Every person decides on a way to live their life. They choose how they will carry themselves through life and with that choice they create opinions that will be used to make the decisions that are best for their lifestyle. In the House of Life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti shows three choices on how to live this mortal life on earth. Explaining these choices, he uses hypothetical situations of people living each way of life. Each poem offers to the reader a way to live during their time on this planet. This paper will explain and compare a life of careless merrymaking, of cautious fear, and of pursuing truth that Rossetti has proposed in his literature.
The first choice speaks of forgetting about the pointless struggles in life and indulging in drinking and lovemaking. It states that even if you try to make a difference you will make no impact on the earth. This statement implies that even though society and technology advance, morals and basic knowledge will only decay. This means you should not try to better the planet, but instead forget your problems and live for the moment. The poem says that many will work hard to achieve knowledge and great wealth and only do so in vain. Realizing their errors, others who care about the world around them will eventually choose a simple, careless way of life. Their lives will have been a pointless struggle and in the end they will only cease to be with no prize awaiting them.
Living in anxiety and fear is the second way of life. With several questions it asks if you will complete your own goals and God's goals he had for you by the time you are destined to pass from this life to the next. It talks of a person who hides his doubts of self purity and wears a guise of certainty. The man imagining that God will come and carry him to heaven, he speaks foolishly of what others do wrong, even though his own life is full of pestilence. The man is asked if he believes that God, the creator or life, will forgive his sins.