'Fears and Scruples' by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem.   Browning did not read it as we read it now. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

— Jorge Luis Borges, "Kafka and his Precursors"

Following the above trajectory for tracing literary influence, this essay will argue that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Sudden Light" is a 'Borgesian precursor' of the modernist epiphanic moment. Jerome McGann reads the poem as "treat[ing] one of [Rossetti's] most deeply desired beliefs, the idea that true lovers occupy an eternal space that defines their relationship, and that this fact gets registered by déjà vu experiences" (Rossetti Archive). Although McGann is correct about Rossetti's conclusion, his brief prescriptive reading ignores the lens through which many readers will inevitably experience the poem: the modernist epiphanic moment. After the work of, among others, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, it is difficult to read "Sudden Light" without applying an epistemological framework that was not yet fully theorized at the time of its composition.

One of the central concerns of literary modernism is the textual representation of time and space as perceived in the individual consciousness. The attempt is, as Woolf said of Joyce, to "reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain" ("Modern Fiction" 107). Such a project is unrelentingly subjective; the individual perceives the world in its infinite detail and somehow makes sense of this in the finite framework of their own consciousness. Most often the 'meaning-making' process fails to transcend the quotidian character of life-hence the copious minutiae of Bloom's inner-monologue in Ulysses. However, in the modernist framework, the subjective 'making sense' of the world that individuals constantly do is augmented from time to time by moments of heightened clarity and meaning-epiphanies, 'moments of being,' Incarnations, and the like. During these times, the recipient of this heightened awareness is somehow brought closer to the way things 'objectively' are; they see more clearly, access some version of spiritual 'truth,' or come to understand something important about themselves or the world around them. These moments tend to exhibit two characteristics:

1. they are delivered in time and space ("this grace dissolved in place" as Eliot calls it in "Marina"), and

2. they offer some brush with the supernal, some closer approximation to things as they 'objectively' are.

The following passage from Woolf's To the Lighthouse is an excellent example:

It paled beside this "rapture," this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight, lying level across the floor (48).

As Lily Briscoe's response to Mr. Bankes' affectionate gaze at Mrs. Ramsay, this moment is entirely dependent on the particulars of time and space for its occurrence. Furthermore, its characterization as a 'heavenly gift' connotes a temporary unity of the objective and subjective, implying Lily sees things as they really are and that the ensuing 'rapture' results from this exulted (if fleeting) clarity.

"Sudden Light" follows a similar pattern. The title itself implies a kind of spiritual enlightenment, an 'illumination' similar to Lily Briscoe's later discovery that "great revelation perhaps never [does] come," but that "instead there [are] little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark." (To The Lighthouse 161). The topos of light conflated with insight evokes St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-4), hinting that the 'sudden light' or 'illumination' experience originates somewhere beyond the limits of human insight and awareness (ie. the supernal). In the same way that Lily Briscoe's 'rapture' is a 'gift from heaven,' Rossetti's moment of 'sudden light' glimpses the eternity of love as it will outlast human life. Both experiences amount to moments "in and out of time" (as Eliot cast it in "The Dry Salvages") during which God's timeless power is dispensed in the finitude of human time and space. For Eliot, human brushes with the divine follow the Christian model of Incarnation, the idea that God chose to become human and enter the physical world to bring about its salvation. Rossetti's rendering of the 'moment in and out of time' is certainly less orthodox than Eliot's, but remains approximate in its appeal beyond human finitude for transcendental and eternal significance.

Beyond being comparable in their cosmology, Rossetti's first two stanzas of "Sudden Light" and Eliot's "Dry Salvages" both attempt to access the epiphanic moment through a catalogue of the physical and sensory conditions that bring it about. Rossetti describes "the grass beyond the door, / The sweet, keen smell, / The sighing sound, the light around the shore," while Eliot ranges through.

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lighting
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
("The Dry Salvages")

Both catalogues only amount to "hints followed by guesses," as Eliot continues, because the epiphanic moment offers only a clouded vision of supernal truth. As such, these lines are descriptive rather than diagnostic; they leave their speakers in relative states of uncertainty.   As Rossetti puts it, "I have been here before / But when or how I cannot tell." This enigmatic uncertainty continues in the second stanza as well ("You have been mine before- / How long ago I may not know"), which continues the catalogue of physical and sensory conditions. Following the modernist pattern, this heightens the expectation of illumination in the third stanza, the moment of supernal insight or heightened awareness. That Rossetti wrote two versions of the final stanza complicates the interpretive question as to whether or not this is accomplished.

"Sudden Light" was published in 1863 (and subsequently in 1870) with the following conclusion:

Then, now, - perchance again!.
O round mine eyes your tresses shake!
Shall we not lie as we have lain
Thus for Love's sake,
And sleep, and wake, yet never break the chain?

Although the capital 'L' gestures vaguely to the idea of love as transcendental, the most powerful insight the speaker manages is an injunction to passionate activity in the present ("shall we not lie...?").   Little else in this stanza communicates the continuity of love as a supernal power beyond death-there is no suggestion that the "chain" which conjecturally 'won't be broken' extends beyond the regular 'sleeping and waking' of life. As such, the 1863 version only fulfils one element of the modernist pattern: the occurrence of the epiphanic moment in time and space.

It is likely that this lack of firmly implied transcendence was the source of Rossetti's discontent with his original ending. According to William Michael Rossetti, "Sudden Light" was probably written in 1854 (Rossetti Archive). A letter from D.G. Rossetti to William Allingham of that year includes a draft copy of "The Birth Bond," a poem that communicates a similar insight to the 1863 conclusion of "Sudden Light":

Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love,
That among souls allied to mine was yet
One nearer kindred than I wotted of.
O born with me somewhere that men forget;
And though in years of sight and sound unmet,
Known for my life's own sister well enough.
(Letters I, 214)

As in the 1863 conclusion to "Sudden Light" (written in 1854), the love relationship in this draft copy of "The Birth Bond" extends to life only; while this love is somehow destined to occur, there is no solid indication that it will exist eternally. Although his good friend Walter Deverell had died earlier in the year (February 1854), Rossetti's thoughts around the time of the composition of "Sudden Light" and "The Birth Bond" were predominantly on the prospect of earthly love-he had met Elizabeth Siddal five years before and his letters reveal his preoccupation with her during the second half of 1854. Considering the guilt Rossetti experienced in the years following Siddal's death, it is not surprising that his thoughts about love became more particularly focussed on transcendence than immanence. In an 1871 letter to William Bell Scott, Rossetti outlined the following cosmological theory in relation to a poem he was composing at the time ("The Cloud Confines"):

I cannot suppose that any particle of life is extinguished, though its permanent individuality may be more than questionable. Absorption is not annihilation; and it is even a real retributive future for the special atom of life to be re-embodied (if so it were) in a world which its own former ideality had helped to fashion for pain or pleasure. (Letters III, 989).

While Rossetti's letter goes on to modify his initial conclusion to "The Cloud Confines," making it less certain that there is some eternal 'truth' to know, the theory outlined above provides the cosmological basis for Rossetti's 1881 strengthening of "Sudden Light":

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

The change expands the moment of 'sudden light' from the specifics of particular romantic entanglement in the 1863 version ("O round mine eyes your tresses shake!") to the general human experience of "our lives our love" in the thralls of "time's eddying flight." The longing of the 1881 ending — for love to be restored in "death's despite" — asserts Rossetti's intimations of immorality far more powerfully than in the 1863 version, suggesting some sort of 'absorption' into the supernal truth of love as outlined in his letter to Scott. As such, the 1881 version builds to a greater unity-the question of the opening line ("Has this been thus before?") looks back to the physical and sensory experiences which brought about the epiphany in the first place, absorbing the totality of the experience into "one delight" that will recur throughout eternity.

The effect of Rossetti's edits is a closer semblance of the modernist epiphanic moment. However, although the poem (especially in its revised version) seems to indicate Rossetti's epistemology as commensurate with those of the modernists, it does not necessarily follow to say that Rossetti was a formative influence on writers such as Woolf and Eliot. The connection between Roessetti and the modernist epiphanic moment, rather, is 'Borgesian' in that when reading "Sudden Light" through the lens of modernism we are likely to recognize, at least in part, what we have grown accustomed to recognizing. The experience is not far removed from a déjà vu, in which the slightly disoriented reader comes to ask-like Rossetti's speaker in the 1881 conclusion-"has this been thus before?" A careful reading of "Sudden Light" reveals that the answer is yes.

Michael Buma graduated from Calvin College in 2001 and is currently a doctoral student in literature at the University of Western Ontario.

*Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802. www.heldref.org. Copyright © 2005.

Borges, Jorge Luis. "Kafka and His Precursors."  Selected Non Fictions. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Hypermedia Archive. "Sudden Light." Ed. Jerome McGann. University of Virginia. 1 June 2004.   <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:2020/archive.html>.

Eliot, T.S.  "The Dry Salvages." Four Quartets. London: Harcourt Brace, 1971.

Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 4 vols. Eds. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-7.

Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction." Collected Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1966.

____________.  To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981.

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