Summary
From the first line of “In an Artist’s Studio,” the reader’s attention should immediately be drawn to repetition: iambic pentameter and the anaphora of “one” in lines 1 and 2 generate this effect, creating repetition in speech and rhythm. With these devices, the speaker means to point to something—namely, the myriad portraits of the same person sitting, walking, leaning, all repeated ad nauseam. By line 3 however, the speaker’s gaze finds a particular portrait, and she becomes enthralled. Here, the poem takes a broad scanning gaze of the room and narrows, focusing in upon a particular portrait. Interestingly, line 3 is when it becomes clear that the speaker is not a conventional lyrical “I”, but a first-person plural “we.” As the speaker's gaze narrows in on this particular portrait, the reader’s perception of the speaker broadens from the individual to the group. Here, a change in form points to a peculiarity in content; the shift in sonnet convention from the personal to the group goes to underline how, even though the artist has hung many portraits on the wall, they all appear to be “selfsame.” But, in line 3 the reader is given pause by the speaker. Although the woman portrayed must be the same, this particular portrait is different. Representation and repetition take a back seat to reflection, as Rossetti personifies this portrait of the woman: it is “her,” the woman, not “it,” the portrait, that is “found hidden just behind those screens.” As the sonnet moves into line 4 however, this personification wobbles with ambiguity, as the metaphor of a mirror reflecting back some true image of a woman, returning all of her loveliness, begins to prod at the nature of artistic representation. Is the woman on whom this portrait is based faithfully recreated, and if so, why is the canvas or “those screens” acting as mirrors? Finally, Rossetti means to ask, to whom does her loveliness return, to whom is it given “back”?
These questions are left hanging as the anaphoric repetition of “A” broaches in lines 5-7. Moving back to representation from reflection, the speaker again notices the repetition in each portrait of the woman. Although the artist has painted her “a queen,” “a saint,” and “an angel,” the speaker realizes something sinister: every portrait, no matter how different, still conveys “the same one meaning.” She, the woman of the artist’s paintings, stands as nothing except the object of his affection; “every canvass means the same one meaning,” because in the speakers’ eyes, the artist sees her as nothing more than a beautiful muse to be painted. No amount of realism or medieval symbolism can change the fact that, in seeking to represent her, the artist has in some ways distilled her and tried to possess her.
The speaker confirms this reading in the final sestet of the sonnet, when in line 8 she employs the striking image of the artist “feeding upon her face by day and night.” Here, the sonnet moves past the theme of objectification, suggesting that the relationship between artist and art contains something parasitic. As he creates his portraits, his desire only grows, and one remains uncertain as to whether this desire is to possess the woman he represents, or rather to represent more perfectly with each rendition. Either way, this amounts to the same result—an artist simultaneously consuming and consumed by his work, as well as an ever-increasing oeuvre of portraits presenting an idyllic, yet somehow multi-faceted portrait of a woman that is no longer as she is painted. Although lines 10-14 give us a wonderfully complex simile, a juxtaposition of the present-past of the portraits, and the absent-presence of the real woman (“not as she is, but was”) the reader cannot help but to wonder about the peculiar calculus with which the artist paints. As a final dose of anaphora hits with the repeated “nots” of lines 11-14, Rossetti implies that each painting, each representation (although an objectified and idealized version of a real woman) somehow bring the images that “fills his [the artist’s] dream” closer to reality.
Analysis
The first thing one should notice when reading “In an Artist’s Studio” is its Petrarchan sonnet form; the lines are written in iambic pentameter, and the poem has an end-rhyme scheme of abba abba cdcdcd. There is some question, however, as to whether the final rhyme in line 14 is actually a “d” rhyme—in which case it would have to be a half rhyme, since “him” and “dim” do not share a full rhyme with “dream”—or rather a return to the “b” rhyme of the long “e” sound earlier in the sonnet. Such a difference should not be dismissed as trivial; suppose one allows that line 14 actually shares the full “b” rhyme instead of the half “d” rhyme. Thus, the final line of the poem would find itself marking a shift back to the initial octave, where the last “b” rhyme occurred in line 7 and reads: “A saint, an angel; —every canvass means.” What should immediately stand out here in line 7 is the strange construction of a semicolon followed by an em-dash. The semicolon, although it comes after a complete phrase, leaves the sentence preceding without a clear conclusion. Meanwhile, the em-dash interrupts that very sentence, and what’s more, never definitively offers a closing em-dash, so that the sentence ending with the semi-colon never effectively closes. In other words, Rossetti’s sonnet leaves readers with a hanging semicolon.
If one allows for the “b” rhyme at the end of line 14, however, the reader finds an innovative way to complete the hanging semi-colon of line 7. Here, in line 7, the plural speaker of Rossetti’s sonnet, the “we” from line 3 seems to collapse into a more unified speaker, as the poem shifts from describing the woman in the portraits to musing on the artist who painted these portraits and his relationship to his art. The final “b” rhyme allows the speaker to broaden back out from a unified, somewhat omniscient voice, to the more broadly defined “we” from earlier in the sonnet. Now the final lines, “Not as she is…” can be seen as returning to describing the woman’s appearance in the portraits just as was occurring before the hanging semi-colon, as opposed to describing the woman in relation to the artist’s idealizations. In other words, one might make the claim that if the Petrarchan sonnet models itself on the conception of a room (remember, “stanza” = “room” in Italian), then the hanging semi-colon of line 7 functions sort of like a room left unfinished: it is a room with only three walls. However, the circuitous return to the “b” rhyme at the end of line 14 acts to close the sonnets walls by connecting two adjoining rooms with a shared door.
By playing with the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet, Rossetti allows for a more expansive conception on a form that, by convention, takes a singular lyrical speaker who expresses the inward experience of love. Instead, she begins with a third person plural speaker, interested in the display of affection that an artist conveys through another art form. Those in the room see the many portrait renditions of the woman hanging throughout the room, and the group collectively describes her. But as we reach the hanging semicolon, and the em-dash, the sonnet returns to a more inward, conventionally lyric speaker, one who can draw striking images.
Another important feature of Rossetti’s sonnet related to rhyme scheme is her use of alliteration. The repeated consonants in “wan with waiting” work to mime, sonically, the stretch of time. In other words, the repeated “w” sound slows down the reader’s perception of time. Once can feel the stretch of these three words, spanning two iambs, while in the same movement imagine the woman herself experiencing the passage of time as her portrait remains unchanged. Notably, alliteration functions as just another device for underlining the repetition that interests Rossetti—and obsesses the artist that is the subject of her poem. Iambic pentameter, first-word anaphora, and alliteration are all poetic devices that can serve a variety of functions, but in this case, they are used to primarily heighten and enhance the temporalities of Rossetti’s sonnet.
Rossetti, like her brother Dante and the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites, was an intelligent person who possessed a vast knowledge of the classics. Thus, it should come as no surprise that her poetry can often be dense with allusions. With “In an Artist’s Studio,” she does not withhold, but instead reimagines the ancient Greek tale of Pygmalion. When the speaker expresses the belief that the artist “feeds upon the face" of the woman he portrays, she calls upon the myth of Pygmalion, in which an artist becomes enamored with a sculpture he has created, until eventually that sculpture comes to life. Rossetti’s genius lies in subtlety, and here the implication is that, although he has fallen in love with his artwork, the woman in the portrait never comes to life. Instead, as mentioned in the summary, the artist creates something that approximates an image. Each time he paints a portrait, his desire for presenting her becomes more intense, while the real woman becomes further objectified. Turning towards the final line of the poem, one can see clearly that the artist’s affection is for a dream, and not reality. As the artist feeds off of the images he creates, he sustains his artistic endeavors at the price of missing out on the woman herself who ages, and becomes weaker, more wan.
The epic simile Rossetti establishes between the woman and the moon shows remarkable plasticity, with the “not as, but was” construction allowing her speaker to play with dual temporalities, otherwise less accessible. The speaker imagines that the woman looks back upon the artist with “true kind eyes,” eyes that are “fair as the moon and joyfull as the light,” two similes that stretch the final four lines of the sonnet. In the picture, the woman is not “wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim,” with the implication being that in reality, she has become those things, a realization made more explicit by line 13’s “not as she is, but was.”
