4 - Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ‘paired works’

Summary

In Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting a concept of poetic distance is precisely complicated by frequent recourse to paired works in the form of poems and paintings that rely upon a kind of redundant ekphrastic gesture, redundant in the sense that the visual artefact described in a poem is not lost to sight but remains to be seen and matched with its verbal counterpart or ekphrasis. In a context of paired works that focus desire in relation to dead female subjects, ‘The Blessed Damozel’ remains perhaps the best known of Rossetti's poems. It is also distinctive since the poem preceded the painting; usually Rossetti worked from painting to poem. He claimed to have written it before he was nineteen, ‘inspired by the Gothickry of Poe's Lenore and The Raven’: ‘I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth,’ he said in 1882, ‘and so I determined to reverse the conditions and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven’. Thereby, in conceiving the poem Rossetti shifts the expression of desire from a melancholy male lover to a dead female beloved. In ‘The Blessed Damozel’ a concept of poetic ‘doubleness’, as Armstrong, (Armstrong 13–14) has expressed it, emerges in the combination of a third person, speaking for the dead woman, with some first person utterance of her desire for her living beloved to come to her.

First published in The Germ in 1850, later revised for his volume Poems (1870), Rossetti's ‘most anthologised “signature poem”’ was influenced especially by his namesake Dante, whose Vita Nuova, which Rossetti translated into English, he adopted as a text of personal import, supplying repeated inspiration for drawings and paintings. The first version is superior to the second in its evocation of an extreme physiological sense combined with a profound philosophical abstraction:

The blessed Damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven:

Her blue grave eyes were deeper much

Than a deep water, even.

She had three lilies in her hand,

And the stars in her hair were seven.

The difficulty of rhythm in the third and fourth lines, the jarring effect of ‘even’ together with those adjectives connoting naturalism, ‘blue grave eyes’ is enhanced by the subsequent symbolic register of lilies and stars.