This paper is about the brother couple: Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a comparative studio of their poems and lifes. First, we are going to talk about the brotherhood where Dante was and Christina was associated to.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, also known as the Pre-Raphaelites, was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. 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. The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status, because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting and imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art.

The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations:

  1. To have genuine ideas to express;
  2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
  3. To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote;
  4. And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

(Extract from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-raphaelites)

They thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S LIFE AND WORKS

Life was very different for one brother and another. For Christina’s, being educated solely at home demonstrates the way the Victorians allowed girls far fewer educational opportunity than boys, no equivalent of either the public school or the university existed for women until quite late in the century. Christina was born in December 5th 1830 in London and educated at home by her mother and all her brothers studied outside the home was Latin; they did not attend a university.

 

In that period of time, 'The Household General' was very common. The mistress of a household is comparable to the Commander of an Army or the leader of an enterprise. In order to run a respectable household and secure the happiness, comfort and well-being of her family she must perform her duties intelligently and thoroughly. For example, she has to organize, delegate and instruct her servants which is not an easy task as many of them are not reliable. Another duty is that of being the "sick-nurse" who takes care of ill family members. This requires all qualities a woman worthy of the name should possess in the 19th century. A very special connection existed between women and their brothers. Sisters had to treat their brothers as they would treat their future husbands. They were dependent on their male family members as the brother's affection might secure their future in case their husband treated them badly or they did not get married at all. Also, while it was very easy to lose one's reputation, it was difficult to establish a reputation. For example, if one person in a family did something horrible, the whole family would have to suffer the consequences. Women always were basicly the generals of a proper household.

Rossetti began writing at age 7 but she was 31 before her first work was published — Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death two months later led to Rossetti being hailed as her natural successor as 'female laureate'. The title poem from this book is Rossetti's best known work and, although at first glance it may seem merely to be a nursery rhyme about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, the poem is multi-layered, challenging, and complex. Rossetti continued to write and publish for the rest of her life although she focused primarily on devotional writing and children's poetry. She was opposed to war, slavery, cruelty to animals, the exploitation of girls in under-age prostitution and all forms of military aggression.

In 1893 Rossetti developed cancer and then died the following year due to the cancer on December 29, 1894.

            Talking about her literary career, Christina Rossetti was never completely a part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nevertheless, her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) was the first unalloyed literary success the Brotherhood enjoyed. Since she began with such success, both her brother and her publisher were eager that she follow it up at once, but her next volume of poetry, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, was not ready until 1866. It sold well, but the critics saw at once that the best poems in it were not quite the equal of the best in her first collection. In fact, "Goblin Market," one of her first poems, remains her best.

            The female poet's history during the pre-Raphaelite period consisted of sentimental poetry, the secular love lyric, and the devotional lyric. Rossetti appropriated and refined the secular literary tradition, where women were powerful symbols but not agents of power. The power of the female symbol found in Christian ideology enabled Rossetti to carry out a radical transformation that would empower the weak. In the scriptures lay the promises and myths of restoring the deprived self, making whole the fragmented self, and restoring the dispossed self. Rossetti transforms these traditional metaphors in her work.

            Themes of frustrated love and tension between desire and renunciation characterize her more serious work. Separated lovers often appear in her poems, but there is another strain in some of her poetry that can be called gothic: goblins, serpents, wombats, ratels, and lizards turn up in her verses.

(Extract from http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/crov.html)

            Perhaps she realized that she was unable to write anything better than "Goblin Market," so it is explained by her turn away from poetry to children's stories and religious materials. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book came out in 1872, and after 1875 she was very much involved with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. One of her poems was The Daughter of Eve:

 

 

 

 

 

 

A DAUGHTER OF EVE

A fool I was to sleep at noon,

And wake when night is chilly

Beneath the comfortless cold moon;

A fool to pluck my rose too soon,

A fool to snap my lily.                                                                     5

 

My garden-plot I have not kept;

Faded and all-forsaken,

I weep as I have never wept:

Oh it was summer when I slept,

It's winter now I waken.                                                                  10

 

Talk what you please of future spring

And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:--

Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,

No more to laugh, no more to sing,

I sit alone with sorrow.                                                                    15

 

(Poem from A Choice of Christina Rossetti’s Verse)

Analysis of A Daughter of Eve

 

 

In “A Daughter of Eve,” Christina Rossetti describes life, where she missed good times. She shows regret by referring to herself throughout the first stanza as a “fool.” In the first two lines, she says that she fell asleep at noon and woke “when the night was chilly.” “Noon” is usually when the day is warmest, brightest, while the chilly night is very negative, especially when she describes the “comfortless cold moon.” In lines 9 and 10, she repeats again the same structure, but instead of using the times of day, she uses the seasons summer and winter. So is: Noon – Summer / Night – Winter.
Rossetti is referring to a specific period of time in her life that she missed, or probably she was separated from someone she loved, or an action she had regreted. For example, she says, “A fool to pluck my rose to soon, A fool to snap my lily.” In the last stanza she talks about not being able to talk or think about the “sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow.” She is “stripp’d bare of hope and everything, no more to laugh, no more to sing.”


The rhyme scheme is “ABAAB”, in which Rossetti expresses her regret using monosyllabic diction and very simple, direct sentence structure. By writing the poem in first person and using more colloquial language, she makes it very personal. By simply reading the poem, the meaning of words such as “rose”, “lily”, and “garden-plot” cannot be clearly defined. These metaphors can mean anything to any reader.
Rossetti follows a constant rhyme scheme throughout, putting emphasis on certain words giving them a sharper meaning, such as “chilly” and “lily”, “wept” and “slept”, and “forsaken” and “waken”.


In the first stanza she stresses the word “fool” by repeating it three times and uses a balanced structure in line fourteen emphasizing the phrase, “No more to laugh, no more to sing.” She highlightes the important words and phrases.


The words Rossetti chooses are clear images of her thoughts and emotions. The past, when she “fell asleep” at noon or in the summer, is described nostalgically. She also expresses a longing for the future by giving to “tomorrow” the adjectives “sun-warm’d” and “sweet.” However, the rest of her imagery is much more negative. She discusses the scene she wakes up to multiple times and each time she gives it a different metaphor. Her first metaphor, found in lines two and three, compares her current state to a chilly night “beneath the comfortless cold moon.” Then in lines six and seven, she calls it her “garden-plot” that, being neglected during her slumber, has now faded and become “all-forsaken.” Her constant use of simple and direct, illustrates her bitter tone of regret.

 

 

 

 

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S LIFE AND WORKS

He was born in May 12nd, 1828 in London. He was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. 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" 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.

Talking about his literary career, in 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". These developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a dead child, Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems. In his later life and death, Rossetti acquired an obsession for exotic animals, and in particular wombats. He would frequently ask friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and would spend hours there himself. Finally, in September 1869, he was to acquire the first of two pet wombats. This shortlived wombat, named "Top", was often brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece of the dinner table during meals.

During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created a controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry". The eroticism and sensuality of the poems caused offense. One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep after sex. This was part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence The House of Life, a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a "moment's monument", implying that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting moment, and to reflect upon their meaning. The House of Life was a series of interacting monuments to these moments. This was Rossetti's most substantial literary achievement.

In 1881, Rossetti published a second volume of poems, Ballads and Sonnets which included the remaining sonnets from the The House of Life sequence.

Towards the end of his life, Rossetti sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug addiction possibly worsened by his reaction to savage critical attacks on his poetry from the manuscript poems he had buried with his wife. He spent his last years as a withdrawn recluse.

(Extract from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti)

 

On Easter Sunday, April 9th 1882, he died at the country house of a friend, where he'd gone in yet another vain attempt to recover his health.
         One of his best poems was The Blessed Damozel:

 

 

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL

The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven;

Her eyes were deeper than the depth

Of waters stilled at even;

She had three lilies in her hand,                                                        5

And the stars in her hair were seven.

 

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,

No wrought flowers did adorn,

But a white rose of Mary's gift,

For service meetly worn;                                                                 10

Her hair that lay along her back

Was yellow like ripe corn.

 

Herseemed she scarce had been a day

One of God's choristers;

The wonder was not yet quite gone                                                 15

From that still look of hers;

Albeit, to them she left, her day

Had counted as ten years.

 

(To one, it is ten years of years.

. . . Yet now, and in this place,                                                        20

Surely she leaned o'er me—her hair

Fell all about my face. . . .

Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves.

The whole year sets apace.)

(Poem from http://www.rossettiarchive.org/)

 

Analysis of The Blessed Damozel

On the painting: there are three levels of reality:

-         Damozel

-         Three angels beneath her

-         Separated painting where lay down looking up the author.

The last one, could be a dream. He’s not part of it. The heaven is the real place where is the Damozel. There is a difference with life and death here: life is what the author says. He wants to be with the Damonzel but it’s not possible because she’s death in heaven. He’s thinking about his lost love.

Another mistake that we can find in the picture is that there are only six stars, and the poem says that are seven. So, is she the seventh star? That is not a realistic painting. Think about the absence or presence of love. The poem is not a literal translation of the painting and viceversa.

The author talks about the colour of the hair of the lady. He says it is yellow, but the picture shows us that her colour’s hair is auburn, that is in our everyday languge brown.

First Stanza

            The author says that the damozel was leaned from the heaven, she was looking from there to the land were was her lover with very deeper eyes, showing three flowers in her hand and seven stars in her hair.

Second Stanza

            She had her robe untied, with no flowers adorning it, only a white rose given by Mary (it is known as Virgin Mary), a present for a service that the damozel did. Compares, gives a metaphor with her hair laying along her back with a ripe corn, that is, her hair was yellow like a corn.

Third Stanza

For her, in heaven one day count ten years. For the author one day of her absence represents the fact she died ten ears earlier. It is the difference in time, not in heaven, yes in your life. The relation past-present: remember the past as it was past. His dead wife will be always in his mind as beautiful as she was after death. He has continued living, older than the Damozel on the painting.

Last Stanza

He’s set in autumn, that is previous steps of the death decay)

She died in summer. We can know it because of all the nature that she has round her. So she is permanent, eternaly young and beautiful and he is starting to die. We can see two levels:        - Idealization: eternaly inalterable change

-         tries to be as realistic as possible.

The Blessed Damozel is probably Rossetti's most famous painting. It is certainly his most elaborate presentation of the subject that interested him beyond all others: the relation of an emparadised woman to her earthly lover.

DGR's picture is an erotic variation on a distinctively Venetian style of representing the enthroned Virgin Mary, i.e., at half-length. In the traditional pictures, the Virgin usually holds the Christ child and is surrounded by attendant angels and saints. Here the child is absent, although his surrogate in DGR's painting is clearly the damozel's lover, pictured in the predella. The saints and angels of tradition are refigured as the group of embracing lovers (or as the child-angels put in the Leyland replica). The lover in DGR's predella also recalls the votive figures that appear in any number of public or domestic votive Madonnas, where the picture is made an offering for some public or private mercy. The votaries typically appear at the feet of the Madonna (if it is full length), or in some corner or lowly place that suggests the votary's humility. DGR's picture, while clearly personal in its votive aspect, necessarily also carries a public and even political significance: for in the context of DGR's programmatric Pre-Raphaelite ideals, the damozel (like Dante's Beatrice) is a guiding personal and social emblem.The flowers in the picture symbolize purity (the lilies) and passion (roses). The varying hues of the latter symbolize the range of spiritual-erotic intensities DGR associates with the damozel.

The three angelic female heads below the damozel are manifestly represented as “younger” beings. Their youth is iconographically related to their angelic—i.e., their non-human—condition. It is entirely to DGR's point that they have no lovers, for in this erotic imagination of paradise the highest spiritual state is reserved for erotic love. That thought appears in two explicit ways: first, in the mutual desire for union that draws damozel and poet toward each other, organizing the entire pictorial space; and second, in the group of emparadised lovers at the top of the picture, who symbolize the fulfillment that poet and damozel long to achieve.

Rarely noticed in the picture is the figure of the Holy Ghost, who appears as a small dove at the very top and center of the work, presiding over the whole scene. He is represented as a one of the picture's moments of radiant gold, rhyming with the string of six intervals of the same gold that run in a waving line across the top of the picture. These appear to the eye as intervals or apertures into a primal field of golden light such as one finds in religious iconographs. They also connect to the gold that is the identifying radiance of the damozel as well as the gold of the stars that crown her head.

The painting ilustrates the poem and the poem ilustrates the painting. The appearence of the photography (the most important invention) was very important in the Victorian Era. What the people of that period searched in the photography was looking reality fixed and stated.

In artistic terms, Rossetti anticipates the photography, a change concept of reality. Combination of different aspects. The Victorian were interested in what is the individual responsability through society and the answer of it.

There’s a new concept between art, paintings, draws and the text. Both exist together. Rossetti evolves into mixing both realities:

            Text = verbal transmition.

            Picture = visual transmition.

The resemblances that we found between the two life-works of these sibilings are that, both of them talk about lovers that had gone, and how unfortunated they felt because of this.

In these two poems, there is a reference of time, shown as the seasons. Dante uses autumn referring to the death, the fall of leaves and Christina uses summer to say that she falls asleep, she was not worried about nothing, when everyone is happy, all is bright and wonderful, and in winter she wakes up, when everyone is sad and down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

-         Jennings, Elizbeth. A Choice of Christina Rossetti’s Verse. Ed. Faber and Faber. London, 1970.

-         Roe, Dinah. Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose. Ed. Hardcover. London, 2007.

-         A. Proctor, Ellen, W. M. Rossetti. A Brief Memoir Of Christina Rossetti. Ed. Paperback. London, 2006.

 

Webgraphy

 

-         http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/crov.html

-         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Victorian_era

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

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

-         http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/rossetti_christina.html

-         http://www.rossettiarchive.org/

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