‘The Pale Sheeted Ghosts Go By’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Sleeper.'
‘The Sleeper’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, after Edgar Allan Poe. Poor photography all my own!
Amongst the dreamy history paintings and luscious colours at the Tate Britain’s Radical Romantics exhibition, a small pen and ink illustration caught my eye. The picture shows a woman in a heavy dress sitting on a windowsill. Her head lolls to one side, her hands rest in her lap and her long hair falls over one side of her face. Her shadow is stark on the blank wall to her right. The decorative lattice windows are open behind the sill to show, in the far background, the outlines of a city. In the near background, a set of shadowy figures crowd about the open window, gazing in at the woman. The image is framed in ink and surrounded by a rose pink wash. The title ‘The Sleeper’ appears below the image and the initials ‘EA Poe’ and DG Rosetti,’ are placed to either side of the window frame, indicating that the image is an illustration by Dante Gabriel Rosetti of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Sleeper.’
The illustration is done in pen and india ink and measures 9 x 4 inches – it’s a small, delicate piece. Given by Rosetti to the English portrait painter Lowes Cato Dickinson (a fabulous name), it was acquired by the British Museum in 1936. In his 1994 catalogue of Pre-Raphaelite Drawings in the British Museum, John Gere suggests that the passage of the poem being illustrated is as follows:
"I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by".
Writing on Rosetti and the Supernatural, Stephanie Chatfield notes that Rosetti was captivated by themes of the supernatural even before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and that he was enamoured of the ‘fantastic and macabre’ works of Poe, illustrating several of the American writer’s works. Tom Mabbott, editing Poe’s collected works, reflects that the poem considers a common theme of Poe’s, the death of a beautiful woman, who will never awaken. The speaker of the poem takes the role of the dead woman’s former lover, visiting her tomb to lament her loss and consider her eternal sleep.
What I found especially intriguing in this image is the role played by sightlines and views and I think these hold the key to Rosetti’s interpretation of the original poem. Whereas Poe’s lament was for a woman who seemed to the observing eye to be asleep but had really passed on, I think Rosetti’s drawing presents a more ambiguous viewpoint.
The viewer is interestingly implicated in this illustration since they take the place of Rosetti, drawing the piece, or Poe’s protagonist, looking upon the beloved figure. The viewer looks directly onto the sleeper, while the strange figures in the background can only see her in profile or from the back. The viewer is also the only one who sees the shady crowd of beings and the city beyond too, although they are lightly cross hatched or sketched, the viewer only really being presented with an outline of this mysterious place and its inhabitants. Although the viewer seems to share the physical space of the room with the figure of the girl, they are also removed from the space by the formal framing of the illustration. Therefore while the viewer perceives the scene, they are also met with questions about what they are seeing and what they believe they are seeing.
The onlookers gazing through the window are amorphous, undefined and ungendered creatures, framed here by the window. However, they also provide a strange, slightly earthy and comic note to the illustration, which jars with the delicate, dreamy figure of the woman on the windowsill. They have pinprick eyes and hints of menacing or shocked expression. These ghostly beings do not look at the viewer; they are fixed upon the figure inside and there is something claustrophobic about the way they are crowded about the window. Their singular attention suggests that the sleeper is not of their world, but has somehow strayed into it.
We might take the figures to be images of the dream seen by the young woman, but might they also be ghostly outlines populating a final resting place? The idea of the cityscape as a trope for Heaven had its roots in the Bible (Revelation 21:2 notes ‘Heaven is a city, it is called the New Jerusalem) and so Rosetti’s lightly sketched city might represent an afterlife.
The framing of the illustration suggests that the viewer looks in upon the dreaming world from their reality, whilst the world of ghosts is removed again from them again, beyond another stylised frame. The figure of the woman on the windowsill therefore seems like the turning point between a possible heaven, inhabited by these pale ghosts and the living world of the viewer. In Poe’s poem, the female figure lies in state on a flat tomb. Here, she sits up, in a dozing pose, for all the world, alive. There is a long tie about the girl’s waist, which reaches to the floor on her side of the window, seeming to tether her to the dreaming world, while tendrils of her hair float out through the window. Interestingly, the woman does not seem to see at all, unless what is shown here beyond her are the images of her own dreams.
There is something a little voyeuristic, both about the figures looking in through the window and the viewer looking in through the frame, their gazes both fixed on the young woman, and so mirroring each other, possibly reminding the viewer of the close ties between sleeping, dreaming and death.
Lines of sight and the seen and unseen here raise a complex and intriguing set of questions about the way the viewer might perceive our own reality and mortality. Rosetti here poses questions about dreaming, waking and death and uses sightlines and framing devices to explore the interlinked nature of these states and their relation to the supernatural. The illustration explores the shadowy and mysterious nature of dreaming and leaves the viewer with an uneasily ambiguous conclusion regarding the figure of the sleeper.
‘The Sleeper is currently on view; 2023 6 Apr-24 Sept, London, Tate Britain, 'Radical Romantics: The Rossettis'
NOTES:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48629/the-sleeper-56d22a05d79d5
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1936-0608-1
http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/dante-gabriel-rossetti-and-the-supernatural/
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe; Vol.1 Poems (1969) pp.179 – 189. (Ed. T.O.Mabbott).