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Poem Of The Week: January By Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

January

For January I give you vests of skins,
And mighty fires in hall, and torches lit;
Chambers and happy beds with all things fit;
Smooth silken sheets, rough furry counterpanes;
And sweetmeats baked; and one that deftly spins
Warm arras; and Douay cloth, and store of it;
And on this merry manner still to twit
The wind, when most his mastery the wind wins.
Or issuing forth at seasons in the day,
Ye'll fling soft handfuls of the fair white snow
Among the damsels standing round, in play:
And when you all are tired and all aglow,
Indoors again the court shall hold its sway,
And the free Fellowship continue so.

The seductive landscape of Rossetti’s decoratively upholstered sonnet is as divorced from any sense of Victorian reality as his pictorial art is from the imperial and commercial imperatives of the age. Instead, the poem embodies a kind of retreat, to a mythical era of simple bucolic pleasures, of Pre-Raphaelite innocence, of chivalric honour and unsullied chastity.

Contradicting the contemporary zeitgeist, Rossetti’s near-panegyric sails close to abandoning the present whilst yielding a de facto rejection of the age’s hypocrisies and flagrant social divisions.

Formally structured, ‘January’ remains persuasive as a means of escape, best viewed out of context and enjoyed as a presentiment of an idealised season in the illusion of a bygone era. Rossetti’s images glow with inner light: the senses blend and sate, the arras warms as alluringly as the baked sweetmeats, and the revellers bask in a congenial ‘Fellowship’ collectively actuated by the poem’s terpsichorean rhythms.

‘January’ is taken from Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Poetry and Prose, published by Yale University Press (2003)

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