The Blessed Damozel

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, painter and translator. Rossetti was born in London, real name was Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His family and friends called him Gabriel, but in its publications, Dante used the name because of literary links. Along with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.

Raised on Italian literature, especially pleased Divine Comedy, which is clearly marked in his works. At the age of nine has been written to King's College London, ten years later he was taken to the Royal Academy. There he became friends with Hunt and Millais.

This is one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's earliest poems, as well as one of his greatest and best known. Rossetti was not thinking of any particular person when he wrote the poem. He wanted to rewrite Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," or "Annabel Lee" from the point of view of the dead woman, not the surviving man. But that is not quite what he did. Instead he has imagined the woman in heaven and what she would say, and he laments, as mourner, both what has happened and the sad truth that what his imagination hopes is not real. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem "The Blessed Damozel" illustrates the poet's profound spiritual beliefs and his Victorian Romantic idealistic view of human love.

The imagery is from Rossetti's namesake, the Italian poet Dante. In The Divine Comedy, the blessed damozel would be Beatrice, who supervises Dante's journey from hell through purgatory to paradise and then guides him through the fantastic and overwhelming visual phantasmogoria of heaven to where God sits enthroned. No rival to Dante's constantly self-exceeding vision of heaven is imaginable, but it is at least within that tradition that Rossetti writes. He gives us the perspective of the woman, ...