Saturday, August 16, 2014

What is an analysis of Rossetti's sensuousness in "The Blessed Damozel"?

One cannot know the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood without knowing Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He is a painter and a poet who is famous for his sensuous depictions of women, both in his art and literature. His style gives life to:

voluptuous femme fatales distinguished by their long necks, luxuriant flowing hair, and rosebud mouths. (Oxford Bibliographies)

He wrote poems after his own paintings with these sensuous women as his muses.
His poem "The Blessed Damozel" is after a painting of his with the same title. The poem is rich with imagery as he employs words to paint the narrative between a damozel (damsel) in Heaven and a man on Earth. He tells a tale of desire and longing between these two people who are separated by a vast expanse between them.
He makes the brief bittersweet experience all the more palpable to the reader by "prolonging the agony" of desire. He does this by extending the moment and appealing to multiple senses throughout the experience. Visually, he describes the woman with "eyes deeper than the depth / Of waters still'd at even" and with "hair that lay along her back": "yellow like ripe corn." She is looking down, her gaze surrounded by the love of lovers. We are then offered an auditory experience of these lovers—who "[speak] evermore among themselves" and whose hearts and spirits rise and whir past her "like thin flames."
Rossetti guides the reader's mental gaze around the scene then brings the sensation to that of touch when he describes how:

she bow'd herself and stoop'dOut of the circling charm;Until her bosom must have madeThe bar she lean'd on warm.

Rossetti then makes use of synesthesia, a poetic device often used in Romantic poetry that builds up an image to gain a powerful effect by appealing to more than one sense simultaneously. He does so when he describes her voice:

Her voice was like the voice the starsHad when they sang together.

Rossetti's sensuousness succeeds in making the readers feel the overwhelming reality of love and loss as well as peace and pining, and he does this through the vivid use of these poetic devices. He breathes warm life into the subject of his painting and allows them to be seen, heard, and felt as they move along with the fluidity of his words. So much so that, by the end of "The Blessed Damozel," the reader is able to likewise "[hear] her tears."
https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art/299805

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199799558/obo-9780199799558-0126.xml

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