Together, I and he.”
It was not until many years later that “The Blessed Damozel” afforded the subject of the picture by which Rossetti is most popularly and superficially known to the outer world. It was his habit to inscribe his pictures with some original verse, generally in sonnet form; and some of his best descriptive sonnets, such as “Pandora,” “Fiametta,” “Found,” “Astarte Syriaca,” and “Mary Magdalene,” had such an origin. “The Blessed Damozel” is said to be only instance of a picture executed after instead of before the correlative poem.
Two important works stand yet apart, alike from what we have classed as introspective and personal poetry, and from the splendid ballads in which consists Rossetti’s most immortal contribution to English literature. “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” exemplify his use of the dramatic monologue, and alone among his compositions bear in a marked degree the influence of Browning. Especially is this influence notable in “A Last Confession.” The Italy of this wonderful fragment—placed by critics of authority in the front rank of Rossetti’s work—is, par excellence, Browning’s Italy, with all the intense humanness and distinction of character which dominates its furies and its loves, with all the Saxon intellect and reason stamped into and burning through the irresponsible passion of the South. Just as in his ballads and sonnets Rossetti grafted the clean-cut Saxon diction on to the long and languorous habit of the Latin tongue, so in “A Last Confession” does he graft vivid thought and piercing argument upon the deep pathos and terror of the theme. It is a death-bed story told in a priest’s ear; a story of passion and crime, and of a girl’s shallow laugh that drove her lover to kill her in a frenzy of despair. For he remembered how, awhile before,—
... “A brown-shouldered harlot leaned
Half through a tavern window thick with wine.
Some man had come behind her in the room
And caught her by the arms, and she had turned
With that coarse empty laugh on him....
... And three hours afterwards,
When she that I had run all risks to meet