Being so at rest that Amelotte
Heard far beneath the plunge and float
Of a hound swimming in the moat.
“Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled
Home to the nests that crowned
Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare
Beating again, they seemed to tear
With that thick caw the woof o’ the air.”
Such fragments afford the merest glimpses of the background, the pure, delicate, ultra-refined, and yet intensely naturalistic setting of the poem.
And indeed it is this highest refinement of naturalism, this perfect idealization of realities, this raising of the simplest and commonest accessories of life into universal beauty and significance, that remains Rossetti’s inmost, utmost charm. This it is that sends us back, again and again, from all the splendours of his maturity, from the vivid glories of the ballads and the long-drawn passion of the sonnets, to the primal sweetness and utter simplicity of “The Blessed Damozel;” the easiest to love, the hardest to place in a just order, amid all that came from the hand and heart of Rossetti.