The Blessed Damozel

title  See WMR's note (1911).

Damozel: old French spelling, which signals the poem's conscious adoption of a medieval style.

2  bar: “suggests the protective barrier placed in front of paintings in nineteenth-century galleries”(Stein, Ritual of Interpretation, 148).

4   Dante, Paradiso III.11-12.

5  “From the Old Masters” ( Baum, “The Blessed Damozel”, li ); and see Dante, Purgatorio XXX. 21. The lily symbolizes purity and is one of the flowers associated with the Madonna. The number three has mystical associations; it particularly recalls the Trinity.

6  Revelation 1:16 and 12:1. In the painting the damozel has a crown of six stars, not seven. The discrepancy defines the crown as the Pleiades, which traditional astrology saw as composed of seven stars, though one—the “lost Pleiad”—was invisible. This “Lost Pleiad”, a favorite subject in the romantic tradition since Byron, is Merope, who was cast from her starry place because she fell in love with a mortal man. In this context the Damozel is the Lost Pleiad. Symbolically the Pleiades are a favorable sign, a forecast of good weather for navigation and agriculture. The number seven in this context also suggests the seven joys and seven sorrows of the Madonna: compare “Mary's Girlhood I”, lines 9-10. In coronation pictures of the Blessed Virgin, she is customarily crowned with twelve stars (symbolizing the twelve apostles).

18  The “ten years” distinctly recalls the length of time between the death of Beatrice and her reappearance to Dante in the Purgatorio .

35-36   Dante, Paradiso XXII. 133ff.

54  Alluding to the ancient idea of the music of the spheres; here, that music is echoed in the damozel's voice.

61-66  See Scott (Autobiographical Notes vol. 2, 113-114), who records that in 1869 DGR found a tame bird on a footpath at Penkill and took it for“the spirit of my wife”.

71  Matthew 18:19.

74  In the Book of Revelation the angels are all clothed in white.

76-78  Revelation 22:1; also Dante, Paradiso XXX. 49-51, 61-64.

79-84  Revelation 4:5, 5:8, 8:3.

86  Revelation 22:2.

87  The dove is a traditional figure of the Holy Ghost.

103-4  Dante, Vita Nuova,“Sonnet. That lady of all gentle memories”, 1-4. (See Rossetti's translation of this sonnet.)

107-8  St. Cecilia: an early virgin martyr, closely associated with the Virgin Mary in the mythology of Cecilia's life. In the middle ages she emerged as the patroness of sacred music. Gertrude: patron saint of pilgrims and travellers. Margaret: either Margaret of Antioch, popularized in the Golden Legend , or perhaps the 13th century Margaret of Cortona, a kind of Mary Magdalene surrogate. Rosalys: she summarizes DGR's procedure in handling these female figures. Rosalys is a kind of pure signifier, a linguistic construct made from two of the Madonnna's most characteristic symbols (the rose and the lily). The extremity of DGR's secular spirituality also appears in this signifier, for the rose=beauty/passion/love while the lily=chastity/purity/devotion.

126   Jameson : “the Madonna . . . is the especial patroness of music and minstrelsy. Her delegate Cecilia patronised sacred music. . . . When the angels are singing from their music books, and others are accompanying them with lutes and viols, the song is not always supposed to be the same” ( Legends of the Madonna, 62 ).

136-7   Cavalcanti, “Sonnet. A Rapture concerning his Lady”, 1-2.

139-44   Dante, Paradiso XXXI. 91-2.