Asier Escrivà Gonzàlez

Dr. Vicente Forés López

# 14217 Poesía Inglesa de los Siglos XIX y XX Grupo A

17 January 2008

Final Paper:

“Between Two Brothers: Dante Gabriel and Christina”

Click here to show Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Blessed Damozel”.

Click here to show Christina Rossetti’s poem “In an artist’s studio”.

Biographical References:

§ Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti were sons of Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, “an Italian poet and scholar who emigrated to England. (…) His support for Italian revolutionary nationalism forced him into political exile in 1821, and he lived in Malta for three years before settling in London in 1824. He held the post of Professor of Italian at King's College London from 1831, as well as teaching Italian at King's College School, until failing eyesight led to his retirement in 1847”. From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 08 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriele_Rossetti. Gabriele Rossetti was also father of the “critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti”. From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 04 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti.

§ Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one the called “Victorian Poets”. He was also a painter and illustrator, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as we will see forward. According to his early life:

“Dante attended King's College School from 1837 to 1842, when he left to prepare for the Royal Academy at F. S. Cary's Academy of Art. In 1846 he was accepted into the Royal Academy but was there only a year before he became dissatisfied and left to study under Ford Madox Brown. In 1848 he, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais began to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group attracted other young painters, poets, and critics; William Michael Rossetti acted as secretary and later historian for the group. In 1849 and 50 D.G.R. exhibited his first important paintings, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini. At about the same time he met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's assistant, who became a model for many of his paintings and sketches.” From The Victorian Web. 04 January 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/dgrseti13.html.

“Following the exhibition of Holman Hunt's painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt's friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by the then still little-known John Keats. Rossetti's own poem "The Blessed Damozel" (his most famous work) was an imitation of Keats, so he believed that Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti was always more interested in the Medieval than in the modern side of the movement. He was publishing translations of Dante and other Medieval Italian poets, and his art also sought to adopt the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians.” From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 04 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti.

“In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices.” From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 04 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti.

“After an engagement lasting nearly ten years, Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal were married barely 20 months before she died from a self-administered overdose of morphine on February 10, 1862. Although suicide was suspected, the coroner generously decided that her death was accidental.” From The Victorian Web. 04 January 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/dgrseti13.html.

After his wife’s death, he decided to leave his actual house:

“…Rossetti moved to 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a large house on the Thames which he shared with Swinburne and also (occasionally) his brother William Michael Rossetti and George Meredith. He continued painting and writing poetry, gaining patrons enough to become relatively prosperous. Another of his models, Fanny Cornforth (who appears in Bocca Baciata, The Blue Bower, and Found ), became his mistress and housekeeper (…). In the late '60s Rossetti began to suffer from headaches and weakened eyesight, and began to take chloral mixed with whiskey to cure insomnia. Chloral accentuated the depression and paranoia latent in Rossetti's nature, and Robert Buchanan's attack on Rossetti and Swinburne in "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871) changed him completely. In the summer of 1872 he suffered a mental breakdown, complete with hallucinations and accusing voices. He was taken to Scotland, where he attempted suicide, but gradually recovered, and within a few months was able to paint again. His health continued to deteriorate slowly (he was still taking chloral), but did not much interfere with his work. He died of kidney failure on April 9, 1882.” From The Victorian Web. 04 January 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/dgrseti13.html.

§ Christina Rossetti was not only a great English poet, she became also one of the most important women in the Victorian era.

“…one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Although her fundamentally religious temperament was closer to her mother's, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.” From The Victorian Web. 04 January 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/rossettibio.html.

“Rossetti was born in London and educated at home by her mother. In the 1840s her family was stricken with severe financial difficulties due to the deterioration of her father's physical and mental health. When she was 14, Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown which was followed by bouts of depression and related illness. During this period she, her mother, and her sister became seriously interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement that was part of the Church of England. This religious devotion played a major role in Rossetti's personal life: in her late teens she became engaged to the painter James Collinson but this ended because he reverted to Catholicism; later she became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley but did not marry him, also for religious reasons.

Rossetti began writing at age 7 but she was 31 before her first work was published — Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). The collection garnered much critical praise and, according to Jan Marsh, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death two months later led to Rossetti being hailed as her natural successor as 'female laureate'. (…)

Rossetti continued to write and publish for the rest of her life although she focused primarily on devotional writing and children's poetry. She maintained a large circle of friends and for ten years volunteered at a home for prostitutes. She was ambivalent about women's suffrage but many scholars have identified feminist themes in her poetry.” From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 04 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti.

“She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894.” From The Victorian Web. 04 January 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/rossettibio.html.

§ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais were the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:

“The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite".” From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 04 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Raphaelite_Brotherhood.

New members joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens. Christina Rossetti was not an official member of the Brotherhood, but she was associated with their ideas and influences.

Analysis, Commentary and Contextual References:

· The Blessed Damozel:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote the poem when he was only 18, but the work was not only a verse writing, it was also a painting. The Blessed Damozel is known as one of DGR’s “Double Works”, as he was a Pre-Raphaelite. The picture (click here to watch, image taken from The Rossetti Archive. 08 January 2008. www.rossettiarchive.org) is an illustration of the poem itself, and also, on the base of the frame, includes the first four verses of the poem. The Damozel is Rossetti’s own version of Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice: the “Gentilissima”, the main character in Dante’s Vita Nuova and the guide of the spiritual odyssey in La Divina Comedia (for more information visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Portinari).

The social context of the work has several opinions, here are good examples:

“The Blessed Damozel is one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's earliest poems (1846), inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's Raven (1845). Since Poe, Rossetti felt, had done the utmost to represent the grief of the lover on earth, Rossetti determined to show the yearning of the loved one in heaven. The painting was done thirty years later, after Rossetti had turned from the flat, intricately patterned illustrations of literary subjects that had characterized his early art (a good example is his drawing for The Lady of Shalott, done for Moxon's Illustrated Tennyson) to huge sensual portraits of women, such as this one. The painting conveys the sensuality and the pictorial details of the poem, but not its medieval quality.” From The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 08 January 2008. http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_3/damozel.htm.

“The Blessed Damozel is DGR's single most important literary work. It constitutes DGR's most important (and evolving) interpretation of his Dantean inheritance. He was involved with it for nearly the whole of his working life: in 1847 he produced the first textual state of the work, a poem that went through a great many subsequent revisions and changes. Then in 1871 he began work on the pictorial rendering of the subject, and he continued to work on studies and different versions of this picture for the next ten years. As a “double work of art” it is unusual in DGR's corpus because the poems preceded the pictorial treatments.” From The Rossetti Archive. 08 January 2008. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1847.s244.raw.html.

When we look the picture we can appreciate that there is a clear difference between the two sides of the painting: the upper part, with four different women, and the lower, with a man lying on the ground and looking up. In the upper side we see a great woman, the damozel, which is in Heaven (line 2 “from the gold bar of Heaven”), she looks sad (line 3 “Her eyes were deeper than the depth); she holds a bunch of flowers (line 5 “She had three lilies in her hand”) and wears many stars in her hair (line 6 “seven stars in her hair”). We find some contradictions when comparing the poem description of the damozel and the picture: she has “seven” stars in her hair, but in the picture there are visible only six; her hair is supposed to be “yellow ripe corn”, but in the picture it’s not yellow, it’s brown; etc. Those differences are NOT mistakes, but issues that try to explain that the picture is not realistic, but aesthetic. The picture does not describe the poem, or vice versa, they must be combined each one:

“The "three lilies in her hand" and the seven "stars in her hair" are details added purely for aesthetic value and have no meaning whatsoever. Rossetti was criticized for images such as "the gold bar of Heaven" which make heaven appear overly materialistic. Images describing the "blessed damozel" such as her hair being "yellow like ripe corn" convey an incredible materiality. This poem and its corresponding painting refer not to reality, but to an imaginary world where female bodies are representations of the speaker's own subjective needs and desires.” From The Victorian Web. 09 January 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/byecroft14.html#damozel.

Down the damozel, we can see three feminine faces, which represent three angels: the author tries to explain us that the upper part of the picture represents the Heaven. So, the damozel is the personification of Heaven. Furthermore, the man who is lying on the ground in the lower side of the picture must be the personification of Earth: the difference between the life/earth/alive man and death/Heaven/Damozel is clear visible. There are many other aspects which we make consider: “the ripe corn”, is the brown “autumn” colour in poetic language; the concept of “autumn” is not only referred to a climatic period of the year, it also symbolizes several aspects related with “death”, if we consider that “winter” is the time of “death”, “spring” is the time to “born/reborn” and “summer” is “maturity”, “autumn” becomes the previous step, the “preparation to death”; of the concept of time (in this case “days”) compared between the two worlds: Heaven and Earth. For example, the poem shows that “Albeit, to them she left, her day/ Had counted as ten years.” What the author wants to tell us is that “her day counted as ten years” or “one day of her in Heaven are ten years of him in life”, so she looks like she has grown only one day since she really died ten years ago. Life changes your time, but time is different in Heaven.

The man lying in the ground must be the own author, because he is looking to the place where the damozel is, that is, Heaven. He could be probably dreaming with his “lost lover”. He is dreaming his blessed damozel is Heaven: “The foundational Rossettian subject of the emparadised woman is in this case imagined as dreaming downward, as it were, to her lover who remains alive in the world. This imagination of the damozel is here structured as the “dream-vision” of the lover himself.” From The Rossetti Archive. 11 January 2008. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1847.s244.raw.html.

Symbolism is frequent in this poem. We can also find lots of Biblical references, like “the gold bar of Heaven”, “a white rose of Mary's (Virgin Mary) gift”, “One of God's choristers”, “By God built over the sheer depth The which is Space begun” and

We two,' she said, 'will seek the groves
       Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
       Are five sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
       Margaret and Rosalys.

Here we have other arguments:

“(…) The theme of Rossetti's poem is said to have been taken from Vita Nuova, separated lovers are to be rejoined in heaven, by Dante. Many people say his young vision of idealized love was very picturesque and that the heavens Rossetti so often painted and those which were in his poems were much like Dante. The heaven that Rossetti painted in "The Blessed Damozel" was warm with physical bodies and beautiful angels full of love. This kind of description of heaven was said to have been taken from Dante's ideas. Others said that Rossetti's heaven was described so in "The Blessed Damozel" because he was still young and immature about such matters. In other words, he had not yet seen the ugliness and despair that love can bring, which he experienced later in his life after the death of his true love Elizabeth Siddal.” Unnamed Summary of “The Blessed Damozel”.12 January 2008. http://swc2.hccs.cc.tx.us/rowhtml/rossetti/summary.htm.

“In "The Blessed Damozel" Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustrates the gap between heaven and earth. The damozel looks down from Heaven, yearning for her lover that remains on earth. Through imagery Rossetti connects the heavenly damozel to things of the earth, symbolizing her longing but emphasizing the distance between the lovers. She stands on God's rampart, which is:

So high, that looking downward thence
       She scarce could see the sun.
It lies in Heaven, across the flood
       Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
       With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
       Spins like a fretful midge.

Though distanced so far from the earth, her hair is "yellow like ripe corn." Rather than declare her ethereal beauty, Rossetti depicts the damozel's appearance through earthly detail. She may be far from her lover and fixed in Heaven, but her appearance and her gaze, like her heart, is grounded with her beloved on earth. Even Rossetti's description of the space between the two lovers is an attempt to unite Heaven and earth. He calls the ether a "flood" and the rampart above the ether a "bridge," both images of inherently earthly qualities — water and the manmade construction that crosses it. The passing of day and night belows her are "tides" tinged by flame and darkness. The earth is so far from heaven it looks "like a fretful midge" — small, agitated, and a sharp contrast to the peaceful stillness of Heaven.

This picture of the space separating the lovers mirrors Rossetti's description of the damozel's eyes. Just as the ether is a flood, her eyes "were deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even." The damozel sees only the distance from her beloved, and through most of the stanzas, she prays for and imagines their union together, rather than immersing herself in Heaven. Heaven is fixed, while the earth spins fretfully, and in an ironic twist, the damozel's gaze is fixed upon the earth. Rossetti creates a poignant sense of her longing by depicting her gaze and her heavenly position through earthly images, and in effect, he gives the reader a glimpse of the heavens from the damozel's unreachable position.” From The Victorian Web. Parallel Imagery in “The Blessed Damozel”. Adrienne Johnson '05, English/History of Art 151. Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, and Decadents, Brown University 2004. 11 January 2008. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/johnson5.html.

The poem is divided into several groups of verses, with a total of 142 verses. The structure is not totally clear, but the rhyme always follows the same way: A-B-C-B-D-B-E-F-G-F-H-F-I…/ a-b-c-b-d-b-e-f-g-f-h-f-i…/ I-II-I-III-I-IV-V-VI-V-VII-V-VIII…/ i-ii-iii-ii-iv-ii-v-vi-vii-vi-viii-vi-ix…: it has the structure of a ballad (Rhyme: a4, b3, c4, b3, d4, b3. Meter: sestet, iambic; alternating trimeter and tetrameter. Genre: ballad.) From The Rossetti Archive. 11 January 2008. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s244.rap.html.

· In An Artist’s Studio:

The title suggests that Christina Rossetti is talking about something she felt in “an artist studio”, probably the artist may be her own brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, because we have seen that he was a pre-raphaelite, very admirable in the use of combining poetry and painting. She uses the title of the poem to offer the audience the place where the action of the text is about. We can appreciate two individuals: “One face looks out from all his canvasses” (a static individual) and “One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans” (a dynamic one). But in line 3: “We found her hidden just behind those screens”, one of the characters shows the audience as a woman, who is “hidden behind screens”. If we suppose that the artist’s studio is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s studio, the most probable thing is that the woman might be one of Rossetti’s female models of his pictures, and one of the most important models is the artist’s life was Elizabeth Siddal: “Rossetti's relationship with Siddal is also explored by Christina Rossetti in her poem "In an Artist's Studio". From Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. 10 January 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Siddal.

When Elizabeth died, she became some kind of Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the best example of this idea is that the author used Mrs. Siddal’s model to create the picture called “Beata Beatrice”, a “double” homage: to Dante Alighieri and Elizabeth Siddal.

Going back to the poem, we can also appreciate some kind of envy or jealousy in lines 5-7 “A queen in opal or in ruby dress, / A nameless girl in freshest summer greens, / A saint, an angel”. She acts like she has become an obsession to Mrs. Siddal similar to Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rebecca”. For her, the figure of Mrs. Siddal was “a saint, an angel”, we find another similarity in Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel”: the feminine beauty of the damozel corresponds to this argument, the Victorian Beauty of Woman. In lines 9-10 “He feeds upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him”, Christina shows that the relation of characters goes further than a simple or professional relationship, they are lovers who kiss themselves (“feeds upon her face”) “by day and night”.

The hidden location of the author often tells the audience that Christina Rossetti was not very happy with her brother’s relationship with Elizabeth Siddal. The concept of possession is important here:

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The main topic of the poem could be “the painter's tendency to confuse the real woman with an image in his mind and on his canvas.” From http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~mcuddy/ENGB02Y/JaneMorris.html.

The poem is divided into four stanzas: the first includes four verses: A-B-B-A (canvasses – leans – screens – loveliness); the second four too: A-B-B-A (dress – greens – means – less); the third includes three: C-D-C (night – him – light); and the last one three too: C-D-C (dim – bright – dream). There are a total of 14 verses, and the complete rhyme scheme is A-B-B-A-A-B-B-A-C-D-C-D-C-D. It has the structure of a Sonnet.

Conclusion:

To finish the paper, we have to focus the huge variety and complexity of different topics which include the Victorian poetry: the female situation, the concept of time and beauty, the imperial society, the economical power, the religious ideology, the scientific and technologic changes, etc.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti were only two single individuals in that society, but the were not only simple “bricks in the wall”, they were revolutionaries who fought for their own ideals, with the creation of societies like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and they would become new artistic models of future artists, overall poets.

We are their fortunate inheritors, we are now able to achieve their knowledge and to interpret it from our point of view to get new ways of expressing the most powerful element in human nature, which is the artistic instinct.

Ø And angels meeting us shall sing…

Bibliographic and Web References:

· Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE)

· Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriele_Rossetti

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Raphaelite_Brotherhood

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Portinari

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Siddal

· The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org

· The Norton Anthology of English Literature: