SOURCE: "Rossetti's A Last Confession: A Dramatic Monologue," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring, 1967, pp. 21-9.

In the following essay, Howard evaluates "A Last Confession " as a skillfully-crafted dramatic monologue.

Critics have often suggested that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetic failures are connected with (or dependent on) his metaphysical problems, that there is no intellectual or emotional conviction behind his religious and supernatural symbols, which are then mere ornamentation, or behind his expressions of mystic union, which are then mere wishful thinking. Most recently and persuasively Harold L. Weatherby has analyzed Rossetti's failure as an inability to establish the proper relationship between form and content, as the poetic use of a spiritual and supernatural reality in which he did not believe.¹ Weatherby finds Rossetti intellectually conditioned by the scientific scepticism of his age but emotionally compelled to follow out his strong predilections for both the supernatural and the...