One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
Right at the beginning of the poem, we are confronted by repetition. One should immediately note that this is a Petrarchan sonnet, written in the plodding and repetitive rhythm and meter of iambic pentameter. What’s more, Rossetti employs anaphora, repeating “one” so as to hit the reader over the head with the fact that the artist’s studio does not contain an eclectic array of paintings, but rather just many paintings of “one face….One selfsame figure”.
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
Line 3’s single clause is most striking because of the use of the first person plural “we”; the speaker has not entered the studio alone. The use of “we” cannot be forgotten, and now for the rest of the poem, one must remember that at least two people are in the studio, and thus at least two people capable of speaking through the sonnet.
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
Although lines 3 and 4 might be read as two independent clauses, closer examination shows that they are actually linked. Strangely, the construction “those, that” effectively equates the plural noun “screens” and the singular noun “mirror.” Ultimately, the speaker says that each screen of canvas on which the woman is depicted acts as a mirror, reflecting back her image. Except Rossetti does not say “reflecting”; she says “gave back,” establishing an economy, where the woman’s “loveliness” is not a quality retained, but rather exchanged between artist, portrait, and viewer.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in the freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; — every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
We must remember here that the speaker(s) is dealing with many canvasses. She is not staring at one painting and seeing a multitude of different images, but rather at many paintings all portraying the same woman in different ways. In one she is “a queen,” in another “a nameless girl,” and in another “A saint; an angel.” The woman is objectified, sure, but Rossetti goes further to tell us that she is also distilled down to a single ideation. Her portrayal as queen, saint, angel is merely incidental since each representation conveys “the same one meaning, neither more nor less.”
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
This is perhaps the most striking line of the entire poem, as the speaker describes the artist as a sort of parasite. Tangentially, one might also think of the public’s growing fascination with the vampire that was occurring around the time of the poem’s composition.
By any means though, the speaker draws out the sensual, nearly sexual relationship of an artist to his or her work. The woman he portrays becomes objectified further, to the point of consumption. He paints his desire as a woman in a portrait, and then feeds his desire on the very work he creates. It’s a disturbingly autoerotic image, one which gives the poem its most potent critique of the objectification of women through art.
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
There are two things one should note here. First, that the speaker does her best to rehumanize the objectified woman in the portrait. The phrase “looks back on him” is a predicate that carries with it a sense of agency normally reserved for living beings and not paintings.
Second, one should also note that peculiar use of “true,” a modifier for “eyes" placed right in the middle of the line. That the woman in the portrait has “true kind eyes” implies that the artist has captured in his paintings something of the essence of his object. Although she might be an ideal, at least her eyes are “true”; they cannot be mistaken for anything but the eyes of whom he wishes to portray.
Fair as the moon and joyfull as the light;
There is a certain ambiguity as to which noun the phrase “fair as the moon and joyfull as the light” modifies. The proximity of the phrase to the pronoun “him” might immediately suggest that the speaker means to describe the artist in terms of the moon, but such a reading does not sit cohesively with the rest of the poem. The more intuitive reading would be that the phrase modifies the woman in the portrait, so that the realism with which the artist has rendered her eyes becomes nullified by the idealism present in the comparison of her beauty to the moon.
Fair as the moon and joyfull as the light
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Although both of these lines might be analyzed separately, it’s worth noting here Rossetti’s ability to craft a metaphor that spans several lines. Once she establishes the “moon” simile, Rossetti aptly generates a series of lunar contradistinctions. The woman is “fair as the moon,” meaning that she possesses a radiance, a “light”; this light is not “wan with waiting”—notice here how the alliteration connotes “waning,” the process by which the moon loses its brightness—or with “sorrow dim.” This simile is important because of its plastic nature, which allows Rossetti to stretch her comparison across the sonnet's entire final quatrain.
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
The anaphora of “not” here, along with the semicolon at the end of line 12, should signal that lines 12, 13, and 14 are connected, albeit subtly. The moon simile that Rossetti’s speaker used to describe the woman’s portrait here now works in tandem with the temporal shift of “not as she is, but was” to attribute the negations from lines 11 and 12 to the real life, current appearance of the woman.
Thus, the speaker implies that the actual woman portrayed by these portraits is “wan with waiting” and “with sorrow dim.” One might think of line 13 as a sort of double negative, which rectifies the negations that preceded.
Not as she is but as she fills his dream.
This final line of the sonnet acts as an explication of what has remained until now implied. The woman in these portraits stands as an ideation of the artist. The portrait is of her “not as she is” but rather “as she fills his dreams.”
