Written in his nineteenth year (though re-touched with important improvements afterwards), while the ballads above referred to were the work of his maturity,—and as remote from them in spirit as in date, the poem is unique among unique poetry. “The Blessed Damozel” is no product of precocity. It has not the laboured archaism, the studied originality, which mark most of the travel-poems of 1849 (“Paris and Belgium,” “Antwerp and Bruges,” etc.). Superb as are the sonnets of that early period—such noble utterances as “The Staircase of Notre Dame,” “Place de la Bastille,” and “The Refusal of Aid between Nations” remaining unsurpassed by anything in the “House of Life” series—the irregular lyrics and blank-verse chronicles of those journeys are apt to keep us in mind of those etymological researches at the British Museum by which Rossetti is said to have stored his vocabulary with the purest Saxon, preparatory to ballad-work. “The Blessed Damozel,” on the contrary, is the most spontaneous and convincing of all his shorter poems. It seems to have sprung straight from the heart of the boy-poet in a sort of prophetic rapture, ere he knew the sorrow which he sang, and which his song should ease, as the most perfect art can sometimes ease, in other souls, for generations to come. Its strength lies in the very acme of tenderness; its source in the purest strain of common human feeling—the passionate, insatiable craving of the faithful heart for the continuity of life and love beyond the tomb, and the deep sense of the poverty of celestial compromises to satisfy the mourner on either side of the gulf that Death has set between. Here again is the true romantic note—the insistence on the joy and glory of the physical world, the delight in the earthly manifestations of affection, and the awed, plaintive conflict of impatience with resignation under the mystery of parting and transition to an unknown state. It is the same thought which an American poet has expressed in “Homesick in Heaven,”—the thought that the beloved departed must in some way share the sorrow of separation, and await the last reunion with scarcely less longing than theirs whom they have left behind. “The Blessed Damozel” is one whom Death has thus removed from her lover’s side, and she is pictured leaning out of Heaven, watching with tears and prayers for some sign of his coming. It is the lover himself who sees her thus, as in a dream, and tells us how,—
“She bowed herself, and stooped
Out of the circling charm,
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,”
and how, on the mystic borderland between earth and heaven,—
“The souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.”
The glories of the upper air have no charm for her until he shares them. Still gazing downward from “the ramparts of God’s house,” she sees—
“The tides of day and night