The Blessed Damozel. D. Gabriel Rossetti

The picture and poem that I have chosen is: The Blessed Damozel. Both of them are in the works of a Pre-Raphaelite artist called Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Now we will try to show how a picture can reveal the things that a poem says.

First of all, we read in the poem and in the first stanza of it, we find a detailed description of a woman, and it’s detailed because reading the first verses we can imagine the girl that the author wants to represent.

If now we look at the picture, and taking into account what the author says, in the first stanza of the poem, we can see a lot of similitudes between the woman that we had imagined and the representation that the painting gives us:

- “The blessed damozel leaned out /From the gold bar of Heaven;”

If we look at the picture, we can see a woman who is leaned on a bar coloured in gold.

- “Her eyes were deeper than the depth /Of waters stilled at even;”

Here we imagine a woman thinking about herself, a girl who is waiting for something to come. The poet represents a figure with a deep look who, probably, is looking into herself and she is missing something or someone.

- “She had three lilies in her hand, /And the stars in her hair were seven.”

We can see that in the poem exists a great fidelity in comparison with the picture because she has three lilies in her hands, and six stars that form a circle around her head, as the halo. Giving some meaning to this, and in my point of view, the halo can tell us that the girl is dead and she is in heaven.

Now we’re going to talk about the topic that can be seen in the second stanza. In it we find the theme of forgetfulness and how the narrator of the poem feels for her although she has gone. A very similar thing can be seen in the picture because if we look at the lower part of the painting, we see that there is a boy who is resting on the ground next to the top of a tree, looking to infinity, as if he were seeing his lover and even as if he were touching her. Here we have the second part of the picture that corresponds to the first one. Both protagonists are missing each other: He is on earth, and she is in heaven, it’s the breaking-off in the relation, nature has divided them and has place them in different worlds.

He is imagining that she is by his side, and she is caressing him, but suddenly he wakes up and think that it’s only the autumn that throws the leaves of the deciduous tree:

- “...her hair /Fell all about my face. . . . /Nothing: the autumn-fall of leaves.”

In the eleventh line, the poet turns back to the description showing us the space in which the woman is:

- “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 see the sun. /It lies in Heaven, across the flood /Of ether, as a bridge.”

- “Around her, lovers, newly met /'Mid deathless love's acclaims, /Spoke evermore among themselves /Their heart-remembered names; /And the souls mounting up to God/ Went by her like thin flames.”

This verses that lead the third stanza of the poem are represented, in the picture, by some representations of lovers in different postures. It seems the girl were looking around her and she only could see herself and her lover. She is surrounded by the love that she has lost.

In the following four stanzas we see how the poet reproduces what she is saying:

- She is talking about the moment when they both become united forever in God’s arms. She will teach him the world in which she is and they will learn together all the new things that they see. They will introduce their love in the present of Mary who will approve their love.

She is try to recover her life, with her lover, on Earth, and be together forever:

- “Only to live as once on earth”

- “All this is when he comes”

The poem ends showing us the sadness that she feels because she knows that can not be with him till he arrives to her world. She can not advance the events, he will die some day and nobody will prevent it.

In the painting, this last four stanzas are difficult to see, because now we are not talking about a description that can be seen on the picture, we are talking about the feelings that are printed inside the picture. But if we take a look to the face of the protagonists we could see the sadness, the feeling of an unfinished love. They bothe have a lost look, imagining that the other is doing the same: to remember these days when they were the one to each other:

- He seems to be dreaming of her, trying to find her in his thoughts, and imagine what she is doing, feeling, at every moment, what she feels.

- We too can see the loneliness in the forest that is very needed when you have to take the reins of your mind, and when you need to talk alone with your lover through she is gone or not. It is a moment where you have to regain your love. And he is demonstrating it, thanks to his position and the space that is surrounding him, the autumn, a melancholic time.

- She, from her dialogue in the poem, is fighting to achieve a new life. She desires to live with him and we can see it in her face because if we look at her countenance we are going to see how she feels:

- Her face is a mixture of loneliness, because she is not with her love; hope, that helps her to wait for him that have to come back to her; the immortal love, that will last to the end of times; the dreaming of engagement, because we can see the lovers that are around her figure and that can be seen as thoughts that have been projected out of her mind as if they had their own life; and of course, a strong melancholy, because she is living in the past, at the moment she died when he left her lover.

Bibliography

Painting: The Victorian Web.http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/5.html 7 May 2006. Last time viewed 10 May 2006

Poem: The Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/9.html. 7 May 2006. Last time viewed 10 May 2006