“The room lay still in dusty glare, Having no sound through it Except the chirp of a caged bird That came and ceased: and if she stirred, Amelotte’s raiment could be heard.
“Although the lattice had dropped loose, There was no wind; the heat Being so at rest that Amelotte Heard far beneath the plunge and float Of a hound swimming in the moat.
“Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled Home to the nests that crowned Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare Beating again, they seemed to tear With that thick caw the woof o’ the air.”
Such fragments afford the merest glimpses of the background, the pure, delicate, ultra-refined, and yet intensely naturalistic setting of the poem.
And indeed it is this highest refinement of naturalism, this perfect idealization of realities, this raising of the simplest and commonest accessories of life into universal beauty and significance, that remains Rossetti’s inmost, utmost charm. This it is that sends us back, again and again, from all the splendours of his maturity, from the vivid glories of the ballads and the long-drawn passion of the sonnets, to the primal sweetness and utter simplicity of “The Blessed Damozel;” the easiest to love, the hardest to place in a just order, amid all that came from the hand and heart of Rossetti.
Written in his nineteenth year (though re-touched with important improvements afterwards), while the ballads above referred to were the work of his maturity,—and as remote from them in spirit as in date, the poem is unique among unique poetry. “The Blessed Damozel” is no product of precocity. It has not the laboured archaism, the studied originality, which mark most of the travel-poems of 1849 (“Paris and Belgium,” “Antwerp and Bruges,” etc.). Superb as are the sonnets of that early period—such noble utterances as “The Staircase of Notre Dame,” “Place de la Bastille,” and “The Refusal of Aid between Nations” remaining unsurpassed by anything in the “House of Life” series—the irregular lyrics and blank-verse chronicles of those journeys are apt to keep us in mind of those etymological researches at the British Museum by which Rossetti is said to have stored his vocabulary with the purest Saxon, preparatory to ballad-work. “The Blessed Damozel,” on the contrary, is the most spontaneous and convincing of all his shorter poems. It seems to have sprung straight from the heart of the boy-poet in a sort of prophetic rapture, ere he knew the sorrow which he sang, and which his song should ease, as the most perfect art can sometimes ease, in other souls, for generations to come. Its strength lies in the very acme of tenderness; its source in the purest strain of common human feeling—the passionate, insatiable craving of the faithful heart for the continuity of life and love beyond the tomb, and the deep sense of the poverty of celestial compromises to satisfy the mourner on either side of the gulf that Death has set between. Here again is the true romantic note—the insistence on the joy and glory of the physical world, the delight in the earthly manifestations of affection, and the awed, plaintive conflict of impatience with resignation under the mystery of parting and transition to an unknown state. It is the same thought which an American poet has expressed in “Homesick in Heaven,”—the thought that the beloved departed must in some way share the sorrow of separation, and await the last reunion with scarcely less longing than theirs whom they have left behind. “The Blessed Damozel” is one whom Death has thus removed from her lover’s side, and she is pictured leaning out of Heaven, watching with tears and prayers for some sign of his coming. It is the lover himself who sees her thus, as in a dream, and tells us how,—