SOURCE: "The Web of Eroticism in Rossetti's 'Troy Town,' 'Eden Bower,' and 'Rose Mary,'" in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer, 1987, pp. 333-44.

In the following essay, Wasko explores Rossetti's alignment of eroticism with themes of death, destruction, and deceit in three ballads written between 1869 and 1871.

In the introductory sonnet to The House of Life Dante Gabriel Rossetti suggests that the sonnet pays "tribute" or addresses itself to a threefold theme—life, love, and death, a focus which his ballads share.¹ Several of his early ballads, written between 1848 and 1854 when he was also busy translating the Vita Nuova, offer variations on a Dantesque vision of love as the creative, dynamic force in this triune complex. Thus love, as a source of heavenly salvation in "The Staff and Scrip," triumphs over death in a setting characterized by ornate medievalism. In the more earthy "Stratton...