IN HIS LATE PLAY, Sardanapalus (1821), Byron repeatedly presents questions of legacy, as the Assyrian monarch struggles to determine what his reign will mean to future eras. The drama ends with Sardanapalus and his beloved slave, Myrrha, atop a suicidal pyre meant to destroy the palace as the rebellious satraps close in–the pyre also to be the king's final monument, the act by which posterity will remember him. Indeed, he imagines his flaming destruction will produce “a light/To lesson ages, rebel nations, and/Voluptuous princes,” even though “Time shall quench full many/A people's records, and a hero's acts;/Sweep empire after empire, like this first/Of empires, into nothing” (V.i.440–45). In the event, Sardanapalus's last words on the matter come in the form of a satire on the Egyptian pyramids, those proud Ozymandian monuments which time has turned into sites of confusion: That physical monuments forget their record, that kine may be mistaken for kings, that the history of civilizations gets swept into nothing: these anxieties all would be rehearsed throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, be focused and intensified as the monuments of Egypt and Assyria found their ways into the British Museum and thereafter into Victorian popular consciousness. Once British archeologists began hauling the strange, half-mute remnants of these elder empires to the center of their own modern one, the melancholy comparisons began in earnest: as Assyria and Ancient Egypt are now, so shall we be. For Romantics like Byron and Shelley, the lessons of Sardanapalus and Ozymandias were primarily political and involved meditations on the fate of empires, as might be expected from these children of the Revolution writing within recent memory of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. The Victorians too looked at the ancient statuary mindful of questions of imperial history and moreover of historiography: how do we read these appropriated relics of the past and how will our own monuments be read in some later day? What have we forgotten and what will be forgot? If Byron had raised these issues, his Victorian inheritors worried them.

Indeed, the Romantic era marked the real beginnings of European archeological knowledge of Egypt and the Near East. Dominique Vivant Denon, French artist and archeologist, published the first drawings of Egyptian monuments in 1802; the Rossetta stone was deciphered by Thomas Young and Jean Francois Champollion between 1814 and 1832; and Claudius Rich (whom Byron mentions in Don Juan) began excavations of Babylon in 1808.¹

Thus, as happened in any number of contexts, the Victorian century witnessed the reorganization of Biblical knowledge by way of newly acquired data, in this case regarding imperial history; questions of the chronology and genealogy of civilizations were asked and answered afresh. Sardanapalus sees no contradiction in calling his own Assyria the “first of empires” and then presenting Egypt as so ancient that many of its basic records have been lost. In other words, Byron knew Pharaonic Egypt was the elder civilization by far, and he also believed that Assyria was the earliest empire, in the particular sense that it was the first to make territorial expansion via military conquest a defining virtue, one in which his Sardanapalus so plainly cannot share. Byron's play stands at the headwaters of the nineteenth-century fascination with Assyria as a dark mirror of England at a time when the nation took up its imperial project in earnest–when, as V. G. Kiernan writes, the army of Britain “was chiefly employed in expanding and policing its empire” (xii).² Egypt was a land of monuments to the dead–“tiresome old burying-grounds” (59; ch. 3) as Dickens's Rosa Bud calls them in The Mystery of Edwin Drood³–whereas Assyria came to represent imperialistic expansion at sword-point (particularly after the fierce bas-reliefs from Nineveh began arriving in London in the 1840s and 1850s), thus focusing Victorian concerns regarding the relation of violence to their place in the roll-call of empires. In short, the Assyrian artifacts were at the same time radically alien and disturbingly familiar, a sort of archeological return of the repressed.

In The Imperial Archive, Thomas Richards has shown how the British Empire under Victoria came to be apprehended as a vast network of information tending towards “a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and empire” (6). In his view, the British Museum was a primary locus of this utopian, archival convergence of knowledge and power and “was widely celebrated in imperial popular culture as the key to the mythologies of Victorian life” (15). However, the correlative of this imperial fantasy of universal comprehension is precisely the anxiety of ignorance that accompanied it. As Jerome McGann describes it in “The Third World of Criticism,”

There are always ghosts in the machine of empire, and even as the Victorians found themselves attending to the daily administrative whirr and clang, they looked before and after at specters of forgetting. The growing collection of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum seemed concrete reminders of “forgotten facts, other imaginations operat[ing] in all that we do and make,” thus providing ample matter for reflections and speculations on the fate of imperial knowledge.

Our case in point: in early October of 1850, the brigantine vessel HMS Apprentice arrived at St. Katharine's docks in London with a cargo of ancient Assyrian sculptures bound for the British Museum. Among these was a large relief statue of a human-headed winged bull, standing over ten feet tall and weighing approximately twelve tons–an impressive icon whose image was rapidly circulated and served to focus the Victorian reaction to ancient Assyria (see Figure 8).⁴

From the pages of the Illustrated London News and Punch to Robert Burford's “Panorama of Nimroud” (set up in Leicester Square in 1851) and the Nineveh Court at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, the image of the colossal Assyrian bull enjoyed an immense popularity in London of the 1850s.⁵ Indeed, when Byron's Sardanapalus was revived by Charles Kean at the Royal Princess's Theatre in 1853, Kean drew directly on the “wonderful discoveries made within the last few years…on the site of ancient Nineveh” in order “to convey to the Stage an accurate portraiture and a living picture of an age long since passed away, but once as famous as our own country for its civilization and power” (5). Thus reproduced and re-imagined, the winged bull became an imperial memento mori, the centerpiece of various fascinating spectacles that fused Eastern otherness and Victorian anxieties about England's future past.

The winged bull sculpture that arrived on the HMS Apprentice inspired two sets of documents with particular relevance to the issues of imperial history and historiography broached thus far–the first set by archeologist Austen Henry Layard (who discovered, excavated, and wrote about the Assyrian artifacts) and the second set by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poem “The Burden of Nineveh” stands at the center of our concerns here. In representing encounters with the colossal Assyrian bull, these texts by Layard and Rossetti perform certain moments of confusion and unintended ironic duplication that transform them into object lessons with regard to the appropriative imperial imagination. That is, unknown facts come to confront the texts and reveal their authors caught up in the processes of imperial history that they seek to describe.

In addition, Rossetti's “The Burden of Nineveh” registers its own literary belatedness, with particular regard to Romantic-era poetry of artifactual encounters, including Shelley's “Ozymandias,” Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the work produced out of the Romantic reaction to the Elgin Marbles. His revisions to the poem between its 1856 first publication and its inclusion in his Poems (1870) not only correct a characteristic and recurrent historical error, they also replace its playful, sophomoric attitude with a more reverential tone. Both of these revisionary programs are signs of Rossetti's particular concerns as a post-Romantic poet confronting a sculpted artifact from a vanished empire, first in an undergraduate literary magazine and next in his defining collection of works. One burden he shoulders in writing the poem involves the aesthetic differences between the antiquities of Greece and those of Assyria in the British imagination; another concerns the task of self-definition as a poet in relation\break to the literary past and his contemporary audiences. The texts of “The Burden of Nineveh” record Rossetti's characteristically Victorian negotiation of these claims. Ultimately, they reveal a process through which Rossetti–like Sardanapalus–learns to stop not caring about history and his place within it, a transformation from willful carelessness to the monumentalizing desires that produce the 1870 Poems–a volume itself predicated upon the digging up of buried relics: the body of Elizabeth Siddal and the sheaf of poems in her coffin.

THIS STORY begins almost a year before the colossal winged bull arrived in England, in the fall of 1849, when Layard had returned to Mesopotamia for another round of excavations. By November, the city of Nimrud had been fairly well cleared, and Layard had moved his team to its ancient neighbor, Kouyunjik, which contained the palace of Sennacherib.⁶

Soon Layard had opened several new chambers, and among the bas-reliefs he found there were two large murals representing the movement and placement of an immense slab of rock that had been carved into the shape of a human-headed winged bull (Figures 9 and 10). The images reproduced here were executed by George Scharf (1820–95), a well-known artist and archeological illustrator who collaborated with Layard and later became the director of the National Portrait Gallery.⁷ For Layard, viewing the original stones for the first time in the dim light of that chamber in Kouyunjik, it was undoubtedly a moment of uncanny recognition. For Scharf, who made these copies of the stones sometime later, it must have been much more so.

After all, Scharf had been the primary illustrator for Layard's wildly popular account of the Nimrud excavation, Nineveh and its Remains, written and published two years before (1847).⁸

In particular, the frontispiece images from the two volumes of this work were wholesale imaginative reconstructions by Scharf and W. L. Walton, based on Layard's narrative (Figures 11 and 12). These illustrations, entitled “Lowering the Great Winged Bull” and “Procession of the Bull beneath the Mound of Nimroud [sic],” show Layard overseeing the activity of Arab workers as they remove the colossal bull and transport it to the banks of the Euphrates where the vessel Apprentice would eventually collect it to take to London. Even cursory comparison reveals that the similarities between the two pairs of images are striking.⁹ In the Scharf illustrations of Layard's activities, the progression exactly reverses that depicted in the Kouyunjik reliefs, where the bull is seen being moved from the river's edge and hauled into place under the direction of the Assyrian king. As Layard wrote to Stratford Canning in 1850 (in words that could just as well have been Sennacherib's), “Three hundred men… dragged the monster in three days through every obstacle of mud and sand” (qtd. in Levine, 33n). Not only is the technology of the process virtually unchanged, but so is its political burden: in both sets of images, the winged bull colossus is a marker of power, large enough to require vast resources to have it placed in one's kingdom. Layard, a vice-regent of sorts from the new dominant empire, replaces Sennacherib (top left, Figure 9 vs. top right, Figure 11) and directs his men to carry away the spoils in a triumphal (if arduous) procession.

Such reflections bring to mind one more image, this one a relief found in Layard's earlier excavations at Nimrud (Figure 13): it depicts Assyrian warriors carrying off statues of Babylonian gods, presumably following the conquest of a city.¹⁰

The scene perfectly illustrates Walter Benjamin's remark in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: Like the Babylonian gods carried off by the Assyrians in this bas-relief– themselves literally the burdens of imperial history–the winged bull of Assyria gets carried off by Layard to London. The cultural treasures themselves bear mute witness to their changing contexts as they are passed from hand to hand while empires rise and fall.

In his narratives of the Nineveh excavations, Layard shows himself to be far from insensible to this idea. In fact, the representations of his activities are structured throughout by this tragic and ironic view of imperial history, a view affirmed most intensely when his images unwittingly echo the Assyrian ones in so marked and significant ways. For example, in his narrative of uncovering the Kouyunjik reliefs in the Discoveries (1853), Layard himself notes the convergence of the images rather blandly:

Immediately following this observation, Layard reprints an Egyptian illustration of a similar process of moving a colossal statue of a pharaoh (probably Osirtasen II) which is “far more ancient than any known Assyrian monument” (115). He notes the many similarities between the Egyptian and Assyrian methods of movement and representation, just as he has related his own British methods to the Assyrian.¹² Layard thus explicitly involves his work in a textual palimpsest of representations of imperial monumentalism.

In the earlier work Nineveh and its Remains (1849), Layard strikes this same note, in a more melancholy key, as he reports watching the rafts carrying the winged bull down the Tigris on its way to England, and says:

Here Layard reveals a characteristically Victorian interest in historical echo, coupled with a lingering and anxious fascination with the ruins of empire–things we will see in Rossetti's poem as well, and which were common to literary treatments of the Nineveh artifacts. For example, Frederick Bohrer cites an 1851 story by W. H. Stone, “The Nineveh Bull,” published in Dickens's Household Words (“Assyria as Art” 26–27). In Stone's work, the bull-statue itself narrates its journey from Nineveh to England and, like Layard and Rossetti's narrator, meditates on the transience of empires: Furthermore, M. T. Larsen compares Rossetti's work to Alfred William Hunt's 1851 poem “Nineveh,” which also reads the Assyrian sculptures under the sign of imperial–and Judeo-Christian–history: Hunt apparently refers here to the imperial “conquest[s]” by the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans which the colossal bull would have witnessed, although the lack of specificity suggests Britain's place in the “prophet-roll of empire” that will be lengthened and concluded only by the reign of Christ. Hunt's poem uses the colossal bull to imagine Assyria and England within an imperial continuum. Similarly, Layard's whole archeological project can be seen as a massive articulation of this imagination; and the rate at which his published accounts of it became best-sellers demonstrates that he was tapping a deep reservoir of fellow-feeling in mid-Victorian society. My sense is that a large part of the power of these texts lies in their somehow inevitable involvements with the imperial imagination they set out to document.

Ricoeur describes this uncanny phenomenon in his essay on “Appropriation,” in which he discusses the way knowledge of a particular sort emerges out of interpretive encounters with the culturally distant and historically alien. For Ricoeur, appropriation of the kind in which Layard's text participates with regard to the Assyrian artifacts is a deeply dialectical concept, one that involves a simultaneous “relinquishment.” As Ricoeur puts it,

In our own terms, Layard's appropriation of the Assyrian winged bull was both a literal and a representational appropriation–and in fact, involved a representation of that appropriation itself. All of this enjoins upon Layard's text a moment of relinquishment, by way of the Assyrian artifacts to which the text refers–that is, its “referential dimensions.” Layard's work, then, stands in a kind of allegorical relation to historical narrative generally. It enacts the process of appropriative representation in an extraordinarily literal fashion, by providing its images of the transport of the colossal bull to England. The subsequent appearance of similar images in the Kouyunjik excavation demonstrates the way historical facts of which a narrative is ignorant are nevertheless referenced by the narrative. Finally, they are referenced in such a way as to produce a revealing event of discourse that gives the reader new capacities for comprehending the narrative and his or her relation to it.

MINDFUL OF THIS MODEL of the way historical narrative works, we may turn to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's response to the same Assyrian bull statue: a poem entitled “The Burden of Nineveh.”¹³

Rossetti began writing it in 1850 some time around the 20th of October–that is, a few weeks after the artifacts arrived in London–but it was not published until 1856.¹⁴ The poem presents itself as a record of the poet's encounter with the monument as it was being hauled up the steps of the British Museum. Three intertwined strands of meditation dominate the poem, one anti-imperialist, one religious, and one historiographical. These come together in the last few stanzas, where, like Layard as he watched the Assyrian bull begin its journey down the Tigris, Rossetti perceives his own moment in relation to others on the timeline of imperial history: Here Rossetti imagines a future Australian empire, brought to immediacy by Rossetti's repeated use of the word “now.” Its archeologists, gathering relics from the ruins of England, may well wonder “which came first,” London or Nineveh, and Of course, the irony of the Australian's confusion cuts both ways, satirizing the historical ignorance of those who appropriate objects from alien cultures, while also suggesting that such errors may reveal deeper truths: perhaps London does bow to the same “god of Nineveh” in its devotion to imperialism and its delusional gospels of progress and materialistic opulence dependent on the labor of the oppressed and the colonized. Rossetti ends his poem by asking, “Was this thy God,/Thine also, mighty Nineveh?”, implying that John Bull and the Nineveh bull are all but congruent.

Rossetti's narrative of the various histories that have surrounded and will surround the colossal bull thus appropriates the alien artifact as a figure for imperial hubris and the confusions of history it engenders. Moreover, the poem is particularly revealing on this matter because it enacts the theory its narrative espouses. At several points in the first published version of the poem, Rossetti himself confuses the order of the Egyptian and Assyrian empires; that is, he makes the same error he imagines the Australians making with respect to London and Nineveh.¹⁶

For example, in stanza eleven, Rossetti writes: “Even to some/Of these thou wert antiquity”–but the Assyrian “Bull-god” was not antiquity to the Egyptians. In fact, the reverse is true: Egypt was far older, particularly if one measured from the period of Assyrian history that had produced the great bull in question (Ashurnasirpal's reign, about 865 B.C.).¹⁷ Rossetti's careless tone here is like that of Rosa Bud, when she calls the Egyptian pyramids “Tiresome old burying-grounds” and asks of its gods and relics, “who cares about them?” Both involve a kind of willful blindness to history, a youthful refusal to be concerned with the dead. Byron's Sardanapalus has conducted his reign in a similar attitude, summarized in his motto, “Eat, drink, and love; the rest's not worth a fillip” (I.ii.252), of which he says, “those few lines contain the history/Of all things human” (248–49). Dickens's Rosa is much more interested in eating candy and teasing her fiancé Edwin than thinking of the “burying-grounds” of Egypt, and, at the conclusion of the 1856 “The Burden of Nineveh,” Rossetti speaks of a similar dedication to life's present pleasures, one that involves a rejection of the dead and thus predicates his historical confusion: This is the voice of Rossetti in his twenties, taking Nineveh for his purposes only so long as it pleases; he presents himself nonchalantly mistaking and abandoning the “Bull-god” and its “doleful laws,” which are also the laws of chronology, of factual responsibility.

However, as Rossetti revised the poem years later, in 1869, this attitude undergoes significant diminishment (marked not least by the excision of the stanza quoted immediately above). In a letter, his brother William Michael pointed out the chronological confusion of Egypt and Assyria, chiding Dante Gabriel gently by saying, “But you know Egyptian civilization and art are far older than Ninevite, and I think the impression from your passage runs counter to this fact” (Rossetti Papers 454). Dante Gabriel responded, “This I had thought of already and it troubled me” (Letters 2: 725). Not only is the error itself a problem, but the “impression” given by the historical carelessness of the poem troubles the older poet, who now finds himself preparing the volume of poetry that he plans to be his monument. Almost two decades have passed since he first saw the colossal Assyrian bull and began writing “The Burden of Nineveh,” and Rossetti's attitude towards history –both literary and imperial–has lost much of its insouciance. Faced with the texts of his youth, he adopts a corrective posture: prior to the publication of the 1870 Poems, several passages that asserted or implied the chronological priority of Assyrian civilization had to be revised.

Before examining these in detail, however, we should note that there is some Biblical precedent for this confusion in Isaiah 19.23: “In that day there shall be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.” Here, Isaiah prophesies that the Egyptians and Assyrians will reject their gods and vow allegiance to the Lord of the Israelites. Rossetti's poem is essentially a cunning revision of this prophecy, as he depicts a time (“now”) when Egyptian and Assyrian artifacts–“they and their gods and thou”–have traveled the broad imperial highway to become “All relics here together,” along with the Christ that Victorian Londoners seem to have put away. Thus Rossetti's confusion of the chronology of the two empires can be read as an accidental deepening of this aspect of the poem's satiric character.

In addition, an important cluster of issues related to Rossetti's poem is invoked by a related Biblical allusion that marks this passage. Rossetti speculates upon the British Museum mummies, saying, “there might indeed have come/One out of Egypt to thy home,” and his language here echoes several statements in the Bible drawn together in Matthew in the story of Christ's birth:

In presenting Herod's persecution of the Christ child, Matthew refers to the prophecy of Hosea, where Jehovah speaks of the nation of Israel and the events of Exodus in this manner: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt” (11.1). As is programmatic in the New Testament, Matthew's narrative essentially appropriates the Old Testament prophecy, transforming it into a prefigurative description regarding Christ's individual experience rather than a retrospective one regarding that of all Israel. In alluding to this crux, Rossetti equates Jesus with “those mummies in the room/Above,” and with the Assyrian bull, which he calls “the mummy of a buried faith.” All are relics now, and what does it matter “Whether of Thebes or Nineveh,” of Bethlehem or Nazareth?

Embedded in Rossetti's allusion to the Biblical “out of Egypt” passage is a larger Victorian debate regarding the historicist interpretation of sacred cows. We have seen that his confusion of Egypt and Assyria illuminates the very burden of imperial history that the stanza discusses; similarly, his reference to the Bible locates the problem of reading religious artifacts of the past by modern lights, which is precisely what the “The Burden of Nineveh” does. During this period in England, issues of Biblical interpretation were under strong historicist pressures from a variety of sources that included Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835–36), Lyell's Elements of Geology (1838), Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Seeley's biography of Jesus, Ecce Homo (1866)–and Layard's archeological work as well (1847–63).¹⁸

The resultant anxieties can be gauged in the appearance of Benjamin Jowett's then-scandalous, Broad Church “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” published in Essays and Reviews (1860), in which he addresses the meaning of the “out of Egypt” passage.¹⁹ Like other liberal Divines of the period, Jowett positively insists upon historicism as the only sound method of reading the Bible, and he objects to both literalist and symbolic approaches which allow us to “find” in scripture whatever we seek, based on our modern ideological preconceptions. “Interpret the Scripture like any other book,” he demands (echoing Coleridge), considering the individual characters and historical circumstances of its various authors; we will therefore find “a spirit and not a letter” shining through its many texts (375–77).²⁰ One corollary of this hermeneutical approach would be a recognition that the New Testament frequently makes use of the Old: its writers make applications of the prophets' words rather than identifying the original meanings of those words as they claim to do. Jowett looks forward to a time when “educated men” will be unable “to believe that the words ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son'…were intended by the prophet to refer to the return of Joseph and Mary from Egypt” (418). According to Jowett, the Matthew passage does not discover the meaning of the Hosea prophecy (via interpretation) but rather ascribes a meaning to it (via appropriation).

Elided in Matthew's appropriation of Hosea are certain foundational events in the history of the Jews, namely bondage in Egypt and liberation at the hands of the Lord.²¹

In redefining God's son as Jesus rather than Israel, the Matthew passage reclaims the logic that led to Passover and Exodus: “Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord: Israel is my firstborn son. I said to you, “Let my son go that he may worship me.” But you refused to let him go; now I will kill your firstborn son”’ (Ex. 4.22–23). That is, the calling of the Israelites “out of Egypt” depended upon their identification as the collective “firstborn son” of Jehovah. Matthew must re-imagine this in order to read Hosea as predictive of Christ rather than retrospective upon the Jewish nation. For Jowett, this approach to the Bible, which Matthew (in a sense) authorizes, leads modern readers to relativistic appropriations in the service of ideological preconceptions and to the blurring of historical specificity that should otherwise ground the interpretive act.

What's more, as with Rossetti and Layard, the earlier history surfaces to confront the later, appropriative text–in this case, the Gospels of the New Testament. In effect, Christ's crucifixion is part of a sacrificial-retributive pattern reaching back to Jehovah's announcement to Pharaoh via Moses: “Now I will kill your firstborn son.” When the Matthew text places Jesus as the one called “out of Egypt,” it literally prepares him for the slaughter–which is precisely the point. If Jesus has always been Jehovah's firstborn son, then he becomes the equivalent sacrifice to atone for, or retrospectively require, the visitation of death upon the firstborn of Egypt. This is a version of the “relinquishment” that Ricoeur identifies as accompanying acts of narrative appropriation: a revelation enjoined upon the text by way of its transumptive reference to the past. Coming as it does in the midst of a poem about the interpretation of religious artifacts from the past, Rossetti's allusion to the “out of Egypt” passage invokes the Jowett controversy over historicity and scripture, just as his attention to the Assyrian bull statue brings Layard's work and its ironic duplications on board. “The Burden of Nineveh,” thus freighted with questions of narrative appropriation and history, requires our careful attention, in that small phrases contain worlds of reference that engage that poem's larger concerns and anxieties. In this case, his revisions to the poem are important insofar as they focus on the historical confusion we have identified as central to its meaning.

FOLLOWING ITS 1856 PUBLICATION, “The Burden of Nineveh” appeared next in the 1870 Poems, which went through many proof stages as Rossetti worked and reworked its details and broad outlines.²²

Of initial interest to us here are the changes he made regarding the chronology of Egypt and Assyria. He received the earliest sets of proofs for the 1870 Poems at Alice Boyd's home, Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, in 1869, on or about the 18th of August (the so-called Penkill proofs).²³ Immediately he began the work of revision, exchanging frequent letters with his brother William Michael and with Swinburne.²⁴ On August 23, William Michael commented on the questionable “Nineveh” lines in a letter to Rossetti, quoted earlier:

This statement, literally accepted, is no doubt true: but you know Egyptian civilization and art are far older than Ninevite, and I think the impression from your passage runs counter to this fact.

Here, William Michael tactfully admits that there may in fact be “some” mummies in the British Museum that are younger than the Assyrian bull but thinks Rossetti's erroneous chronological assumption unavoidable in the poem as it stands.

Several days later, on August 27, Rossetti responded to his brother's objections:

Rossetti seems to have written this letter after he had begun to make revisions to the proofs. The reading he offers to William Michael here emerged as Rossetti's attempt to bring the chronological relations into line at the foot of page 16 of the Penkill proofs (copy A) by rewriting the lines entirely.²⁵ Here and elsewhere in this essay, Rossetti's penned additions to the proofs are printed in boldface type: Rossetti's first thought was to say “but then some/Of these were thine antiquity.” He tried substituting “thou heldst” for “were thine” but still was not satisfied. He then put the lines in the form of a question, in keeping with the many other interrogatives of the poem: “but were not some/Of these even then antiquity?” But apparently the “these even then” sequence was too labored, and he settled on “were not some/Of these thine own antiquity?” Furthermore, in the second (B) copy of the Penkill proofs, Rossetti made similar alterations. Again writing at the bottom of page 16, he adds the following: The final reading of the passage that appeared in the 1870 Poems was identical to the one indicated in this copy of the proofs.²⁶

In his initial letter, William Michael also calls attention to stanza 15 on page 18 of the proofs (and present in the 1856 published version), in which Rossetti had called the Assyrian empire a “Delicate harlot, eldest grown/Of earthly queens.” This clearly would no longer do, and he made the following changes on the proof page, here editing the printed text directly to remove the idea that Assyria was the “eldest” of empires:

Finally, a chronological correction was required to stanza 9 at the top of page 16. In the initial version, Rossetti had stated that the statues of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods in the British Museum were now confronted with “An elder, scarce more unknown god/… from Nineveh.” He considered changing this by removing “Egypt” but eventually settled the matter by replacing “An elder” with “Another.” The A proof sheet shows him trying out a number of possible revisions: Ultimately, he decided just to replace “An elder” with “Another” and leave the line referring to Egypt as it stood. Having done so, Rossetti had straightened the matter of chronology in his poem; the new volume appeared in late April of 1870 bearing a text of the “The Burden of Nineveh” that incorporates the revisions we have traced. Taken together, the two versions of the poem reveal a trajectory from youthful carelessness to respectful homage, from the iconoclasm of the early days of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the monument-building that produced Poems (1870).

LIKE KEATS who had (apparently on purpose) presented “stout Cortez” rather than Balboa first sighting the Pacific ocean on that peak in Darien, Rossetti in 1856 had (apparently by accident) travestied the facts of imperial history.²⁷

In addition to the emendation of this error for the 1870 volume, Rossetti's revisionary task involves placing “The Burden of Nineveh” in explicit dialogue with its Romantic precursors, as he prepares to issue it as part of Poems (1870), the volume he knew would determine his reputation as a poet. Many of these revisions amount to a programmatic alteration in tone, from the deprecating humor of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine version to the higher seriousness and darker ironies of the later text. As David Riede remarks, “The most immediate effect of the altered tone is that the irony must now be taken more seriously–the tone of the whole poem is changed” (89). By 1870, for example, gone are the wonderful satiric portraits of contemporary Londoners: “cold-pinched clerks,” “small clergy,” “misses” who “titter in their stays,” and “Antique-students” who eat “cheese and hunch” and ask “Whether the great R.A.'s a bunch/Of Gods or dogs, and whether Punch/Is right about the P.R.B.” (stanzas 7–8).

In fact, the 1856 Magazine version offered itself as a self-mocking piece of parody, not unfit for the entertainment of a middle-class Victorian audience who also loved Punch, a publication Rossetti was clearly reading at the time of the poem's composition. Punch's several comments regarding the Pre-Raphaelites came in the early 1850s, virtually in tandem with its publication of various parodies of Layard's Nineveh sculptures, parodies to which “The Burden of Nineveh” owes a debt.²⁸

For example, the opening lines of the 1856 version of Rossetti's poem maintain the precise tone of Punch's poetic offerings: Compare, for example, the opening lines of a poem entitled “Grand Demonstration of Public Feeling in the British Museum,” published in Punch in 1852, where the subject is also an encounter with the Nineveh bulls: The various relics and statues of the museum come to life, including “Mummies” who “rush'd from their places” (10) and “LAYARD's Bulls next advancing, and prancing, and dancing” (13) which Memnon then attempts to worship: The confusing proximity of “Isis or Ibis” in these lines, the frequent rhymes, and the general mockery of “the overcramm'd ark” recalls Rossetti's sense of the British Museum as a “polyglot… Babel,” where “Isis, or Ibis” can no longer be distinguished.

Rossetti would alter his opening stanza considerably for the 1870 Poems, in which, rather than complaining of his “lot… to jot and blot and rot” amidst this “Babel,” he claims he has “lingered o'er the prize/Dead Greece vouchsafes to living eyes,–/Her Art for ever in fresh wise/From hour to hour rejoicing me” (2–5). In other words, a Keatsian inspirational visit to the Elgin Marbles is introduced to serve as prelude and counterpoint to the encounter with the colossal Assyrian bull. Thus the poem dramatizes its own belatedness as a poetic response to an art object of the past; as a Victorian Englishman, Rossetti is both an imperial and a poetic latecomer in this regard. One telling symptom is the poem's divided attitude towards the winged bull, particularly obvious in the 1870 version. For example, Florence Boos finds “The Burden of Nineveh”

In poeticizing his reaction to the Assyrian bull, Rossetti oscillates between reverence and satire, as a kind of uneasy appropriation of the Romantic attitude.²⁹ As Boos indicates, the poem functions as both an “Ode on an Assyrian Statue” and a critique of imperial hubris reminiscent of Shelley. Rossetti's revisions serve to make this oscillation more pronounced, augmenting the high seriousness of both its wonder and its ironic critique and thus orienting its reference more directly to its Romantic forebears (Blake, Shelley, Keats).³⁰

The addition of the Elgin Marbles to the 1870 version of “The Burden of Nineveh” signifies most clearly Rossetti's appropriation of the Romantic ekphrastic mode.³¹

He presents his own encounter with the Assyrian bull as the sequel to seeing the Greek statuary, thus underscoring his poem's status as a Victorian revision of a Romantic topos. In his career-making volume, the 1870 Poems, it makes sense that Rossetti would raise the stakes of the poem to engage directly with the literary past as well. However, to bring in the Elgin Marbles is also to invoke the profound division between the English response to them and to the Assyrian monuments. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” Keats presents his heart as assailed by the conflicting claims of “Grecian grandeur” and “the rude/Wasting of old time” (12–13). Unlike the figures on his urn, the Parthenon statues have been ravished by time and thus invoke thoughts of mortality even as they (for him) represent the immortal beauty of art. They have become “a shadow of the magnitude,” a sublime but attenuated synecdoche for the glory that was Greece, and therefore perfectly assimilated to Romantic Hellenism, which saw that nation as a rudely wasted –but still glorious–version of its ancient self.³²

For many Victorians, the Assyrian sculptures seemed by contrast only primitive and idolatrous, even ugly. In fact, as Layard's discoveries began arriving in London, authorities found little to admire and worried that these works might corrupt English taste. Bohrer recounts the 1853 testimony of Sir Richard Westmacott (sculpture advisor for the British Museum) in Parliament, where he was asked, “Do you think the liberal introduction into the British Museum of works of earlier and oriental art has had any effect upon the interest felt by the public with regard to the Elgin marbles?” and, more pointedly:

In such rhetoric, the palpable otherness of the Assyrian monuments is opposed to the deep continuities between the Parthenon stones and English self-conceptions, particularly with regard to taste. Compare, for example, the rhetoric of an 1816 House of Commons report on the Elgin Marbles: “by a more constant examination of those divine models, a purity of taste and accuracy of judgment grows up in the mind of the student” (qtd. in Scott, 131). “We are all Greeks,” said Percy Shelley (Prose 332); but when Rossetti asks at the conclusion of his poem, “Was this thy God,–/Thine also, mighty Nineveh?”, he makes a similar and more surprising move with a reversed, satiric thrust.³³ So, even as Rossetti's reference to the Elgin Marbles places his poem as a successor to the Romantic tradition, it underscores a radical difference in predicates: the Elgin Marbles reminded Englishmen of the undying grandeur of the Western creative spirit, whereas the Assyrian stones were an occasion for ascribing pride, tyranny, and blindness to the East. Insofar as Rossetti's poem turns upon making connections between London and Nineveh, it requires an ironic, knowing tone at odds with Romantic sincerity.

In addition, the exhumation of his wife Elizabeth Siddal and the retrieval of the manuscripts buried with her placed an additional ironic burden upon the volume and may have induced particular revisions to a poem about an excavated thing, a “mummy of a buried faith,/Stark from the charnel without scathe,/… Such fossil cerements as might swathe/The very corpse of Nineveh” (1856; lines 16–17 and 19–20). Like the Assyrian bas-reliefs in which Scharf must have recognized a prediction of his own work, these words would have sounded uncanny to Rossetti in 1869 around the time of the exhumation, as he sat before the proof sets that included newly typeset versions of the once-buried poems.³⁴

One index of this can be found in the stanza immediately following this mentioning of “the charnel,” “cerements,” and a “corpse,” in which the narrator meditates upon “Some colour'd Arab straw-matting,/Half-ripp'd,” which “was still upon the thing” (1856; lines 21–22). The poem's language describing the Assyrian bull evokes Lizzie's uncharneled corpse; this subsequent passage brings to mind the manuscript pages themselves, woven “half-ripp'd” texts that had been disinfected, copied into type, and destroyed after their emergence from the coffin. Poignantly recalling (for him, now) Rossetti's own youth and long engagement to Lizzie when these pages of poetry were written, the narrator wonders, The questions simultaneously evoke Keats's “Ode to Psyche,” a poem that informs so much of Rossetti's work: The “pale-mouthed prophet” finds an echo in the “purple mouths” of the “brown maidens,” like Keats's “virgin-choir” making their “delicious moan.” In addition, this “colour'd Arab straw-matting” associated with “maidens” may also allude to Shelley's “Alastor” (1815), in which the wandering poet meets “an Arab maiden” who “spread her matting for his couch” (lines 129 and 131).

Thus Rossetti's “straw-matting” points variously backward: as ancient remnant, to an eroticized Assyrian past; as a figure for the buried pages, to Rossetti's personal history as artist and husband; and as an object of poetic address, to the rhetoric of Romanticism. In revising this stanza in 1869, Rossetti changed only the first two lines, which became, “The print of its first rush-wrapping,/Wound ere it dried, still ribbed the thing” (1870; lines 21–22). At one level, he seems to have realized that “straw-matting” or “rush-wrapping” would not have survived from antiquity and that the woven material he had seen on the “Bull-god” was more likely modern packaging for its move to England. In the revised version, then, all that remains is the “print,” now that the textile has disintegrated–a situation mirroring Rossetti's own in looking over the printed pages made from the disinterred, destroyed manuscripts. His revision makes a ghost of material once buried.

“THE BURDEN OF NINEVEH” therefore comes to embody Rossetti's (characteristically mid-Victorian) anxieties regarding the literary and historical past; it is freighted with its own latecomer status, both as a poem and as a record of the deeds of empire. We have measured this burden by examining the ways Rossetti's work (like Layard's) is ringed round with ironies. Particularly with regard to its Assyrian entanglements, his text functions like a kind of difference engine, via its referential dimension, demonstrating the gap between the Western imagination and the historically and culturally alien, even as it discusses that gap from an apparently knowing position. We might think of De Man's concept of representation as “a blinded vision that has to be rectified by means of insights that it unwittingly provides” (106). Yet, here this process occurs via historical reference rather than within the linguistic order, so Ricoeur's theoretical perspective regarding appropriation seems more to the point. In his terms, Rossetti's chronological error occurs as a sign of relinquishment, wherein the narrative that has appropriated the Assyrian artifact has been undermined by the chronicle to which it refers.

Yet perhaps “undermined” isn't quite right–because that error and its implications enact the poem's explicit concerns, and figure its anxieties. Rossetti's poem suggests that the greatest burden of Nineveh is the historical ignorance that shadows cultural treasures such as the great bulls, which are inevitably spoils of empire, be it Assyrian, Egyptian, English, or Australian.³⁵

To borrow Patrick Brantlinger's phrase, imperial power is always governed by this “rule of darkness.” The poem returns again and again to the “recovered shadow” of the Nineveh bull that has been brought to the strange light of London after so many centuries in the darkness beneath the Mesopotamian sands. Now, that shadow falls “On London stones” and adumbrates the arrival of this ignorance Rossetti explores, even while those “secret histories, forgotten facts, and other imaginations” are operating within the terms of his exploration. In a very literal sense, then, Rossetti's response to the colossal Assyrian bull grows out of the basic contradiction of the museum itself, which offers each appropriated relic to be understood even as it confounds them all in a physical proximity that occludes temporal and geographical distances.³⁶ In the stanza where Rossetti confuses the order of the Egyptian and Assyrian empires, he writes that “now, they and their gods and thou” are “All relics here together,” and asks, “now/Whose profit? Whether bull or cow,/Isis or Ibis, who or how,/Whether of Thebes or Nineveh?” (stanza 11). The question recalls Byron's “kings,/Or kine… their monarch, or their ox-god Apis” and Rosa Bud's “Isises and Ibises,” and is less financial than ideological, implying that only through some historical narrative will these relics acquire meaning and thus become engines of edification, or moral profit; that is, their profit will be told, not as a tally but as a tale. “The Burden of Nineveh” imagines several such tales, but in the end it retains its worried doubt over the value of such histories in the wake of Romanticism and in the midst of the new imperial center. Furthermore, these doubts linger to haunt the museum and the poem, as the “recovered shadows” of the many artifacts, the Nineveh bull and the Elgin Marbles included, merge into confusion their ghostlier demarcations–in the crowded rooms of Great Russell Street and in the thronged mind of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.