On reading “The Blessed Damozel” by Rosetti, I found it
rather naïve and lacking depth. The romance itself has no personal or
interesting characteristics. Though the female lover is so besotted with her
yet living love that she will not enter heaven, she has no personality; it’s
more as though she is the embodiment of pure love than an actual person. Her
qualities include her gender (female), her virginity (indicated by her wearing
the “white rose of Mary’s gift,/For service…”), beauty (long hair, “yellow like
ripe corn” - which is an unromantic simile
– with seven stars in it, and she wears a “robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,”
which is undeniably period-appropriate sexy imagery), complete godliness (she
has direct and familiar intercourse with God’s mother and her handmaidens, and
ultimately Christ himself whom she requests to put her lover and she together
on heaven as on earth – the temerity!), and consummate lover.
As for the male lover, we hear virtually nothing about him
or his love for the deceased, other than an implied pining for her since her
death ten “years of years” ago (line 19). Even when his heavenly lover recoils
into heaven without him, “[laying] her face between her hands,/And [weeping],”
we hear nothing of a reaction from him even though this should be a highly
emotional and/or meaningful moment. His silence rings almost as indifference,
or might imply that his part in the love (or poem itself) is totally
unimportant.
In other words, I didn't find it effective - certainly not as a love poem.
I would have to agree with you Lindsay. This does not suffice as a love poem, at least not in the sense of mutual love. The male's indifference at the end of the poem rings too strong. "And she wept. (I heard her tears)", This leads me to believe his emotions toward her are not as strong as hers. Throughout the poem she proclaims her love in many ways, and it seems like it is very hard to read his "love." I know if I were to lose my love, I would be weeping alongside them, rather than stating the obvious. As a reader, his silence leaves you lost because you can't know exactly how he feels.
ReplyDeleteYes to your first point about the female beloved, and perhaps this is precisely the point: she is an idealized projection of his imagination, and the struggle of the poem is happening inside the mind of the lover who speaks parenthetically. It is possible then to read the poem is entirely about the lover-speaker, whose faith is under scrutiny in the poem. Consider what the final stanza suggests about the lover: what is he seeing and hearing? Has he imagined her recognizing the impossibility of the elaborate scene she has sketched for the future?
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