SOURCE: Markley, A. A. “Rossetti's ‘The Portrait’.” Explicator 57, no. 2 (winter 1999): 83-85.

In the following essay, Markley investigates the function of the monologue in “The Portrait.”

In his poem “The Portrait” (1870), Dante Gabriel Rossetti focuses on the attachment of a grieving artist to a portrait of his dead lover and provides a complex exploration of the idea of artistic expression as an act of self-reflection. Rossetti's exploration of this relationship is strengthened by his subtle references throughout the poem to the Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo, an ancient story that fully explores the implications of self-love in its themes of the reflection of image and the echoing of sound. In addition, the poet alludes to contemporary dramatic monologues that also explore the relationship between a viewer and an object of art. Once he presents his readers with a familiar situation in which a speaker gazes at a portrait...