Jenny Literary Elements

The speaker of the poem is one of Jenny's customers. He is a young, educated man who has more wealth than Jenny. He reached out to Jenny before the events of the poem because he was tired of studying and wanted to dance. He is a Londoner, like Jenny.

The point-of-view is first person.

"Jenny" is made up of 34 stanzas. The rhyme scheme is couplets, meaning that every two lines rhyme with each other. The meter is iambic tetrameter, which means there are four sets of un-stressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable: bum-BUM bum-BUM bum-BUM bum-BUM, and so on. The stanzas vary in length.

The speaker uses a simile when describing Jenny's eye color in Stanza 1: "whose eyes are as blue skies" (10).

The speaker uses a metaphor to compare Jenny's hair to gold coins in the same stanza: "whose hair / is countless gold incomparable" (10-1).

In Stanza 24, the speaker uses a simile to describe that the way that lust is stuck in the world is "like a toad within a stone" (279).

In Stanza 18, the speaker uses the metaphor of a tree to represent Nell's descendants: "And who shall say but this fair tree / May need, in changes that may be, / Your children’s children’s charity?" (209-11).

A recurring metaphor in the poem is one in which the speaker compares Jenny to a book. This metaphor first appears in Stanza 4 as the speaker exclaims as he regards her: "You know not what a book you seem, / Half-read by lightning in a dream!" (51-2). It appears again in Stanza 12, as the speaker thinks about the result of speaking out loud to Jenny: "Why, as a volume seldom read / Being opened halfway shuts again, / So might the pages of her brain / Be parted at such words and thence / Close back upon the dusty sense" (157-61). In these lines, the speaker questions the power of Jenny's mind and operates under the assumption that it has been ruined because of her profession. The speaker's words would open up the pages of Jenny's mind for the first time in a while, but they would quickly shut again.

The image of the book appears again in Stanza 22, but this time the book is a metaphor for sin and the rose is a metaphor for Jenny's purity: "a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look" (250-1). "Pure women" can't "look" at the book because it is so sinful that it would ruin their purity.

We find alliteration and assonance in the first line of the poem: "Lazy laughing languid Jenny" (1). This line repeats the sound of the "l" to cause alliteration and the vowel sound "a" to cause assonance.

There is also alliteration with the repetition of a "t" sound in "a man to-night to think of toads!" (299).

We find irony in "Jenny" when the speaker describes Jenny in a way that is the opposite of what we are expecting. For example, the speaker seems to conflate Jenny with a "wise virgin" when he notes how the light in her room stays on all night: "Your lamp, my Jenny, kept alight, / Like a wise virgin's, all one night!" (311-2). We know that Jenny is in fact not a virgin (because she is a prostitute) and the reason she has her light on all night is that she is entertaining a male customer in her room (the speaker).

Another moment of irony in "Jenny" is when the speaker compares Jenny to holy depictions of women in Renaissance artwork: "Fair shines the gilded aureole / In which our highest painters place / Some loving woman's simple face" (230-2). (An "aureole" is another word for "halo.") In these lines, it is ironic that Jenny's face is imagined in an aureole, because she is being placed within a scene of iconography or religious beauty even though she is a sinner.

Lyric poetry. Also technically a dramatic monologue (only one character expresses themselves throughout the entire poem).

Jenny's room in London during the Victorian period

Somber and sympathetic, though at times slightly mocking.

Even though the poem is named after Jenny, the speaker is the main protagonist. Jenny is mainly a passive character throughout the poem.

The main conflict in "Jenny" is between morality and sexuality. The speaker preaches for morality and speaks out against immorality, including prostitution. However, he also pays Jenny to spend time with him, thus economically supporting the institution of prostitution. Similarly, Jenny is immoral in her actions and yet the speaker compares her to a "wise virgin" at the end of the poem: "Your lamp, my Jenny, kept alight, / Like a wise virgin's, all one night!" (312-3). In this way, the poem holds an ambiguous stance when it comes to this conflict, and depicts the tension between morality and sexuality instead of choosing a side. The speaker and Jenny are both moral and immoral at the same time.

There is also an implied conflict between Jenny, a prostitute, and her foil Nell, a virtuous woman. They are so different from each other, the speaker emphasizes, that comparing them would "mak[e] a goblin of the sun" (205). Additionally, Nell must never come into contact with Jenny, because Nell's purity would be tainted by Jenny's knowledge of impurity if that were to happen.

The climax occurs at the very center of the poem as the speaker begins to compare Jenny and Nell. The stanza at the very center of the poem is a single line: "It makes a goblin of the sun" (205). As Lise Rodgers argues, this stanza is the "epicenter" of the poem as the speaker expresses his utter confusion about Jenny's sensuality: "he can be sure of nothing anymore, not even the most simple observations—of those that seemed simple up to this point." As the poem leads up to the climax, the speaker has the realization that Jenny sleeps "just as another woman sleeps!" (177). In the end, the speaker comes to the realization that the differences between Nell and Jenny are insurmountable. Something intrinsic to Jenny's being has been changed as a result of her immorality and she is substantively different from Nell.

The speaker makes an allusion to the Bible in Stanza 8: "Behold the lilies of the field / They toil not neither do they spin" (99-101). In the context of the New Testament, these lines are spoken by Jesus as he urges his followers not to worry about material goods because God will provide for them. The speaker puts a dark twist on this notion and eventually reveals that the lilies have died. Perhaps this is because Jenny is a sinner, and God has forsaken her. On the other hand, perhaps Rossetti's play on this passage from the Bible is a testament to the time and place Jenny and the speaker live in—an increasingly more modern London—where God cannot easily provide for humanity. Whatever the reason, the lack of resources is what caused Jenny to become a prostitute in the first place, thus perpetuating a never-ending cycle.

Love is personified at two points in "Jenny." In the first example, love actively increases Nell's good qualities because they have a good environment to grow in: "For Love himself shall ripen these / In a kind of soil to just increase / Through years of fertilizing peace" (199-201). Later in the poem, love is personified again: "Love at first sight is vague, until / That tinkling makes him audible" (375-6). In these lines, "love" is imagined as a man who is apparent through the "tinkling" of gold coins that the speaker leaves in Jenny's hair.

There are two instances of hyperbole in "Jenny." In the first example, the speaker uses hyperbole to emphasize how long ago the days of Jenny's innocence were. To him, the "old days" when Jenny was an innocent child are "much older than any history / that is written in any book" (127-8). This obviously can't be true, because individual human lives are relatively short when it comes to the history of mankind, and because there are history books that detail the beginning of mankind's history. In this way, the speaker uses hyperbole as a tool to show that Jenny's fall from grace has caused an insurmountable change that cannot be reversed, and her immorality has stretched on for long enough that it feels like it has been thousands of years.

The second example of hyperbole in "Jenny" is when the speaker shares the result of comparing Jenny and Nell. The comparison, he says, "makes a goblin of the sun" (205). This line suggests that any comparison between Jenny and Nell is as fruitful as comparing a goblin to the sun—in other words, useless. However, we know this is hyperbole because the speaker himself is comparing the two women and that comparison is nothing more than a comparison between a "pure" and an "impure" woman.

Rossetti uses onomatopoeia to describe the sound of coins near the end of the poem: "The tinkling makes him audible" (376).