SOURCE: Bristow, Joseph. “He and I’: Dante Rossetti's Other Man.” Victorian Poetry 39, no. 2 (fall 2001): 365-88.

In the following essay, Bristow examines the sonnet “He and I” within the context of the sonnet sequence “The House of Life,” focusing on Rossetti's portrayal of sexuality in the poem.

Toward the largely despondent close of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “The House of Life” stands “He and I”: a “representation,” as David G. Riede observes, “of some sort of self-division and self-alienation” that appears rather “enigmatic.”¹ Composed in 1870, this intriguing sonnet—which results in a distressing physical encounter between the male poetic voice and his masculine other—may well look puzzling in a long two-part series whose reflections on heterosexual manhood have in any case seemed obscure to many scholars. “Biographers and critics alike,” writes William E. Fredeman, “have been tantalized by Rossetti's poem; it challenges their imaginations and taxes their ingenuities.”² Try...