative senex.

In "Death's Songsters" (LXXXVII), the narrator presents completely negative versions of anima figures confronting the hero Ulysses. He is partially motivated by Eros in that he wishes to unite with his wife Penelope and partially by Logos since he is driven by a task and is willing to work to achieve it. Ulysses, consequently, has many of the characteristics of the narrator himself. Earlier in "Venus Victrix" (XXXIII), the narrator praised his first Beloved and compared her to Juno, Pallas, Venus, and Helen--all representatives of loveliness. In "Death's Songsters," Helen now is a negative anima luring Ulysses and his warriors to death:

She whispered, "Friends, I am alone; come, come!"         

     Then, crouched within, Ulysses waxed afraid,    

     And on his comrads' quivering mouths he laid

His hand, and held them till the voice was dumb.

In the sestet, the narrator presents a more universal symbol of a negative anima in the sirens, who try to lure Ulysses to his death. Joseph F. Vogel, in his analysis of this sonnet, has argued convincingly that the last two lines--"Say, soul,--are songs of Death no heaven to thee, / Nor shames her lip the cheek of Victory?"--should be interpreted as the narrator's approval of the soul's refusing to die. The word lip refers to Death's lip and not Victory's lip. Vogel paraphrases the last line as: "Would not the 'lip' of 'Death' (by her kiss which would symbolize my succumbing to the temptation to suicide) bring shame to 'the cheek of Victory' (my victory over previous temptations to suicide, or perhaps any victory in life)?"¹¹ Despite the narrator's conscious negative attitude toward the anima, he does not advocate suicide, even though suicide is on his mind.

In "Hero's Lamp" (LXXXVIII), the narrator presents another negative picture of the anima. This time women in general carry the negative image of the anima. Earlier, in "The Lamp's Shrine" (XXXV), the narrator conceived his Beloved as light and as a lamp, which he worshiped as he did Love's light. In the tale of Leander and Hero, Leander was guided by the light of the lighthouse in Sestus on his going across the Hellespont to meet his Beloved Hero, who was a priestess of Aphrodite. In a storm one night the light went out and Leander drowned. In her grief, Hero committed suicide.¹² In the octave, the story is recounted by focusing on the lamp:

That lamp thou fill'st in Eros' name to-night,

     0 Hero, shall the Sestian augurs take

     To-morrow, and for drowned Leander's sake

To Anteros its fireless lip shall plight.

Anteros is Eros' twin brother and his opposite. Anteros is sometimes called the avenger of slighted love and, at other times, the opposer of love.¹³ Anteros' "fireless lip" indicates his coldness.

Anteros and death have a close association through the repetition of the word lip in the "fireless lip" of the lamp taken to Anteros and Death's lip in the previous "Death's Songsters" (LXXXVII). James Hillman indicates, too, that Cicero claimed that Death was the brother of Eros since both were the children of Night.¹⁴ Later in the second sonnet of "Newborn Death" (C), Death is a brother to Love (Eros), Art, and Song. Anteros receives the lamp after Hero's death; this is depicted in the last line of the octave: "Lo where Love walks, Death's pallid neophyte." Death, like Anteros, has replaced Love, or Eros.

The narrator's own isolation from his anima--his immortal self--and Eros is fully depicted in the tale of Leander and Hero. The negative anima appears indirectly in the sestet. Hero's lamp in "Anteros' shadowy shrine" will "stand unlit" "Till some one man the happy issue see / Of a life's love." The result is that no man in this world has found a happy result from love and by implication because of some fault in women; consequently, the lamp remains unlit. The sestet of "The Lamp's Shrine" (XXXV) is the exact opposite of the sestet in "Hero's Lamp," since the Beloved as a lamp is lit and is in Love's (or Eros') shrine, not in that of the loveless Anteros. Earlier the Beloved brought happiness; now only unhappiness and death issue from love.

In "The Trees of the Garden" (LXXXIX), the narrator continues to evoke negative animas from culture. The narrator addresses a long question to those "who have passed Death's haggard hills" and to those "Whom trees that knew" their "sires shall cease to know / And still stand silent." Death rules as it did in Willowwood. The narrator asks:

                  . . . is it all a show,--

A wisp that laughs upon the wall?--decree

Of some inexorable supremacy

     Which ever, as man strains his blind surmise

     From death to ominous death, looks past his eyes,

Sphinx-faced with unabashed augury?

The sphinx, part-woman, part-bird, and part-lion, is a negative anima, which was forever immortalized in Oedipus Rex. Life as "a wisp that laughs upon the wall" and a "decree / Of some inexorable supremacy" or Fate looks back at man "Sphinx-faced with unabashèd augury." The sphinx refuses to reveal the meaning of life. Earlier in "Genius in Beauty" (XVIII), the narrator described his first Beloved's face as an image upon a wall in a similar way to the "wisp" that is associated with the sphinx:

Nay, not in Spring's or Summer's sweet footfall     

     More gathered gifts exuberant Life bequeaths

     Than doth this sovereign face, whose love-spell breathes

Even from its shadowed contour on the wall.

Both this shadow of his Beloved's face and the "wisp that laughs upon the wall" resonate with the images of Plato's allegory of the cave presented in The Republic. There man was also in a situation where his light and meaning came from beyond. He was chained in a cave, facing a wall filled with shadows of objects behind him in the light. The realm of forms, God, the Good, and light were hidden from his view and he only saw shadows. The first Beloved was the means for the narrator to gain access to the god Love and to the narrator's own anima, which was like Plato's forms, or archetypes, or the God who ruled in a realm of light. At that time the narrator had hope and optimism of gaining access to the realm of immortality, but the sphinx image in this later sonnet kills all optimism.

In 1875, the same year that "The Trees of the Garden" (LXXXIX) was composed, Rossetti drew a large pencil drawing entitled "The Question" or "The Sphinx." The sphinx, which is emblematic of the mystery of life and death, gazes blindly into space in this drawing. At her feet lies a youth who has just died and below him climb a man in his prime and an old man, both of them seeking the mystery of life and death. These men represent the stages of life--youth, manhood, and old age.¹⁵ At this stage of Rossetti's and the narrator's life, youth has also died, and the Beloved anima has assumed a negative character like that of the sphinx.

In the sestet of "The Trees of the Garden" (LXXXIX), the narrator turns to another feminine image--the Earth's self--and blames her for not answering the question about the meaning of life and death: "Nay, rather question the Earth's self. Invoke / The storm-felled forest-trees moss-grown to-day / Whose roots are hillocks where the children play." The "Earth's self," or soul, has become a negative anima. The "Earth's self" is too closely associated with death, fate, and old age to be a positive anima. The "Earth's self" reappears in the second sonnet of "The Sun's Shame" (XCIII) as "the World's grey Soul." Since the World's Soul has become old, it envies the "green World" which is "journeying, / all soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!" The "World's grey Soul" is old and under the shadow of winter; the "green World" is yet unborn--that is, "soulless." However, it is filled with the anticipation of life in Spring. Again, the theme of separation reigns in these sonnets.

The negative anima image has been constantly broadening in context in this group of twelve sonnets beginning with "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV). The narrator's projection of his negative anima into the outer world, however, reaches a climax in "'Retro me, Sathana!"' (XC). In Gnostic, Christian, and Greek thought, the material cosmos is basically feminine. In this sonnet, the narrator's destructive impulses are directed both toward the material world and toward his own masculine conscious ego as personified by Satan, who is a negative Logos. The narrator reminds Satan that he, Time, and the physical cosmos will be destroyed. Hair which has been associated with entrapment and death appears prominently in the destruction of Time:

                           Even as, heavy-curled,

     Stooping against the wind, a charioteer

     Is snatched from out his chariot by the hair,

So shall Time be.

The physical cosmos, or feminine Nature, will also be destroyed with Time

                  . . . and as the void car, hurled

Abroad by reinless steeds, even so the world:

Yea, even as chariot-dust upon the air,

It shall be sought and not found anywhere.

After turning his full destructive force upon Satan and the physical cosmos that represents the feminine, the narrator relinquishes his close identity with Satan and his destructive will. The narrator asks Satan to keep to "the broad vine-sheltered path" where Satan will "wait the turning of the phials of wrath / For certain years, for certain months and days." The narrator, in turn, will take up his journey through life by treading "in narrow ways." Life is becoming restricted for the narrator since he is no longer being creative. Without unions with his anima and immortal self through the aid of Eros, who also represents the immortal self, creativity is impossible.

The completely negative and destructive Satan appears in other forms in Greek myths. Eros unites opposites and likes. These unions can occur in an idealized fashion, where tenderness and concern are part of the spiritual, soul-like, and sexual love. The love between the narrator and his Beloveds has been the type of love combining the spiritual and the physical. Eros, however, can be totally isolated from the soul, and in this state, all feminine tenderness and concern for the other disappears. Eros then becomes a Logos, who is completely separated from the human soul. Only masculine traits rule. In the tale of Amor and Psyche, Eros, though outwardly a god, was spiritually a dragon to Psyche and only appeared to her in the darkness of night. He refused to recognize Psyche's individuality and rights and kept his love for her a secret from the gods of Mount Olympus. In this role of satisfying his sensual lust upon Psyche, Eros was enacting the patriarchal system that reigned in Greece before the soul was humanized through Psyche and the feminine finally recognized as having rights. Eros' encounter with Psyche on their first night of their symbolic marriage was essentially a rape; this was according to the principles of the patriarchal system. For the woman, rape and marriage were synonymous.¹⁶

The myth of Persephone was also one of the prominent models for the woman's fate. Lured by narcissus flowers, Persephone wandered off into a field in which opened a chasm. Hades rode up in his chariot, carried her away, raped her, married her, and made her Queen of Hades. The Eleusinian mysteries founded by Demeter are based on these events of Persephone's descent into Hades and death and her return.¹⁷ Like Eros with Psyche, Hades is only concerned with his sensual pleasures and his domination of the woman through the institution of marriage, which was virtual enslavement for women. Hades is completely negative and acts like a negative Logos or a negative senex. Narcissus' own father Cephisus, who was a river god, dragged the virgin Liriope into his watery realm and raped her just as did Hades with Persephone. Both Hades and Cephisus are isolated from the upper spiritual realm of Mount Olympus, and each act like a negative senex or Logos, obsessed with materiality and power.

In his description of human drives, Lipot Szondi depicts the sexual sphere of drives as being composed of two opposing parts: the tender or feminine side of sexuality represented by Eros and the aggressive, sadistic masculine side represented by Thanatos. In the average man, the two sides of the sex drive are united so that he can be both tender and aggressive at the same time. The union of the two extreme components has a softening effect upon each of them. Separated, however, the drive components become extreme and negative. Thanatos becomes excessively aggressive and violent like Hades and Cephisus, who perceive women as rape objects.¹⁸ Psyche, who insisted on tender and idealized love and consideration for her own individuality, attains her desire and receives the approval of Zeus and the gods of Mount Olympus.¹⁹

The violent, sadistic, and sensual aspects of love as portrayed in the patriarchal figures of Hades, Cephisus, and even Eros in his first encounter with Psyche remain constantly as a component of love. In the Narcissus myth, Narcissus rejects his father's patriarchal vision of love as being a rape and never accepted any form of physical love, which was offered by the youths, nymphs, and Echo. Instead, he fell in love with his own image and lived out his feelings of love on spiritual and soul planes. However, the negative father Cephisus symbolically returned internally and directed his sadistic attacks against Narcissus' own feminine soul and spirit parts of his mind. Psyche, too, unconsciously turned her animus, or male spiritual part, aggressively against the image of Eros that became a part of her own mind after separating from him. As we have seen, the narrator experienced the negative senex in the form of Death in his grieving over the loss of his first Beloved. In "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV) and "'Retro me, Sathana!"' (XC), the negative Logos returns in the form of Satan, who can also personify the sadistic, aggressive masculine side of sexuality that is totally separated from the softening aspects of the spiritual Eros or the soul. The union of Eros with the feminine soul is necessary to soften and humanize the aggressive masculine side of the sexual drive.

"Lost Days" (LXXXVI), an early sonnet in this group of twelve sonnets, and "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI), the sonnet immediately following "'Retro me, Sathana!'" (XC), show the changes that the narrator undergoes in relationship to his divided nature. From a Logos point of view, any day that is not filled with achievement, goals, tasks, and activity are "lost days." Both Logos and Eros have phallic natures that require constant activity. Through a series of images involving "ears of wheat," "golden coins," "drops of blood," and "spilt water," the narrator illustrates how each of these are wasted. The narrator feels totally separated from his "lost days," just as his conscious mind acting as a negative Logos is cut off from his immortal self as puer, Eros, and anima. Earlier in "Stillborn Love" (LV) when the narrator was optimistic and was united with both his anima and Love, the "hour which might have been" greeted the two lovers before "The house of Love." Then the hour found fulfillment in this final union. In "Lost Days," the narrator is obsessed with separation; thus the reunion in eternity of the "lost days" with the narrator, who has no Beloved with him, is negative. Instead of a happy reunion as in "Stillborn Love" (LV), the "lost days" are each "a murdered self." Each accuse the narrator for his murder: "I am thyself,--what has thou done to me?" In his pessimistic and depressive mood, the narrator can only imagine the worse. By separating consciously from his youth, the narrator has murdered a part of himself.

In "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI), the split of the narrator's mind is externalized into the rivalry of two men for one woman. They are both under the domination of the two equal powers of Love (the puer) and Death (the senex). Marriage and death become intermingled; the Beloved dies, and her shroud acts as a "stark marriage-sheet" and the church bell that peels her death is like the "wedding-bell" for the marriage that did not take place. After her death, the two rivals were reconciled to each other, united through their grief at the death of their Beloved. After the climactic destruction in "'Retro me, Sathana!'" (XC), the narrator has passed into a more normal phase of handling grief as was shown in the sonnets centering around "Stillborn Love" (LV). The bitterness of "Lost Days" (LXXXVI) is gone too. In the sestet of "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI), the narrator compares two hopes striving for "Peace" in one soul to the two rivals seeking the same Beloved. After Peace has perished, the two hopes are united and travel together within the same soul: "So through that soul, in restless brotherhood, / They roam together now, and wind among / Its bye-streets, knocking at the dusty inns." After the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator has depicted himself as being on a journey through life.

Now, he is recognizing that this external journey is an internal journey within the soul. The introductory sonnet to The House of Life stresses the relationship of time and the soul: "A Sonnet is a moment's monument." Although the narrator has depicted his soul's experiences in external events, these events are also internal events of the soul. "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI) shows that Love and Death both involve loss, yet the narrator becomes more reconciled to this loss by the thoughts of a "restless brotherhood" between formal rivals, or divided parts of his soul such as his puer from his senex or his Logos from his Eros.

The two sonnets of "The Sun's Shame" (XCII; XCIII) and "Michelangelo's Kiss" (XCIV) are filled with regrets and accusations toward external objects of nature and culture. This is part of any normal grief and of the more pathological forms of grief in depression and melancholy. These accusations are often bitter, but after the extreme violence and destruction exhibited in the sonnets prior to these, the effect is more moderate than before. In "The Hill Summit" (LXX), the narrator was a "belated worshipper" of the sun yet a fearful one since he was anxious about his future journey. In the first sonnet of "The Sun's Shame" (XCII), the narrator's worst fears have come true. In "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), the narrator consciously separated from his youth. Now, in "The Sun's Shame" (XCII), the narrator sees the result of this separation; he says, "Beholding youth and hope in mockery caught / From life; and mocking pulses that remain / When the soul's death of bodily death is fain." Both youth and the soul are mocked and both are separated from life. The narrator then goes through a list of evils that result from this separation:

Honour unknown, and honour known unsought;

And penury's sedulous self-torturing thought         

     On gold, whose master therewith buys his bane;         

     And longed-for woman longing all in vain

For lonely man with love's desire distraught.

The last two lines' reference to "lonely man" "longing" for a woman "all in vain" evokes the earlier situation of narrator. All the powers that worldly men hold dear--"wealth, and strength, and power, and pleasantness"--are given not to the likes of the narrator but "Given unto bodies of whose souls man say, / None poor and weak, slavish, and foul, as they." In "'Retro me, Sathana!'" (XC), the narrator willfully anticipated the destruction of the material cosmos, indiscriminately killing good and evil men and women as Satan did to "fair deed" and "Sin" in "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV). Now in the first sonnet of "The Sun's Shame" (XCII), the narrator discriminates between the good and bad and accuses the sun for shining on such an evil world. The narrator accuses the sun in both its youthful and its old-age phases for the shame of allowing such things to happen: "Beholding these things, I behold no less / The blushing morn and blushing eve confess / The shame that loads the intolerable day." The narrator has begun to close up the separation between youth and senex somewhat by seeing blame as belonging to each.

The second sonnet of "The Sun's Shame" (XCIII) continues this melancholic view by presenting regrets of old men and of the aged "World's grey Soul." In this sonnet and the next, "Michelangelo's Kiss" (XCIV), the narrator moves closer to the viewpoint of the senex, who is separated from youth. The negative Logos is becoming the negative senex. In "The Sun's Shame" (XCIII), a great man "bowed down with stress / Of life's disastrous eld" gazes enviously on "blossoming youth," and filled with "self-pity and ruth," the old man desires again to possess youth. For a moment he feels optimistic at what he could do but this passes quickly. He "bitterly feels breathe against his soul / The hour swift-winged of nearer nothingness." Ultimately, the viewpoint of the negative senex rules, and thoughts of death dominate the old man's thinking. As we have seen, the "World's grey Soul" has the same thoughts about "the green World." In "Michelangelo's Kiss" (XCIV), Michelangelo is depicted at a time of old age. Like the narrator, Michelangelo loved a Beloved except that his was solely a spiritual love. When his Beloved Colonna was at the point of dying, Michelangelo only kissed her hand "but not her brow or cheek." The narrator views this episode with regret, since Michelangelo's "Soul" earned so little after such a long time of waiting. This is a lost moment, a kind of murdered self. If this is the Soul's reward in life, the narrator asks, "What holds for her [i.e., the Soul] Death's garner? And for thee?" The narrator, as the love of his Beloveds and his gifts of Art and Song have demonstrated, has gained much from life for his soul, but in his pessimistic mood, he can only see the negative aspect of life.

"The Vase of Life" (XCV), which immediately follows "Michelangelo's Kiss," tries to answer the question on what Death holds in his "garner" for the narrator. The contrast of a youth and a mature great man such as Michelangelo dominates the sonnet. The "Vase of Life" portrays life on the outside of the vase while the inside is concerned with death, since the vase is to become an urn for the ashes of-the mature man; consequently, the vase becomes a Vase of Death too. When the narrator was at the height of his powers after the unions in the Willowwood sonnets, he could see both the past and the future equally well; youth and Fate (or old age, or death) were united in him. The mature man has this same ability to see the whole of life at once. The narrator contrasts the mature man's actions in relation to life to that of the youth who is shown in pictures on the outside of the vase and in his run through life: "Around the vase of Life at your slow pace / He [i.e., the mature great man] has not crept, but turned it with his hands, / And all its sides already understands." The youth does not understand what is happening to him since he is caught up in his race of life, but the great mature man has great comprehension. The youth in the last picture on the vase "stands somewhere crowned, with silent face." Like Love and the narrator, who were crowned through Love's "aureole," the youth has achieved a peak moment. Since, however, the second part of the youth's life is not portrayed, his achievements are aborted. Youth has to be joined to maturity to bring about lasting achievements. The mature man, in a sense, supplies the ingredients missing in the pictures of youth's journey; the mature man fills the vase "with wine for blood, / With blood for tears, with spice for burning vow, / With watered flowers for buried love most fit." The mature man would have thrown away the vase and thus his own life except that "Yet in Fate's name" he "has kept it whole." Fate is closely allied to death, for the vase now "Stands empty till his [i.e., the mature man's] ashes fall in it." This contrast between youth and the mature man, or puer and senex, shows a kind of "restless brotherhood" mentioned at the conclusion of "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI). Through his universal situations, the narrator wavers back and forth between total separation, with negative results, and a tense or "restless" reconciliation of the two opposing conditions of youth and old age.

Life in "Life the Beloved" (XCVI) is caught in this same tense union of youth and old age. Whereas in Part I, the narrator depicted the soul of his Beloved as leading him to Love, now the Life aspect of the soul is the Beloved. The personal soul has given way to this universal soul as Life itself. To the narrator, "Life herself" is his "spirit's friend and love." The narrator's use of the word spirit exactly expresses the masculine nature of the man's conscious ego and also his unconscious masculine immortal self. Once again the narrator gives equal weight to hope and despair, or the time of youth and old age. Life is shown as being "as Spring's authentic harbinger" and glowing "with fresh hours for hope to glorify." The narrator, however, presents the other side of the coin by showing Life caught in the grips of winter and evening, the times of old age and death: "Though pale she lay when in the winter grove / Her funeral flowers were snowflakes shed on her / And the red wings of frost-fire rent the sky." In the octave the narrator first presented the situations of his reactions upon seeing a "friend's face, with shadow of soul o'erspread" and a "love's death-bound features." These are similar to the negative aspects of Life, which are given in the sestet. The narrator does not remember his "friend's face" overcast with melancholy, but "In thought" the "Ghostly and strange" face is wedded to "all fortunate favour."

The same is true for the features of a dead Beloved which "never dead / To memory's glass return" but always keeps "a livelier lovelihead" in memory. This hopeful picture is opposite to the previous melancholic attitudes toward the images within "memory's glass." In "The Soul's Sphere" (LXII), the sorrowful images in the "soul's sphere of infinite images" became one of the sources for poetry. In the still earlier sonnet "Through Death to Love" (XLI), the narrator's heart was obsessed with "wild images of Death." Reluctantly, the narrator in "Life the Beloved" (XCVI) is trying to banish from his mind the negative attitudes of both his Logos and senex and to adopt a more positive attitude toward death, old age, Fate, and the consequent separations that these entail.

In the twelve sonnets from "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV) through "Life the Beloved" (XCVI), the narrator has passed at first through extreme forms of grief, depression, and melancholy and later through the more normal patterns of grief. His unconsciously grieving for his first Beloved that was portrayed in the twelve sonnets preceding the Willowwood sonnets and his normal grieving for both Beloveds after the Willowwood sonnets provide the patterns for the narrator's grieving in these twelve sonnets. Here, however, the narrator consciously grieves over his separation from his youth and all that this means. In the last five sonnets of the whole sonnet sequence from "A Superscription" (XCVII) through "The One Hope" (CI), Death and Fate finally rule almost completely.

In the first sonnet of "Newborn Death" (XCIX), Death is born to "mother Life" and implicitly to the narrator as father. As we have seen, this birth of Death repeats the situation of "Bridal Birth" (II), where Love is born to the first Beloved. Death now rules as did Love previously at the very beginning of the sonnet sequence. In the second sonnet of "Newborn Death" (C), the other children of "Life, the lady of all bliss," who are Love, Song, and Art, apparently have died and will be replaced by the child of Death. The narrator asks Life, "And did these [i.e., the children Love, Song, and Art] die that thou mightst bear me Death?" These deaths of Love, Song, and Art indicate that the narrator is separated from youth and from a fruitful union with his anima. After the sonnet "Farewell to the Glen" (LXXXIV), the narrator did not indicate any creative activity; instead, he evoked already-created images of culture and proceeded to destroy them or to fill the air with his pessimistic thoughts and regrets.

"A Superscription" (XCVII), the first sonnet of this last group of five sonnets, announces that the separation between the male components of his mind is complete. In "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI), the hope that male rivals would finally be united in a "restless brotherhood" through their common grief at the loss of a Beloved proved possible. In "A Superscription," the division in the mind of the narrator is incurable. "Might-have-been" (also called "No-More," "Too-late," "Farewell"), who is the speaker of the sonnet, addresses his pessimistic remarks to the narrator. This speaker represents death in the sense of the dead or "lost days" of the past as were described in "Lost Days" (LXXXVI). Instead of thinking of the happy days ruled by the youth Love, the speaker "Might-have-been" can only see the dead days of the past. The speaker is the present conscious empiric ego, which has now identified completely with the melancholic senex, who is Fate and Death. This conscious ego attitude expresses the feelings of the mortal man. This senex-dominated speaker says to the narrator, "Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell / Cast up" "between" "thy Life's foam-fretted feet." This "dead-sea shell" image is particularly apt since earlier in "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV), the narrator stated that in the view of Love, the narrator was "one murmuring shell he [i.e., Love] gathers from the sand." This shell image in "The Dark Glass" appeared after the narrator had speculated on the questions of Life and Death. The sea shell is always dead matter, but the speaker "Might-have-been" emphasizes this and the narrator's approaching deadness by placing the word dead before "sea shell" in this sonnet "A Superscription (XCVII)."

The speaker "Might-have-been" in "A Superscription" (XCVII) has exerted a "spell" over the narrator's life through his negative thoughts on mortality, death, and separation. Memory of images of the Beloveds have been a blessing to the narrator in the past as was shown in "Secret Parting" (XLV), where the narrator and his second Beloved tried "To build with fire-tried vows the piteous home / Which memory haunts and wither sleep may roam." Memory, also, as the speaker is reminding the narrator, can be a source of pain as was shown in "Parted Love" (XLVI), where the narrator punished himself by saying, "Stand still, fond fettered wretch! while Memory's art / Parades the Past before thy face, and lures / Thy spirit to her passionate portraitures." In "A Superscription" (XCVII), the speaker "Might-have-been" emphasizes only the negative past emotions and memories. He holds up for the narrator a "glass where that is seen / Which had Life's form and Love's." Now, however, through the speaker's spell the past Beloveds and Love himself have been reduced to "a shaken shadow intolerable" and "the frail screen" "Of ultimate things unuttered." Before in "Herself" (LVI), Heaven used its "own screen" of the True Woman's physical beauty to hide "her soul's purest depth and loveliest glow." Now in "A Superscription" (XCVII), the "frail screen" indicates not soul and beauty but death and Fate. The narrator is now in the position of the stranger who gazed into the True Woman's "glass" in "Her Love" (LVII) and received an icy return instead of passion. The speaker "Might-have-been" has destroyed with his "spell" the optimistic view of the narrator in "Life the Beloved" (XCVI) that his love's "death-bound features" would never appear "dead to memory's glass." Instead the worst fears of the narrator that were expressed in "Through Death to Love" (XLI) have occurred. With images similar to those in the opening lines of "A Superscription" (XCVII), the narrator in this earlier sonnet expressed his fears after a series of doom-filled comparisons such as "like terrors that agree / Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea":

     Even such [i.e., the terrors], within some glass dimmed by our breath,

     Our hearts discern wild images of Death,

Shadows and shoals that edge eternity.

At the time of "Through Death to Love" (XLI), the narrator still had his second Beloved to comfort him, but in "A Superscription" (XCVII), he is totally alone. In the sestet, the speaker "Might-have-been" torments the narrator more by reminding him that the speaker may be "still" for some time, but just when the narrator's "soul" is surprised by "winged Peace," the speaker will show his face again and "ambush" the narrator. The speaker "Might-have-been" will reveal his "cold commemorative eyes" and thus make the narrator recall only the worst memories of his past, particularly his losses. The title, "A Superscription," which means something engraved on the outside of something else, suggests that the sonnets before this sonnet comprise a unit that is complete in itself and thus belongs to memory. Under the spell of the speaker "Might-have-been" the previous persons, gods, and experiences have shrunk to a "shaken shadow."

In "A Superscription" (XCVII), the narrator is no longer addressing himself or the reader. A new personality, or a doppelgänger, has taken over in the form of the speaker. This double represents a transformation of the narrator's conscious ego. In Gnosticism, particularly in "Poimandres," Logos, or the divine spark, is trapped in a physical universe and is located in man as the intellect or the conscious mind of man. The Logos can be a puer just like Love, or Eros, or a senex like Saturn, or Fate. When Eros unites Logos with his immortal self, represented by either or both the anima or the masculine spirit, the Logos retains many of the features of the puer. Even then Logos, as intellect or conscious mind, is deeply involved with material reality, since the conscious ego is closer to external reality than any other part of the mind and, consequently, acts as a mediator between the unconscious and outer reality. The senex as Fate and Saturn represents the physical universe of becoming, and Logos as the conscious male ego is never really separated from the senex. "Love's Fatality" (LIV) portrays Love's double--"Vain-longing"--as "Love's Fatality." Love's double is "Linked in gyves" to the material cosmos, which is ruled by fate and death. The puer-senex archetype indicates that the puer and the senex are actually one.

When the narrator became identified with youth, or the puer, in the first thirty-six sonnets of Part I, he tried to make the world of becoming into a world of being. The senex, too, has the same attribute of desiring to keep things as they are when he, too, is separated from his opposite.²⁰ Acting together, the puer initiates actions and the senex demands hard work and a final product. Since the puer and the senex are actually one, even though they appear as opposites, each can transform into the other at any time.

As the intellect or the conscious ego, Logos is most intimately connected to the material reality; consequently, Logos is most susceptible to being transformed into a senex. This occurs when the Logos is separated from his immortal selves of the anima and the spirit and ultimately the self. The Logos then has identified with the senex, who is ruler of the physical universe and represents fate and death. As the narrator did in the case of his anima in the last Willowwood sonnet, Logos as the male conscious ego has introjected, or actively identified with, the senex and his values. Since this is done consciously, a condition which indicates the ego state of inflation, the narrator is conscious of both opposites in his mind at the same time. Logos has now become split into two parts: one part is still identified with the puer and the other with the senex. Because the narrator does not like the senex, who represents restriction, separation, death, and fate, the introjection, or active identification, occurs in a negative state of mind. A similar state of affairs existed when the narrator introjected his anima upon the death of his first Beloved, the results being announced in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI). In that situation, however, the introjection occurred unconsciously. The result of Logos' introjecting the senex in a negative state of mind is that part of his conscious mind is now negative and opposes his positive state. These events concerning the Logos--the divine spark, the intellect, and the conscious male ego--follow basically the patterns already established earlier in the narrator's relationships to his anima and to Love, the representative of the immortal self. In the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator consciously came to terms with his anima and Love in positive ways; now the narrator is trying also consciously to deal with the senex.

"He and I" (XCVIII), which immediately follows "A Superscription" (XCVII), shows the conflict between these two split parts of the narrator's conscious ego. The earlier rupture between the empiric conscious ego, which is subject to death, and the immortal self depicted by Love and youth has already been completed. In "He and I" the narrator has taken back his role as speaker and addresses himself. He asks, "Whence came his feet into my field and why?" This senex-dominated ego, who was the speaker in "A Superscription" (XCVII), only sees the negative side of life. The narrator asks, "How is it that he sees it all so drear? / How do I see his seeing, and how hear / The name his bitter silence knows it by?" The narrator is confused in his own personal identity as to who he really is. In his state of inflation, he has to be ambivalent, since he consciously and actively identifies with two opposites.²¹ Before, the narrator had this view of life: "This was the little fold of separate sky / Whose pasturing clouds in the soul's atmosphere / Drew living light from one continual year." As in "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI), the narrator pictures the external world as being only an image of the internal soul's world. The narrator wonders again who is really being this negative person, he or the other I: "How should he find it [i.e., the lovely picture just given] lifeless? He, or I?"

In the sestet of "He and I" (XCVIII), the narrator identifies this "he" as a "new Self" and uses imagery that evokes that appearing in the first two Willowwood sonnets. The narrator asks, "Lo! this new Self now wanders round my field, / With plaints for every flower, and for each tree / A moan, the sighing wind's auxiliary." In the Willowwood sonnets, Love is present with the narrator and sings a song about Willowwood and those separated from life and their loved ones. In "He and I,," the "new Self" has taken Love's place and yet like Love recalls the negative aspects of life. This new Self, however, has brought the wind with him. The wind, which represents change, mortality, and ultimately death, has replaced the stillness of the grove in the Willowwood sonnets. The "flower" imagery of the field echoes the image of True Woman as the "flower of life" given in "Herself" (LVI); the new Self, however, has "plaints for every flower." In the second Willowwood sonnet, the narrator's own memory was mixed with Love's song and pictured his and his Beloved's former selves as "a dumb throng" that "stood aloof, one form by every tree." The new Self in "He and I" has "for each tree / A moan, the sighing wind's auxiliary." The new Self, however, does not drink of the waters of a refreshing well such as that of Willowwood and thus become united internally with his Beloved; instead: "And o'er sweet waters of my life, that yield Unto his [i.e., the new Self's] lips no draught but tears unseal'd." The new Self weeps over the separations and sorrows of the past as did the narrator in the Willowwood sonnets, but the new Self is not the old Self of the Willowwood sonnets. Consequently, no union with the Beloved or Love or the immortal self is possible. The narrator, however, recognizes the continuity between the old Self and the new; he says, "Even in my place he weeps. Even I, not he." The new Self as the senex and the old Self--or the "I"--as puer are now the two sides of Logos, or the conscious ego.

In "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), the image of Death was identified as being one with Love. This new Self in "He and I" (XCVIII), which has allied itself completely with death's viewpoint, has acted out the same role as Love in the Willowwood sonnets. Love as god, youth, and as both the immortal self and guide to this self can give way to age, mortality, Death, and Fate. The puer-senex archetype is an archetype of twins, and Love and Death are similar twins ruling over different phases of life. "He and I" (XCVIII) has revealed this kinship, and the "Newborn Death" sonnets (XCIX; C), which follow immediately, confirm the brotherhood of Love and Death, since they are two of the children of Life. Although Love and Death are brothers, they are ultimately completely separated in this last group of five sonnets. If the narrator's conscious empiric ego--at least the puer side of the Logos, which still clings to an identity with Love, who has always been a positive puer--could accept Death in place of Love, he would perpetuate the union of likes. His spirit, the most divine part of himself, thus, would go to Heaven. This is Gnostic, Hebrew, and Christian teachings. The narrator could adopt a patriarchal religious viewpoint and be a mystic who unites with God. This upward movement of the spirit is denied to the narrator since he rejects a union of likes--a union of his masculine spirit, which at this time is the puer side of his Logos, with God, or the self.

"The One Hope" (CI), the last sonnet of The House of Life, offers the possibilities open to the narrator after a union of likes in a spiritual Heaven is rejected. The narrator opens the final sonnet with a question:

When vain desire at last and vain regret

     Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,

     What shall assuage the unforgotten pain

And teach the unforgetful to forget?

In "Love's Fatality" (LIV), "vain desire" and "vain regret" have already appeared. There "most dread Desire of Love" was "Life-thwarted." We have already seen that this vain "Desire of Love" is linked with the mortal conscious ego--then the Logos--that is subject to the iron bands of the planets that govern human fate: "Linked in gyves I [i.e., the narrator] saw them stand / Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand in hand." Love, who can lead to the immortal self and thus personifies the whole psyche, is linked as a twin to "Vain-longing" "hand to hand." The narrator looks at both forms of Love in turn; the narrator associates "Sweet Love" with the heavens above in his description of Love, "And one was eyed as the blue vault above." This Love could lead to the spiritual realm above and result, consequently, in a union of the masculine conscious ego of the narrator as well as his masculine spirit as personified by Love, with the self, which is God, the Father, who rules the upper world. The narrator, however, concentrates his attention on "Vain-longing" and offers hope that is like the clouds that led Moses out of the deserts of Egypt toward the paradise of Canaan, which is a paradise within earth's realm:

But hope tempestuous like a fire-cloud hove

     I' the other's [i.e., Vain-longing's] gaze, even as in his whose wand

     Vainly all night with spell-wrought power has spann'd

The unyielding caves of some deep treasure-trove.

"Vain-longing" as the conscious mortal ego is bound to the realm of the body just as the soul is. Love, too, as the uniter of body, soul, and spirit is kept within the body until death. The narrator says, "And I [i.e., Vain-longing], thy cowering self, in chains grown tame,-- / Bound to thy body and soul, named with thy name,-- / Life's iron heart, even Love's Fatality."

Though distressed at that time just after the Willowwood experiences, the narrator still had hope since he was united within with his anima and with love. With these internal unions working, possible external unions may once again occur; even if not, there is the consolation of the internal unions. By the time of "A Superscription" (XCVII), the narrator has basically accepted his separation from youth and consequently Love, the personified immortal spirit and guide to the immortal self. "Vain-longing" has turned into a negative "Might-have-been" or "No-more" who now by his "spell" has turned "Life's form and Love's" into a "shaken shadow."

In "The One Hope" (CI), however, the narrator still clings to hope, despite the oncoming of death. The "longing" aspect of "Vain-longing" has not completely disappeared, since the puer side of the Logos, or conscious ego, opposes its opposite, the negative senex, which is also part of the conscious ego. This negative senex is obsessed with separation, death, Fate, and hopelessness. One indication of the narrator's clinging to hope appears in the first sonnet of "Newborn Death" (XCIX). Up to this sonnet Death was always masculine as was typically shown in "The Heart of the Night" (LXVI), where Death was "Lord of death." In "Newborn Death" (XCIX), the narrator conceives Death as "the helpful daughter" of his "heart." Only at this point in the sonnet sequence has Death become feminine. This change in sex at this late point in the sonnet sequence shows that the narrator still desires to unite with the feminine, not the masculine. Death as a daughter can be an anima figure to him. The narrator's portraying Death as a daughter, too, shows that the senex part of his conscious ego has become stronger since the senex is a father figure.

A female Death is not unique. Often in early times in Egypt, the woman was represented as both the mother of Life and Death. Frequently, in coffins, the insides were painted with the image of a woman with welcoming arms.²² Rossetti's own story "The Orchard Pit" depicts death as a siren in a tree who sings, "Come to Love," "Come to Life," "Come to Death."²³

In a real sense, the narrator has retained an image of his Beloved throughout the sonnet sequence. The narrator perceived at first a living woman, then an anima figure within his own mind, then a figure of memory, an externalized anima-figure such as "Lady Beauty," and finally feminine Life as the bearer of the anima. With the realization that Death will triumph over Life, the narrator transforms Death into a woman; thus, even in death the narrator will still perpetuate the internal union with his anima, or soul.

The narrator's second question in the octave of "The One Hope" (CI) indicates that the realm of the soul, not that of the spirit, is the longed-for destination. The narrator asks,

Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,--      

     Or may the soul at once in a green plain  

     Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain

And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?

In his analysis of this sonnet, John Lindberg has traced the Greek and Roman sources for this sonnet. He finds that the references in the sonnet point to Sibyls in general and in particular to the Cumaean Sibyl mentioned in Virgil's Aeneid; this Sibyl advised Aeneas to take a golden bough as an amulet of protection on his descent into the underworld. Lindberg sees the "sunk stream long unmet" as the river Acheron and the "green plain" as the Elysian Fields that appear just before the main part of Hades. In the sestet appear these lines: "Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air / Between the scriptured petals softly blown / Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown." Commenting on these lines, Lindberg notes that the Cumaean Sibyl often inscribed her oracles on leaves thrown to the wind if she thought the person asking the question was unworthy.²⁴

Paull Franklin Baum cites another possible reference for the "dew-drenched flowering amulet." According to Greek sources, the soul culls a flower, which is a hyacinth, from a fountain, and this flower tells the soul its fate in eternity.²⁵ Apollo, according to one myth, was in love with a divine youth named Hyacinthus. However, one day, Apollo accidently kills Hyacinthus. Like the narrator in the first Willowwood sonnet, Apollo shed tears in grief, and afterwards a transformation occurs. As happened with Narcissus, Hyacinthus is turned into a flower; in fact, Hyacinthus and Narcissus very likely are the same person.²⁶ Apollo's tears were the agency of the transformation.²⁷ Apollo, then inscribed the word alas on the petals of the hyacinth.²⁸ This possible reference to the hyacinth flower, which remains in the earth's realm, reinforces the impossibility of a spiritual union of likes in an upper spirit world as the final goal for the narrator. Apollo points both upward and downward. As the god of light and reason, he points to the spiritual realm, but as the god who inspires his priestesses and followers, he is a god of ecstasy, enthusiasm, and mysteries of the night.

Although Lindberg does not mention it, the Cumaean Sibyl is a priestess for the god Apollo. As Lindberg did note, however, the Sibyl is the goddess of Beauty in the sonnet "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII). This link between the Sibyl and the soul reinforces the dominance of the soul rather than the spirit at the end of the whole sonnet sequence. Apollo earlier appeared as the narrator's source of poetic inspiration in "The Song-Throe" (LXI). This last reference to him and his Sibyls point to his night and feminine aspects more than to his day and masculine qualities. The narrator's soul's realm, consequently, is emphasized by these references to Apollo and the Sibyls.

The narrator concludes the sonnet "The One Hope" (CI) and the whole sonnet sequence with a hope: "Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er / But only the one Hope's one name be there,-- / Not less nor more, but even that word alone." The "alien spell" can refer to the negative side of the narrator's ego that is identified with the negative senex who in "A Superscription" (XCVII) exerted a negative "spell" over "Life's form and Love's." Instead of this attitude, the narrator's positive side of his conscious ego--the puer aspect of his Logos--still clings to a hope.

The narrator's emphasizing "that word alone"--hope--as the only thing left for him echoes the myth of Pandora. In the Greek story of Pandora, hope is the only thing left in her casket after she lets out all the evils into the world. Before Pandora, there were no women in the world; thus she was an Eve-like creature for the Greeks. Rossetti himself painted a picture of Pandora in 1871 and wrote a sonnet on it entitled "Pandora."²⁹ In this Greek myth, hope is associated with the feminine and not the masculine. In Renaissance art, Pandora often appears with three other figures: Nemesis (the goddess of Fate), Good Events, and Cupid (Love). Death also is included in these pictures of Hope and her companions since Hope carries the broken weapons of Death. Death, too, is associated with Pandora not only through the plagues and miseries she releases upon mankind but through the vase (not the casket later substituted by others) which serves as an urn for the ashes of the dead.³⁰ Pandora's vase serves the same purpose as the vase in "The Vase of Life" (XCV). Nemesis, Death, and Love, the companions of Hope, play prominent roles in the whole sonnet sequence; Death and Nemesis particularly rule at the end but Love still lingers in the narrator's clinging to hope.

"Hope's one name" can easily be viewed as the Beloved, or the anima, the object even of "Vain-longing," who has been closely identified with the negative senex. "Hope's one name" can also have an aesthetic meaning. In "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII), "Beauty enthroned" is both the soul and the Sibyl. The narrator as artist and poet can seek after the beauty of his soul. In "Heart's Hope" (V), the narrator indicated his dedication to art and to his Beloved. The narrator asks,

By what word's power, the key of paths untrod,    

     Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,         

     Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore

Even as that sea which Israel crossed dry shod?

In the sestet of this same sonnet, the narrator pledges to universalize his Beloved in art: "Yea, in God's name, and Love's, and thine, would I / Draw from one loving heart such evidence / As to all hearts all things shall signify." Since the narrator's soul is picking up the amulet in "The One Hope" (CI) and finding "one Hope's one name," the name could be the soul's "Beauty" as depicted in "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII). The narrator's conscious ego as partly personified by "vain desire" and "vain regret" longs to continue its love affair with beauty, whose source is the soul, and of course with the soul itself. The introductory sonnet signifies that "A Sonnet is a moment's monument,-- / Memorial from the Soul's eternity / To one dead deathless hour." The realm of Song and Art does perpetuate the soul's beauty beyond a person's death, and because Song and Art live in the culture, the soul's beauty is "deathless." The introductory sonnet too promised to explore the "difficult deeps of Love," which was mentioned later in "Heart's Hope" (V). The deepest realm is that of the soul and Hades. Thus on one side of the sonnet as a coin is death and his realm of Hades. Charon, who transports souls across the river Acheron, demands his coin in order to allow anyone to cross to the Elysian Fields and Hades beyond. We have already seen that Saturn, the senex, is the god of minting and coins. The greats of this world such as poets can reside in the Elysian Fields that are described in "The One Hope."³¹ The narrator can not ultimately know what his fate will be other than the certainty of death; the grace that the soul longs for is "unknown." Just as in the case with Pandora, the only thing that remains is hope.

Fittingly, the narrator ends the sonnet sequence in the realm of the soul. There is a Willowwood fountain there too in the Elysian Fields in the form of a "sweet life-fountain." Narcissus was fascinated with the image of his own masculine self's image in the Ovid version of the myth. The narrator in The House of Life emphasizes the other self as the anima, or the soul, that Narcissus longed for in the Pausanias version of the Narcissus myth. The soul's ultimate realm is Hades, which is the source of images, dreams, and fantasies, and not Heaven, the realm of the spirit. James Hillman cited one big difference between spirit and soul. The masculine spirit rises to the heights to a union with God and has its imagination emptied. This is the mystical experience of a St. John. The soul, however, in its descent to the underworld is filled with images and thus has visionary experiences such as did William Blake.³² Masculine religions like Judaism and Protestantism basically reject images and ultimately forms of art and beauty, whereas the Greeks, who stress man as the measure of all things, love beauty and images from the soul. Mount Olympus, originally, was located on an earthly mountain. The narrator begins with love for an externalized form of his own anima, internalizes this anima, and then externalizes it again in forms of beauty in Song and Art. At the very end, the narrator still hopes that the soul's beauty will continue. The typical hero continues his great adventures after a descent into the underworld, but the narrator ends his journey through life and through his soul obsessed by the underground realm of the soul. The image-making power of the soul, the imagination, has triumphed in the end, despite the oncoming of Death. The narrator turns Death into a woman in order to preserve his relationship with his anima.

Narcissus in his immortality as a flower did not leave the earth. As a shade, he descended, like the soul, into Hades. In most Greek and Roman accounts, the soul never reaches farther upward than the moon and, in most cases, disappears through complete death or descends into Hades as a shadow, or image. The narrator, too, has not elected to-adopt the mystic's way of uniting with God beyond the physical cosmos ruled by the seven Governors, or seven planets, particularly Saturn, who appears also in the realm of the dead. Narcissus, the narrator, and the soul confine themselves to the physical cosmos or to Hades. They all recognize the power of Fate, which is what the seven planets as Governors signify.

In the Greek world, astrology and the astrology chart expressed man's fate and his mortality. In its ultimate organization, The House of Life recognizes the power of the body as a microcosm and the physical cosmos as a macrocosm. In Christian and Gnostic thought the physical universe and particularly the earth was conceived as a Hades. The soul, also, as Life was conceived as feminine and thus did not belong to the ethereal realm of the spirit which lies just beyond the realm of the seven Governors. These concepts and others related to Fate and astrology will be explored in an analysis of the overall organization of The House of Life.

NOTES

¹ Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (1955; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 107-110. The ego in Jung's concepts is always the center of consciousness in the same way the sun is the center of the solar system. Freud and Szondi, however, recognize the ego as also having unconscious elements; consequently, with them, Jung's concept of the self becomes a part of the ego. To Jung, the self is a higher identity that includes all elements of the human mind--its conscious and unconscious elements. Since the ego is a part of the self, it--as all parts can do in symbolism--can represent the whole. In inflation, the ego becomes the self too and thus God.

² Ibid., p. 179-180.

³ T. Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Elliot Stock, 1882), p. 249.

⁴ James Hillman, "On Psychological Creativity," Eranos Jahrbuch, 35 (1966), 379.

⁵ Ibid., p. 377.

⁶ Ibid., p. 378.

⁷ Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 179.

⁸ Carl Jung, Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), pp. 57-61.

⁹ Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius (Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 46-51 and p. 115.

¹⁰ Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), pp. 253-254.

¹¹ Joseph F. Vogel, "Rossetti's The House of Life, 'Death's Songsters,"' Explication, 21 (1963), item 64.

¹² Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1940), p. 293.

¹³ Ibid., p. 36.

¹⁴ James Hillman, "The Dream and the Underworld," Eranos Jahrbuch, 42 (1973), 262.

¹⁵ Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 139-140 and Plate 350.

¹⁶ Neumann, Amor and Psyche, p. 62 and pp. 130-132.éé

¹⁷ C. Kernéyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), pp. 30-33 and pp. 144-151.

¹⁸ Lipot Szondi, Lehrbuch der experimentellen Triebdiagnostik: Text-band, Dritte, Erweiterte Auflage. (Bern: Hans Huber, 1972), pp. 66-68 and pp. 73-90. Sigmund Freud originated this dualism of the instincts of tender love whose goal is union and whose ruler is Eros and the "death instincts." Freud did not use the term Thanatos for his concept "death instincts" in his fundamental works on death, or sadistic, instincts: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (1920; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1959), p. 73 and pp. 92-110; The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (1923; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), pp. 30-37. Freud also analyzed the effects of the separation of Eros' tender drive and the aggressive, or sadistic, drive in a man's love choices: "Contributions to the Psychology of Love: The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," trans. Joan Riviere, Collected Papers, 4 (1912; rpt. Basic Books, 1959), pp. 204-208.

¹⁹ Neumann, Amor and Psyche, pp. 51-52.

²⁰ James Hillman, "Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present," Eranos Jahrbuch, 36 (1967), 327-328.

²¹ Lipot Szondi, Ich-Analyse: Die Grundlage zur Vereinigung der Tiefenpsychologie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1956), pp. 177-183 and pp. 300-305.

²² Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), p. 147; p. 222; p. 242; Plate 90; Edgar Herzog [Psyche and Death, trans. David Cox and Eugene Rolfe (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1966), pp. 99-132] traces the history of the feminine side of the archetype of death

²³ The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti, (London: Ellis, 1911), p. 609.

²⁴ "Rossetti's Cumaean Oracle," Victorian Newsletter, 22 (1962), 20.

²⁵ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence, ed. Paull Franklin Baum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 224.

²⁶ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, I (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 81 and p. 288.

²⁷ C. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1951), p. 139.

²⁸ Hamilton, Mythology, pp. 88-89.

²⁹ Surtees, Paintings and Drawings, p. 125 and Plate 318.

³⁰ Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), pp. 3-7 and pp. 27-28.

³¹ Hamilton, Mythology, p. 228.

³²James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 241.

Chapter VII

Personifications of the Self

and

The Year's Turning Wheel

Narcissism in its mythical, psychological, and archetypal forms has proven to be a fundamental organizing principle for The House of Life. Another expression of Narcissism appears in the astrological framework of the whole sonnet sequence. Both the key words of House in the title of the whole sonnet sequence and Fate in the title "Change and Fate" of Part II initially suggest that astrology may play a major role in the structural organization of the whole sonnet sequence.

Although a concensus of critics--as typically represented by Paull Franklin Baum--feel that the term House in the title The House of Life may have slight, if any, reference to astrology and that certainly there is no astrological meaning in any detailed manner, others have noted an astrological significance.¹ T. Hall Caine, a friend of Dante Rossetti, supports an astrological interpretation for the organization of the whole sonnet sequence rather than Swinburne's architectural concept. Caine states emphatically, "the title is an astronomical, not an architectural figure."² Jacques Savarit, a French critic, has no doubt that Rossetti used the word House as part of his title for the sonnet sequence in an astrological sense. He devotes a long footnote to a discussion of all the basic references of commentators who are for or against the astrological meaning of House.³ William Michael Rossetti understood that his brother employed "the term The House of Life as a zodiacal adept uses the term 'the house of Leo."' That means, according to William Rossetti, that the "sun is said to be 'in the house of Leo."' William Rossetti notes, too, that his brother was "fond of anything related to astrology or horoscopy--not indeed that he ever paid the least detailed or practical attention to these obsolete speculations."⁴ A complete analysis of the astrological organization of The House of Life will reveal that Dante Rossetti knew more about astrology than his brother suspected or was unwilling to admit. R. L. Mégroz in his book on Dante Rossetti describes Rossetti's interest in spiritualism in 1864 and recounts the séances at Rossetti's house.⁵

Dante Rossetti had other contacts with astrology, particularly through his interest in William Blake. John Varley, who was well known in art, notably as a founder of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Color, had an avid interest in astrology. When John Varley met William Blake in 1819, he asked Blake the date of his birth and cast a horoscope for him. Later, Blake did a series of drawings for Varley, some of which eventually appeared in Varley's pamphlet A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy.⁶ In 1847, Dante Rossetti bought a Blake Notebook from the British Museum and, at a much later date, the Varley pamphlet. William Rossetti had the Varley pamphlet bound; the binder ruthlessly cut the pamphlet's margins in binding it. Later, whenever Dante Gabriel mentioned the pamphlet, William felt guilty.⁷ In a letter in 1880, Dante Rossetti mentions Varley's work again in connection with his brother William's cataloging Blakes' works and drawings for the forthcoming Life of Blake by Gilchrist. Dante Rossetti writes to William, "I have here some twenty drawings by Blake, of which you may like to take notes, for your Catalogue, on Monday. One of them seems to me the same head as one (I think a female born under sign Cancer) in Varley's Zodiacal Physiognomy."⁸

A powerful source for Dante Rossetti's taking an interest in astrology was his father Gabriele Rossetti's studies and writings. Rossetti's father believed that Freemasonry, which advocates a "universal religion of humanity," "originated in the Egyptian, Eleusinian, Dionysiac, even the Druidic mysteries; among the Pythagoreans or the Gnostics." Gabriele Rossetti believed, too, that Plato, Pythagorus, and Dante, among other greats of history, were initiates of Freemasonry. The love poetry of the troubadours, the Italians, and Dante was really poetry extolling not erotic love but "the religion of fraternal love," which points to the one God unifying all. Gabriele Rossetti also writes that Petrarch's Laura stands for a masonic lodge and that the whole of Dante's Paradiso represents a lodge. (Dante Rossetti's father's use of the word lodge, meaning also a form of house, may have been another possible source for the title The House of Life.) Rossetti's father was intensely interested in the theme of love and perceived the Catholic Church as setting up a reign of hate against the "doctrine of Love" which was central to Freemasonry and Gnosticism.⁹ William Rossetti, looking back over his youth, remembers his father "when writing about the Comedia or Vita Nuova, was seen surrounded by ponderous folios in italic type, 'libri mistici' and the like (often about alchemy, freemasonry, Brahminism, Swedenborg, the Cabbala, etc).¹⁰ Anyone interested in the occult as was Gabriele Rossetti could not avoid becoming deeply involved in astrology.

Another rich source for Rossetti's becoming interested in astrology was Dante, the great poet of the Middle Ages. As a child Dante Rossetti felt the influence of Dante through his father, who named him after the renowned poet. As early as 1836, as children Dante, Christina, and William could read Italian well. Dante Rossetti, according to his brother William, was influenced by Dante's writings and read them deeply.¹¹ As an adult, Rossetti painted many pictures concerning Dante's life and poetry. Besides this, Rossetti was deeply involved with Dante's writings and the poets of Darite's time. In 1847 and 1848, Rossetti translated Dante's Vita Nuova, and in 1861 this work and poems by poets in Dante's circle were published in The Early Italian Poets. Later this volume was retitled Dante and his Circle and was published in 1873.¹²

Dante Rossetti could not fail to encounter astrological concepts in Dante's Divine Comedy. The plan of the universe in this poem is based on Claudius Ptolemy's conceptions of the universe as presented in his writings Syntax, or Almagest, and Tetrabiblos, the latter being published in Greece in the second century A. D.¹³ Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos is the Bible of modern western astrology and draws upon astrological teachings of Babylon, Egypt, and Greece.¹⁴ It relies also extensively upon the mathematical and metaphysical teachings of Pythagorus (DA 70-75).¹⁵ Dante's "supreme authority" on astrology was Ptolemy as it had been, and is now, for astrologers. Dante was equally familiar with Pythagorus (DA 232-236). In Dante and the Early Astronomers, M. A. Orr thoroughly analyzes the astrology present in the Divine Comedy and recounts the history of astronomy and astrology up to Dante's thirteenth century. Orr's lengthy analysis demonstrates how astrology and the world view it represents structure the Divine Comedy in many crucial ways.

In his study of the poets who are associated with Dante, which is entitled Dante and his Circle, Rossetti also encountered an organization of a series of sonnets based on the calendar. Folgore da San Geminano wrote a series of sonnets dedicated to each of the twelve months of the year. This series was called "Of the Months: Twelve Sonnets." These twelve sonnets were framed by a "Dedication" sonnet and a "Conclusion" sonnet. This same poet wrote another series of seven sonnets devoted to the seven days of the week; it was called "Of the Week: Seven Sonnets." A sonnet of "Dedication" was included but no concluding sonnet.¹⁶ The sonnets on the months can relate to the zodiac, and even the seven days of the week have an astrological significance, since each day of the week is named for one of the planets.¹⁷

In his Divine Comedy, Dante not only uses Ptolemy's and Pythagorus' astrological organizations of the universe but refers to astrological formations constantly in order to orient the reader about the exact time of the day and the year. For example, Dante as narrator begins his journey on Good Friday in 1300 when the sun was in Aires and the moon in Libra.

In Vita Nuova, Dante tells of his love for Beatrice, her death, and the consequences of this for him. Interspersed in the prose narrative are a series of sonnets and songs to illustrate peak moments in the story and in his own emotional life. At this time, Dante was obsessed with the idea of the rolling spheres as first proposed by Pythagorus and promoted by Ptolemy (DA 254, 355, 425). There are nine spheres--the seven planets and the Heaven of the Stars and the Primum Mobile. Since Dante associated her with these nine heavens, Beatrice, his Beloved, was identified with the number nine. Dante, like    Rossetti, was born in May, and when "Nine times already since" his "birth had the heavens of light returned to the selfsame point almost," Dante first met Beatrice, who was also nine years old. After her death, Dante gives an astrological explanation of why the number nine is linked to Beatrice:

And touching the reason why this number was so closely allied unto her, it may peradventure be this. According to Ptolemy, (and also to the Christian verity) the revolving heavens are nine; and according to the common opinion among astrologers, these nine heavens together have influence over the earth. Wherefore it would appear that this number was thus allied unto her for the purpose of signifying that, at her birth, all these nine heavens were at perfect unity with each other as to their influence.... The number three is the root of the number nine; seeing that without the interposition of any other number, being multiplied merely by itself, it produceth nine, as we manifestly perceive that three times three are nine. Thus, three being of itself the efficient of nine, and the Great Efficient of Miracles being of Himself Three Persons (to wit: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), which, being Three, are also One:--this lady was accompanied by the number nine to the end that men might clearly perceive her to be a nine, that is, a miracle, whose only root is the Holy Trinity.¹⁸

As a translator of Dante's Vita Nuova and the works of the minor poets around Dante and as a student of the Divine Comedy, Rossetti became intimately aware of the possible value of astrology as a means of organizing completely or partially a work of literature, particularly poetic works. Thus, the word House in Rossetti's The House of Life, as we have seen, may indeed have an astrological meaning.   

In trying to define the astrological implications of House, William Rossetti refers to the sun being in "the house of Leo." Today, Leo is considered by astrologers to be principally a sign of the zodiac and not a house. William Rossetti's use of the term is, however, perfectly correct according to Ptolemy's use of the term house in his book Tetrabiblos. Ptolemy refers to the house in two ways. A house is a certain place along the path of the zodiac--which is the band of twelve constellations around the earth near the equator. This zodiacal path of three-hundred and sixty degrees is divided into twelve equal parts or houses of thirty degrees each; thus the sun in its yearly journey around the earth travels one degree a day or thirty degrees a month. Ptolemy's conception is that the earth is the center of the solar system. The planets in Babylonian and Greek times were Gods and, consequently, had to have houses to live in.¹⁹ Ptolemy refers to each of the signs then as the house of Leo or the house of Libra or the house of Aires (TB 41-43).

Ptolemy also looks at the places on the zodiacal path from the viewpoint of the planets owning a house--that is, as a lord of a house. For example, the sun is lord, or ruler, of the sign Leo or the house of Leo because this place or house is the natural home for the sun. Therefore, the space occupied by the constellation Leo in the zodiac can be referred to as the house of the Sun (TB 45-47). Mars' native place in the zodiac is Aires. Mars also is ruler over the sign, or constellation, of Scorpio; Scorpio can thus be called the house of Mars too. Ptolemy's use of the term house in these two ways refers to the yearly cycle of the planets' movement through the houses of the zodiac, particularly that of the sun (TB 42-43, 47). Early astronomers picked zero degree of Aires as the beginning of the zodiac. At this point the sunrise in the east begins to occur in the constellation of Aires, and each day for thirty days the sun will rise with the Aires constellation of stars behind it. In the yearly cycle, this beginning point of Aires is the vernal equinox.

This yearly cycle of the sun and the planets moving around the earth--according to Ptolemy's system--determines the destiny of humanity. For precise information on the influence of the stars and planets on an individual's life, a chart of the heavens at the moment of a person's birth is needed.²⁰ Ptolemy used the point of the ascendant--the east position where the sun rises on the day of birth-to orient the chart of the heavens at the hour of birth (TB 106-109). The planets and the signs that they were in were called houses. After Ptolemy, the actual spaces beginning at the ascendant point became important in themselves regardless of the signs or the planets (PA 71). The precise hour, minute, and second of birth became the horoscope point (hora means hour), and this was placed at the same point as the ascendant point used by Ptolemy.

The term house used in horoscopes adds another dimension to the system based exclusively on planets and signs. The degree of the horoscope does not correspond normally with any particular star or planet. It is an abstract point just as is the ascendant (AG 256-260). Both Ptolemy and the later astrologers using a horoscope could cast birth charts, which are based on the daily turn of the earth on its axis in twenty-four hours. Ptolemy believed the celestial spheres turned around a stationary earth during a twenty-four hour period. Later astrologers, however, had the additional meanings associated with the twelve spaces, or houses, of the daily cycle. For Ptolemy, a planet had to be related in some way to the ascendant and the zodiacal sign; otherwise, the thirty degree space near the ascendant, or horoscope, has no meaning. William Rossetti was probably aware of the distinction between Ptolemy's and the later astrologers' use of the term house, since he said his brother Dante was "fond of anything related to astrology or horoscopy."²¹ The astrology chart, consequently, may be viewed from two viewpoints: from that of the yearly revolution of the sun around the earth or from the view of the daily spin of the signs, or houses, of the zodiac around the earth in a twenty-four hour period. In both cases, twelve houses are involved.

If The House of Life has an astrological structural organization, then the number twelve must be a key number because of the astrological meaning of house. The House of Life has one hundred and one sonnets in its main body and an introductory sonnet. The number twelve does not naturally divide into one-hundred and one, nor are there one-hundred and forty-four sonnets, which would be an ideal number encompassing both a daily and a yearly cycle of twelve signs or houses.

If we, however, still retain the concept of the twelve zodiacal signs or houses turning around the earth in a day or a year and look for some correspondence between the first twelve sonnets of The House of Life and either a zodiacal sign or a numbered house, then some possibilities immediately appear. The first twelve sonnets of the sonnet sequence are concerned with the union of the narrator and his first Beloved in love. In the numbered houses' system, the seventh house is that of marriages and unions. In the Ptolemy system, the seventh sign is Libra, the balance or scales. Even a cursory examination of the relationship of this house and sign to the first twelve sonnets of The House of Life will indicate the appropriateness of-this choice.

Each group of twelve sonnets and the other signs of the zodiac and houses follow this house of Libra in the astrology chart's normal chronological pattern. Scorpio, for example, will be the sign for the next twelve sonnets beginning with "Youth's Antiphony" (XIII) and ending with "Pride of Youth" (XXIV). The number twelve for each group of sonnets for each house mirrors the daily cycle of the earth's turning around on its axis and, at the same time, will actually symbolize the time span of one month in the yearly cycle of twelve signs. It would be impossible for Rossetti literally to use the horoscope system of houses or the ascendant point of Ptolemy, since the hour of birth of the narrator is not given. Still the conflict between the individual--represented by the personal birth chart--and the universal--indicated by the yearly zodiacal chart--is retained by the use of the number twelve for each group of sonnets in a house. The twelve sonnets then can represent a twenty-four hour day cycle and/or month cycle. As stated in "Heart's Hope" (V), the narrator wishes both to present the individual experience of the narrator and to universalize it. The daily cycle or month cycle and the yearly cycle represent both phases of an individual's life.

Figure 1 presents the proposed astrological organization of The House of Life. This astrological organization will be examined to see if it corresponds to the content of the whole sonnet sequence and particularly to the archetypal, mythological, and psychological meanings of narcissism. This overall organization is predominately based on the yearly cycle of the sun and planets through the zodiac.

The signs of the zodiac provide names for houses such as the house of Libra, the house of Scorpio, and the house of Sagittarius. The seven planets also provide names for the houses. Originally, the seven planets, which include the sun and moon, only occupied one house each. In the Egyptian tradition of astrology, the Demiurge created the planets and assigned them definite places, or houses; this is called "the theme of the world" (AG 184-187). With the exception of the moon, these positions on the zodiac correspond to the distances of the planets from the sun. (See Figure 2.) The theme of the world explains why each planet occupies and rules one house each. Astrologers, however, wanted to have the planets fill up the rest of the chart. The solution was that each planet has a house by day and a house by night. The sun being day itself and the moon being night itself must occupy only one house each; the other five planets will occupy two each. The planets would line up, consequently, both on the side of the sun and on the side of the moon (AG 187-188; TB 41-42; PA 71-73). (See Figures 3 and 4 for two views of the same arrangement.)

Another factor must be added to this system of houses. Already, the planets have been arranged by their domination by the sun or the moon and by whether the planets each rule a house by day or by night. In his study of the mystical properties of numbers, Pythagorus believed the whole universe was ordered according to the nature of numbers. To Pythagorus, "God is number; number is God." The universe is divided into two categories; in one category are all limited things, and in the other all unlimited. In the universe, there are ten fundamental pairs of contraries: (1) limited-unlimited; (2) odd-even; (3) one-many; (4) right-left; (5) masculine-feminine; (6) rest-motion; (7) straight-crooked; (8) light-darkness; (9) good-evil; (10) square-oblong.²²

Ptolemy divided the houses and signs on the basis of Pythagorus' numbers, particularly the odd-even, male-female, light-darkness categories, but the other categories tend to be included in his and later astrologers' interpretations of the planets, the signs, and the houses associated with particular numbers.

Since Ptolemy abandoned the rich sources of mythology, which conceived each planet as a god or goddess and each sign as a particular animal, human, god, or thing, he, in a sense, replaced human and divine mythology with a mythology of numbers and geometry (AG 154).²³ In Figure 4, the plus sign (+) designates the positive, masculine, and diurnal signs and houses; the minus sign (-) indicates the negative, feminine, and nocturnal signs and houses (TB 21-23). This system will be modified by other considerations regarding the compatibility of the planets in relationship to each other. A planet's influence is most powerful when it is in either its native day or night house.

One more factor needs to be included before we examine closely the relationships of the houses, signs, and planets to the organization and content of The House of Life. Planets are classified according to the degrees that separate them and the consequent line and angle formed between or among them. The arrangement of the planets in signs or houses in relationship to the sun and moon determine whether they are malefic, benefic, or neutral (TB 36-38; A 110; PA 67-70). (See Figure 5.)

In astrology, the relationships of planets to each other are called aspects. Signs or houses themselves can be in some kind of aspect relationship too. In the zodiacal arrangement of The House of Life as presented in Figure 1, the houses of Cancer, Leo, and Virgo are not associated with any of the sonnets, since the sonnet sequence concludes in the house of Gemini. These missing houses, however, have close associations, or aspects, with the most important planet in our solar system--the sun. The zodiacal band of constellations gained importance in earliest times because of the rising and setting of the sun among its constellations; this movement indicated the sun's path through the zodiacal constellations (DA 25-26; 29-31).²⁴ In the myths of heroes, the hero--particularly if he goes on a "night sea journey"--is often a solar god and his adventures match that of the sun travelling through the zodiac.²⁵

Many times Jung has equated the archetype of the self, and the ego too, with the sun.²⁶ In his analysis of the functions of the human mind, Jung pictured the mind as having four functions acting like a quaternity. One function such as thinking would dominate the conscious mind and its opposite function feeling would be hidden in the unconscious. Two functions, partly conscious and partly unconscious, would aid the primary conscious function.²⁷ (See Figure 6 for the diagram of the structure of the functions in the human mind; this structure has a resemblance to the arrangement of The House of Life as depicted in the zodiacal chart of Figure 1.) The sun, whose native house is the house of Leo, appears in Figure I in the most excluded and distant part in the zodiacal arrangement of The House of Life. The self is the part of man that can not be made fully conscious; it is like the blind spot of the eye. The self can be considered as a stationary being like the sun in the house of Leo, and like the sun, it can have aspects to all the people, places, and things in its life. The ego, as Jung has noted, can act like the self and thus can assume the character of the sun in its travels through the houses of the zodiac. The ego is more concerned with becoming and movement than the self that is linked with being and stasis.

Ptolemy only shows the aspects of the sun in the house of Leo to those planets on the solar side of the zodiac. (See Figure 7 for an astrology chart showing the aspects of the sun in the house of Leo to all the other ruling planets of each house or sign. Both solar and lunar planets, signs, and houses are included.) Since the narrator is telling of his experiences in a sequential manner from the first to the last sonnet, he is telling of his course through life. In this sense, the narrator's ego is going through a series of events in time like the sun in its journey through the zodiac. Myths of heroes can be looked upon as myths of the development of the ego, the center of consciousness.²⁸ The symbolism of the sun can be viewed from the two perspectives of a moving sun, with close identity with the ego, and a stationary sun that is linked with the self.

If we look at the aspects of the sun in the house of Leo to the other planets and their houses and signs, we will find some strong correspondences between the events and contents of the sonnets in The House of Life and the different houses and planets. Figure 7 will be used for this analysis.

The most severe opposition occurs between the sun in the house of Leo and the planet in the house of Aquarius (or the day house of Saturn). This house is covered by sonnets from the first Willowwood sonnet (XLIX) through "Transfigured Life" (LX). Saturn has already been identified with the senex, Death, and Fate, and Love with the puer. In the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator looks at both the senex Saturn and the puer Love and all they stand for. For the Greeks, Aquarius, or the Water-Bearer, was Ganymede, the handsome youth (AG 146). Ganymede has all the traits of a puer. He was the son of King Tros (whose name later was adopted for the name of the city of Troy) and the "most beautiful youth alive." The theme of a union of likes is central to Ganymede's story since Zeus fell in love with him and brought him to Mount Olympus to be his Cup-bearer, or Water-Bearer. Zeus eventually put Ganymede's image among the stars as Aquarius. Zeus' turning himself into an eagle and abducting Ganymede from the plains of Troy is related to the religious idea of the struggle: "Eagle and Serpent--waxing and waning year, King and Tanist."²⁹ The puer-senex archetype is also a time archetype; James Hillman believes that Ganymede as the Cup-Bearer is also Saturn in the form of the Aquarian Water-Bearer.³⁰ There is an element of the union of opposites in the Zeus-Ganymede myth since an icon exists which shows Ganymede as a new king preparing for a sacred marriage (GM 1 116-117).

The house of Aquarius is a day house for Saturn; the sign is also positive, masculine, and diurnal. Aquarius, thus, has some positive qualities. He is universal man and known for his independence. Around the year 2000, the world will enter the Great Month of Aquarius, which will last approximately 2000 years. Plato's Great Year system is based on the fact that the constellations of each sign of the zodiac slip back a bit each day and each year since the sun travels more slowly in a year than the constellations. Consequently the zodiacal signs in a Great Year are going backwards from the Age of Pisces, which is the Christian era of approximately 2000 years, to the Age of Aquarius.³¹ Jung believes this Age of Aquarius will "constellate the problem of the union of opposites." Jung further states that the individual--which points to the basic individualistic nature of Aquarius--must solve the problem of evil: "This problem can be solved neither by philosophy, nor by economics, nor by politics, but only by the individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit."³²

Basically, Aquarius as an individual and as universal man tries to unite the opposites without and within. In 1781, Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, and many astrologers made this planet the ruler of the house of Aquarius. Uranus' main attributes are independence, unconventionality, willful desire for freedom, rebellious desire for change, and inventiveness.³³ Since these attributes were already part of the Aquarian nature, it was easy for some to make Uranus the ruler of the house of Aquarius instead of Saturn or a joint ruler of the house with Saturn.

Aquarius is also part of a triplicity, which is composed of three houses, or signs, of one of the four elements--fire, earth, air, and water--and are in a trine, or triangular, aspect of one-hundred and twenty degrees to each other. (See Figure 8.) Ptolemy designated day and night rulers for each of the triplicities; these rulers do not coincide always with the original rulers of each house since Ptolemy had to eliminate some planets as possible rulers (TB 45). The rulers of triplicities are not as powerful as the native ruler of each house in the triplicity. In fact, the rulers of the triplicities should be considered only after the native planet ruler and the planet exalted in the house.³⁴ Some planets in this air triplicity were basically incompatible to each other. This system of rulers is also directly related to the concept of the exaltation, detriment, and fall of a planet; this will be covered later. Mercury rules this triplicity of air by night. As we have seen, Mercury can be the puer and Love (or Eros) and Saturn the senex and Death. In "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII), the last sonnet in the house of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, and in the Willowwood sonnets, Love, Death, and the Beloved are one. Libra is the house of Venus (or Aphrodite), and although she normally rules the house of Libra by day, in this air triplicity by day Saturn rules her house and the two other houses. From the beginning, Life and Death and Love and Death have been constantly near each other.

This air triplicity shows the connections between Love and Death. Mercury as the puer is in the house of Gemini and Saturn, the senex, in the house of Libra. Gemini is the last house in The House of Life and Libra the first. The positions of the puer and senex in the houses are reversed in this air triplicity from that we have seen in The House of Life, where the puer, or Love, is at the beginning in the house of Libra and the senex, or Death, is at the end in the house of Gemini. In the yearly cycle, however, Gemini comes first and Libra later; consequently, the positions of the two planets are correct in zodiacal time just as the chronological ordering is correct for the houses Gemini and Libra. Despite this reverse order of the locations of Mercury and Saturn as puer and senex in the houses of this air triplicity from that in The House of Life, their being joined together in the same triplicity shows their close kinship and Janus-like natures. This air triplicity is composed of masculine signs (all +'s). Venus, therefore, as a feminine planet had to be excluded as a ruler from this masculine triplicity (AG 204).

A house concerned with air is above all connected with intelligence and communication. Mercury as the messenger of the gods, who communicate their messages from above to humans on earth and divinities and souls in the underworld, is the symbol of communication and intelligence. Air is the medium in which living beings breathe, through which sound travels, and ultimately through which communications are sent (MA 39). Aquarius, as one of the few human signs in the zodiac, represents human intelligence and knowledge. He is "True Knowledge," and those who are born under the Aquarian sign are dedicated to the search for truth. The air qualities of Aquarius also emphasize his universal nature, taking the forms of an ideal relationship between all things and a universal brotherhood (A 21). The Willowwood sonnets portray these qualities, especially in the narrator's coming to know what his true state is and in his trying to unite the opposites within himself.

The sign Aquarius (k ) represents among other things, two snakes. The snake is an ancient symbol for wisdom (A 26; MA 79). Robert Graves traced the symbol to Zeus as a snake in an incestuous union with his mother Rhea as a snake (GM 1 53). This emphasizes the union aspect of the sign. The image of the WaterBearer, too, can function as a sign of the "distillation of Wisdom from Knowledge, to be poured out for the benefit of all" (A 26). After the fruitful unions in Willowwood, the narrator expressed his new found individualism in Song and Art. In these ways he benefited the collective and universalized his individualism.

Saturn's night house is the house of Capricorn. Saturn in this house is in a negative aspect to the sun. In the sonnets covered by Capricorn--from "The Love-Moon" (XXXVII) through "Death-in-Love" (XLVIII)--the narrator grieved unconsciously over his first Beloved's death and was eventually separated from his second Beloved. In "Death-in-Love," the narrator learned that Love was Death. Saturn's house of Capricorn is negative, feminine, and nocturnal. The sun in its yearly cycle is in the first part of winter in Capricorn's month of January; the winter solstice occurs at the beginning of the house of Capricorn.

The Capricorn animal of half-goat and half-sea animal was derived by the Greeks from the goat god Pan and Triton (or Neptune). In one myth, Pan fled before Typhon and jumped into the Nile to escape him; from this story water and Pan were associated (AG 144). Pan played a role in the tale of Psyche and Amor, as we have seen, in that he aided Psyche after she attempted to commit suicide. The Greeks see Pan as the origin of panic; James Hillman perceives Pan also as a source for instinctual nature that takes one unawares just as Pan does with the nymphs he assaults. Pan is like the senex in the sense that he shakes man out of his complacent, dream-like world and brutally forces him to recognize the reality and the rule of physical nature. Pan is the god behind rape--unbridled sexuality--and the god behind masturbation that is a sexual symbol for individualism, aloofness and God-like independence. The puer and the senex both exhibit these latter tendencies in their negative states. Pan is "wholly impersonal, objective, ruthless" and spontaneous; all these are qualities of nature. Apollo, the narrator's god of inspiration, got his mantic powers from Pan.³⁵

The sonnets included in the night house of Capricorn are deeply concerned with depression, suicide, and death. The sign for Saturn ( G ) has the cross of matter above, though to one side, over the semi-circle which represents the soul. The material affairs of the world dominate over soul (MA 30). Saturn as the last planet in the cosmos, in the seventh sphere, rules over the material cosmos and the immortal soul and spirit held within it by the chains or l'armature of Fate. Since Saturn is the last planet in the physical universe, he has always represented limitation within the solar system and the lives of men. In the year's cycle, the sun reaches its lowest culmination--that is, its height in the sky above the horizon and its most southern position--in the Northern Temperate zone. Since the sun can represent the spirit, this emersion into the realm of the physical earth represents the greatest involvement with the physical by the sun. Saturn has been called the "lord of the physical body."³⁶

The planet Jupiter, a benefic planet, in the house of Pisces is in moderate opposition--an aspect of one-hundred and fifty degrees--to the sun in the house of Leo. The myths for the house of Pisces, or Fishes, originated in Chaldean and Syrian myths. Aphrodite (or Venus) and her son Eros were pursued by Typhon, and, like Pan, they threw themselves into a river, the Euphrates. They were transformed into fish. The sonnets in The House of Life associated with the house of Pisces are concerned with Song. The narrator looks back in time to the period of his relations with his Beloved and fearfully looks toward the future. The house of the two fishes is a sign of opposites. Ptolemy, as we shall see later, calls this kind of sign "bicorporeal" because it takes on the nature of the sign that precedes it and follows it (TB 34). Today, astrologers call this sign "Common" or "Mutable." The sonnets associated with Song in The House of Life deeply concern the opposites of Pain and Joy, memory and anticipation, the values of the puer and the values of the senex, the Beloved of the past and the narrator's desire to be a "worshipper" of the sun.

Jung devotes a great deal of his analysis of the archetype of the self in Aion to the sign Pisces. Jung was particularly interested in Pisces because the Pisces Great Month of approximately 2000 years coincides with the Christian era. The fish was an early symbol for Christ and Christianity. Particularly fascinating for Jung was the obsession of Christianity with opposites such as Christ-Devil. To Jung, the vertical fish with its head pointing North represents Christ and the horizontal fish with its head pointing West signifies the Anti-Christ, or devil. Christ ruled through the llth Century A.D., and the Anti-Christ of materiality has ruled the second half of the Pisces' Great month since then. Christ has been a symbol of the self, but He was incomplete since He was all good; the Anti-Christ or Devil is-needed as a shadow to complete the self archetype. Jung, thus, pictures Pisces as representing all the opposites of Christianity and other opposites as well. Among some of these opposites are Saturn, the ruler of Aquarius and Capricorn, as Death, and Jupiter, the ruler of Pisces and Sagittarius, as Life. Pisces can be the archetype of hostile brothers (AS 74; 77; 112-114; 150). Jung also sees the two fish as spirit (sun) and soul (Luna) that are swimming in different directions (MC 5).

The aspect of Jupiter in the house of Pisces to the sun in the house of Leo is negative partly because this is a negative, feminine, and nocturnal house and sign and partly because Pisces belongs to the feminine triplicity composed of water signs or houses. (See Figure 9.) Venus rules the triplicity by day (TB 45). Venus (or Aphrodite) was born from the sea and has a natural relationship to water and fish. The myth connected to Pisces reinforces this. The narrator in The House of Life at the time of the sonnets that are associated with the house of Pisces is still concerned with his Beloved; his emotions constantly call up memories of her. Venus is a benefic planet. Being a ruler during the day strengthens her positive qualities. The narrator has memories of Pain, but his emotion of love no longer has the terrors of those in the sonnets of the house of Capricorn.

Jupiter as the native ruler of Pisces introduces a positive nature for Pisces, despite the conflict of opposite wishes, viewpoints, and natures. Jupiter's nature is the exact opposite of the malefic Saturn, who in his negative phase emphasizes restriction, limitation, and condensation; Jupiter signifies expansion, joy, enthusiasm, generosity. Jupiter personifies the higher mind, just as Zeus, or Jupiter, acts as the ruler of the gods (A 31). Jupiter has the quality of the solar force in elevation and can represent the conquering power of spirit--the sun (AM 40-41). After the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator comes into the realm of the senex, or Saturn. Jupiter stands for the period of life of a man of the age from fifty-six to sixty-eight (TB 205). Jupiter may well be perceived as the positive side of the senex's and Saturn's nature that appear when the senex is in a positive relation to the puer. In the house of Pisces, Jupiter's expansive nature has, however, been dampened some by negative elements. The opposite nature of Saturn and Jupiter points to their belonging to the same archetype; in this case, the senex. Jupiter's symbol ( F ) is almost the exact reverse of Saturn's ( G ). In Jupiter's sign, the half-moon of the soul is slightly to the side and above the cross of matter (MA 29). Consequently, soul takes precedence over matter with Jupiter; the reverse is true for Saturn.

Mars rules the period of the adult phase of man's life from the age of forty-one until fifty-six (TB 205). He has the qualities of a puer and a senex--but more puer than senex--and thus is related to Jupiter and Saturn. Mars as an outgoing force like Jupiter has his powers dampened in this triplicity characterized by the feminine and water.

This feminine triplicity of water signs or houses is ruled by the moon at night. The moon normally rules the house of Cancer, or the Crab. Water is the moon's natural element. Water symbolizes emotion, which has all the changeable qualities of the moon herself, and water has no shape and conforms to whatever container it finds itself. Water can contain great depths and be symbolic of the unconscious, the realm of dreams, images and emotions. Intuition, inspiration, poetry, dance, and music are intimately connected to the house of Pisces (MA 39-40). Ptolemy makes the moon the ruler of the first four years of a man's life (TB 203-204). These are the years that condition all future emotional responses and are the sources for poetry and art. The moon is a universal symbol for the soul (MC 132; 140-144). The narrator in the sonnets dedicated to Song and associated with the house of Pisces plumbs his emotions as the source of his poetry. He is deeply concerned with the depths of his soul; this is particularly shown in "The Soul's Sphere" (LXII).

The house of Scorpio, which is ruled by Mars, is the third member of this feminine water triplicity. The planet Mars and this house are in an adverse aspect--the square of ninety degrees--to the sun in the house of Leo. This house of Scorpio is negative, feminine, and nocturnal. The myth behind the house of Scorpio involves Orion and the scorpion man. The original source was the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, where the sun god Gilgamesh was attacked by a scorpion man (AG 142-143). In the Greek myth, Orion, like Ganymede the Cup-Bearer, is the handsomest man alive. He, however, is quite aggressive and boastful, having Mars-like qualities. After a series of misadventures, Orion is blinded by Oenopion, the son of Dionysus in revenge for Orion raping his sister Merope. Orion could have his sight restored if he will go to the east. In Delos, the sacred birthplace of Apollo, Orion sleeps with Eos, who also seduced Ganymede before Zeus took interest in-him. Apollo, who wishes revenge on Orion, finds Mother Earth and repeats Orion's boast that he could rid the world of wild beasts and monsters. Mother Earth sends a monstrous scorpion to pursue Orion, who jumps into the sea to escape. Apollo persuades his twin sister Artemis (Diana), the moon goddess, by a ruse, to shoot at the swimming form of Orion. As a compensation for her having killed him, Artemis had Orion's image placed among the stars. He is on the edge of the zodiac where the giant scorpion is located (GM 1 151-152). Later, the claws of the scorpion were transformed into the scales of Libra when astrologers needed a twelfth sign in the zodiac (AG 141). Apollo, who is the god of inspiration for the narrator in The House of Life, already figures prominently in the myth behind the house of Scorpio.

In this feminine triplicity of water signs, the moon rules by night and Venus by day. Venus was originally known as Ishtar, the morning and especially the evening star that accompanies the sun. She thus has more warmth than the cold moon (AG 99). Venus is closely allied to earth as well as the sea. She is the Goddess of Beauty, mainly physical beauty. As Erich Neumann has pointed out in his analysis of the tale of Amor and Psyche, Venus is the goddess of instinctuality and sexuality. Venus represents the anonymous power of sexuality, the genitals of the hermaphroditic Anthropos, since the sign of Scorpio covers the generative organs. A basic conflict in the tale of Amor and Psyche is between Psyche and Venus. Psyche wishes for individual and human love, which demands the awakening of the soul from its domination by the body, and Venus, whose beauty is only a means to the goal of sexual intoxication and fertility. Venus' relationship to anonymous and overpowering sexuality Iies in the myth of her birth. She was created from the phallus that was severed from Uranus by Kronos--who later became identified with Saturn--and that fell into the sea.³⁷ In Babylonian mythology, Venus was Ishtar, who formed part of a triad of moon, sun, and earth. Because of Ishtar's (Venus') attributes, astrologically and mythologically, she becomes identified with the body and earth. The sun is the spirit; the moon, the soul; Venus, the body (earth) (AM 24). Later in the sonnets in The House of Life that are associated with the house of Aires, which is ruled by Mars, the conflicting feminine nature of Psyche (or soul or moon) and Venus (or body) will be dramatized by the two sonnets on the different kinds of beauty: "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII) and "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII).

This fundamental conflict between the two kinds of feminine beauty and natures of moon and Venus appear in the house of Scorpio. Mars is pulled between the two natures and beauties as is the narrator in The House of Life in the sonnets associated with the house of Scorpio. An alternative sign--now considered by astrologers coequal to the scorpion--is the soaring eagle or the phoenix (A 25). The eagle that soars above and the scorpion that creeps upon the earth depict a basic characteristic of the Scorpion sign: the Scorpio person has a divided nature that is at war with itself, taking on the character of the war-like Mars. The war, or split, is within the realm of desire. The eagle represents the ideal force and the scorpion the pull of the earth and its concerns (MA 68-69). The sign for Scorpion is an M, which is the Hebrew letter Mem, which means the female principle, and a barb, or hook, which can stand for the scorpion's tail or Eros' dart, which emphasizes the lure of the senses. The same sign M is used for Virgo, the Virgin; the difference between the two signs is that this additional part of Virgo means fish. Virgo is an earth sign, but the emphasis of the sign is upon virginity and potentiality. Virgo became associated with the Virgin Mary and the fish with Christ (A 25). The use of the same M of the Virgo sign as part of the Scorpio sign emphasizes also the divided nature of Scorpio.

In the sonnets in The House of Life associated with the house of Scorpio, the divided nature of this house with its eagle and scorpion natures is retained. In "Youth's Antiphony" (XIII), the ideal closeness of the lovers (eagle state) is contrasted to the "world's throng" (the realm of the scorpion). In "Youth's Spring-Tribute" (XIV), the lovers' ideal state of love in spring is contrasted to the bitter reality of threatening winter (representative of the scorpion). The ideal bond of kinship and transmigration of souls in "The Birth-Bond" (XV) is counter to the physical bonds of man's laws of relationship between strangers. In "A Day of Love" (XVI), ideal, or eagle-like, places of love and communion with the narrator's Beloved contrast with the places without his Beloved.

Just as in the myth of Orion, where the scorpion man is a monster of Mother Earth and threatens Orion, so in these sonnets the physical and cultural world of man threatens the two lovers. "Beauty's Pageant" (XVII) picks up the theme of nature's beauty and changes in contrast to the narrator's glorification of his Beloved's moods and beauty. In "Genius in Beauty" (XVIII), the narrator opposes the beauty produced by the great poets and artists of the world and the beauty of nature to his Beloved's beauty that will outlast them all. In "Silent Noon" (XIX), the narrator contrasts by implication an ideal frozen moment of time that is "dropt" to the lovers "from above" to other more ordinary moments in this world.

The narrator moves into the emotional realm in "Gracious Moonlight" (XX) and contrasts his Beloved's optimism to his own pessimism. His Beloved's ideal nature is shown by her being the moon, "Queen Dian," and being threatened by clouds of this world. "Love-Sweetness" (XXI) picks up the basic opposition between Venus' sensual love and the moon's soul, or spiritual, love. The narrator pictures his and his Beloved's spiritual love in the image of two twin souls that have wings. In "Heart's Haven" (XXII), the threatening world and its concerns frighten the lovers who find an ideal haven in each other and in the secure shelter provided by Love. "Love's Baubles" (XXIII) again takes up the contrast of Venus' sensual love and a more idealized love between the two lovers. The baubles of Love that are "wanton flowers" for others has an "inmost heaven-hue of the heart of flame" for the narrator. "Pride of Youth" (XXIV) concludes this series of sonnets by depicting the instinctual sexual power of Venus in the Youth's turning from an Old Love to a New Love. The religious imagery at the end of the sonnet contrasts this sensual and fickle love to an idealized and worshipful kind of love--a love of the soul and spirit. The negative nature of the house of Scorpio is concentrated upon the threats of Venus' sensual world of body and earth.

Mars is the ruler of both the house of Scorpio and the house of Aires. Whereas the house of Scorpio is a negative, feminine, and nocturnal sign, the house of Aires is a positive, masculine, and diurnal sign. The aspect of the house of Aires to the sun in the house of Leo is the most favorable of all aspects--the trine or one-hundred and twenty degrees (TB 35-38). The house of Aires is part of a triplicity of masculine fire signs. (See Figure 10.) Since Mars is a malefic planet, it could not rule this triplicity either by day or by night because the sun is present. Jupiter, consequently, rules this fire triplicity of positive, masculine, and basically diurnal houses during the night and the sun during the day. The sun is the most powerful of all the planets; therefore it dominates this fire triplicity.

So far, the houses have been considered in terms of which planet normally owns them and which planet has the greatest influence in each house or group of houses. These houses are native homes for these planets. Each planet, also, has a house in which it begins to acquire its maximum power and influence and an opposite house to this one in which the planet begins to be at its lowest power and influence. Its peak of power is in its own native house. The planet is considered to be exalted in the house where it begins to acquire power and to be depressed, or in a fall, in the house where it begins to move into its low point of power and strength. Modern astrologers use Ptolemy's aspect of opposition--one-hundred and eighty degrees-to emphasize the lowest point of a planet's power and influence. They call this state detriment. Unfortunately, some astrologers switch the terms detriment and fall; context however makes it clear what each term means (A 29-34; TB 3738, 45-46; AG 195; MA 144). (See Figure 11.)

The sun, which is a fire planet and part of this masculine triplicity, begins in Aires, at the time of the vernal equinox, in its yearly cycle and at sunrise in its daily cycle. The sun begins to exert its power then and is thus exalted in Aires. Its native house is Leo, where its strength is the greatest. Although the house of Leo coincides with the depth of night in the day cycle, it appears in the year cycle at the period of the last part of July and most of August. This is the hottest part of the year in northern latitudes. The sun at sunset, or at the point of the descendant, and at the autumn equinox begins its period of a loss of power. It is in its fall. The sun would be at its weakest in the opposite house of Aquarius; the sun then would be in detriment. In the house of Libra, the sun is in its fall, decline, or depression, and in the house of Aires is in its exaltation.

In The House of Life, the first twelve sonnets are associated with the house of Libra, which is ruled by Venus. In these first sonnets, the narrator is dominated by Cupid, the son of Venus, and by his love for his first Beloved, who has many associations with the moon, or Diana, the twin sister of Apollo. The aspect of the house of Libra to the sun in the house of Leo is favorable--sixty degrees. The house of Libra is a day house, positive, and masculine. The narrator who has fundamental associations with the sun is being dominated by feminine powers and their male representative Love. In the house of Aires, which is exactly opposite the house of Libra, the narrator finally chooses to be in actuality the "belated worshipper" of the sun that he consciously recognized in "The Hill Summit" (LXX) near the end of the house of Pisces. In the first sonnet belonging to the house of Aires, the narrator chooses the philosophy of "Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die" (LXXIII). The basic character of the planet Mars, who rules Aires, is action. Mars essentially represents phallic power, the aggression and assertiveness of the male. As a god of War, Mars personifies passion, energy, assertiveness, courage, and initiative (A 31). Mars is at his peak of powers in the house of Aires and at his lowest, or in a state of detriment, in the house of Libra. Again, this illustrates that in the house of Libra, the masculine powers--both the sun and Mars--are at their weakest state. In The House of Life, the narrator worshiped Love and his Beloved and did not concern himself with external expression of his powers in the world.

The sun is exalted in the house of Aires and rules the masculine fire triplicity of the houses of Aires, Leo, and Sagittarius. Since the sun is so powerful, the house of Aires is the collective domain of the three masculine planets--sun, Jupiter, and Mars (AG 203). The sun in its exalted state in the house of Aires adds will to Mars' passion and energy, and thus the sun becomes "Will in Action" (A 29).

The sonnets in The House of Life associated with the house of Aires show the narrator, particularly during the first half of this group of twelve sonnets, at his most expansive and active phase in the sonnet sequence. The tone changes, however, midway as the narrator encompasses the broadest meanings of life and death. The first six sonnets of this group in the house of Aires emphasize action, the second part of the philosophy, "Think thou and act."

The sign for Mars ( E ), the ruler of the house of Aires, was originally displayed with the cross of matter over the circle of the spirit ( N ). Matter and the concerns of the external world of man take precedence over spiritual elements. The sun's symbol ( A ), however, is the symbol for spirit--the symbol of eternity "and of the power of spirit of primal motion, from whence all else issued and was created" (MA 25; 28). The dot in its center probably stands for the divine spark, or masculine spirit, that is within man. The circle itself is a symbol for God. The second set of six sonnets in the house of Aires beginning with "The Monochord" (LXXIX) concern the sun's most fundamental meanings as shown in its symbol. The narrator takes up broad philosophical questions in these last six sonnets of the house of Aires. These sonnets illustrate the first part of the narrator's philosophy of "Think thou and act." The myth behind the house of Aires, or the Ram, is Jason and the Argonauts, who seek and find the Golden Fleece, which is the golden pelt of a ram (AG 131). This adventure emphasizes the action qualities of the house of Aires.

The house of Sagittarius is in the same favorable aspect--the trine aspect of one-hundred and twenty degrees--to the sun in the house of Leo as is the house of Aires. The trine aspect, since it forms the ideal shape of an equilateral triangle among three planets, is the most favorable aspect of all. The masculine fire triplicity ruled by the sun in the day is the best triplicity of all in respect to the sun and all it stands for. The house of Sagittarius, like Aires, is positive, masculine, and diurnal. The sonnets in The House of Life associated with the house of Sagittarius, however, begin with the ominous "Winged Hours" (XXV), include "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV), and end with the death of the first Beloved in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI). The rest of the sonnets are basically concerned with the narrator's glorification of his first Beloved with some moments of fear interspersed. These echo the negative aspects. Yet in the ultimate interest of the emergence of the masculine powers of the narrator in terms of the sun, Mars, and Jupiter, the decline and even death of the external representatives of the feminine--the Beloveds--is necessary for the internal development and external expression of both the soul and the spirit.

The myth behind the sign of the house of Sagittarius involves both negative and positive elements in regard to the feminine and the masculine. The symbol for the house of Satittarius is Chiron, the centaur, half-man, half-beast, who is shooting an arrow into the heavens (AG 143). Sagittarius is concerned with the higher wisdom of religion, philosophy, and law. He is involved with things in the distance, away from purely mundane matters; he seeks the universal and is the symbol--as his far-travelling arrow signifies--of free-ranging intellect. Jupiter, who rules Sagittarius, is expansion and this quality has full expression in the house of Sagittarius. Sagittarius' desire ultimately is for a wide variety of experience that will provide the foundations for a "true wisdom" (MA 71-74; A 31). Chiron, the centaur, accidently was wounded by an arrow that pierced his left knee. After he gave up his immortality to Prometheus and died, Zeus placed his image in the stars (GM 11 114).

Apollo and Chiron have a close connection. Apollo falls in love with the maiden Coronis, daughter of the King Phlegyas, and becomes her lover. When she becomes pregnant, she deceives Apollo by sleeping with her own lover. Apollo, in anger, has his twin sister Artemis kill Coronis with arrows. Apollo, however, saves the child, who was Asclepius, the future great healer and wise man. Apollo gives Asclepius to Chiron to raise him and to teach him, as Chiron had done with other greats; Chiron teaches Asclepius the arts of medicine and the chase. The motif of arrows and the theme of wisdom run through the myths concerning Chiron. Robert Graves interprets the alliance of Apollo, Chiron, and Asclepius and their knowledge of healing as representing the overcoming of another form of worship by the Thessalians, the expelling the "college of Moon-priestesses" and the "suppressing the worship of the goddess." In the story of Apollo and Coronis, a white crow plays a key role as messenger and guardian; in anger, Apollo turns it into a black crow. Graves interprets the crow as an emblem of divination, which Apollo steals (GM 1 173-177). In The House of Life, the death of the first Beloved in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI)--which is the last sonnet of the sonnets associated with the house of Sagittarius--has a parallel significance to Chiron's and Apollo's asserting the powers of the sun and the masculine over the powers of the moon and the feminine in its external forms of public worship.

Positive aspects of the house of Sagittarius have to appear as this is a positive, masculine and diurnal house in a trine aspect to the sun in the house of Leo. Chiron shoots his arrow into the heavens and does not concern himself with where it lands; his purpose is-to reach the heights. In a similar fashion, the narrator in The House of Life spiritualizes and universalizes his first Beloved by projecting her into the heavens. Imagery of moon, sun, stars, fire, and light predominate in the twelve sonnets from "Winged Hours" (XXV) through "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI). In "Heart's Compass" (XXVII), as we have seen, the first Beloved is identified with Love, who has qualities of the sun. The first Beloved's eyes are "the sun-gate of the soul," beyond which are the "furthest fires oracular." Her eyes are set by Love in the "Night's" sky, presumably as the moon and some bright star. The solstice imagery in this same sonnet suggests the peak moment of the arrow of Chiron as well as the narrator's height of idealization. The compass imagery and the "furthest fires oracular" evoke an old conception that fires existed at the North Pole, the very hub of the heavenly wheel. The North Pole is the seat of both God and the Devil, of the entrance to Heaven and of the fires of Hell itself. The magnetism from the North Pole attests to the fires that exist there. These fires drive the whole machinery of the world (AS 133-135).

Although Chiron symbolized higher wisdom, he is half-beast and thus belongs to the animal world; his arrow eventually falls to the earth. In "Soul-Light" (XXVIII), the narrator compares his love and his life with his first Beloved to a traveller glorying in the "heat's mid-height" and his rejoicing at another peak moment of the day, at sunset, where "startide brings / Wonder new-born." In "Moonstar" (XXIX), the narrator compares his first Beloved to the moon whose light outshines any bright star that comes too close to its light. Venus in Babylonian mythology and astrology was the goddess Ishtar and the planet Venus. She is the brightest star both in the morning and the evening. Later the Greeks split this goddess into Athene, the morning star, and Aphrodite (Venus), the evening star. Athene like the dawn is assertive and warlike, but Venus in her evening aspect can take on more of the qualities of an Eros love (AM 175 33-34; DA 52).

Although the narrator does not identify the Lady who is the star that is outshone by the first Beloved as moon, there are echoes of Venus, who plays such an important role in the house of Scorpio. Venus, as already indicated, rules the house of Libra, where sensual love reached a peak, never to be reached again. The cooler moon representing the anima predominates in the house of Sagittarius. The house of Sagittarius transforms Venus' sensual love into an ideal love. "Last Fire" (XXX) depicts the peak of the summer's fires; the height of the "day's sun of rapture filled the west / And the light sweetened as the fire took leave." In the sonnets from "Her Gifts" (XXXI) through "Venus Victrix" (XXXIII), the narrator glorifies his first Beloved as a queen and as above even goddesses like Juno and leaves the heights of the heavens for the heights of earthly and religious veneration and worship. In "The Dark Glass" (XXXIV) and "The Lamp's Shrine" (XXXV), the narrator places his love for his Beloved in the realm of the total meaning of life on earth and beyond and declares his worship of Love and his first Beloved, who is a lamp giving forth the light of Love. The house of Sagittarius represents the heights that religion, philosophy, knowledge, and ideal love may attain within the earth's realm.

Jupiter, or Zeus for the Greeks, is the normal day ruler of the house of Sagittarius and its night ruler in the masculine fire triplicity. Jupiter has a great deal to do with the positive aspects of this house. Ptolemy used the humor system of dry, wet, cold and hot in relation to all the planets in order to explain their specific characteristics. Ptolemy did not wish to use the mythology of the planets as gods since his interest was in the mathematical aspects of astrology and fate. Saturn is the extreme of coldness because of his distance from the sun; he also is dry. Mars is at the extreme of dryness, but he contains heat too. Jupiter is between Saturn and Mars and, consequently, between Saturn's extreme cold and Mars' extreme heat. Jupiter thus has a temperate influence (TB 19-21). Figure 12 presents the dry, wet, cold, and hot attributes of each planet; this is important since these four qualities allow the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth to be used as qualities of a person's temperament. The character aspects of the planets and elements form the basis of the humor theory of personality: fire = heat; air = cold; water = wet; earth = dry.³⁸ The house of Sagittarius, ruled by Jupiter, is between the house of Scorpio, ruled by Mars, and the house of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn. The same situation exists for the house of Pisces, which is ruled by Jupiter: this house is between the house of Aquarius, ruled by Saturn, and the house of Aires, ruled by Mars. In the system of humors, Jupiter was always considered the most healthy of the four. He was linked with warmth, moisture, and blood. His character type was sanguine. These qualities appear in the house of Sagittarius. Much of astrology's analysis of character is based on the mythology of the gods and on the humor theory of personality.³⁹ We have already seen that Saturn is forever linked with melancholy.⁴⁰ (See Figure 13 for the planets, their qualities, and their personality types.) Ptolemy's classification of malefics, benefics, and neutrals and his system of analysis of character according to aspects of the planets are founded on the cold, hot, wet, and dry qualities and ultimately on the humors (TB Book III and IV).

The planet Venus, who rules the negative, feminine, and nocturnal houses of Taurus, is in negative aspect--ninety degrees square--to the sun in the house of Leo. The sonnets in The House of Life associated with the house of Capricorn, which is a negative aspect to the sun, depict the narrator's depressed and pessimistic outlooks resulting from the death of the first Beloved. The same kinds of feelings and attitudes appear in the sonnets associated with this house of Taurus. The basic cause for the narrator's change of his optimistic and outgoing attitude in the sonnets associated with the house of Aires is his feeling of depression over another great loss--his youth, drive, and vigor, which had particularly been expressed in the cultural spheres of Song and Art. Both of these two groups of twelve sonnets belong to houses that are part of the feminine earth triplicity. (See Figure 14.) As this is a feminine triplicity, Saturn can not rule; Venus rules it by day and the moon by night. All these houses are feminine, negative, and nocturnal. The Venus that rules the house of Taurus is a negative Venus, whereas the Venus ruling the house of Libra is a positive Venus. In this light, Venus can appear as a positive or negative anima. Erich Neumann has categorized the negative anima as the temptress, depicted in Lilith, whom we have met in the sonnet "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII), Circe, and Athena, who is the goddess of War and the Greek form of Ishtar as a morning star. As a positive anima, Ishtar appears in her evening star form as Venus, the goddess of Love. 41 In Babylonian mythology, Ishtar (Venus) ultimately becomes identified with the earth (or body) in the triad of sun (spirit), moon (soul), and Venus (body) (AM 23-26).

The house of Taurus is the first earth house in the daily and yearly cycles of the astrology chart. Taurus is the second house of the whole zodiac. As indicated previously, Pythagorus identified even numbers with the feminine, evil, the unlimited, the many, darkness, etc. The number two is the first even number, and it above all numbers takes on these qualities. In the Gnostic myths of creation and Babylonian, Ptolemy's, and Christian cosmologies, the earth is the center of the material universe and is opposed to the divine world beyond. The earth personifies matter, the body, and entrails as Otto Rank has shown and as has been depicted in Dante's Divine Comedy. All these associations fall upon the house of Taurus and the negative Venus. Eve as the first woman takes on all these negative qualities too. In sum, the house of Taurus is matter. The house of Aires as the first house in the zodiac, however, is spirit, good, light, and ultimately God, Who comes first. Matter, the body, and woman come second (A 18).⁴²

The myth behind the house of Taurus contains all the elements of the number two. The bull (Taurus) is the bull that Zeus turned into in order to court Europa, who was transported on the bull's back to Crete, where she bore Zeus many sons, among them Minos and Rhadamanthys (AG 133).⁴³ A bull appears again in this family line stemming from Europa in Minos' life. Minos committed a sin by not sacrificing a white bull to Poseidon. In revenge Poseidon had Aphrodite make Pasiphae, Minos' wife, fall in love with the bull. Out of the union of Pasiphae and the bull was born the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and a man's body. Minos hid both in the labyrinth below his fabulous palace in Crete (GM 1 292-294). Sin, the weakness of the woman Pasiphae, lust, a monster, and the entrails of the earth, all having some association with the number two, appear in this myth. Through Cupid, Venus instigated the love affairs in both myths.

The sign of the house of Taurus ( b ) includes a masculine sun symbol ( O ) and the crescent of the new moon ( B ). Jung sees this combination as a favorable sign, signifying the marriage of the sun and the moon; this makes Venus appear in her best form (MC 144). This certainly can be true generally, but when a planet, like Venus, is in bad aspect to another planet, particularly the sun, then possible positive associations are greatly negated. Astrological, Christian, and numerological traditions go counter to Jung's positive view of the house of Taurus and Venus as ruler. Jung, himself, identifies the crescent moon, or new moon, as the "rabid dog," which is the dark part of the moon and which is devouring the bright part. Diana as the moon has her hunting dog, which represents this same dark side. The "rabid dog," Jung concludes, is "none other than the vindictive and treacherous aspect of Diana as the new moon." Out of the same sacred marriage of the sun (consciousness) and the moon (unconsciousness for the man) appears poisonous animals that represent the first initial results of the marriage of spirit and body or soul (MC 144; 155; 159). The Minotaur may well symbolize the first union on an earthly level. In Babylon, Venus had associations with the moon, particularly to the moon's phases conceived as "horns." From this and Venus' own two phases as morning and evening stars, most likely, came the links between the moon and Venus and, ultimately, produced the negative aspects of Venus in the house of Taurus (AM 32-34).

The moon is the planet that overall symbolizes the unconscious of a man or the consciousness of a woman. The planet Venus, too, is feminine and thus is included in this general symbol of the moon. Venus, as noted earlier, however, often becomes more associated with the body and hot sensual desire than the cold moon. As Carl Jung and Erich Neumann have pointed out, the feminine archetype manifests itself in many forms, particularly the positive and negative mother and the positive and negative anima.⁴⁴

The sonnets in The House of Life connected with the house of Taurus open with the sonnet "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV), which contains a picture of Satan in Hell. "Lost Days" (LXXXVI) and "'Retro me, Sathana!'" (XC) contain the same figure later. Traditionally the number two has been associated with the devil. Satan is ultimately the ruler of the earth, which is linked with the entrails of the universe. The earth also has its own bowels, where Satan, in some traditions, rules over Hell.⁴⁵ The horns of the devil represent twoness and also relate to the crescent of the new moon and to femininity.⁴⁶ These aspects reinforce the evilness of the number two and the feminine earth house of Taurus. Jung cites a medieval alchemist who argues that God could "not praise the second day of creation, because on this day (Monday, the day of the moon) the binarius, alias the devil, came into existence."⁴⁷ In the natal chart system of houses, the second house, the natural house being Taurus, traditionally has the name Door of Hell (AG 282; MC 188).

Jung, too, emphasizes that the number concepts about one and two--which were first conceived by Pythagorus and later taken up by Plato--continued in natural philosophy in the Middle Ages. Pythagorus conceived one as being God and unity. Disunity comes with the introduction of, in a sense, the first real number, the number two. This number becomes the "Other" who opposes the "One." Actually, though, the number two is "none other than the same unity split into two and turned into a 'number."' The "One" seeks to retain its "one-and-alone existence" and the "Other" strives continually to be another who opposes the One. "The One will not let go of the Other because, if it did, it would lose its character; and the Other pushes itself away from the One in order to exist at all."⁴⁸ This "Other," or two, is the model for Satan, the elder brother of Christ, who rebelled from God, the "One," in order to establish his own identity. The sonnets associated with the house of Taurus portray the state of separation and the resulting tensions and negative attitudes of the narrator as the "Other," who becomes a Satan-like figure.

We have seen these general concepts in the phenomena of the narrator's narcissism where he projected a part of himself, his anima, onto his first Beloved, who was the "Other," yet the same. The whole phenomena of the Double, particularly in the Narcissus myth, portrays the same conflict between an original unity and a divided nature. The narrator's introjecting his anima and his uniting with Love in a state of inflation are efforts to attain an original oneness.

Although the condition of twoness--where one opposes the Other and where, in actuality, the opposites belong to the same unit--continues in the sonnets associated with the house of Gemini, the tensions are considerably lower and the destructive negativism of the Other has ended. The planet Mercury rules the house of Gemini and is in a positive aspect--sixty degrees or sextile--to the sun in the house of Leo. The house of Gemini is positive, masculine, and diurnal. Earlier we saw that the house of Aquarius belonged to this same masculine air triplicity. (See Figure 8.) The sign of the planet Mercury ( C ) is exactly like that of "Venus" ( D ) except for one part. In both signs, the circle of spirit takes precedence over the cross of matter. Venus, who can be the body and the earth, still is receptive, feminine, and warm and can thus be idealized; she appears among the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus; it is her beauty that lifts her to the heights of Mount Olympus. Mercury, however, has the additional half-moon, the symbol of the soul (MA 26-27). Thus, with Mercury, the soul takes precedence over spirit and matter; he is the psychopomp of souls and is messenger between the gods and earth and Hades. Mercury and air both signify relatedness, communication, and intelligence. Mercury's nature is dual. He is considered neutral since he can be malefic or benefic and sometimes is dry and sometimes moist. Mercury, or Hermes, can be a hermaphrodite; this was the case in alchemy, where he appeared as Mercurius.

Mercury easily represents the puer, and, in one of his forms, has been identified by Jung as Cupid, or Love. Saturn, as senex, is Mercury's other side. Venus as the goddess of Love and the mother of Cupid, or Love, is also involved in the crucial triplicity of air. The puer-senex archetype is an archetype of time. All three major divisions of time are present in this triplicity. In The House of Life, the house of Libra, normally ruled by Venus, contains sonnets of the beginning; the house of Aquarius, the middle; the house of Gemini, the end. In this triplicity of air, the identity of the puer as Mercury and Saturn as senex is preserved in the reversal of their normal positions of the puer at the beginning and in the day and Saturn at the end in the night. They, however, are at the correct extreme positions of beginning and end. In the original positions given to the planets by the Demiurge at the creation of the world--on the solar side of the astrology chart--the normal order of puer and senex is retained. (See Figures 2 and 4.) Mercury rules the house of Virgo and Saturn rules the house of Capricorn. The house of Capricorn is the house where the sun symbolically dies at the time of the winter solstice. Capricorn is the door to the gods.⁴⁹ Capricorn is the last house of earth in the zodiac and represents man's final form and destiny in a material universe. In the house of Cancer, man was first given birth; this house is called the door of men (A 21).⁵⁰ Mercury in the house of Virgo covers the period of youth; according to Ptolemy, this is the period from four to fourteen. Saturn covers old age from sixty-nine to death (TB 204-205).

The sonnets in The House of Life associated with the house of Gemini are dominated by the doppelgänger motif. Death and Love, for example, are brothers and ultimately belong to the archetype of puer-senex. The narrator is in an ego state of inflation, where he identifies with both opposites at once. In "A Superscription" (XCVII), "Might-have-been" opposes one part of the narrator's conscious mind. "He and I" (XCVIII) continues the duality of a new Self opposed to an old Self. Song as a male child and Art as a female are brother and sister and behave like twins in the second sonnet of "Newborn Death" (C). Life and Death are another pair of opposites in these sonnets. Gemini means twins. The sign ( c ) for the house of Gemini is the Roman numeral II, which emphasizes the essential duality of this house. As this house is not an earth house and is the third house in the zodiac, it does not carry the connotations associated with the twoness of the house of Taurus. As we will learn later, the house of Gemini is one of the bicorporeal, or mutable houses. A bicorporeal takes on the qualities of each house preceding and following it.

The myths linked with the constellation of the house of Gemini portray the twins' motif. The identities of the twins vary, but the three sets of twins most closely identified with the house of Gemini are Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces), Hercules and Apollo, and Apollo and Bacchus (Dionysus) (AG 135). Zeus fell in love with the nymph Nemesis, the same one who prepared the grove for Narcissus as a punishment for failing to love others. Nemesis is also known as Ledo, and out of Zeus' union with her Castor, Helen, and Polydeuces (Pollux) were born. Other myths indicated that Castor was immortal because he was born from Zeus and Nemesis, and Pollux was mortal since he had a mortal father (GM 1 206-207). Dionysus, according to some traditions, was only a demi-god and thus partly mortal; his immortal part was the god Apollo (GM 1 109). Dionysus eventually shared the same temple at Delphi with Apollo.⁵¹ Hercules' connection to Apollo, as we shall see, is through Nemesis. The main concern of the narrator in The House of Life has been his love for the immortal parts of himself, whether the anima or Love, as the puer and representative of the self. This same motif appears explicitly in the Gemini sign, which points to the immortal and mortal twins.

The apples of Hesperides and Nemesis provide links with most of these twins. Robert Graves calls the Elysian Fields the apple orchards of the west, or the Garden of the Hesperides. Nemesis is a goddess of this sacred grove. She carries an apple branch hung with fruit. Although she brings vengeance to the wicked, she gives an apple to a hero as a gift that becomes his passport to the Elysian Fields and immortality (GM 1 22). In the sonnet "The One Hope" (CI), Elysian Fields' imagery dominates. The narrator also portrays Death as a woman in the first sonnet of "Newborn Death" (XCIX). Nemesis also has several roles as death. She is identified with Persephone as "Death-in-Life" in the form of Aphrodite Urania, who kills a sacred king at a time when a matriarchal society prevailed over a patriarchal. She has an astrological connection too, since she carries a solar wheel as one of her symbols. (We have met her Latin counterpart Fortuna, who appears in pictures with Pandora.) In this old myth, the goddess Nemesis chases the solar king through the zodiac and devours him at the point of the summer solstice. At this time, the solstice did not occur between Gemini and Cancer, but it does presently. Nemesis as a feminine Death figure fits in well with the ending of the sonnet sequence in the house of Gemini at a time just before the summer solstice. Nemesis is identified as a swan and according to the myth concerning her and the sacred king, the swans took the king's soul off with them toward their breeding grounds toward the north (GM 1 71-72; 126).

Hercules' eleventh labor was to fetch fruit from the golden apple tree of the Hesperides, over which Nemesis ruled with other goddesses. Hercules is called the "Lord of the Zodiac" because each of his labors represents one house of the zodiac. In this case, the Garden of the Hesperides is the eleventh house, called the Serpent house because the sign of Aquarius ( k ) symbolizes Zeus as a snake copulating with his mother Rhea as a snake (GM 1 53; 11 106, 151). The signs of Gemini and Aquarius differ as to the actual end of the sacred King or sun's career. In the year cycle, the sun dies at the winter solstice, which now occurs at the beginning of Capricorn not Aquarius as formerly; in the daily cycle, the sun reaches its lowest point at midnight, which occurs in between Gemini and Cancer in the basic model of the chart. The summer solstice at the end of Gemini also signifies the beginning of the decline of the sun's powers.

Apollo's connection to Hercules is through this eleventh labor. Apollo's name means apple or destroyer. At the setting of the sun, who is Apollo, the three colors of the sunset sky give the names to the three Hesperides. Apollo as the sun appears as a red apple cut in half by these colors at sunset. When the sun dies in the western waves of the Atlantic, the Hesperus, the evening star, or Ishtar or Venus, appears. Hesperus, or Venus, is playing the same role as a symbol of Death as does Nemesis in her encounter with the sacred king (GM 1 49; 129-130).

The other house of the air triplicity is Libra, which contains the first twelve sonnets of The House of Life. The planet Venus--which is appearing in her evening form as the Hesperus--is in a positive aspect to the sun in the house of Leo as was the house of Gemini. The goddess Venus points toward the instinctual sexual side of love as well as possibly to an idealized form on occasion. Cupid, or Love, her son, like her can lead to sensual or ideal love. Both sensual love and idealized love appear side by side in the first twelve sonnets. "The Kiss" (VI) and its companion "Nuptial Sleep" (VIa) epitomize the lovers' sensual love and "Lovesight" (IV), the worshiping and idealized aspects of their love.

The myth behind the house of Libra reinforces the dual nature of Venus. Originally, there was no Libra house, only the area of the zodiac taken over by the pincers of the scorpion man. These pincers evolved into the scales or balance of justice normally held by the Virgin Astree, the Goddess of Justice, whose constellation represents the House of Virgo (AG 139). The house of Libra begins at the point of the autumn equinox, at which point day and night are equally balanced.

Not only the planets in the astrology chart can be related by aspects, the signs or houses too can be treated in the same manner. An important feature of aspects among the signs as houses is polarity or the opposition aspect of one-hundred and eighty degrees. The center of the astrology chart is the North Pole of the earth. The spokes of the astrology wheel dividing the houses can also go through them. This means that two houses opposing each other are part of a great circle passing through both the North and South Poles. Just as the number two represents a split unity, so the opposite houses are separate yet really are one. They are like doppelgängers and the two parts of the same archetype. Only three sets of signs as houses in The House of Life oppose each other. The first house of Aires, as we have seen, signifies great individuality, particularly of the masculine spirit. The first half of the natal horoscope, starting with Aires, is devoted to the person and his individual affairs; the second half commencing with the house of Libra begins the person's involvement with the other in all its forms. The house of Libra is the opposite of the individuality of Aires, since it concerns unions, marriages, and relationships (MA 92-93; A 82). The house of Aires is involved with aggression, action, and conflict; its opposition is the house of Libra, which negates action and emphasizes balance and conciliation. Mars, the ruler of the house of Aires, is a god of War, and Venus, the ruler of the house of Libra, is a goddess of Love.⁵²

The house of Taurus represents "Possessions and feelings of the person" or the material aspects or the desire to retain one's individuality by expression in some external material possession (MA 92). In The House of Life, the narrator tears down the ideals of women as expressed in culture, literature, and art in the sonnets associated with the house of Taurus. In the sonnets in the house of Scorpio, the narrator idealized his first Beloved, despite the threats from outside forces. The house of Scorpio offers both a chance for regeneration or destruction; it refers to the feelings and possessions gained from others, usually involving strong passion or deep mystical feelings (MA 92-94).

The meanings of the planets, signs, and houses are almost inexhaustible, since the whole astrology chart is filled with individual archetypes. Alain Yaouanc, whose synonym is Hades, has written extensively on astrology, following the traditional paths of Pythagorus, Ptolemy, and others and utilizing fully the myths to explain astrology. He gives few citations.⁵³

Since Dante Rossetti gives no indication of the hour of birth of the narrator, the natal chart with its system of houses can not be used except in the most general manner. In the houses system based on the daily cycle of the sun through the zodiac, there is a natural affinity between the houses as signs and the rulers of each house and the numbered houses. The first house's native sign is Aires and its native ruling planet is Mars. (See Figure 15.)

Some general correlations exist between the two systems of houses belonging to the yearly and daily cycle. The House of Life has twelve sonnets for each house, with the exception of the house of Gemini, which has only five sonnets. The houses of Cancer, Leo, and Virgo are missing. Each group of twelve sonnets may be perceived in terms of a daily cycle, consisting of an alternation of day and night, or, more properly, a monthly cycle. In either case, six sonnets, equalling a full day or the first half of the month, appear to have a definite rhythm, tone, and mood different from the following last six sonnets, which equal a full night or the second half of a month. Within each six sonnets, a similar rhythm of rise and fall occurs between the third and fourth sonnet, equalling the time of noon or the point one-quarter through the month, and the ninth and tenth sonnets, correlating with the time of midnight or the point three-quarters through the month. A series of rhythms of beginnings, peaks (or middles), and endings exist within the twelve sonnets. The most dramatic turn in rhythm, mood, and, often, content occurs between the sixth and seventh sonnet of each group.

In the sonnets in the house of Taurus, the first six sonnets open at dawn or the beginning of the month with "Vain Virtues" (LXXXV), where the negative and destructive Satan appears for the first time, reach a peak between "Death's Songsters" (LXXXVII) and "Hero's Lamp" (LXXXVIII)--the time of noon or one-quarter of the month--and climax, or end, with "'Retro me, Sathana!'" (XC). The mood begins to change with the beginning of the second six sonnets from the earlier active negativism and bitterness to resignation, feelings of shame, renunciation, and detachment with "Lost on Both Sides" (XCI). The last three sonnets beginning with "Michelangelo's Kiss" (XCIV) and ending with "Life the Beloved" (XCVI)--equalling the time from midnight to dawn or the last quarter of the month--intensify the mood of the preceding three sonnets. An examination of the other sets of twelve sonnets will reveal these changes in rhythm, mood, and content. (See Figure 24.)

The yearly cycle of the sun and planets around the earth--according to Ptolemy's conception of the universe--has been examined according to the aspects of trine, forming triplicities, and opposition, forming polarities. Equally important are a group of aspects based on the square or ninety degree aspect. These square relations create quadruplicities. They are most vital for showing the development and movement involved for the planets from the beginning to the end of the yearly cycle. They have great symbolic value because of the application of the law of analogy, or correspondences, that govern astrological and mythical thinking. What happens above in the macrocosm happens below in the microcosm and vice versa.

The cardinal points of the compass are the most significant places on the astrology chart; the word cardinal means something principal-that is, something on which other things depend or hinge. Cardinal points are turning points, points of action, points of outgoing activity, and points of initiating actions (MA 40). Ptolemy called the two cardinal points of north, which begins at zero degrees at the house of Cancer, and south, which has its beginning at the house of Capricorn, tropical, or turn, signs. The summer solstice for the sun in its yearly cycle occurs at the beginning of the house of Cancer, and the winter solstice happens at the beginning of the house of Capricorn. Ptolemy called the other two cardinal houses equinoctial signs, since the vernal equinox, which is the cardinal point at the beginning of the house of Aires, marks the point where day and night are of equal length. The same is true for the autumn equinox occurring at the beginning of the h-ouse of Libra (TB 31-35). (See Figure 16.)

These four cardinal points designate the beginning points in the zodiacal band of houses occurring in the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Further, Ptolemy gives qualities to each period, which, in turn, is dominated by a planet or planets. By analogy, Ptolemy equates these four seasons with the life span of a man (TB 31-35). (See Figure 17.) In the daily cycle, the four cardinal points are equally important. The eastern cardinal house of Aires occurs at the point of sunrise; the southern cardinal house of Capricorn is at the sun's highest point at noon, which is called the Mid-Heaven or M. C. for Medium Coeli; the western cardinal house of Libra for sunset; and the nadir northern point of the house of Cancer, which is also called the Lower Meridian or I. C. for Imum Coeli. (See Figure 15.)

In The House of Life, the sonnets begin in the cardinal house of Libra, where Love is enthroned in sonnet one. A dramatic turn happens at the end of the house of Sagittarius in "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI), where the first Beloved dies. This occurs right before the cardinal house of Capricorn and at the point of the winter solstice. The third sonnet of "The Choice" (LXXIII) marks the dramatic beginning of the action phase of the narrator in culture and in painting; this sonnet begins the cardinal house of Aires. The cardinal house of Cancer is missing, but since in the sonnets in the house of Gemini the narrator anticipates death, this death will happen in the cardinal sign of Cancer.

Ptolemy's next quadruplicity is composed of fixed signs or houses, which immediately follow the cardinal signs; they are the signs or houses of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius. Ptolemy calls these houses fixed because the qualities of cold, heat, dry, and wet, which the sun first met in the cardinal houses, are now fully established, or fixed (TB 34-35). (See Figure 18.) This concept applied to the sonnets in The House of Life does not work as well as do the cardinal houses. The narrator in the sonnets of the house of Scorpio does become established in his veneration of his first Beloved but in a lower key and with concerns for the outside world. The sonnets in the house of Aquarius continue the depressing mood and attitudes of the preceding house of Capricorn but only for a short time. In fact, the Willowwood sonnets mark the most dramatic changes in the whole sonnet sequence. There may be other factors working that negate the influence of this particular view of the house of Aquarius. The sonnets of the fixed house of Taurus only continues the mood and attitudes of the previous cardinal house in a minimal way; overall, the change is as abrupt and dramatic as with the sonnets in the houses of Aquarius, Aires, and Capricorn. The house of Leo is missing.

The rest of the remaining signs or houses form a quadruplicity of bicorporeal signs or houses; today, astrologers call them mutable or common. These houses of Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces are called bicorporeal by Ptolemy because they are between the cardinal and fixed signs and participate in the qualities and characteristics of both (TB 34-35). The word, mutable besides meaning change and inconstancy, means serving others. People under these signs are not the leaders and initiators like those of the cardinal signs but are the followers and obliging servers of others or institutions. They may, however, become leaders and renowned people in fields and professions involving service (MA 41-42). (See Figure 19.)

The signs for the house of Gemini ( c ) and Pisces ( l ) dramatically display their double nature. Sagittarius's dual nature is seen in his being half-horse and half-man. Virgo's sign has no obvious indications of duality. The sonnets of the house of Sagittarius do not have any dualism running throughout, but the beginning sonnet "Winged Hours" (XXV) and the ending sonnet "Life-in-Love" (XXXVI) are counter to all the other sonnets in this house that idealize the first Beloved to an extreme degree. The sign of the house of Aquarius ( k ), which can be two snakes copulating, has the attributes of duality, even though it is a fixed sign. Zeus as a snake, through incestuous copulation with his mother Rhea as a snake, freed himself from her power and prohibitions and began his career as a ruling and powerfully masculine god (GM 1 53). In the Willowwood sonnets, the narrator committed mental incest, and began his development of his inner self in external forms. The sonnets in the house of Pisces express duality throughout; the narrator looks back in longing to his happy and sorrowful times with his Beloveds and forward in fearful anticipation toward the future. The sonnets in the house of Gemini are overwhelmingly dualistic. The house of Virgo is missing.

Carl Jung has always been interested in astrology because it is a manifestation of the self or psyche. Whereas the Christian church constantly strove by dogma and ritual to reinforce the consciousness of man and to alienate him from the unconscious, astrology, as well as alchemy, tried to preserve a bridge to the basic roots of nature and the unconscious psyche. Jung believes astrology leads "consciousness back again and again to the knowledge of Heimarmene, that is, the dependence of character and destiny on certain moments in time"⁵⁴ Rossetti's definition of a sonnet as "a moment's monument" fits in well with Jung's concept of astrology's fundamental purpose. Jung began his long study of alchemy because he believed that the alchemist projected his whole mind, or psyche, or self, particularly the unconscious, into his work.⁵⁵ Alchemy is founded on fundamental concepts derived from ancient thought, especially Gnosticism, Pythagorism, and astrology.

The zodiacal wheel, too, is a receiver of man's projections of the self and the unconscious. Jung writes, "As we all know, science began with the stars, and mankind discovered in them the dominants of the unconscious, the 'gods,' as well as the curious psychological qualities of the zodiac: a complete projected theory of human character."⁵⁶ The zodiacal wheel is a mandala, particularly a time mandala.⁵⁷ In another place Jung cites Plato's concept of the soul as being a sphere. Jung describes the astrology wheel first in terms of an anima mundi, or world soul: "As the anima mundi, the soul revolves with the world wheel, whose hub is the Pole. That is why the 'heart of Mercurius' is found there, for Mercurius is the anima mundi. The anima mundi is really the motor of the heavens." Jung then conceives of the astrology wheel in its daily cycle or individual cycle: "The wheel of the starry universe is reflected in the horoscope, called the 'thema' of birth. This is a division of the heavens into twelve houses, calculated at the moment of birth, the first house coinciding with the ascendant. Divided up in this way the firmament looks like a wheel turning.... The 'thema' (that which is 'set' or 'ordained') is indeed a ... 'wheel."' Jung concludes with an analysis of the meaning of the projected image of the individual astrology wheel: "The basic meaning of the horoscope is that, by mapping out the positions of the planets and their relations to one another (aspects), together with the distribution of the signs of the zodiac at the cardinal points, it gives a picture first of the psychic and then of the physical constitution of the individual. It represents, in essence, a system of original and fundamental qualities in a person's character, and can therefore be regarded as an equivalent of the individual psyche" (AS 136). In essence, the wheel as a circle and the cross formed by the four cardinal points is a symbol for the self.

There are two views given of the self by the symbolism involved in the astrology wheel. Any circle or its representative as city, castle, room, vessel, and, by implication, a static wheel can emphasize the "ego's containment in the greater dimension of the self" (AS 224). At another place, Jung stresses that the ego can contain the self and vice versa since the whole can represent the part and the part, the whole (MC 110). The astrology wheel in motion, however, stresses "the rotation which also appears in a ritual circumambulation." Jung further explains this: "Psychologically, it [i.e., the wheel in motion] denotes concentration on and preoccupation with a centre, conceived as the centre of a circle and thus formulated as a point. This leads easily enough to a relationship to the heavenly Pole and the starry bowl of heaven rotating round it" (AS 224). Jung's description of the psychological meaning of the astrology wheel parallels the classic definition of narcissism as centering interest on the self (or ego).

The two concepts of movement of the astrology wheel and its possible static features of the circle and the quaternity, or cross, lead to two ways of viewing the astrology chart. The static element is expressed by the quaternity or the quadruplicity signs or houses, particularly the cardinal houses, in the astrology zodiacal path. The number four is the central number for this static element. The rotating zodiacal band of stars, as we shall soon see, is essentially linked with the number three. This number three dominates the succession of cardinal, fixed, and bicorporeal, or mutable, houses. In the astrology chart, there are four sets of these three types of houses--cardinal, fixed, bicorporeal. Any analogies to them point to the movement of the sun and the other planets through the zodiac. Each class of these three kinds of houses, in turn, form a quadruplicity, or quaternity in Jung's terminology.

The numbers three and four, consequently, are the root numbers of one of the primary relationships of the twelve houses--3 x 4 = 12. Jung constantly insisted that the self is expressed by the number four; in his analysis of the functions of the psyche--as earlier indicated--only three functions such as thinking, intuition, or sensation can become conscious or partly conscious. The fourth function such as feeling is always unconscious. The trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is an example of this pattern since the Devil, the fourth member, is left out. The astrology chart is a symbol of the solution to the dilemma of three and four. If Jung finds three things, he wants to know where the fourth is (AS 224-225). This last concept is important for the organization of The House of Life since one-fourth of the houses of the zodiac--Cancer, Leo, and Virgo--are missing. Only nine houses or three triads of cardinal, fixed, and bicorporeal houses remain. Triads appear prominently in the fundamental organization of the sonnet sequence.

E. F. Edinger, a Jungian analyst, examined Jung's concepts that the psyche is always symbolized by the number four and that if a triad appears, this indicates an incomplete picture of the psyche. Edinger, however, sees the completeness of many triads that require no missing element to make a satisfying whole. A classic example is the triad of beginning, middle, and end. Edinger's solution is that the quaternity image expresses "the totality of the psyche in its structural, static, or eternal sense, whereas the trinity image expresses the totality of psychological experience in its dynamic, developmental, temporal aspect."⁵⁸

In the astrology chart, the static quadruplicities are composed of each of the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water, the basic constituents of the universe. More important, however, for a complete model for the psyche are the dynamic triads of cardinal, fixed, and bicorporeal houses arranged within a static quadruplicity. Edinger connects the dynamic triad to Hegel's basic law of historical process, which states there is the threefold cyclic pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (TQ 20). This concept is at the heart of the triads in the astrological quadruplicities.

Ptolemy and his predecessors relied on the Pythagorean concepts of the meaning of numbers. The first house of Aires is linked to the meaning of number one. Edinger, like Jung, draws upon Pythagorus' concepts, too, to explain the operation of any first number of a triad, or the thesis in Hegel's system. The number one, or thesis, is the original unity or totality that exists prior even to the concept of numbers, which immediately conjures up multiplicity and division. Ronald C. Davison, using the cycle aspects of the triads forming the quadruplicities, describes the "cycle of experience" that is depicted in the zodiac. His cycle matches the Hegel cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis too (A 18). The Greek word planets means wanderers because in their journey through the zodiac they followed erratic paths. The planets' courses were considered by the ancients as journeys by Gods; the idea of houses evolved from this fundamental conception. The cardinal fire sign or house of Aires is the first number, the thesis, the original totality. Davison labels it "the First Cause, the Life Principle, Pure Spirit, God the Creator, the Resurrection, Outrushing Force whose impetus is irresistible" (A 18). Davison does not give his sources but these titles for the house of Aires point to the meanings traditionally attached to the native sign and house of Aires, its native ruler Mars, the sun in exaltation there, and the number one. This number according to Pythagorus and Edinger is an original state of perfection and unity prior to "the creation and separation of things" (TQ 20). The house of Aires as spirit symbolizes this state.

The house of Taurus, which is an earth sign, feminine, nocturnal, and negative, is an opposite of the house of Aires, which is a fire sign, masculine, diurnal, and positive. Taurus is the antithesis of the house of Aires. In the Pythagorean system, two means conflict. Edinger, following Pythagorus, emphasizes that two "symbolizes the act of creation, the emergence of the ego from the original state of unity. Two implies opposition. Two is the separation of one thing from another and thus represents a state of conflict (TQ 20). The house of Taurus is a fixed sign. Aires as a cardinal house demands movement, but Taurus as a fixed house requires rest, permanence, and stability. The contrasting elements of fire and earth graphically illustrate these two opposite natures. Davison labels the house of Taurus "Pure Substance, Undifferentiated Matter, the Matrix which receives the impact of the Outrushing Spirit of Aires." The house of Taurus thus represents "all those forces that make for stability and permanency in the universe." People who are dominated by this house of Taurus are the builders in the world and the conservators of the resources of the earth (A 18).

The house of Gemini is the third house, and it is a bicorporeal air sign or house. In the Pythagorean system, three is the sum of one and two and unites both numbers within itself. Three, then, becomes a "reconciling symbol that resolves the conflict state of two" (TQ 20). The house of Gemini as a bicorporeal sign unites the two previous conflicting houses of Aires (spirit) and Taurus (matter) into one. Gemini assumes the qualities of both by means of a higher "third," which creates a synthesis in Hegel's terms. Davison labels the house of Gemini "Motion," since "the result of the impact of irresistible force (Aires) on an immovable object (Taurus)" is motion, Air, which is a symbol for intelligence, tries to adjust these irreconcilable forces. People whom Gemini dominates are intensely interested in all types of phenomena caused by the interplay of spirit and matter. Gemini people love facts and desire to communicate them (A 18-19).

Jung states this same principle about a higher "third": "As opposites never unite at their own level (tertium non datur!), a supraordinate "third" is always required, in which the two parts can come together" (AS 180). This is the governing principle of paticipation mystique, transference, narcissism, the phenomena of the double, sacred marriages, Kohut's grandiose self and omnipotent object--all of them playing fundamental roles in The House of Life.⁵⁹ In the case of transference, for example, a man's anima is a supraordinate third that unites the physical and conscious man and the physical and conscious woman. At the same time another supraordinate third--the woman's animus--unites in the same manner as the anima of the man. The two triangles unite to form a square or quaternity. Looking at each separate triad of the man and the woman, Jung wants to know where is the fourth. His answer for the man's triangle is the Wise Old Man and for the woman's triangle, the Chthonic Mother. The Wise Old Man and the Chthonic Mother are both senexes (AS 21-22). The conscious ego as a puer can be united to the senex by the supraordinate of the self, which is the whole unit of the square. The same is true if the conscious ego is the senex and is in union or opposition to the puer. These archetypal situations have operated particularly in the last half of The House of Life.

In narcissism, the third element is the self, which unites the opposites that appear such as anima and conscious ego or immortal spirit and mortal conscious ego. Attraction, or fascination, or love, and repulsion, disgust, or hate mean that a higher element is uniting these two opposites that were once one. The narrator in the first thirty-six sonnets in The House of Life is explicitly united to his first Beloved by the god Love; in actuality, the divine anima is a third supraordinate force operating. The circle as a symbol of the self emphasizes harmony; with the square, however, opposition still exists, though united into a whole, in the form of two triangles whose apexes point in opposite directions.⁶⁰

The house of Cancer is not only a new thesis--since it is a cardinal sign--it is an antithesis to the synthesis achieved in the house of Gemini. The first three houses have been concerned with fundamental spiritual (Aires), material (Taurus), and mental (Gemini) forces. These comprise three elements--fire, earth, and air. The element water of the house of Cancer is needed to complete this triad and make it a quaternity. The house of Cancer, consequently, belongs with the first three houses comprising the primordial. Yet at the same time, this house is a transition to the next triad of the houses of Leo, Virgo, and Libra, which represent a higher stage of development for man. The first triad is dissolved in the waters of the house of Cancer and a new cycle of life is born. The life of the individual man begins with the presence of water, which is Cancer's element. Cancer is the "Pure Waters of Life," the "Universal Womb," the "Mother Principle" and "emotion." Taurus is a feminine principle, too, but it is the elementary form of matter (A 18-19).

Ptolemy's concepts of the stages of the life of man are based on the original houses of the planet gods at the creation of the world by the Demiurge. The moon, which rules Cancer, rules the age of infancy that extends up to the age four. With the exception of the sun Ptolemy continues the ages of men chronologically up through the houses after Cancer to Saturn in the house of Capricorn. Normally man dies here (TB 202-205). (See Figure 20 for a listing of the seven ages of man.) With the exception of the moon, these original native houses for the planets are called solar houses (TB 41-43). (See Figures 2 and 4.)

The first four houses of Aires, Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer are primordial; the houses of Leo, Virgo, Libra, and Scorpio are considered individual. The influence of the moon comes into being after the winter solstice between the houses of Capricorn and Aquarius, and the universal nature of the last houses are more in the realm of the spiritual. Man, like the sun dies to this world in Capricorn and undergoes a spiritual rebirth. The attraction of the soul (or moon) begins to exert its force. The sun in the house of Leo is equally strong and even more so in the houses stressing universal values. In astrology, the house of Capricorn is the door of the gods, since souls, according to Pythagorean thought, begin their ascent after death toward their divine Father. The house of Cancer is likewise called the door of men, since souls fall to earth and begin their human existence in the house of Cancer.⁶¹

Before we examine the overall relevance of this fundamental process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis as expressed in cardinal, fixed, and bicorporeal houses, we will briefly indicate the basic meanings of each of the remaining houses. The cycle of Becoming is repeated in the next major triad consisting of the houses of Leo, Virgo, and Libra. The house of Leo, a fixed sign, is the first opposite to emerge from the new thesis of the house of Cancer. Leo is "Divine Incarnation, Spirit made manifest." The sun who rules this house is the symbol of spirit made corporeal. This house is the "sign of Creation made manifest." In the human sphere of matter, the spirit becomes "Ideal Man," the human incarnation of the original spirit which first appeared in the house of Aires. This fixed house of Leo must have an antithesis, which is the bicorporeal house of Virgo. The incarnate spirit of the house of Leo needs a more specialized matter to work with than that of the house of Taurus. The house of Virgo is "Differentiated Matter" and "Ideal Woman" on which and through which the incarnate spirit of the house of Leo can operate. Virgo people organize matter into higher units and objects (A 19-20). Virgo's nature of being earth and an idealized, or higher, form of earth explains its bicorporeal nature.

The house of Libra as a cardinal air sign offers a new higher state for previous opposites of Leo and Virgo. A new synthesis is formed in the house of Libra between Leo, the Ideal Man, and Virgo, the Ideal Woman, just as the house of Gemini united the primordial opposite elements of fire (spirit) and earth (matter). The house of Libra thus represents "Ideal Relationships," "Perfect Harmony or Balance," and the "Universal Harmony" that results "from the marriage of Spirit and Matter" (A 20). These descriptive labels of the house of Libra perfectly fit the situation in the first twelve sonnets in The House of Life, where the narrator and his first Beloved were united by Love in perfect physical and spiritual harmony.

R. C. Davison notes that each water sign prepares the way for a new form or manifestation and always on a higher level (A 20). The house of Scorpio becomes an antithesis to the house of Libra and, like the house of Cancer, is an antithesis to the triangle of thesis (Leo), antithesis (Virgo), and synthesis (Libra) that precedes it. Overall, the house of Scorpio represents "emotional power," and "dynamic Power." The double nature of Scorpio signified by the eagle and the scorpion can cause this power to work toward regeneration or destructively in death (A 20). In the sonnets in The House of Life associated with this house, the narrator idealizes his first Beloved and also expresses his fears about encroaching hostile elements. Throughout these sonnets, the destructive forces that were totally excluded in the sonnets of the house of Libra come into focus. The house of Scorpio ends the strictly individual part of the "cycle of experience" that Davison describes. The emphasis on the universal begins with the house of Sagittarius.

This stressing of the universal commences with the house of Sagittarius and includes the remaining houses of the zodiac. The house of Sagittarius may be considered both an antithesis to the house of Scorpio, which stressed the individual, and a new thesis of universality. Sagittarius is a bicorporeal fire sign or house, taking on the qualities of the two surrounding houses; his dual nature of horse and man and his arrow that flies high above the earth illustrate this. Davison describes the house of Sagittarius as "Spirit diffused in many directions to bring about Illumination," transformed "consciousness" resulting from "the true understanding of existence," "perfect Principle" as "the final spiritual expression of the Life Force," and aspiration. The house of Sagittarius is one of the last two houses directly tied to the earthly realm (A 21).

The house of Capricorn, which is a fixed earth house, is the antithesis of the house of Sagittarius. Capricorn, as the last of the earth houses in the zodiac, represents "matter organized for use in its most perfect form, the final crystallization of the material universe as the embodiment of the Perfect Principle of Sagittarius." The house of Capricorn embodies "Perfect Form," "the Father principle," the "Governing Authority," the "ultimate destiny of Matter," the organizing principle used for the benefit of the community. It is also the culmination of the life of the material man, and it prepares the way for a synthesis in the house of Aquarius, where universalization means a spiritual rebirth (A 21). The sun dies at the beginning of the house of Capricorn and is reborn there too, but this new spiritual rebirth, now symbolized by Christ's birth, reaches consciousness in the house of Aquarius. In The House of Life, the twelve sonnets devoted to the house of Capricorn depict the end of the narrator's involvement with flesh and blood Beloveds. The overriding theme is death and separation. The old has to die to give birth to the new.

The house of Aquarius is a fixed air sign and is a synthesis of the Perfect Principle of the house of Sagittarius and Perfect Form of the house of Capricorn. Aquarius is the house for Universal Man. This house represents "Ideal Relationship between all things," "Universal Brotherhood," "the Group unified by a common Ideal," and "co-operation in the widest possible sense" (A 21). The house of Aquarius is the last air house and the communication and relationship qualities of air are extended to the universal. In The House of Life, these attributes of Aquarius are not immediately apparent in the twelve sonnets devoted to this house. However, in the Willowwood sonnets, a spiritual rebirth occurs and the strictly external relationships with an embodied anima and with the spirit of Love, or the puer, are internalized. These transformations prepare the way for the new individualism and selfhood to be expressed in universal forms, particularly Song and Art, that are valuable to the collective. The key phrase applying to the narrator's transformations in the Willowwood sonnets is to know. The house of Aquarius embodies "True Knowledge" that springs from an "intuitive [and thus a soul-like or spiritual] understanding of First Principles and the Wisdom that results from the interplay of Perfect Principle with Perfect Form" and "the power that springs from Knowledge" (A 21). The narrator in The House of Life gained power in the Willowwood sonnets that gave him the strength to create works of Song and Art.

The house of Pisces is another water sign and forms a transition between the universal houses and the primordial houses. This house is an antithesis of the becoming triad that does, paradoxically, concern the universal. This universal triad consists of Sagittarius, Capricorn, and Aquarius. The house of Pisces is a bicorporeal, or mutable, house. Its bicorporeal nature, water element, and sign of two fishes emphasize the duality of this house. It represents the end of the "cycle of experience" and preparation for a new cycle. Water is "the element in which germination takes place as a preliminary to outer manifestation." The house of Pisces signifies "emotion as a Universal Solvent, dissolving all boundaries, permeating all forms, rounding out all experiences into compassionate understanding" (A 22). The twelve sonnets in The House of Life associated with the house of Pisces and dedicated to Song emphasize the narrator's emotions of Joy and Pain and his coming to terms with them. These sonnets, too, portray the narrator's introspective efforts to understand his past experiences and his fearful anticipations of the future. Both the old and the new are included. The house of Pisces emphasizes all the characteristics of any final spiritual state, where age, renunciation, sacrifice, and sympathetic understanding of others prevail (A 22). Traditionally, the house of Pisces has been the house for lyrical poets and sensitive poets in general (MA 84-87).

The House of Life does not begin in the house of Aires but in the house of Libra, and it does not end in the house of Pisces but in the house of Gemini. Since the houses after the house of Capricorn are concerned with the spiritual and since they, too, belong in the general domain of the moon, the houses of Aires, Taurus, and Gemini have to be considered in a soul or spiritual aspect. The birth of the physical man , as we have seen, occurs in Cancer, and his symbolic or real death happens in Capricorn. This is based on the original set of houses for the seven planets. The twelve sonnets in The House of Life directly associated with the house of Aires concern the narrator's expressing his soul and spirit in the cultural form of paintings or art and his philosophizing over the deeper meanings of life, spirit, soul, and death. The house of Aires, thus, is both an individualistic and cultural, or universal, expression of spirit and soul. The twelve sonnets devoted to the house of Taurus are not positive expressions but negative expressions related to matter concerning the cultural and imaginative manifestations of matter in the form of women and Satan.

The five sonnets associated with the house of Gemini conclude the whole sonnet sequence and end the spiritual manifestations of man. In the house of Cancer, physical man will appear again. The sonnets in the house of Gemini involve the most fundamental, or primordial, issues of man--the meaning of life, death, fate, and the human personality. The narrator in the sonnets linked with the house of Gemini can not view life, death, and fate universally, as would be the case with the Higher Mind of Sagittarius, but individually. In the yearly cycle, the sun reaches its peak of powers at the point of summer solstice, which occurs at the very end of the house of Gemini and the beginning of the house of Cancer. The House of Life, consequently, ends near the peak of the sun's spiritual phase and, paradoxically, at-the moment of the decline of its powers.

Carl Jung has noted that two triads can from a square, and in this way opposition and unity can occur together.⁶² The triads of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis form three kinds of experiences: primordial, individual, and universal. Each triad opposes the triad that comes before it and also after it. A transitional house, always a water sign, completes a triad and acts as a dissolvent, or antithesis, to the whole previous triad, and thus a bridge to the next triad. This series of triads represents man's experience of his Becoming. (See Figure 21.) Yet this series of Becomings is limited by a circle--the astrology wheel--which is a symbol of totality and Being. The quaternity present in the astrology chart also emphasize this aspect.

The House of Life has ended near the lowest point of the astrology chart. The house of Cancer, where this low point is placed, is called, as we have seen, the door of men, where souls enter the realm of the physical. The emphasis in both the position of Gemini and Cancer in the astrology chart and the myth behind the door of men emphasize descent rather than ascent which belongs properly to the house of Capricorn at the top of the astrology chart and the door of the gods. Throughout the whole sonnet sequence from the very introductory sonnet to the last, the narrator has emphasized soul in all its manifestations. Quickly, Love, who embodies spirit, became an equal concern. The two together point to the self, which is a supraordinate third encompassing both. The missing triad of houses in The House of Life is that of Cancer, Leo, and Virgo. Jung always perceived a fourth element of any three as being in the unconscious of the individual; in this case, the missing element is a fourth triad. The number three, which symbolizes Becoming, can become basically conscious but the fourth number symbolizing Being and eternity is beyond man's conscious control. (See Figure 22 for the triad of houses explicitly excluded from The House of Life with their ruling planets.) The sun--also Apollo--unquestionably is a symbol for spirit and ultimately for the self. Mercury, as we have seen, has close identity with the puer, Love, and, thus, spirit. Mercury rules over the house of Virgo, an earth sign. The earth of Virgo, however, is a virgin earth, an earth of potentialities. The Virgo sign supplies the body in a triad of body, spirit, and soul. Virgo is Ideal Woman. Woman and body are synonymous in many systems of thought. The moon is the universal symbol for soul.

Soul, self, and spirit have been the dynamic sources for all the transformations of the narrator from the beginning of The House of Life. They, like these three houses, are hidden from the narrator's direct view and can only manifest themselves in external objects, persons, or images. The puer figures of the moon, Mercury, and even Virgo, the Virgin, flank the sun image of the self. Directly opposite the puer as soul in the house of Cancer is the senex Saturn, who rules Capricorn. The soul of the narrator underwent its greatest trials in the house of Capricorn as did Psyche in her trip to Hades. Opposite the sun as self in the house of Leo is Saturn, the senex, Death, and Fate, again as a ruler of the house of Aquarius, where the narrator consciously integrated his soul and spirit and formed a positive connection to his self, which includes all opposites. Mercury as spirit and puer and Virgo as a puer earth oppose the house of Pisces, where the narrator confronts and assimilates his past experiences with his Beloveds and Love on an emotional level.

The narrator in The House of Life has moved from the realm of the individual in the house of Libra to the primordial realm of Gemini and confronts the primordial sphere of the moon in the house of Cancer. In the last sonnet "The One Hope" (CI), images of soul and Elysian Fields in the domain of Hades predominated. In the Pythagorean doctrines about soul and spirit, the soul remains on the moon after it separates from the body at death or the soul dies, or it, in some versions, remains in Hades. The spirit, on the other hand, is released eventually from its envelope of the soul and begins its ascent to the heavenly Father through the door of the gods in the house of Capricorn. (Saturn is the last planet of the material cosmos.)⁶³ The upward movement of spirit stresses a union of likes, a union of the son spirit with the Father as God and self.

In his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in the Divine Comedy, Dante meets Beatrice his Beloved in the earthly paradise of Eden resting on Mount Purgatory in the southern hemisphere. Purgatory is in the realm of air that is the first half of the atmosphere between the earth and the moon, which is the first heavenly sphere (DA 354; 377; 390). Beatrice becomes his guide. Dante's meeting with Beatrice, who is an anima, or soul, figure for him, occurs between earth and the moon and in an earthly paradise, which is Eden and also like the earlier Elysian Fields of Greek mythology. The House of Life ends in this region of the soul, even though self and spirit lie beyond. In Dante's Vita Nuova, Dante associates Beatrice with the number nine.⁶⁴ The narrator of The House of Life only travels through nine houses in his journey from the house of Libra to the house of Gemini. The union of opposites between the conscious ego of the narrator and his soul prevails in all the symbolism at the end over the other half of his self--the spirit.⁶⁵

Carl Jung cites an alchemical text which describes the work of alchemy in terms of a journey through the zodiac of the astrology chart. The alchemist undergoes a spiritual rebirth in Saturn's house of Capricorn. In alchemy, there is an ascent--as from Capricorn to Gemini or Cancer--and a descent--as from Cancer to Capricorn. This is the model that The House of Life follows. The Christian drama is the reverse in a descent of Christ and then his ascent. In Alchemy, the emphasis is upon earth--turning lead into gold--in the search for spirit and soul. Both Christianity and Gnosticism accent the spirit and depreciate matter. The narrator, like the alchemist, could never forget "Body's Beauty." The alchemist's journey to free the soul from its entrapment in the unconscious and the earth started in the zodiac at the house of Saturn (Capricorn) and descended toward the sun, near which resides the puer Mercury. (Mercurius was the goal of alchemy; he was gold and Saturn the senex was lead.) The alchemist expected a rebirth in the realm of the sun in the house of Leo. This part of the journey through one half of the zodiac was considered an ascent as the alchemist traveled upward from the dark and cold Saturn in the house of Capricorn toward the sun in the house of Leo. Mercury and rebirth were not found in the area of the sun, so the alchemist had to return back to Saturn in the house of Capricorn, where his rebirth took place. This was considered the descent. Gold or spirit is to be discovered in the lowest of elements, earth, or lead (MC 210-234).

The narrator in The House of Life followed a similar journey of descent into Saturn's realms in the houses of Capricorn and Aquarius and an ascent toward the region of the moon and sun. However, the narrator's ultimate goal was the moon and the soul, and he was aware of the rule of Fate and Death over his life at the end. The senex still had power in the puer's house of Gemini. The goal of the alchemist's journey through the zodiac was to free himself and his soul from the compulsions of Fate and his own character. The hero who follows such "a journey of the soul" does free himself, but the narrator in The House of Life cannot free himself from his fascination with the Beloved soul and the self that lies beyond. The narrator's narcissistic fascination with self, his character, his fate, the body, the soul, and death remain too strong.

In the Gnostic myth of the divine Anthropos as presented in "Poimandres," the hermaphroditic Anthropos became narcissistically enraptured with his own image reflected in the waters and shadowed on the earth of feminine Nature. Previously, to this moment, the Anthropos had descended through l'armature des sphères, or the seven planets, or seven Governors. He became by this act subject to Fate and a material universe; his coupling sexually with Nature united him completely to the material cosmos. The astrology chart retains this myth as part of its basic structure. The whole chart represents this cosmic man, since he surrounds the earth and each house covers part of his body, beginning with his head in the house of Aires and ending with his feet in the house of Pisces (A 22-23). (See Figure 23.)

Jung has analyzed this aspect of the zodiacal chart. He concludes that "the circular movement in time (circulatio, rota) of the sun through the houses of the Zodiac" is for the purpose of making a "synthesis of the elements" and that, ultimately, "the aim of the circulatio is the production (or rather, reproduction) of the Original Man [i.e., the divine Anthropos], who was a sphere" (MC 6-7). Jung continues his analysis by indicating that the quaternity of the houses of Aires, Libra, Capricorn, and Cancer and their rulers show the Anthropos is subject to Heimarmene, or Fate. The divine Anthropos and Mercurius in alchemy are one and the same (MC 6-17). The Anthropos is the self, composed of the opposites of spirit and soul. He is the macrocosm and individual man is the microcosm. The complete circle of the astrology chart points both to the eternal self--based on the number four--which comes from beyond the circles, or l'armature des sphères, and to the self's confinement by Fate and the material cosmos. The astrology chart portrays dramatically the conflict between eternal Being--symbolized by the circle, the number four, in all its manifestations, the Anthropos, and the houses of the planets-and Becoming-symbolized by the number three, trine aspects, and triads of houses, elements, and planets. (See Figure 24 for a summary of the astrological organization of The House of Life.)

Dante Rossetti retains all these conflicts and concepts in his organization of The House of Life on an astrological basis. The nine houses that explicitly appear in the sonnet sequence form a set of three triads. This phase of the organization shows that the narrator is subject to the Fate indicated in the title of Part II and to Becoming. Counter to this reality is the triad of Cancer, Leo, and Virgo, not explicitly included in the astrological organization of the sonnet sequence. This missing triad contains the immortal self and its components of soul and spirit (and a potential body). This triad completes the other three triads and makes a quaternity, which stresses Being. This triad of the houses of Cancer, Leo, and Virgo covers the time of summer in the yearly cycle of the zodiac. In the early sonnets, particularly in the house of Sagittarius, imagery of summer predominated, and this was a period of great happiness for the narrator and the time when the immortal puer was at his peak. The tensions between the realms of Becoming ruled by Saturn in his positive and negative forms and Being represented by the puers of Love (Eros), Mercury, youth, spirit, anima, and the self work throughout The House of Life. The narrator's downward movement--considered an ascent by alchemists--that ends in the region of the soul emphasizes again the predominance of the soul and, too, the body that is linked to it more than spirit is. Even the missing parts of the body of the divine Anthropos--the chest to the abdomen--represented by the houses of Cancer, Leo, and Virgo stress the medial position of the soul in respect to the divine and the material. The soul traditionally is always pictured in the middle zone between the spirit above and the body below. To the narrator the soul and the body contained beauty and were poles that constantly exerted their influences; in the end, the self is most represented by "Soul's Beauty" (LXXVII) and "Body's Beauty" (LXXVIII). The soul never ascends--or at least never higher than the sphere of the moon--to the pure spiritual realm beyond the spheres of the seven planets. The narrator emphasizes the descent into the soul, the psyche, and ultimately the self; the soul's realm of images, imagination, beauty, and even death overcomes any desire for an ascent of spirit to the Father God for a union of likes. The divine Anthropos initially followed this same course in his narcissistic fascination with images and feminine nature. Narcissus, whose home is near Eros' domain and who was also known, in some traditions, as Hyacinthus, had the final destinations of the earth as a flower and Hades as an image, or shade (GM 1 81).⁶⁶

The myth of Narcissus has been a fundamental element in the content and organization of The House of Life. Narcissism has taken many psychological, mythological, archetypal, and astrological forms. Love of self--in its forms of spirit, or puer, and soul--appears predominately and ultimately in every aspect of the content and form of The House of Life. In "Heart's Hope" (V), the narrator asked,

By what word's power, the key of paths untrod,    

     Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,         

     Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore

Even as that sea which Israel crossed dryshod?

Even this early in the sonnet sequence, the narrator yearned to be released from a world of Becoming, Fate, Death, and imprisonment symbolized by Egypt and to reach the ideal realm of Canaan here on earth--an Elysian Fields type of place. The "deeps of Love" explored were his narcissistic love of his anima, or his psyche, his spirit and ultimately his self. In the sestet of this same sonnet, the narrator gave his "Heart's Hope": "Yea, in God's name, and Love's, and thine [i.e., the first Beloved), would I / Draw from one loving heart such evidence / As to all hearts all things shall signify." In an admirable fashion, the narrator and his ruling spirit Dante Rossetti fulfilled this most personal hope.

NOTES

Abbreviations:

A       Ronald C. Davison, Astrology

AG    Bouche-Leclercq, L'Astrologie Grecque

AM    A. E. Thierens, Astrology in Mesopotamian Culture

AS     Carl Jung, Aion

DA    M. A. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers

GM    Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

MA    Margaret E. Hone, The Modern Text-Book of Astrology

MC    Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

PA     William J. Tucker, Ptolemaic Astrology

TB     Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos

TQ     E. F. Edinger, "Trinity and Quaternity"

¹ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence, ed. Paull Franklin Baum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. 34-35.

² T. Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Elliot Stock, 1882), p. 30; Algernon Swinburne ["The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), p. 64] perceives the word House in The House of Life as referring to a mansion with many rooms.

³ Jacques Savarit, Tendances Mystiques et Ésotérigues chez Dante-Gabriel Rossetti (Paris: Didier, 1961), pp. 26-27.

⁴ William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London: Cassell, 1889), p. 183.

⁵ R. L. Mégroz, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter Poet of Heaven in Earth (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), pp. 126-127.

⁶ Ellen McCaffery, Astrology: Its History and Influence in the Western World (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970), pp. 334-336; other valuable books on the history of astrology: Jack Lindsay, Origins of Astrology (London: Frederick Muller, 1971); P. I. H. Naylor, Astrology: An Historical Examination (London: Robert Maxwell, 1967); Theodore Otto Wedel, The Mediaeval Attitude Toward Astrology: Particularly in England (1920; rpt. U. S.: Archon Books, 1968).

⁷ Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, I (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1906), pp. 302-304; the full title of Varley's pamphlet is: A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, illustrated by Engravings of Heads and Features, and accompanied by Tables of the Time of rising of the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac, and containing also new and Astrological Explanations of some remarkable Portions of Ancient Mythological History (Longman, 1828).

⁸ Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Family-Letters: With a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, II (1895; rpt. New York: Ams Press, 1970), p. 359.

⁹ R. D. Waller, The Rossetti Family: 1824-1854 (Manchester University Press, 1932), pp. 82-93.

¹⁰ Family Letters, I, p. 64.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 58 and p. 64.

¹² William Rossetti, Designer and Writer, p. 134 and p. 160.

¹³ M. A. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers (London: Gall and Inglis, 1913), p. 209, pp. 232-233, and pp. 354-355. Henceforth all citations to this book will be in the text and be indicated by the abbreviation DA.

¹⁴ Michel Gauquelin, The Scientific Basis of Astrology: Myth or Reality (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), p. 61; Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, or Quadripartite: Being Four Books of the Influence of the Stars, ed. J. M. Ashmand (London: Davis and Dickson, 1822), p. xv. The rest of the citations for this book will be in the text and be identified by the abbreviation TB.

¹⁵ William J. Tucker, Ptolemaic Astrology: A Complete Commentary on the TETRABIBLOS of Claudius Ptolemy (Kent, England: Pythagorean Publications, 1961), p. 60. The rest of the citations will be in the text and be identified by the abbreviation PA. Louis Rougier, La Religion Astrale des Pythagoriciens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 35 and pp. 99-105.

¹⁶ The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), pp. 465-473.

¹⁷ McCaffery, Astrology: Its History, p. 37; The planet initially ruling at sunrise has the greatest influence on the day: Sunday = Sun; Monday = moon; Tuesday = Mars; Wednesday = Mercury; Thursday = Jupiter; Friday = Venus; Saturday = Saturn.

¹⁸ Collected Works of D. G. Rossetti, p. 311 and p. 336. Dante's concepts of the numbers nine and three are important for The House of Life since these same numbers play crucial roles in its structural organization.

¹⁹ A. Bouché-Leclercq, L'Astrologie Grecque (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899), pp. 182-186. Henceforth all citations will be in the text and signified by the abbreviation AG.

²⁰ Ronald C. Davison, Astrology (New York: Arc Books, 1963), pp. 79-82. Henceforth citations will be in the text and be indicated by the abbreviation A. Although Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos provides all the fundamental concepts of astrology, some modern astrologers like Davison, former President of the Astrological Lodge of London, who adhere to the traditions of ancient astrology, will be used to supplement Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos. Traditional lore of astrology such as appears in modern textbooks would have been available to Dante Rossetti in the popular books on astrology in the early and mid Nineteenth Century. Ellen McCaffery's Astrology: Its History (pp. 343-348) has a list and descriptions of these popular astrologers and their works.

²¹ William Rossetti, Designer and Writer, p. 183.

²² E. T. Bell, Numerology (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1933), p. 84 and pp. 89-90.

²³ Since Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos does not contain mythology, Rossetti could not have derived it from there. Sources like Varley's A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, Ovid's Metamorphoses, traditional accounts of Greek mythology, popular astrology books of the Nineteenth Century, and occult books such as Dante Rossetti's father possessed would have to supply this aspect of astrology missing in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos. Modern references such as Bouché-Leclercq's book, Robert Graves' books on mythology, and modern astrology books based on the traditional aspects of astrology will supply this important element of astrology.

²⁴ J. Norman Lockyer, The Dawn of Astronomy: A Study of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians (1894; rpt. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964), pp. 24-39.

²⁵ Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia (1952; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), pp. 209-211. Jung's portrayal of "the night sea journey" is based on Leo Frobenius' book, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, which surveys myths about the sun and heroes identified with the sun.

²⁶ Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (1955; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books-, 1963), p. 108. Henceforth all citations will be in the text, indicated by the abbreviation MC.

²⁷ Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung: An Introduction With Illustrations (1942; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 10-17; C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921; rpt. Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 330-333 and pp. 436-437.

²⁸ In The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954) Erich Neumann, a Jungian, traces the development of the ego and consciousness from birth to death as the journey of a hero through life as depicted in myths, symbols, and archetypes.

²⁹ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, I (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955), pp. 115-117. At the end of each account of a myth, Graves gives the classic Greek sources for the myth; many of these sources were readily available in the Nineteenth Century. Henceforth all citations will be in the text, indicated by the abbreviation GM.

³⁰ James Hillman, "Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present," Eranos Jahrbuch, 36 (1967), 337.

³¹ Derek and Julia Parker, The Compleat Astrologer (1971; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1975), pp. 44-45.

³² Carl Jung, Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 87. Henceforth all citations for this book will be in the text and indicated by AS.

³³ Margaret E. Hone, The Modern Text-Book of Astrology (London: L. N. Fowler, 1951), pp. 33-34 p. 78. Derek and Julia Parker (Compleat Astrologer, p. 191) cite Hone as one of the nine outstanding modern astrologers. Henceforth all citations to Hone's book will be in the text and indicated by the abbreviation MA.

³⁴ This was a rule of Morin de Villefranche, who was a traditional type of astrologer, who continued the astrology of Ptolemy, and who served Cardinal Richelieu in the Seventeenth Century [Astrosynthesis, trans. Lucy Little (New York: Zoltan Mason Emerald Books, 1974), p. 122).

³⁵ James Hillman, "An Essay on Pan," and Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, "Ephialtes: A Pathological-Mythological Treatise on the Nightmare in Classical Antiquity," Pan and the Nightmare (New York: Spring Publications, 1972), pp. xix-xx, p. xxiv, pp. xxxi-xxxvii, and p. 60.

³⁶ A. E. Thierens, Astrology in Mesopotamian Culture: An Essay (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1935), p. 37. Henceforth, citations will be in the text and indicated by AM.

³⁷ Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius (Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 59, p. 75, and p. 87.

³⁸ Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), pp. 3-9.

³⁹ Michel Gauquelin [Le dossier des influences cosmiques Caractères et Tempéraments (Paris: Denoël, 1973) and La Cosmo-Psychologie (Paris: Centre d'Ètude et de Promotion de la Lecture, 1974)] is a modern astrologer, who has done exhaustive statistical analyses of the positions of the planets at key places in the astrology charts of thousands of sports figures, politicians, writers, and others. He describes these persons according to the traits of the dominant planet in their charts. At the end of one of his books, he gives long quotes from Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos to show his basic source. His character analyses--according both to planets and to the humors' characterology--is one of the best of modern sources for the traits belonging to particular planets.

⁴⁰ Klibansky et. al., Saturn and Melancholy, p. 10 and p. 127.

⁴¹ Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), pp. 80-83.

⁴² Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts (New York: Capricorn Books, 1968), pp. 63-69.

⁴³ Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1940), pp. 78-81.

⁴⁴ Neumann, The Great Mother, pp. 3-83; Carl Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype," The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), pp. 73-110.

⁴⁵ Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (1932 ; rpt. New York: Agathon Press, 1968), pp. 145-146.

⁴⁶ Cavendish, The Black Arts, p. 69.

⁴⁷ C. G. Jung, "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity," Psychology and Religion: West and East (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), p. 118.

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 118-119; Imre Hermann's concept of dual union and the instincts of clinging and separating, which were incorporated into Lipot Szondi's system of drives, portray these same conflicts between "One" and the "Other." Szondi, Triebpathologie: Elemente der exakten Triebpsychologie und Triebpsychiatrie (Bern: Hans Huber, 1952), pp. 418-425; Nicholas Abraham, L'Instinct Filial: Introduction à Hermann (Paris: Denoël, 1972), pp. 35-38, pp. 44-46, pp. 55-57.

⁴⁹ Rougier, La Religion Astrale, p. 75.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ W . K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (London: Metheun, 1950), p. 178.

⁵² Hadès, L'Astrologie et le destin de l'Occident: 1971-2000 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1971), p. 25

⁵³ Hadès, L'Astrologie et le destin; Les mystères du Zodiac (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974).

⁵⁴ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (1944; rpt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 34.

⁵⁵ Carl Jung, "Psychology of the Transference," The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psyhology of the Transference and Other Subjects (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), pp. 198-199.

⁵⁶ Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 234.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 199.

⁵⁸ E. F. Edinger, "Trinity and Quaternity," The Archetype: Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress for Analytical Psychology (Basel: S. Karger, 1964), pp. 16-18. Henceforth all citations will be in the text and indicated by the abbreviation TQ.

⁵⁹ Lipot Szondi in his first book Schicksalsanalyse: Wahl in Liebe, Freundschaft, Beruf, Krankheit und Tod, 3rd ed. (1944; rpt. Basel: Schwabe, 1965) bases the compulsion of unconscious choice--or Schicksal which means fate--on the triangle consisting of the chooser, the chosen, and the gene that represents a member of the person's family ancestors of the chooser and a similar person in the family ancestry of the person chosen. This gene, or member of one's Family Unconscious, is the supraordinate element that Jung has identified. The number three dramatically introduces Fate, destiny, and the realm of experience into an individual's life.

⁶⁰ Carl Jung, The Archetypes, pp. 234-235.

⁶¹ Rougier, La Religion Astrale, p. 75.

⁶² Carl Jung, The Archetypes, pp. 234-235.

⁶³ Rougier, La Religion Astrale, p. 75; Hadès, L'Astrologie et le destin, p. 24; Walter Wili, "The History of the Spirit in Antiquity," Spirit and Nature: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon Books, 1 954), pp. 94-95.

⁶⁴ D. G. Rossetti, Collected Works, pp. 336; Louis-Phillippe May, Dante et la Mystique des Nombres (Paris: La Quadrature du Cercle, 1968), pp. 10-11.

⁶⁵ Wili, "The History of the Spirit," pp. 93-95; Marielene Putscher, Pneuma, Spiritus, Geist: Vorstellungen vom Lebensantrieb in ihren Geschichtlichen Wandlungen (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973), pp. 132-134.

⁶⁶ C. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1951), p. 172.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The first part of this bibliography consists of cited works concerning Dante Rossetti and The House of Life. The second part contains psychological, psychoanalytical, and Jungian works, mythological references, astrological works, and a few peripherally related books.

I

WORKS CONCERNING DANTE ROSSETTI AND THE HOUSE OF LIFE

Benson, Arthur C. Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1904.

Buchanan, Robert. "The Stealthy School of Criticism," in The Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Jerome H. Buckley. New York: Random House, 1968.

Caine, T. Hall. Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Elliot Stock, 1882.

Doughty, Oswald. A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Frederick Muller, 1949.

Fredeman, William E. "Rossetti's 'In Memoriam': An Elegaic Reading of The House of Life," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 47 (1965), 298-341.

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. "The Image of the Anima in the Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," The Victorian Newsletter, #45 (1974), 1-7.

Hume, Robert D. "Inorganic Structure in The House of Life," Papers on Language and Literature, 5 (1969), 282-295.

Hyder, Clyde K. "Rossetti's Rose Mary: A Study in the Occult," Victorian Poetry, I (1963), 197-207.

Kendall, J. L. "The Concept of the Infinite Moment in The House of Life," Victorian Newsletter, #28 (Fall, 1965), 4-8.

Lewis, Roger Carlisie. "The Poetic Integrity of D. G. Rossetti's Sonnet Sequence, The House of Life." Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1969.

Lindberg, John. "Rossetti's Cumaean Oracle," Victorian Newsletter, 22 (1962), 20-21.

Mariller, H. C. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of his Art and Life. London: George Bell, 1904.

McGann, Jerome J. "Rossetti's Significant Details," Victorian Poetry, 7 (Spring, 1969), 41-54.

Mégroz, R. L. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter Poet of Heaven in Earth. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928.

Pridgen, Rufus Allen. "Apocalyptic Imagery in Dante Rossetti's The House of Life." Doctoral dissertation, The Florida State University, 1975.

Robillard, Douglas J. "Rossetti's 'Willowwood' Sonnets and the Structure of The House of Life," Victorian Newsletter, #22 (1962), 5-9.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Works, ed. William Michael Rossetti. London: Ellis, 1911.

_______. Family Letters: With a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti. 2 vols. London, 1895; New York: Ams Press, 1970.

_______. The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence, ed. Paull Franklin Baum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928.

Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer.         London: Cassell, 1889.

_______. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1906.

Ryles, Clyde de L. "The Narrative Unity of The House of Life," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69 (1970), 241-257.

Savarit, Jacques. Tendances Mystiques et Ésotérigues chez Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Paris: Didier, 1961.

Spector, Stephen Joel. "The Centripetal Journey: The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1969.

Surtees, Virginia. The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles. "The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," in Essays and Studies. London: Chatto and Windus, 1875.

Talon, Henri. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti, peintre-poète dans La Maison de Vie," Études Anglaises, 19 (1966), 1-14.

_______. D. G. Rossetti: THE HOUSE OF LIFE: Quelques aspects de l'art, des thèmes et du symbolisme. Archivès des Lettres Modernes, Minard, l966.

Tisdel, Frederick M. "Rossetti's 'The House of Life,"' Modern Philology, 15 (1917), 257-276.

Vogel, Joseph F. "Rossetti's The House of Life, 'Death's Songsters,"' Explication, 21 (1963), item 64.

Waller, R. D. The Rossetti Family: 1824-1854. Manchester University Press, 1932.

Wallerstein, Ruth C. "Personal Experience in Rossetti's House of Life," PMLA, 42 (1927), 492-504.

Zakrezewska, Maja. "Untersuchungen zur Konstrucktion und Komposition von DGRs Sonnettenzyklus The House of Life." Doctoral dissertation, Freiburg, 1922.

* * * *

The most complete bibliographical information on Dante Rossetti and The House of Life up to 1968 is contained in William E. Fredeman's Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) and Frederic E. Faverty's The Victorian Poets: A Guide to Research (2nd ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968]).

II

PSYCHOLOGICAL, PSYCHOANALYTICAL, JUNGIAN,

MYTHOLOGICAL, AND ASTROLOGICAL WORKS

Abraham, Karl. "Notes on the Psycho-Analytical Investigation and Treatment of Manic-Depressive Insanity and Allied Conditions," in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M. D., trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

_______. "A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders," in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M. D., trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

Abraham, Nicholas. L'Instinct Filial: Introduction à Hermann. Paris: Denoël, 1972.

Bell, E. T. Numerology. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1933.

Bouché-Leclercq, A. L'Astrologie Grecque. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, eds. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith. 1621; New York: Tudor Publishing, 1927.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 1949; New York: World Publishing, 1956.

Cassirier, Ernest. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.

_______. Language and Myth. New York: Dover Publications, 1953.

_______. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

Cavendish, Richard. The Black Arts. New York: Capricorn Books, 1968.

Corpus Hermeticum, trans. A. J. Festugière. 2 vols. Paris: Société d'Édition, 1945.

Davison, Ronald C. Astrology. New York: Arc Books, 1963.

Dodds, E. R. Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Edinger, Edward F. Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972.

_______. "Trinity and Quaternity," in The Archetype: Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress for Analytical Psychology. Basel: S. Karger, 1964.

Elkisch, Paula. "The Psychological Significance of the Mirror," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, V (1957), 235-244.

Fenichel, Otto. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945.

Ferenczi, Sandor. "The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money," in Sex in Psychoanalysis. 1914; New York: Dover Publications, 1956.

Festugière, R. P. La.Révélation d'Hermes Trismégiste. 4 vols. Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, 1950.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey. 1920; New York: Bantam Books, 1959.

_______. "Contributions to the Psychology of Love: The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," trans. Joan Riviere, in Collected Papers. 5 vols. 1912; New York: Basic Books, 1959.

_______. The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere. 1923; New York: W. W. Norton, 1960. -

_______. "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," in Collected Papers. 5 vols. 1915; New York: Basic Books, 1959.

_______. Mourning and Melancholia," in Collected Papers. 5 vols. 1917; New York: Basic Books, 1959.                  

_______. "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in Collected Papers. 5 vols. 1914; New York: Basic Books, 1959.

_______. "On the Transformation of Instincts With Special Reference to Anal Instincts," in Collected Papers. 5 vols. 1916; New York: Basic Books, 1959.

Fuller, John. The Sonnet. London: Methuen, 1972.

Gauquelin, Michel. La Cosmo-Psychologie. Paris: Centre d'Étude et de Promotion de la Lecture, 1974.

_______. Le dossier des influences cosmigues: Caractères et Tempèraments. Paris: Denoël, 1973.

_______. The Scientific Basis of Astrology: Myth or Reality. New York: Stein and Day, 1969.

Gedo, John E. and Arnold Goldberg. Models of the Mind: A Psychoanalytic Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 2 vols. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955.

Guthrie, W. K. C. The Greeks and Their Gods. London: Methuen, 1950.

Hadès. L'Astrologie et le destin de l'Occident: 1971-2000. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1971.

_______. Les mysteres du Zodiac. Paris: Albin Michel, 1974.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: New American Library, 1940.

Herzog, Edgar. Psyche and Death, trans. David Cox and Eugene Rolfe. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1966.

Hillman, James. "The Dream and the Underworld," Eranos Jahrbuch, 42 (1973), 237-321.

_______. "An Essay on Pan," and Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, "Ephialtes: A Pathological-,Mythological Treatise on the Nightmare in Classical Antiquity," in Pan and the Nightmare. New York: Spring Publications, 1972.

_______. "The Feeling Function," in Lectures on Jung's Typology. New York: Spring Publications, 1971.

_______. The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972.

_______. "On Psychological Creativity," Eranos Jahrbuch, 35 (1966), 349-409.

_______. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

_______. "Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present," Eranos Jahrbuch, 36 (1967), 301-360.

Hinkle, Beatrice M. The Re-Creating of the Individual. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923.

Hone, Margaret E. The Modern Text-Book of Astrology. London: L. N. Fowler, 1951.

Jacobi, Jolande. The Psychology of C. G. Jung: An Introduction With Illustrations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd ed-., rev. 1958; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Jung, Carl. Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self. New York: Pantheon Books, 1959.

_______. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. New York: Pantheon Books,- 1959. -

_______. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation andSynthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. 1955; New York:Pantheon Books, 1963.

_______. "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity," in Psychology and Religion: West and East. New York: Pantheon Books, 1958.

_______. "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype," in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. New York: Pantheon Books, 1959.

_______. Psychological Types. 1921; Princeton University Press, 1971.

_______. Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953.

_______. "Psychology of the Transference," in The Practice of Psychotherapy. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954.

_______. The Spirit Mercurius," in Alchemical Studies. Princeton University Press, 1967.

_______. Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia. 1952; New York: Pantheon Books, 1956.

_______. and C. Kerényi. Essays on a Science of Mythology: Myths of the Divine Child and the Divine Maiden, trans. R. F. C. Hull. 1949; New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Keppler, C. F. The Literature of the Second Self. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1972.

Kerényi, C. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. New York: Pa"ntheon Books, 1967.

_______. The Gods of the Greeks. London: Thames and Hudson, 1951.

_______. Hermes der Sellenführer: das Mythologem vom männlichen Lebensursprung. Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1944.

Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy Religion and Art. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964.

Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. New York: International Universities Press, 1971.

_______. "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 14 (1966), 243-272.

_______. "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 27 (1972), 360-400.

Layard, John. "Homo-Eroticism in Primitive Society as a Function of the Self," in Current Trends in Analytic Psychology: Proceedings of the First International Congress for Analytic Psychology, ed. Gerhard Adler. London: Tavistock Publications, 1961.

_______. "The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype," Eranos Jahrbuch, 12 (1945), 253-307.

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. The "Soul" of the Primitive. 1927; Chicago: Henry Regnery, 17966.

Lewin, Bertrand D. The Psychoanalysis of Elation. New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1961.

Lindsay, Jack. Origins of Astrology. London: Frederick Muller, 1971.

Lockyer, J. Norman. The Dawn of Astronomy: A Study of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians. 1894; Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964.

May, Louis-Phillippe. Dante et la Mystique des Nombres. Paris: La Quadrature du Cercle, 1968.

McCaffery, Ellen. Astrology: Its History and Influence in the Western World. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970.

Naylor, P. I. H. Astrology: An Historical Examination. London: Robert Maxwell, 1967.

Neumann, Erich. Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius. Princeton University Press, 1956.

_______. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon Books, 1955.

_______. The Origins and History of Consciousness. 1949; New York: Pantheon Books, 1954.

New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. London: Hamlyn House, 1959.

Orr, M. A. Dante and the Early Astronomers. London: Gall and Inglis, 1913.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957.

Panofsky, Dora and Erwin. Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956.

Parker, Derek and Julia. The Compleat Astrologer. 1971; New York: Bantam Books, 1975.

Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1873; New York: New American Library, 1959.

Pausanias's Description of Greece, trans. J. G. Frazer. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965.

Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, or Quadripartite: Being Four Books of the Influence of the Stars, ed. J. M. Ashmand. London: Davis and Dickson, 1822.

Pulver, Sydney E. "Narcissism: The Term and the Concept," Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 18 (1970), 319-341.

Putscher, Marielene. Pneuma, Spiritus, Geist: Vorstellungen vom Lebensantrieb in ihren Geschichtlichen Wandlungen. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973.

Rádo, Sándor. "The Problem of Melancholia," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9 (1928), 420-438.

Rank, Otto. Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. 1932; New York: Agathon Press, 1968.

_______. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. 1925; Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971.

_______. "The Double as Immortal Self," in Beyond Psychology. 1941; New York: Dover Publications, 1958.

Rogers, Robert. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.

Rougier, Louis. La Religion Astrale des Pythagoriciens. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959.

Rudwin, Maximilian. The Devil in Legend and Literature. LaSalle: Open Court, 1931.

Spotnitz, Hyman and Philip Resnikoff. "The Myths of Narcissus," Psychoanalytic Review, 41 (1954), 173-181.

Stein, Robert. Incest and Human Love: The Betrayal of the Soul in Psychotherapy. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974.

Stuart, Grace. Narcissus: A Psychological Study of Self-Love. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

Szondi, Lipot. Experimental Diagnostics of Drives, trans. Gertrude Aull. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1952.

_______. Ich-Analyse: Die Grundlage zur Vereinigung der Tiefenpsychologie. Bern: Hans Huber, 1956.

. _______. Lehrbuch der experimentellen Triebdiagnostik, 3rd ed. Bern: Hans Huber, 1972.

_______. Schicksalsanalyse: Wahl in Liebe, Freundschaft, Beruf, Krankheit und Tod, 3rd ed. 1944; Basel: Schwabe, 1965.

_______. Triebpathologie: Elemente der exakten Triebpsychologie und Triebpsychiatrie. Bern: Hans Huber, 1952.

Thierens, A. E. Astrology in Mesopotamian Culture: An Essay. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1935.

Tucker, William J. Ptolemaic Astrology: A Complete Commentary on the TETRABIBLOS of Claudius Ptolemy. Kent, England: Pythagorean Publications, 1961.

Tymms, Ralph. Doubles in Literary Psychology. Cambridge, England: Bowes & Bowes, 1949.

Varley, John. A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, illustrated by Engravings of Heads and Features, and accompanied by Tables of the Time of rising of the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac, and containing also new and Astrological Explanatios of some remarkable Portions of Ancient Mythological History. Longman, 1928.

Villefranche, Morin de. Astrosynthesis, trans. Lucy Little. New York: Zoltan Mason Emerald Books, 1974.

Vinge, Louise. The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century, trans. Robert Dewsnap. Lund: Gleercups, 1967.

von Franz, Marie-Luise. "Über religiöse Hintergründe des Puer Aeternus-Problems," in The Archetype, ed. Adolph Guggenbühl Craig. New York: S. Karger , 1964.

Wedel, Theodore Otto, The Mediaeval Attitude Toward Astrology: Particularly in England. 1920; U. S.: Archon Books, 1968.

Wili, Walter. "The History of the Spirit in Antiquity," in Spirit and Nature: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954.