SOURCE: "The Mirror's Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1991, pp. 333-49.

In the following essay, Miller offers an analysis of "the double mirroring structure" of Rossetti's poetry.

 And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of her self contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.1 

If Rossetti's Lilith looks only, speculatively, at her own image in the mirror, she also looks self-consciously aware of the looks of all those men whom she draws by her indifference into her fatal net. Rossetti's source here is that text from Goethe which he translated:

 Hold thou thy heart against her shining hair,
If, by thy fate, she spread it once for thee;
For, when she nets a young man in that snare,
So twines she...