Antwerp to Ghent

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

General Description

Date: 1849
Rhyme: blank verse
Meter: iambic pentameter
Genre: epistle

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

The opening stanza consciously sets the poem as a meditation on phenomenal perception. In fact, the poem is very much an artist's poem, and even more a Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelite artist's poem with its insistence on attention to dynamic and volatile detail. The aesthetic argument is carried implicitly, as a stylistic event, until the end of the poem, when DGR makes his final dramatic allusion to Turner's famous painting of 1844, Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway.

Printing History

First printed in WMR's 1886 Collected Works, and collected thereafter.

Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: 29-1849.raw.xml