INDEX
1. Victorian Age, Historical Background
2. Science and Religion
3. Alfred Lord Tenison
4. Robert Browning
5. E.B Browning
7. Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood
8. Bibliography
9. Paper’s Task
- INTRODUCTION
(By Cristina Boix)
For much of this century the term Victorian,
which literally describes things and events (roughly) in the reign of Queen
In science and technology, the Victorians invented the
modern idea of invention -- the
notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment.
In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called
into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature
and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon
self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of
art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.
In ideology, politics and society, the Victorians
created astonishing innovation and change: democracy,
feminism, unity of workers, socialism,
Marxism and other modern movements
took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud appears to be not only
the first that experienced modern
problems but also the first that attempted modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean
parent of the modern -- and like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful
reaction against itself.
The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple or
unified, only in part because
More than anything else what makes Victorians
Victorian is their sense of social
responsibility. The poet Matthew Arnold refused to reprint his poem
"Empedocles on Etna," in which the Greek philosopher throws himself
into the volcano, because it set a bad example; and he criticized an Anglican
bishop who pointed out mathematical inconsistencies in the Bible not on the grounds
that he was wrong, but that for a bishop to point these things out to the
general public was irresponsible.
The
Victorian Age was characterised by rapid change and developments in nearly
every sphere - from advances in medical, scientific and technological knowledge
to changes in population growth and location. Over time, this rapid
transformation deeply affected the country's mood: an age that began with a
confidence and optimism leading to economic boom and prosperity eventually gave
way to uncertainty and doubt regarding
1.
QUEEN VICTORIA
She was born on
24 May 1819. On 10th June
1837, after the death of her uncle, William IV, she became queen at the age of
eighteen. She fell instantly in love with her German cousin,
2.
IMPERIALISM
In 1876 Queen
First,
The
3.
IRISH QUESTION
This was also the age of the 'Irish Question', the
question being whether or not the Irish should be allowed to rule themselves.
4.
EDUCATION
Education in nineteenth-century
A lady's
education was taken, almost entirely, at home. There were boarding schools,
but no University, and the studies
were very different. She learned French, drawing,
dancing, music, and the use of globes. If the school, or the governess, was
interested in teaching any practical skills, she learned plain sewing as well as embroidery
and accounts.
5.
SCIENCE AND PROGRESS
Industrial
Revolution: the developments that transformed
As many thousands of women throughout rural
The Industrial Revolution gathered steam and
accelerated the migration of the population from country to the city. The
result of this movement was the development of horrifying slums and cramped row
housing in the overcrowded cities.
6.
SOCIAL CLASSES
§
Working
class - men and women who performed physical labour, paid
daily or weekly wages
§
Middle
class - men performed mental or "clean" work,
paid monthly or annually
§
Upper
class - did not work, income came from inherited land and
investments
7.
MONEY
Pounds (£)
Shillings (s.)
Pence (d.)
Typical Incomes (annual)
Aristocrats £30,000
Merchants, bankers £10,000
Middle-class (doctors, lawyers, clerks) £300-800
Lower middle-class (head teachers, journalists, shopkeepers, etc.) £150-300
Skilled workers (carpenters, typesetters,etc.) £75-100
Sailors and domestic staff £40-75
Labourers, soldiers £25
8.
DISEASES
Cholera - caused by human
waste in the drinking water.
Symptoms: nausea, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, overwhelming thirst, cramps
Death often followed within 24 hours of the first symptom
Consumption - a
tuberculosis of the lungs
Symptoms - weakness, fatigue, wasting away, blood in the lungs
(killed hundreds of thousands of English in the nineteenth century)
Typhus - spread by body
lice and dirty conditions
Symptoms: delirium, headaches, rash, high fever
9.
WOMEN AND MEN
In the late
industrial era in
"The majority of women (happily for them) are not
very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind" - Dr. William Acton
Dr. Acton's books were very popular, and they suggest
how much truth there was in our stereotypes of the constrained character of
nineteenth-century English sexual behaviour.
In proper middle-class and upper-class circles, women
were supposed to have no sexual conduct before marriage - a hand around the
waist, a small kiss, and a fervent pressing of the hand was probably the
accepted limit in most cases.
Among the working classes in
For middle- and upper-class men, premarital sex would
have been with servants and prostitutes, since "nice girls" didn't go
beyond the small kiss or squeeze of the hand.
There were about 80,000 "gay" women
(prostitutes) and "fancy men" (pimps) in
For most of the nineteenth century, homosexuality was
punishable by death. However, the last execution on the grounds of
"homosexuality" took place in 1830.
10.
RELIGION
Victorian England was a deeply religious country. A great number of people were habitual church-goers, at least once and
probably twice, every Sunday. The Bible
was frequently and widely read by people
of every class; so there were many religious stories and allegories. Yet
towards the end of Queen
(1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married_Women%27s_Property_Act
(2) www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/VictorianEngland.htm
SCIENCE
AND RELIGION
(By Marga Martí)
During the nineteenth century, the entities we refer
to as 'science' and 'religion' both underwent dramatic changes. It would
consequently be naïve to expect to be able to find one simple and unchanging
relationship between the two. The relationship has varied across time and
geography, and from one individual to another. In addition to the historical
interest of the nineteenth century debates between science and religion, there
is a great historiographical significance. The way in which science and
religion have been perceived in the twentieth century was heavily influenced by
the writings of late nineteenth-century historians of science and religion,
whose influence we have only recently begun to move beyond.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century in
This
harmony between science and faith, mediated by some form of theology of nature,
continued to be the mainstream position for most men of science, and most
interested individuals, right up to the 1860s, at least. But it did come under
threat. In the 1820s and 1830s, some working-class radicals saw a chance of
using certain versions of the sciences for political ends. Some forms of the
sciences, especially those emanating from
In this second paper we are
going to talk about Religion but from the point of view of the Victorian Poets.
As we have seen in the general
background of the Victorian Era, Religion
was a very important matter, it
influenced their lives and above all,
their way of writing.And as we
wrote our first paper about the ifluence of Religion in the Romantic Poets, we
are going to focus our work in some authors that belong to the Victorian
Period, whose Poems deal with this subject,religiosity in poems but in a
different era.
ALFRED LORD
TENNYSON
(By Marta Lizana)
A Brief Biography
Sir Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson Alfred Tennyson was born August
6th, 1809, at Somersby,
He was
Poet
Laureate of the United Kingdom after William Wordsworth and is one of the most
popular English
poets.
He also had a lifelong fear of
mental illness, for several men in his family had a mild form of epilepsy,
which was then thought a shameful disease. His father and brother Arthur made
their cases worse by excessive drinking.
In 1827 Tennyson escaped the
troubled atmosphere of his home when he followed his two older brothers to
The Tennyson brothers became well
known at
Arthur Hallam's was the most
important of these friendships. He and Tennyson knew each other only four
years, but their intense friendship had major influence on the poet. On a visit
to Somersby, Hallam met and later became engaged to Emily Tennyson, and the two
friends looked forward to a life-long companionship. Hallam's death from
illness in 1833 (he was only 22) shocked Tennyson profoundly, and his grief
lead to most of his best poetry, including In Memoriam , "The Passing of Arthur",
"Ulysses," and "Tithonus."
Since Tennyson was always sensitive
to criticism, the mixed reception of his 1832 Poems hurt him greatly. Critics
in those days delighted in the harshness of their reviews: the Quarterly
Review was known as the "Hang, draw, and quarterly." John Wilson
Croker's harsh criticisms of some of the poems in our anthology kept Tennyson
from publishing again for another nine years.
Late in the 1830s Tennyson grew
concerned about his mental health and visited a sanitarium run by Dr. Matthew
Allen, with whom he later invested his inheritance (his grandfather had died in
1835) and some of his family's money.
The success of his 1842 Poems
made Tennyson a popular poet, and in 1845 he received a Civil List (government)
pension of £200 a year, which helped relieve his financial difficulties; the
success of "The Princess" and In Memoriam and his appointment
in 1850 as Poet Laureate finally established him as the most popular poet of
the Victorian era.
By now Tennyson, only 41, had written some of
his greatest poetry, but he continued to write and to gain in popularity. In
1853, as the Tennysons were moving into their new house on the Isle of Wight,
This is one of Tennyson's most famous works. It is a
series of narrative poems based entirely on King Arthur
and the Arthurian tales, as thematically suggested by Sir Thomas
Malory's earlier tales on the legendary king. The work was dedicated to
Tennyson suffered from extreme
short-sightedness -- without a monocle he could not even see to eat -- which
gave him considerable difficulty writing and reading, and this disability in part
accounts for his manner of creating poetry: Tennyson composed much of his
poetry in his head, occasionally working on individual poems for many years.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson died on
October 6, 1892, at the age of 83.
After that we are going to analyse a
poem which has references on the main ideas of Romanticism.
"The Kraken" (1830)
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
“The Kraken” first appeared in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.
By Alfred Tennyson.
“The Kraken” is one of Tennyson's
few good sonnets, even though it has fifteen lines. In terms of rhyme scheme,
the ABABCDDCEFEAAFE pattern suggests that it is modelled on the Petrarchian
(Italian) rather than the Shakespearean (English) form of three quatrains and a
concluding couplet.
The sestet has been extended to
return to the dominant words and rhymes of the opening four lines.
The poem draws its images from the
Norse legend of a gigantic sea-monster that supposedly preyed upon shipping off
the coast of
The connection of Tennyson's
sea-best to the biblical end of time suggests the influence of John Milton's Paradise
Lost.
Tennyson's poem neatly combines the
Bible, literature, mythology, and natural history, balancing the theories of
science with the traditions of Christian faith.
Seeing this poem we can see how he uses the
reaction against the rationalization of nature, in art and literature it
stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new
emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the experience in
confronting the sublimity of nature.
Some examples of nature are words as “thunders”
(line 1), “sea”(line 2), “sunlights”(line4) or “light”(line7).
Another examples are referring to religiosity as
when at the end of the poem the authors mentions “then once by man and angels to
be seen, / inroaring he shall rise and on the surface die” (line 14 / 15)
During the reading of the poem we
can make an image of an animal as an octopus but seeing in a deeper part of the
poem we can observe that the author is showing us the natural elements that
involved the situation as the sea, the shadow, the weather, or the animal’s
form. But the other important aspect is the vision of the animal as the devil,
a big monster which causes horror.
ROBERT BROWNING
(My Task: Sandra Gisbert)
English poet, noted for his mastery of dramatic
monologue. Robert Browning was long unsuccessful as a poet and financially
dependent upon his family until he was well into adulthood. He was born in
Camberwell, south
From 1837 to 1846 Browning attempted to write
verse drama for the stage. During these years he met Carlyle, Dickens, and
Tennyson, and formed several important friendships. In 1846 Browning married
the poet Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), whose poetry we’ll see later on,
and settled with her in
His
influence continued to grow, however, and finally lead to the founding of the
Browning Society in 1881.When Elizabeth Browning died in 1861, he moved to
Browning had been interested in religion all
his life: for the “atheism” which he caught from Shelley was as superficial and
temporary as the vegetarianism. Pauline, Paracelsus, Pippa Passes, all
the principal poems of the early period bear witness to his sense of the
profound significance of religion.
We’ll see the aspect of religion in an extract of “Pauline”, his first poem, which was published anonymously in 1833. After its publication, Browning sent twelve copies to his friend W. J Fox so that the poem could be discovered by other critics and intellectuals. The critics of “Pauline”, which were very humiliating, and the total commercial failure very probably convinced Browning, who was then in his early twenties, never to write in the same again. Here, he dramatises his own youth struggles with religion.
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Pauline[2] O GOD, where does this tend—these struggling aims? |
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What would I have? What is this ‘sleep’, which seems |
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To bound all? can there be a ‘waking’ point |
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Of crowning life? The soul would never rule— |
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It would be first in all things—it would have 5 |
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Its utmost pleasure filled,—but that complete |
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Commanding for commanding sickens it. |
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The last point I can trace is, rest beneath |
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Some better essence than itself—in weakness; |
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This is ‘myself’—not what I think should be 10 |
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And what is that I hunger for but God? |
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My God, my God! let me for once look on thee |
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As tho’ nought else existed: we alone. |
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And as creation crumbles, my soul’s spark |
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Expands till I can say, ‘Even from myself 15 |
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I need thee, and I feel thee, and I love thee; |
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I do not plead my rapture in thy works |
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For love of thee—or that I feel as one |
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Who cannot die—but there is that in me |
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Which turns to thee, which loves, or which should love.’20 |
In the first line, he makes a rhetorical
question appealing to God asking for his own existence and making reference to
his faith struggles. Then he asks for death. What is beyond death? Is there any
further life? “Can there be a “waking”
point of crowning life?” In that life after death the soul will be the
queen, the one who would reign, and the “first
in all things”, but that sovereign “would
sicken it”, that is, we can not only follow our soul, but we have to be
also rational and think.
In the 8th line, he states that at
the end of our time, what would remain would be our essence, only we, not what
we think. We can think that there would be lots of things after death like
condemnation or heaven, but the only thing that it’s true in all that is
ourselves. He asks himself the reasons for the existence of pain “And what is that I hunger for but God?”
In the 12th line, he tells God to
let him see him as no one else existed. He wants to know if he really exists.
And if he really existed, he would dedicate his life to him, he would love him
till the end of his life.
In the 17th line, he says that he is
not pleading for salvation, he is not pleading for not dying, but he only wants
to know if he exists, if there is a God and if he should love that God.
“Paracelsus”
() is more a philosophical poem in order to search the Truth and salvation. In
this fragment, we see that Browning believes in God for his own salvation. If
he falls into darkness, it would only be for a moment, because God’s lamp will
make him emerge
[3]..."If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.
You understand me? I have said enough?"
Now, in a
very short poem “Pippa Passes” (1841)
gives a quick vision of God and the world and gives enthusiasm to his readers
saying that all is right in the world if everything is in its place.
[4]The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!
ELIZABETH BARRETT
BROWNING
(By Xihong Liu)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6,
1806 at Coxhoe Hall in
Her ability to read Hebrew mentioned before
entailed her many criticism. Horne is one who would question
Her literary success drew the attention of poet
Robert Browning, who actually would later become her husband. As
Her intellectual fascination with the classics
and metaphysics was balanced by a religious obsession which she later described
as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of
an enthusiast." According to Glenn Everett, the connotations of the former
word “enthusiast” here could be referring the Methodism. Methodism is a
religious movement, founded by Charles and John Wesley and by
George Whitefield, which originated as a “reaction against the apathy and the
emphasis on logic and reason that characterized the Anglican Church in the
early eighteenth century”. 2
Her influence and preference for the Greek
Christian poets draw us to one of her main attitude towards religion and real
poetry: "We want the touch of
Christ's hand upon our literature," she says, “as it touched other dead things; we want the sense of the saturation
of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry though them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the
Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has
been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a
yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something
which would have been much with a stronger faculty.” She yearns for a sense
of poetry which is loosing its way, she wants the poetry to be sanctified and
made holy. It was a time when the intimate relation between God and poetry was
dying and the sacredness of poetry was
disappearing.2
Elizabeth Barrett Browning thus represents the
emotional and sensible part of this frame of Victorian poets. She was highly
fond of Greek classic literature and her originality resides in her
contribution of a female poetry point of view to the Victorian Age and most
importantly, concerning this paper, a Christian view. These three factors
combine an interesting perspective: religious vision from a woman’s point of
view. Elizabeth Barrett Browning combined the spiritual realm with the world of
nature: In the seventh book of Aurora
Leigh (1856), her heroine thus asserts that
“natural things
And spiritual, --who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death" (AL. XLI, 20-23) 5
According
to Browning, the human spirit could not survive without the natural world, for
" The natural's impossible, -- no form,
No motion: without sensuous, spiritual
Is inappreciable, -- no beauty or power:
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man
(For still the artist is intensely a man)
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it, -- fixes still
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through,
With eyes immortal, to the antetype
Some call the ideal, better called the real,
And certainly to be called so presently” (AL. XLI, 31-11) 5
Expressed in simpler words, Browning's verse
describes the mutual complementation of both the human spirit and the nature, one
cannot stand alone without another. Thus the dynamic interaction of nature and
the human spirit “fixed the type with
mortal vision,". And since nature "pierce through... with eyes
immortal” then God resides in the nature, a powerful nature that complements
the human spirit. The belief of the coexistence of the spirituality and the
nature is neither atheist nor traditional Christian. EBB just adds a
spirituality face to the nature one and the result is that “this twofold sphere”.6
GERARD MANLEY
(By Ana Such)
BIOBRAPHY
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the great
unsung poets, virtually unknown in his lifetime. It has some of the obsessive
ornateness and sentimentality of the Victorians, but also a startling
musicality which is ahead of its time and ours.
He was born at
When he was at school he demonstrated great
poetical talent winning a prize in poetry and a scholarship to
He assisted the parish priest in Sheffield,
INSCAPE
AND INSTRESS
These two ideas helped him to explain his
poetry and why is it so religious. The concept of “Inscape” was also used by
other poets, like Wordsworth, Emerson or Joyce.
And both, characteristics and force (Inscape
and Instress) are created by God, He creates everything beautiful, also poetry.
That is Hopkin’s vision of his creations, and so is how
GOD’S
GRANDEUR [10]
(1877)
1 The world is charged with the grandeur of
God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook
foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze
of oil
Crushed. Why do men now not reck his rod?
5 Generation have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade, bleared,
smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s
smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being
shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
10 There lives the
dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black
West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward,
springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah!
Bright wings.
SUMMARY
The Poem God’s
Grandeur was published, like all
This religious poem shows
The firs quatrain of the first stanza describes
a world in which the presence of God is shown like an electrical force. Here we
can see a metaphor, because God is compared with the electrical current.
Moreover, the presence of God grows up “like the ooze of oil / Crushed”(3,4),
in abundant, “to a greatness”(3).
The second
four lines describe how act the contemporary people. Human life is
invaded by labour, “toil”(6) and “trade”(6). Everything is now industrialised,
it is changing the landscape, a landscape that was before like the heaven. And
even though God is the creator, humans do not contemplate and take care of the
beauties that are still left. They are alienating from nature. In this quatrain
we can also find an onomatopoeia: the rhythm of “have trod, have trod, have
trod” (5) is like the sound of the footsteps when people trod.
The final sextet shows us that, although the
nature is sometimes forgotten, it has the power to regenerate, it does not
cease renewing. It is shown compared with the morning, who comes after the
night. That is also a metaphor. And the power that makes this is God (Remember
terms “Inscape” and Instress”, page 2). God helps the nature to renew like a
mother, with patience, with “warm breast” and “bright wings” (14). This is
another topic in Hopkin’s poetry. Sometimes he uses maternal attributes and
shows us how she forgive us and give us protection. In this case, the mother is
God, who has the same characteristics: love, tenderness, protection, patience
and no-rancour. Because even though we do not take care of the nature, He gives
it us again, He does not suffer from revenge.[11]
[12]
COMENTARY
I have chosen this poem because here I can see
an evolution of the religion. In this poem
Industrial Revolution occurred in
For religious people these changes were not
accepted. They wanted the same world as before, and for them it was a
deterioration of the human beings.
In the Romanticism, the power of God was not
explained with rational terms, it was so because it was a divine power. But now
PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD:
(By Neu Zorrilla, Ana Duch and Patricia García)
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of
English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.
They refused what they considered influenced by
the Mannerist artists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that
the Classical compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupted
influence on academic teaching of art. Consequently, this group of artists
chose the name Pre-Raphaelite because they wanted to return to the style of
painting before Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first
avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status,
because they continued using and accepting
'mimesis', or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art.
They
wanted art to go back to the freshness, simplicity and genuine feeling of the
earlier period. They wanted to bring back seriousness to art, so they
chose subjects from poetry, literature and
religion which expressed ideas that were important and relevant to them.
Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that
freedom and responsibility were inseparable. Even so, they were particularly
fascinated by Medieval culture, they believed that this era had a special
spiritual integrity. This emphasis on medieval culture was a difference with
the realism promoted by the stress on independent observation of nature.
In its early stages the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood believed that the two interests were consistent with one another,
but in later years the movement was divided in two directions. The realist side
was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist side was led by Rossetti and
his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.
After 1850, Hunt and Millais moved away from
direct imitation of medieval art. Both accentuated the realist and scientific
aspects of the movement, although Hunt continued to emphasise the spiritual
significance of art, seeking to
reconcile religion and science by making accurate observations and
studies of locations in
Now we are going to talk about to poets that we
think that were the most important or could have a big importance in the
history of poetry, they are Dante Rosetti and Lewis Carroll.
Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-82),
the third founding member of the Pre-Raphaelites, became the recognized leader
and even formed a second grouping of the brotherhood in 1857, after Millais and
Hunt had gone their separate ways. Rossetti came from an artistic and versatile
Italian family. He was raised a strict Anglican by his mother. During
his mid-adolescence, though, he began to turn away from his religious
upbringing. In contrast to his sister, Christina, and his fellow
Pre-Raphaelite brother, William Holman Hunt, Rossetti didn't embrace a
structured, orthodox religious doctrine. Still, Christian history, stories,
symbols, and imagery remained major thematic elements in his work long after he
stopped adhering to organized religion.1
3
From an early age Dante developed a
Bohemian lifestyle - his collection of wombats creating something of a stir -
and he took to mysticism and religion, immersing himself in Arthurian legendry.
It was rumoured that many of his beliefs were as much the result of a fondness
for laudanum as any other cause. 2
He prefers to use women topics, writes about
religious themes and presents commonplace symbols and associations only to show
that they have no meaning and that no longer do we live in the world of the Divina Commedia -- a world of divinely
ordained analogies and hierarchies. Rossetti was a poet as well as a painter,
and in common with the other Pre-Raphaelite, his art was a fusion of artistic
invention and authentic renderings of literary sources. He specialized in
soulful maidens of extraordinary looks for his romantic themes, using his
beautiful but neurotic wife Elizabeth Siddal as his model. Her striking face,
with its long-nosed, languid expression, appears in many pictures. 3 1
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's tried to accept his
religious upbringing left a space in his life that he filled with his art. He
turned to the Fair Lady -- whether as Blessed Damozel, femme fatale, or victim
-- as a source of salvation. His heaven was a heaven of earthly pleasure. His
God smiled approvingly on the lovers' embrace. The creation of art was an act
of devotion and the appreciation of female beauty a form of prayer. Rossetti's
devotion to female beauty in his work reflects a similar obsession in his
personal life. In his poetry and painting, Rossetti used the theme of feminine
beauty to explore his own fantasies and conceptions of heaven, salvation, and
the dichotomy between earthly and spiritual love. 3
One of his most famous poems, which reflect his
symbolism and his usual topics, is The Blessed Damozel, which is going to be
analysed accordingly.
Dante
Gabriel Rossetti was only 18 when he wrote "The Blessed Damozel." He
began the poem while he was translating Dante’s Vita Nuova in which Beatrice in
Heaven is the earthbound Dante’s saviour. Similarly in “ The Blessed Damozel” a
deceased woman looks down at her beloved from Heaven and wait for him, but the
Blessed Damozel is much more human than her precursor, because Rosetti chose to
describe her physical characteristics.3
[1]
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/prb.html
2 http://www.love-poem.org.uk/
3 http://victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/moller12.html
Although Rossetti was still young, the images
and themes in his poem have caught the attention of many critics throughout the
years.4
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,
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;
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
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,
Surely she leaned o'er me - her hair
Fell all about my face. . . .
Nothing: the autumn-fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)
It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun;
So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could seen the sun.
4. http://swc2.hccs.cc.tx.us/rowhtml/rossetti/summary.htm
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.
Around her, lovers, newly met
In joy no sorrow claims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remembered names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.
And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.
From the fixed place of Heaven she saw
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove
Within the gulf to pierce
Its path; and now she spoke as when
The stars sang in their spheres.
The sun was gone now; the curled moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf, and now
She spoke through the still weather.
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together.
(Ah sweet! Even now, in that bird's song
Strove not her accents there,
Fain to be hearkened? When those bells
Possessed the midday air,
Strove not her steps to reach my side
Down all the echoing stair?)
"I wish that he were come to me,
For he will come," she said.
"Have I not prayed in Heaven? - on earth,
Lord, Lord, has he not prayed?
Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
And shall I feel afraid?
"When round his head the aureole clings,
And he is clothed in white,
I'll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light;
As unto a stream we will step down,
And bathe there in God's sight.
"We two will stand beside that shrine,
Occult, withheld, untrod,
Whose lamps are stirred continually
With prayer sent up to God;
And see our old prayers, granted, melt
Each like a little cloud.
"We two will lie i' that shadow of
That living mystic tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove
Is sometimes felt to be.
While every leaf that His plumes touch
Saith His Name audibly.
"And I myself will teach to him,
I myself, lying so,
The songs I sing her; which his voice
Shall pause in, hushed and slow,
And find some knowledge at each pause,
Or some new thing to know."
(Alas! we two, we two, thou say'st!
Yea, one wast thou with me
That once of old. But shall God lift
To endless unity
The soul whose likeness with thy soul
Was but its love for thee?)
"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.
"Circlewise sit they, with bound locks
And foreheads garlanded;
Into the fine cloth white like flame
Weaving the golden thread,
To fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.
"He shall fear, haply and be dumb.
Then will I lay my cheek
To his, and tell about our love,
Not once abashed or weak:
And the dear Mother will approve
My pride, and let me speak.
"Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,
To Him round whom all souls
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads
Bowed with their aureoles:
And angels meeting us shall sing
To their citherns and citoles.
"There will I ask of Christ the Lord
Thus much for him and me:--
Only to live as once on earth
With Love - only to be,
As then awhile, for ever now
Together, I and he."
She gazed and listened and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild,
"All this is when he comes." She ceased.
The light thrilled towards her, filled
With angels in strong level flight.
Her eyes prayed, and she smiled.
(I saw her smile.) But soon their path
Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her
tears.)5
5.http://www.web-books.com/classics/Poetry/Anthology/Rossetti_D/Blessed.htm
The poem
has three voices: a narrator describing the relationship, the thoughts and
desires of the woman in heaven, and the voice of the still living beloved who
express his desperation. Heaven is plenty of embracing couples. The activity of
heaven is actually earthly, corporeal love. This love has become spiritual,
though, because it's based in the love and desire for the union of two souls
and two bodies, not just a physical attraction. In Rossetti's fantastical code,
anyway, true love is spiritual and smiled upon by God. 3
The first few stanzas tell of how the Damozel
is in heaven overlooking earth and thinking of her lover. He makes a
description of his divine idealization of Heaven using his own symbolism like
“she had three lilies in her hand” and “and the stars in her hair were seven”
which have no meaning because they have only an aesthetic value. This symbolism
received some critics, which accuse Rosetti for make Heaven materialistic, “
from the gold bar of Heaven”.3 4
Rossetti
writes in stanza three of how time to the Damozel seemed to last forever
because she is without her love. "Albeit, to them she left, her day had
counted as ten days” There are some stanzas in the poem (stanza four, eleven
seventeen and twenty-four) where the lover speaks about his feelings and
desperation without her.4
In stanzas ten and eleven, her lover describes
the sound of her voice like a bird's song which tells the reader that not only
is he thinking of her, but he can hear her and feel her about him. Of course,
she can't understand why she must be miserable in heaven when all others are
with their loves, and ask God "Are not two prayers a perfect
strength?" (Stanza 12). And then in
stanza thirteen, she dreams of the day that they will be together and present
themselves in the beauty and glory of God. If they aren’t together she can’t
enter in
It is in
the stanza 17, when the narrative changes again back to the lover. He says that
she says "we two" but he asked himself, when and will they ever
really be together like they used to be. The two worlds separating them don’t
keep them apart in thought, but it is not possible to be together.4
In
stanza twenty-two, she says that she will want their love to be as it was on
earth with the approval of Christ the Lord.
Near the end of the poem, in the two last
stanzas, the Damozel finally realizes that she can’t have this until the time
comes. The Damozel understands it and suddenly becomes peaceful and lets the
light take her in stanza twenty-three. Finally she will enter heaven without
her love. Her lover knows this and say in the last stanza "I saw her
smile...I hear her tears." Apart, but together in their thoughts, but the
two are separated by two worlds and there is nothing that can be done but hope
and pray. And for that reason the Damozel "laid her face between her
hands, And wept." 4
The Blessed Damozel That work was made by
Rosetti after the poem. The man is drapped along the bottom of the painting in
a predella depicting a separate landscape, looking to his lover in Heaven for
his salvation.3 6
Dante Gabriel Rossetti used the ideas of
Christian belief in order to write this poem. His poem explores if two lovers,
or anyone will be reunited once again in heaven.4
This union of physical beauty and sensuousness
with the idea of Heaven and salvation is Rosetti’s fantasy. His view of
religion compares love to Heaven and claim the spirituality of love, which is
approved by God, and can last forever and bring us the salvation.
6. http://www.anglistik.uni-bonn.de/research/lessenich/The_Blessed_Damozel_2.jpg
Other
author from this time is Lewis Carroll
the writer of
At the
time of his birth, his father, Dr. Dodgson, was the vicar of Daresbury,
Cheshire (he later was presented with the Crown living of Croft, Yorkshire, and
subsequently became Archdeacon of Richmond and one of the Canons of Ripon
Cathedral), and was a distinguished scholar whose favourite study was
mathematics.
Daresbury was isolated, but there was no want
of children, so Charles invented games to amuse himself and his brothers and
sisters. He made a train with railway stations in the Rectory garden; he did
conjuring in a brown wig and a long white robe; he made a troupe of marionettes
and a stage with the aid of the family and a village carpenter; he wrote all
the plays for it himself, and manipulated the strings. The most popular was The
Tragedy of King John. He also made pets of snails and toads, and tried to
promote modern warfare among earthworms by giving them small pieces of clay
pipe for weapons.
Until he was twelve his father educated him,
and then he went to Mr. Tate's school at
On May 23, 1850, he matriculated at