Critical Appreciation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel"

A wonderful poem written by a young man of nineteen Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882), The Blessed Damozel (1842) breathes all the freshness , warmth and passion of youth . The poem is full of fine subtle touches the freshness and spaciousness are lacking in some of his more ornate later poems.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828 - 1882)

Inspired by Edger Allan Poe’s The Raven, it is a love poem dealing with longing of the beloved for her lover. Read More Poetry The blessed damsel who is in haven longs passionately for her lover who is still on the earth. Her intense longing is felt by the lover on earthy life who also yearns for her. She has been in heaven for ten years. Passing like a day, all these ten years in heaven she is gazing from the heavenly height trying to see her lover on earth. Read More Poetry But to her lover on earth they had seen like ages. She thinks of his coming to heaven and what she will do when he comes. She will take him to the deep wells of light, bathe with him in the heavenly streams and visit the occult forbidden shrine. She will take him to Lady Mary and declare their love and get her approval ken they will be taken by Mary to God. There she will ask Lord Christ to reunite them as lovers in heaven for ever. But all this she will do when he comes. She waits hopefully, a little wistfully for, and sobs in the end. The lover on the earth hears her tears, and sees her smile. Despair, in Rossetti's vision, is also to be found in heaven despair and longing for earthly bliss, for human love. 

Read More Poetry Rossetti deals with the love of the blessed damsel the heavenly spirit, as if she were still an earthly creatures with all the warmth and intensity of love found in a young girl . Read More Poetry In spite of calm deep eyes and angelic voice this lovely damsel longs so passionately for her lover that her bosom makes the gold bars of heaven's rampart warm. Her sobs and tears are so touching as to melt the heart of all lovers. There is peculiar mixture of the human and angelic in the poem. Just as there in strange alteration between heaven and earth one may trace in the poem the obvious influence of Dante's Divine Comedy. It combines physical love with the spiritual. 

Rossetti is a painter first and poet next. His picture appeared first and poems afterwards. Like Keats he is pictorial poet. His out look on the world is essentially that of a painter. Read More Poetry He thinks and feels in pigments. Only a painter could have give us lines like these;

                  " The Blessed damozel leaned out

                    From the gold bar of heaven

                    She had three lilies in her hand

                   And stars in her hair were seven

                   And souts mounting up to God

                   Went by like this flames ".

              Read More Poetry Another delicate exquisite device is the interacting at intervals, in language of perfect simplicity and yet without archaism of the main poem , the thoughts of the distant lover still enchanted by earth ,e.g.

             "Oh! Sweet Even now in that birds song

               Strove not her accents there ".

 

The Blessed Damozel is one of the most fascinating poems written by Rossetti . It combines the vastness with the nearness which lends if an incomparable charm, says sir A.C Benson adds : " In contrast to the death and distance of the picture comes the thought of the nearness and closeness of the lie of human love, that passes through the dizzy spaces like an electric thrill, and hold the faithful hearts close together even through orestands in the tranquil and serene fortress of heaven and the other spins , a fevered and mortal atom, in the poor fretful world . There is a genial faith in the far off union, the passionate heart forecasting the perfect happiness of the meeting. Read More Poetry  For he will come - she says. This beautiful poem is a supreme instance of the charming of the ancient form with the most passionate dreams of Today.”

The manner in which Rossetti turns to heaven and to a spiritual after life would convey the idea that his is religious poetry. In fact, the title of his poem  The Blessed Damozel brings to mind the Virgin Mary. But Rossetti's intention was never to write for religious purposes. On the contrary, whereas religious believes in shedding of all earthly bonds following a union with God, the idea Rossetti presents in The Blessed Damozel is that earthy love survives in heaven. There is also a lot that the religious minded would object to in his portrayal of the disconsolate woman's indifference to all heavenly delights in her disconsolate grief stricken state.

 Ardhendu De  

References

1. Benson, Arthur Christopher (1906). Rossetti. English men of letters. S. Chand & Co. hdl:2027/njp.32101066385236

2. The Blessed Damozel - Wikipedia. (2012, February 16). The Blessed Damozel - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blessed_Damozel