SOURCE: "Behind 'Golden Barriers': Framing and Taming the Blessed Damozel," in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 77, Spring, 1990, pp. 13-16.

Some time after 1866 Dante Gabriel Rossetti formulated this eroticized theory of ut pictura poesis:

Picture and poem bear the same relation to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection. (Works 606)¹

Most discussions of Rossetti and the sister arts mention this quotation: Richard Stein sees Rossetti's statement as a "fragment" which "seems to outline and analogy between an intellectualized concept of love and his composite art" (196-97); and Maryann Ainsworth believes it is particularly applicable to "the most successful instances of the picture-poem idea" which "came to him during his last ten years," that is, between 1872 and 1882 (6-7).

Perhaps the fullest and most perceptive analysis of Rossetti's formulation of ut pictura poesis has been made by Ian Fletcher, who suggests that

The "beauty" of the picture is reciprocated by the "identical"—if superficially dissimilar—beauty of the poem resulting in an indivisible ideal unity, comparable only to the state of love. In Rossetti's sonnets for pictures of women, the metaphor is actualized as an encounter between observer-poet and portrait-beloved. (28-29)

Certainly Rossetti's emphasis on a reciprocal, identical beauty indicates that his hypothetical point of "supreme perfection" occurs at a moment of higher, aesthetic synthesis. That is, a kind of vicarious, erotic union occurs between male artist-spectator and female art-object, an aesthetically creative rather than a procreative dialectic.

The fictional artist's desire for reconciliation and identity with the female subject of his art—his anima—is, as Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi has shown, a central Rossettian topos. Rossetti's anima first appeared in the selection of poems he sent to William Bell Scott for his perusal in November 1847 under the title "Songs of the Art Catholic," in her guises as the speaker's sister, Margaret, in "My Sister's Sleep," as the Virgin Mary in "Mater Pulchrae Delectionis," and as the eponymous heroine of "The Blessed Damozel." Gelpi argues convincingly that in the poems which feature versions of his anima Rossetti was striving to achieve "union of the self by uniting masculine and feminine principles within the self," claiming that this "internal drama" (1) lends psychological coherence to his work.

Gelpi feels that while it may be coherent "The Blessed Damozel" is problematic. She points out that if the anima "becomes an end in herself, the imaginative symbol of all that the conscious self desires, then she is dangerous," and concludes that the poem "ends not with a union of self achieved but with such a union still hoped for, and in that obsessive, unfulfilled wish for union lies the danger" (4). However, I shall be arguing that although the union of male and female fails to occur in "The Blessed Damozel" the "danger" of the anima's domination of the male is averted because of two factors not considered by Gelpi: firstly, because the poem's "two" male speakers, the omniscient and the parenthetical narrators, eventually unite to form a single voice, a dominant male discourse; and secondly, because as the male position consolidates, the once vociferous and dominant Damozel is neutralized, eventually losing her voice and weeping.

The nature, unity and function of the narrative voices in "The Blessed Damozel" have been the subject of continued debate among Rossetti critics. In his analysis of the first published version of the poem, which appeared in the second number of The Germ (80-83) in February 1850, D. M. R. Bentley claims that the poem was intended as an almost polemical exercise in "the re-creation of a medieval awareness" which throws into relief the relationship between "the implied poet and the historical percipient in the poem." Bentley defines this "historical percipient" as

an omniscient and speculative figure whose style and assumptions characterize him as the representative of the medieval-Catholic awareness that the reader is invited to enter. The function of the percipient in "The Blessed Damozel" is complex: like the implied poet of Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures" his task is to present a "picture" (in some case the "diptych" composed of the blessed Damozel and her earthbound lover) and to imagine the world and feelings of its personae…. Through his re-creation of a spatial and emotional relationship that is radically alien to the "modern" mind, the percipient inducts the reader-spectator into the medieval-Catholic awareness that he was designed by Rossetti to embody. (6)

This ingenious critical construction of a poem equipped with an implied poet, percipient narrator, parenthetical speaker and Damozel, fails to take sufficient account of the fact that as one of Bentley's own footnotes concedes, many commentators see the "entire drama" of the poem as being "enacted within the single consciousness of the earthbound lover," the parenthetical speaker. In part our perception of the whole poem as a product of the parenthetical speaker's schizophrenic consciousness may be a response to Rossetti's failure completely to control point of view in "The Blessed Damozel." This lack of control is sufficient reason to regard Bentley's view that there are four levels of narration as being somewhat optimistic; a more convincing case has been made by Paul Lauter and Thomas Brown for the earthbound, parenthetical-print speaker being the presiding consciousness, the former arguing that the poem's vision "can be regarded entirely as the grieving … lover's projection" (346).

With her "blue grave eyes," "three white lilies" and "white rose of Mary's gift" (Il. 3, 5, 9), the Damozel is evidently a Marian anima figure. What the narrator does in an attempt to unite himself with his anima is to activate the simultaneous processes of aesthetic and erotic unification which bring the poem and picture and man and woman into Rossetti's reciprocal state of ideal conjunction. Thus as the poem begins poetry and painting become nearly identical, as the top part of the Rossettian "diptych," the initial description of the Damozel, is presented as a monumental tableau. But this vision is not totally static: the lady's "still look" (l. 16) is, paradoxically, still full of "wonder" (l. 15), a characteristically Rossettian attribution of psychological animation to a static, pictorialized figure. The Damozel's powerful gaze strives to penetrate and thus to overcome the "steep gulph" of time and space which separates her from her beloved.

Consequently she leans out from "the gold bar of heaven" (l. 2) in an effort to escape the confines of pictorial stasis which the frame-like heavenly barrier imposes. Realizing that she is consigned to remain perpetually silent and still within her golden frame the Damozel immediately challenges the limitations of her condition by leaning and gazing outward, and warming her pictorial barrier with the pressure of her bosom. Eventually and inevitably, after ten stanzas, the Damozel breaks her pictorial vow of silence with a petulant outburst:

"I wish that he were come to me,
For he will come," she said.
"Have I not prayed in solemn heaven?
On earth has he not prayed?
Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
And shall I feel afraid?"
(ll. 61-6)

The Damozel's prayers have been reciprocated and, significantly, anticipated by her earthly lover, who is encased, as Bentley points out, in parentheses which are the "typographical equivalent of a predella" (39). The parenthetical typography of "The Blessed Damozel" is the most striking example of Rossetti's literary pictorialism, a device which complements the pictorial image of the "gold bar," and appears virtually to have dictated the bipartite form of Rossetti's Early Renaissance style depiction of The Blessed Damozel (1875-8).²

Bentley claims that the "fantastic mind of the lover" is "separate from yet accessible to the percipient" narrator, but if anything the reverse is true: the parenthetical speaker, who becomes the reclining figure in the painting's predella, has access to the scene described by the seemingly omniscient narrator. He adds an important coda to the initial description, emphatically qualifying it in terms of immediate first-person, present tense experience:

to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.

(To one it is ten years of years:
… Yet now, here 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.)
(ll. 17-24)

The bland omniscience of the first voice which explains that a day for the Damozel counts as ten years for those left behind is abruptly corrected by "one" who apparently knows better, the hyperbolical lover for whom the Damozel's "day" is "ten years of years." Because the main narrative and the parenthetical one substantially overlap there is a sense of reciprocity, and a point of intersection and interaction is thereby established.

Momentarily her lover is convinced that the Damozel has been in contact with him and he fantasizes that it is her hair—the yellow hair of a corn goddess—which fell about his face. In "Body's Beauty" "one strangling golden hair" ensnares Lilith's victims but here the Damozel's hair is a reassuringly tangible token of her reality. Rapunzel-like it links heaven and earth almost as if it would draw the man heavenward, and like the gold bar of heaven the yellow hair defines the world of its two inhabitants, not as a barrier but as an inclusive and natural frame, embracing both lovers. As this fantasy dissolves it is replaced by a natural correlative for the falling hair, falling leaves, which are an ironic earthly equivalent of the corn image, signifying decay instead of fertility. Both the "hair, lying down" (l. 11) the Damozel's back and the dead leaves of the parenthetical speaker's world are featured in the appropriate heavenly and earthbound sections of Rossetti's painting, reinforcing the reader-spectator's sense of a close correspondence between bipartite poem and painting.

Although he says relatively little directly the parenthetical narrator in fact controls the movement of "The Blessed Damozel." Rather like the sestet in a sonnet the parenthetical speaker's comments initiate a volta, changing our point of view and perception of the Damozel by meditating upon particular aspects of her existence. Subsequently this speaker interrupts the Damozel as she anticipates teaching him in heaven, and again it is evident that he hears or knows what is said in the main body of the poem because he comments directly upon it:

"And I myself will teach him—
I myself lying so,—
The songs I sing here; which his mouth
Shall pause in hushed and slow,
Finding some knowledge at each pause
And some thing new to know."

(Alas! to her wise simple mind
These things were all but known
Before: they trembled on her sense,—
Her voice had caught their tone.
Alas for lonely Heaven! Alas
For life wrung out alone!

Alas, and though the end were reached …
Was thy part understood
Or borne in trust? And for her sake
Shall this too be found good?—
May the close lips that knew not prayer
Praise ever thought they would?)
(ll. 85-102)

The lady's certainty that her lover's mouth shall "'pause in'" between her songs "'finding some new knowledge at each pause'" is clearly a cue to the earthly lover to rehearse his lines for heaven. He duly responds with a lament which reveals an interesting aspect of their former relationship: with "her wise simple mind" the Damozel had had intuitive foreknowledge of heaven's songs, whereas he had been doubtful. Therefore in the second stanza of his second speech the lover engages in an intense self-interrogation, asking himself: "was thy part understood?" "May the close lips that knew not prayer / Praise ever, though they would?" Evidently the earthly lover remains as yet unable to make the leap of faith necessary to re-unite him with the Damozel, and we therefore return to the speaker who knows her part.

When Rossetti published "The Blessed Damozel" in the 1870 edition of Poems these parenthetical stanzas were revised, condensed, and I think, clarified:

(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?)
(ll. 97-102)

In this stanza the prospect of endless unity with the Damozel's soul seems even more unlikely to her lover because his sense of inferiority has been intensified, and in the oil painting the male's inferiority is graphically established by the small scale of his figure in comparison with the Damozel's above him: his head is about the same size as one of her lilies.

The problem which the poem tries to resolve, but which the static painting does not and cannot deal with, is how to subordinate the confident decisive Damozel to a weak, passive male. In The Germ version of the poem this problem is particularly acute because it is evident that "her" mind is decidedly more wise than simple, while his wallows in repeated lamentation. Rossetti's revisions of The Germ text go some way towards eliminating the repetitive histrionic quality from his voice but in both versions of the poem the male is dominated by the female, and both texts reverse this situation in almost identical concluding stanzas:

She gazed and listened and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild:
"All this is when he comes." She ceased;
The light thrilled past her, filled
With Angels, in strong level lapse.
Her eyes prayed, and she smiled.

(I saw her smile.) But soon their flight
Was vague 'mid the poised spheres.
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands
And wept. (I heard her tears.)
(ll. 139-50)³

Given the final words in "The Blessed Damozel" the parenthetical speaker is uncharacteristically assertive, and because his statements are affirmations of the percipient's descriptions they read like parenthetical asides by him. Thus the juxtaposition of the impersonal, "Her eyes prayed, and she smiled" with, "I saw her smile," constitutes a significant convergence of "objective" and "subjective" points of view.

The ultimate integration of the twin aspects of the male psychology represented by Rossetti's main and parenthetical speakers is predicated upon a decisive shift in the latter's perception of the Damozel. Previously she had been vastly superior and therefore dominant inducing in her earthly lover a sense of inadequacy which results in his identity crisis. Objectively he recognizes her manifest superiority, but subjectively and parenthetically he is disturbed by this perception, at first rejecting the existence of his vision as "nothing." However, having heard the Damozel speak he is forced to admit her existence and question his worthiness of her.

The strategy finally adopted for reconciling the male to his anima is not to elevate him but to neutralize her. The Damozel's "gold bar" of the first stanza becomes the imprisoning "golden barriers" of the final one behind which she now retreats, becoming "mild" of speech, and regresses into the passive mode of Mariana, waiting for him to come. She becomes silent and therefore meek and benign, praying with her eyes and smiling and although the smile pleases the earthly lover his final triumph occurs when the Damozel cries. Seeing the smile and hearing the tears the earthly lover gains complete control of his vision and her mind. She ceases to be wise and becomes simple, crying for her beloved instead of threatening to teach him.

For the observer-poet of "The Blessed Damozel" the moment of "supreme" perfection occurs only when he is in complete harmony with himself, when his two voices virtually match, and when his anima is entirely subordinated to him. In a more covert fashion "The Blessed Damoze!" makes a similar point to Browning's "My Last Duchess": total male power resides in the complete control of a female art-object. The Duke is only happy when "all smiles" have stopped and Rossetti's earthly lover is happiest when the Damozel smiles contentedly but cries helplessly.

Notes

¹ The 1974 edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics translates Horace's dictum ut pictura poesis thus: "as is painting so is poetry"; and it gives a brief history of the topos.

² This version is in the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, and is reproduced by Surtees no. 244.

³ There are a few minor changes in punctuation in the 1870 version of "The Blessed Damozel." In addition, "the light thrilled past her" becomes "the light thrilled towards her," the angels are in "strong level flight" instead of "lapse," and "their path was vague in distant spheres," instead of "vague 'mid the poised spheres."

Works Cited

Ainsworth, Maryann Wynn. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art." Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art. Ed. Ainsworth. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1976. 6-7.

Bentley, D. M. R. "'The Blessed Damozel': A Young Man's Fantasy." Victorian Poetry 20 (Autumn-Winter 1982): 31-43.

Brown, Thomas. "The Quest of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 'The Blessed Damozel.'" Victorian Poetry 10 (Autumn 1972): 273-77.

Fletcher, Ian. Swinburne. London: Longman, 1973.

Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth. "The Image of the Anima in the Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Victorian Newsletter No. 45 (Spring 1974): 1-7.

The Germ: A Facsimile Reprint of the Literary Organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Published in 1850 Ed. William Michael Rossetti. London: Elliot Stock, 1901.

Lauter, Paul and Thomas Brown. "The Narrator of 'The Blessed Damozel.'" Modern Language Notes 73 (1958): 344-48.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Ed William Michael Rossetti. London: Ellis, 1911.

Stein, Richard. The Ritual of Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975.

Surtees, Virginia. The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raissonné. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.