Artists throughout time have done impressive pictorial recreations of literary works that speak to them. However, what would the recreation painting be like if the poet painted it himself? In “The Blessed Damozel,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti tells the story of a dead woman in the Heaven, or the damozel, dreaming to rejoin her living lover on earth. However, when the dream ends, she weeps about the uncertainty of her future with the lover. As a poet and a painter, Rossetti made a recreation of his poem on canvas and named it Sancta Lilias. The version in Tate Britain is an unfinished work, including just the head of Lilias. The painting and the poem both show the divinity and liveliness of the damozel and Lilias. However, in showing the protagonists’ love passion, the poem uses a relatively expressive way to depict the damozel’s desire for a reunion with her lover, while the painting shows a sense of repressiveness in Lilias’s emotion.

Rossetti depicted the woman in both the poem and the painting with the characteristic of divinity. Upon seeing the painting in person, I noticed that the canvas surface reflected the environmental lights and created a shiny effect for the whole painting. This effect is achieved by the golden pigment, which gives a smoother texture to the canvas surface, on the background and clothing of Lilias. The reflection on the golden pigments creates the glowing effect that shroud the painting with a sense of holiness. The effect might be unintentional for Rossetti, but it perfectly converges with the image of the Angel-like damozel depicted in his poem. The damozel appeared as a nymph watching the earth “From the gold bar of Heaven” (Rossetti 2). She is elevated, distant, and sacred as an Angel in her first appearance. Even though Rossetti gave her human traits later, he still keeps her sacredness throughout the poem. In addition, the poem’s setting is the Heaven, in which the damozel imagines encountering the saints like Mary and Jesus with her lover (Rossetti 75-104). As a result, the whole poem creates a mood of sacredness and holiness, which aligns with the visual effect in the painting.

Despite making her appear sacred, Rossetti showed the woman’s liveliness from different perspectives in the poem and the painting. As Professor Ohri commented during lecture, Rossetti humanizes the damozel by showing her body temperature in the lines “Until her bosom must have made/ The bar she lean’d on warm” when she misses her lover on the edge of the Heaven (Rossetti 45-46). Maintaining a mortal human’s body temperature indicates her emotional connection to the earth. Her passionate love is also a human desire unfit for the Heaven. In the poem, the damozel questioned God: “Have I not pray’d in Heaven?–on earth,/ Lord, Lord, had he not pray’d?/ Are not two prayers a perfect strength?/ And shall I feel afraid” (Rossetti 69-72). The rhetorical questions show her passion and desire to meet her lover—feelings of the mortal world instead of heaven. In contrast to presenting invisible and abstract characteristics, the painting shows Lilias’s connection with the secular world visually through her position and careful depiction of her skin. In the painting, Lilias’s rosy lips and pink complexion on her cheeks make her look like a living woman rather than an angel (Fig. 1). The position of her head, looking down from Heaven toward Earth, suggests her desire to reunite with her love.

The damozel in the poem expresses her passion openly and directly, while Lilias represses her feeling with the depress expression on her face. The damozel presents her desire to meet her lover and imagines a wedding in heaven in the second half of the poem. In her long, emotional monologue, she passionately questioned God for not actively supporting her reunion with the lover and showed her frustration due to loneliness in heaven. She imagines taking her lover to “bathe” in “God’s sight” and “seek the groves/ Where the lady Mary is,” so that their marriage could be blessed and happy (Rossetti 78-104). She is not ashamed of expressing her passion and feels proud to show her lover to the angels in heaven. However, in the painting, a sense of repressiveness can be observed in the expression of love. Rossetti includes only six stars in Lilias’s hair in the painting, while he describes the damozel in the poem with seven stars(Fig. 1). According to the Tate Britain Museum’s introduction of the painting, the seven stars in the poem is an allusion to the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione in Greek mythology—and the missing star a reference to the daughter Merope who fell in love with Sisyphus and feels ashamed of her passion toward a mortal human. Therefore, her star shines dimly in the painting and is invisible for the viewers (Fowle). In contrast with the damozel’s expressive monologue, Lilias’s missing star indicates her repression of love–the star that represents Lilias’s relationship, the love between mortal and immortal, is hidden from the viewers. Her facial expression is calm—to hide the struggle of hoping for a reunion that is openly stated in the poem.

Rossetti includes similar features of divinity and vitality in the damozel and Lilias. However, the damozel expresses her passion, while Lilias represses it. Recreations of arts and literatures have their own significance since authors would exhibit new understandings through their recreations. Rossetti’s unique recreation of a scene in his own poems proves that fiction paintings have their value and significance for artists’ personal skill improvements.

Works Cited