what are the three responses to the experience of love as depicted in the poem a triad?
Answers
Answer:mong the most illuminating of Rossetti's poems that explore possibilities of attaining a love-ideal in this world are "A Triad," "Dream-Love," "A Bride Song" and "A Birthday." The first two finally abjure any such possibility, while the second pair, at least on the surface, seem to celebrate a realization of the ideal. On closer inspection, however, we find that "A Bride Song" reflects a state of mind that is conditional. The poem exposes the psychology of an optimist in pursuit of ideal love, and its singer is therefore vulnerable to failure. "A Birthday" retreats in a different manner from any clear delineation of a permanently fu1filled passion in the real world. Moreover, the poem is significantly ambiguous in defining the nature (erotic or spiritual) of the described love.
The power of "A Triad" (1856) is indicated by the opposite responses the poem elicited from Rossetti's contemporaries. At one extreme, Edmund Gosse — who is certainly her most astute early critic — described the sonnet as "marvellous," and in his general review of her work (1893) queried incredulously, "Why has Miss Rossetti allowed this piece, one of the gems of the volume of 1862, to drop out of her collected poems?" ("Christina Rossetti," 216). At the other extreme, an anonymous reviewer in the Spectator sneered, "For voluptuous passion ... ['A Triad'] could have been written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti" (Quoted in Packer, 106). Whereas Gosse values the poem primarily for its aesthetic achievement, the Spectator's reviewer is clearly disturbed by its moral and social implications. Indeed, Jerome McGann praises the poem as an exposé of the sexual and social constraints on Victorian women, which undermined their integrity and prevented true fulfillment in love relationships (NER, 245). Although the sonnet certainly can be viewed as a critique of the facts of love for women in Victorian England, it does not initially invite a reading in its true historical contexts, but rather elides them. The poem portrays three types of female passion — all ultimately inaccessible to true fulfillment, two pursuing delusive pathways to it:
Three sang of love together: one with lips
Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;
And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow [105/106]
Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;
And one was blue with famine after love,
Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low
The burden of what those were singing of.
One shamed herself in love; one temperately
Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
One famished died for love. Thus two of three
Took death for love and won him after strife;
One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:
All on the threshold, yet all short of life. [Poems, 1:29]
Here the parodic use of the Petrarchan sonnet form, synonymous in English poetry with the statement of love ideals, serves to expose and undercut such ideals. One woman is a voluptuary who ambiguously "shamed" herself in love, thus proscribing the possibility of genuine fulfillment. The second, vain and calculating "like a hyacinth at a show," misguided in her goals and values, destroys all potential for genuine love by participating in a "soulless" marriage as a "sluggish wife." The third apparently attempts no gratification of her passionate impulses and "famished died for love." Yet all three are paradoxically "on the threshold" simply by virtue of their all-consuming compulsion to love. Significantly, all "sang of love together." Making up a pathetic but harmonious chorus, the three types of women combine to suggest the various impulses at work in every woman's quest for fulfillment in love. The poems final phrase, however, suggests that fulfillment would be impossible even to such impulses in combination: not each, but all "are short of life." One could infer from this poem that an ideal of fulfillment is attainable but would require a love match in which the woman is able to satisfy her passions without debasing herself as a voluptuary or a dependent. Yet the presence in the sonnet of the woman "blue with famine after love" is monitory. The ambiguous description can be seen not only to characterize a woman in vain pursuit of love, but also to insist that even "after love" — apparently a satisfactory experience — the lover remains unfulfilled (as does Laura in Goblin Market after eating the Goblin men's fruits). In short, not just these lovers, but all possible variations upon them, are doomed to be "short of life. "Ironically, such lovers turn to "song" — an expression of their frustration and victimization by false ideals — as a surrogate source of fulfillment and harmony in their lives.
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