“In an Artist's Studio” is a Petrarchan sonnet, while her “A Daughter of Eve” consists of three riming cinquains.
“In an Artist's Studio”
The speaker in Rossetti’s Petrarchan sonnet dramatizes the mysterious face that appears in all of the canvases of the artist; the first line, “One face looks out from all his canvases,” reveals that the artist is obsessed with one face that he paints again and again.
There are portraits of the same woman as she “sits or walks or leans.” There is one of her looking at herself in the mirror. She is as lovely as a queen in an opal dress or in a ruby dress. She also appears as an ordinary girl “in freshest summer-greens.” The woman appears in other paintings as “a saint” or “an angel.” The speaker then asserts that “every canvas means / The same one meaning, neither more nor less.”
In the sestet, the speaker describes the painter’s persona: “He feeds upon her face day and night.” The painter is obviously fixated on the woman whom he paints over and over again in different settings and in different clothes. Unlike a living woman, who might scowl at him from time to time, the face in the paintings always “with true kind eyes looks back on him.”
The speaker then claims that the painter is continually painting a fantasy, because this face appears “not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” The statement implies that the speaker knows who the woman is and can see that the painter has romanticized her to his own specifications.
“A Daughter of Eve”
As a daughter or descendent of Eve, who lost the paradise of the Garden of Eden through disobedience to an original Divine command, the speaker laments her human frailties. Her complaints are properly against her own nature, and she does not blame others for her own improper choices.
In the first cinquain of “A Daughter of Eve,” the speaker bemoans her lot, calling herself a fool for sleeping so late, and also “A fool to pluck my rose too soon, / A fool to snap my lily.” Laziness and lack of patience lead to despair.
In the second cinquain, she sorrows over not tending her garden properly; again, she has slept when she should have been working. The expression, “Make hay while the sun shines,” is applicable here. If one does not work and save during the good seasons of one’s life, the bad ones will come and find one unprepared.
And in the third cinquain, the speaker contradicts what must have been advice about looking to the future. She cannot expect “sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow” because she has lost “hope and everything.” She drearily complains that she can “No more to laugh, no more to sing,” because she “sit[s] alone with sorrow.”
Another Rossetti Article: The Thread of Life: A Christmas Realization
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