Poems+by+Dante+Gabriel+Rossetti


 * __About the Book: __**

//Poems// by Dante Gabriel Rossetti was published in 1881 by the London firm Ellis & White. It contains an abundance of Rossetti's poetry, mostly written between 1847 and 1853, and includes various forms, which are organized in the following order: poems, lyrics, sonnets, and lastly, translations. This book is suitable place to find a full range of Rossetti's works; it is both in-depth and orderly.

The cover for //Poems// is a plain, dull-green colour, accented with circular gold designs and flowers. According to [|the Rossetti Archive], "DGR designed the book cover-to-cover: page and type design, endpapers, binding" (para. 18). He worked on it meticulously and revised its contents several times before publishing the first edition - this included releasing trial books and proof printings, all of which underwent complex changes from quantity, order, and selection of poems. He did everything he could to ensure a favourable reception by reviewers. In 1870, he completed the volume, and the first edition of //Poems// was published. Upon its release, Rossetti was not yet fully satisfied - the endpapers, in particular, seemed inadequate to him. He is quoted as saying, "The woodcut looks raw on the white paper. If a second edition is ever wanted, this should be on a light - very light - greenish paper, of the tint I do my chalk drawings on. I think the woodcut had better have been left out of the plain-bound copies, as it looks quaint and provoking without the binding." Moreover, he was unhappy with the lettering on the spine (he felt that it was too broad), and this had to be recut (Rossetti Archive).

This book in particular is the second edition. The endpapers have been replaced with a blue floral print. The Rossetti Archive indicates that Rossetti's brother, William Michael Rossetti, noted that “The flowered paper used in the binding appears to have been brought by my father in 1824 from Malta—perhaps from Naples.” Because of this, as the Rossetti Archive points out, "the endpapers thus encode (semi-privately) an important personal feature of the book, and are further evidence of the kind of deliberate attitude DGR took in marrying the physique of the book to its conceptual and linguistic materials. In this case, the endpapers connect directly to the important poems in the volume that deal with DGR's father" (para. 28). //Poems,// therefore, is the result of an intimate and well-thought out process by Rossetti that merged contents with design.

Inside the second edition, it contains an advertisement that  explains the changes the publisher has made between this edition and the last. This includes the addition of Rossetti's unfinished piece, "The Bride's Prelude", and indicates that the fifty sonnets of the "House of Life" have been bundled together under 'Ballads and Sonnets'. These sonnets were presented in the first edition of this book as a work-in-progress, and were initially a set of fifty sonnets plus eleven songs. In this second edition, however, he has altered the sequence by augmenting the sonnets and removing the songs (Rossetti Archive, para. 9). 

__**About the Poet: **__ 

[|The Oxford DNB]states that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828. His sister, [|Christina Rossetti,] is another well-known poet from the era. From a young age, Rossetti exhibited an interest in poetry and paint, read widely – from Shelley to Coleridge, to French fiction and Italian poetry – and experimented with translation. One of his earliest poems is //The Blessed Damozel//, which is the first of his works displayed in //Poems//.  Around 1848, he joined with a group of six other men to form the [|Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood]. They each felt that art at the time had grown stale and their aim was to bring it back to vitality and freshness.  In 1850, Rossetti met [|Elizabeth Siddal], a woman who modeled for paintings by other members of the Brotherhood at the time. He began to draw her frequently, and they developed a relationship, which grew tense and troubled due to his ambivalence about their marriage. They eventually did marry in 1860, however a year later, Siddal gave birth to a stillborn child. This grieved her deeply. The next year, Rossetti came home to find Siddal overdosed on laudanum, and she died shortly thereafter. He went on to produce and sell several[| paintings], and gathered great success from his [|sensual, exotic portraits of women] in particular. During the late 1860’s, however, he began drinking heavily. Others noticed that he was growing quarrelsome and irritable, and his life falling to neglect. Rossetti would also complain of many illnesses, some of which were completely imagined. Others were real, including insomnia and failing eyesight. Due to his increasingly poor vision, he painted less and less. This caused a rekindling of his interest in poetry, and in 1868, Rossetti planned to publish a collection of poetry (//Poems//). This volume, as the Rossetti Archive indicates, was encouraged by William Boyd Scott, who believed that “the value of his paintings lay in their poetry, that he was a poet by birth-right, not a painter” (para. 1). Rossetti soon began gathering old poems and writing several new ones to include in the collection. The final product was a work that underscored "the relation of poetry to painting and vice versa", with each section deeply engaged with pictorial subject matter and revealing a close relationship between content and design (Rossetti Archive, para. 30). The process, according to the Oxford DNB, was painstaking; he worked his poems over and over, and it underwent several alterations before being completed. In 1870 it was finished, and the first edition of Poems was published. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; line-height: 1.5;">A short time later, in 1872, Rossetti would suffer a complete mental breakdown; he grew manic, hearing voices and having ideas of conspiracies against him, and attempted suicide by ingesting laudanum. He remained in a coma for 36 hours, after which he returned home and began a slow recovery. He started painting again, but grew lonely, depressed, and addicted to [|chloral] – a medication that had been prescribed to him previously for his insomnia. In October 1879, he took an overdose of chloral; from then on, he steadily grew more weak, pale, and sickly. On April 9, 1882, Rossetti died just short of his forty-fifth birthday (Bullen).


 * __<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Blessed Damozel: __**

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">//[|The Blessed Damozel]// is the first poem that appears in //Poems//. It is one of his earlier pieces, written when he was around 19 years old (Knickerbocker 486). It has been said that Edgar Allen Poe’s //The Raven// is what inspired //The Blessed Damozel// for Rossetti, as he has been quoted as saying, "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in heaven” (McKillop 93). <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">//The Blessed Damozel// tells the story of a lady who is separated from her lover by death. She leans out “from the gold bar of Heaven”, and yearns to be with him again, dreaming of the day that they will be reunited in paradise (Rossetti, "The Blessed Damozel" 2). She wishes their love could be as it was on Earth, but knows that she must wait, that her wishes cannot be fulfilled until the time comes. She is optimistic, but sad and heartbroken; she must enter heaven without her beloved, and realizes that they will be separated until it is his time to join her in the afterlife. It is a beautiful poem about a melancholic situation, which Rossetti renders dream-like and poignant with his detailed descriptions. From her eyes, to the lilies in her hand, to her robe; Rossetti has taken care to imagine every fine point vividly, and does not fail to do the same in conveying both the damozel’s and her beloved’s emotions. It reads almost as a conversation between the lady in heaven, and her partner on earth. She speaks, and his replies are given in brackets, reminding the reader of this tragic situation this couple finds themselves in and how they are both afflicted by the loss of one another. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Despite this being written when Rossetti was young, it displays maturity in thought and is a rather sophisticated exhibition of budding talent. For additional reading, [|Thomas H. Brown] provides his own analysis of this poem, and responds to it as “a quest poem in which the lover probes multiple levels of his consciousness in an attempt to discover the reality of a spiritual-supernatural existence” (274).


 * __<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Works Cited: __**

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Brown, Thomas H. “The Quest of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in “The Blessed Damozel”. //Victorian Poetry// 10.3 (1972): 274. Web.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Bullen, J. B. “Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–1882).” //Oxford Dictionary of National Biography//. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. May 2015. Web.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">McKillop, Alan D. “Festus and The Blessed Damozel”. Modern Language Notes 34.2 (1919): 93. Web.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">//Poems (1870).// Rossetti Archive. Web. []

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “The Blessed Damozel”. Poems. London: Ellis & White, 1881. 3-9 Print.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. //Poems.// London: Ellis & White, 1881. Print. PR5340 E81