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Elsewhere I have attempted to read Rossetti's interrogative lyrics as "schemata for dramatic vocalization," (1) to correct what Culler observes as written criticism's "innate hostility to voice," its evasion of "the vocative." (2) In this essay I shall attempt to pursue this line of inquiry further by reading a group of Rossetti's more engaging poems as fictive imitations of what Austin identifies as "exercitives," speech acts in which the speaker attempts to exercise influence by, for example, "ordering, urging, advising, warning." (3) I shall approach these poems as fictive speech acts that through the dramatic context they evoke and through their tone and degree of urgency implicate a matrix of meanings, not exclusively bound to static images...
