Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand
Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
Triumphal labours of the day to be.
The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’
The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.”
And as his health continued to improve, Rossetti’s poetry and painting rose again to their highest level. The former, indeed, is thought by some sound critics to reach at this juncture a superb merit unattained before; for it was here that he wrote the first of the three great romantic ballads which mark the zenith of his poetic power. “Rose Mary” stands supreme in this incomparable category. Nor did he ever far surpass, if at all, his pictures of this period,—“The Bower Maiden” (1873) for frank and vigorous natural beauty in the pretty child with the fresh-blowing marigolds, “Dis Manibus” or “The Roman Widow” (1874) for delicate and simple pathos in the treatment of the classic world; and “Proserpine” (1874) for the sombre moral tragedy symbolized in the classic story, seldom, if ever, so interpreted on canvas before.
In these years also he painted the beautiful “Garland Girl,” “La Ghirlandata” (1873), and “Veronica Veronese” (1872), called at first “The Day-dream,” but wholly distinct from the later work of that date; reverted, or endeavoured to revert in sketches, to his old fantasy of “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” and resumed a subject begun in 1864, but never quite fully worked out, “The Boat of Love,” suggested by Dante’s second Sonnet,—“Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io,” and representing Dante and Beatrice embarking in a boat with his friend and brother-poet Guido Calvacanti, and his lady Giovanna, and Lapo degli Uberti and his love.
“The Boat of Love.”
By permission of the Corporation of Birmingham.