If he forgot all this, it was no fault of his own making; his illness never fully subsided. But I was among the favoured still who had known him in his best days, and was appointed to serve him in his most trying hour.
I can further say that when I saw Rossetti in his prime, a healthy man, he was the noblest of men, and had a heart so good that I have never known a better, seldom its equal.
Illness changed him, but then he was no longer himself.
Taking Rossetti’s pictures and his verse together as one, he was a great poet; his poetics and paintings help each other, as did Blake’s in a vastly inferior degree, but their separation shows faults in each with distinctness. When one reads his poems, one thinks of his paintings; when one looks at his paintings, one thinks of his poems; whence the charm that surrounds all his work.
The celebrity that awaited Rossetti’s poems among critics was latent in his paintings, which were already famous for their emotional colouring and fine portraiture of women; and, being in intimate social relation with many leading members of the press, his poetical pretensions were accepted by acclamation. Then he had a powerful clientèle among buyers. Those who possessed his pictures were very ready to receive and admire the poems of their favourite artist, and to push them about in the fashionable and the wealthy world, as the works of the poet-painter, a title rarely obtained, so many gifts does it imply.
It was this that at once secured him his deserved success. He had published the “Blessed Damozel,” one of the poems on which his reputation rests, when a young man unknown to art, and it attracted no attention in the world at large; for justice is not done to merit of any kind unless it can pay its way.
The “Blessed Damozel” may be characterized as a drawing with tender descriptions of convent life, with the Virgin Mary as lady abbess; the whole lifted into remotest space, where lies the boundary-line of Heaven; the damozel being a sort of nun living among the holy, while all her reflections are human; the burden of them from first to last on love for an absent one, without whose presence she can find no happiness in her purgatorial heaven. It reads like the suggestion of a picture done in mediæval times—as old as the court cards in the pack used by players—at a period when the glory of saints and of christs was symbolized by a sort of curtain-ring round the head, or by circular fireworks which emitted sparks in perpetual corruscation.
I do not feel that the antique moulding of this poem is a fair excuse for its being illogical in places. The sun was so far off that it was scarcely visible—say two billion miles or so, like Uranus or Neptune; but that it looked like a bridge, is a simile that cannot be made suggestive of any round body save the moon. That she can see the earth spin like a fretful midge, does not please the logical understanding, when that body is at least as far off as the scarce-visible sun. We are comparatively close to our neighbouring orbs, Venus and Mars, which do not exhibit the slightest motion to our eyes—how then should a world as remote from the damozel as Uranus is from us be seen in motion?
We are made to realize that the “Blessed Damozel” is of flesh and blood; she stoops and bends forward until her bosom makes the bar she leans on warm. But the souls mounting up to God were spirits; they passed by her like thin flame. This does not show the logical consistency which poetry demands even more rigidly than prose.
The poem is strictly sentimental. The one feeling of love-longings runs through every stanza.