Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote "The Blessed Damozel" when he was 19 years old. It was one of the very first poems of his career, and it later became one of the most influential poems of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The first version of "The Blessed Damozel" first appeared in print in 1850 in The Germ, a journal meant to highlight the works of those within the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Rossetti continued to edit "The Blessed Damozel" and published newer versions on several occasions. After Rossetti wrote "The Blessed Damozel," he composed a painting with the same name that depicts the damozel of the poem. Even though Rossetti would habitually write poems and create paintings about the same subject matter, "The Blessed Damozel" holds the distinction of being the only instance Rossetti completed a draft of the poem before setting to work on the painting. The fact that there is a visual, as well as poetic, version of "The Blessed Damozel" underscores the Pre-Raphaelite goal to link poetry and art by combining the two mediums.
"The Blessed Damozel" describes a young woman in heaven, and her heartbroken lover on earth who wants to be with her. The pair remain separated by the end of the poem—the lover is stuck on earth while the damozel is stuck behind the "gold bars" of Heaven. Through the years, scholars and fans of Rossetti have speculated whether this poem, particularly in its later versions, is autobiographical. Rossetti lost his wife and muse, Lizzie, and a young age and buried her with a manuscript of his poetry. Some people believe that this poem is partly about his longing for her and uncertainty of whether he will see her again in Heaven.
Throughout the years, scholars have traced the literary influences that Rossetti pulled from in order to write "The Blessed Damozel." D.M.R. Bentley writes in "'The Blessed Damozel': A Young Man's Fantasy" that "critics have been 'pleased to think' that 'The Blessed Damozel' is indebted, not just to Dante and the other poets of his circle, but to a small galaxy of Romantic and Victorian writers, including Coleridge, Keats, Goethe, Musset, Blake, Shelley, Tennyson, and the Bailey of Festus." Similarly, Janna Knittel notes in "Knocking at Paradise: Christina Rossetti Rewrites 'The Blessed Damozel" that Rossetti pulled from an "Italian tradition" while working on this poem: "Dante Rossetti bases his poem on a convention widely used in many of the poems he translated for Early Italian Poetry (1861). In the Italian tradition, a woman who is absent from the male speaker, either by distance or by death, is praised with the same intensity and language as would be used to describe deities and saints."
"The Blessed Damozel" contains a motif to which Rossetti would often return throughout his career: the blurring of the line between life and death and past and present. "The Blessed Damozel" also contains key elements that helped to shape the thematic foundation of Pre-Raphealite poetry, including symbols harkening back to medieval ritual sacraments, a preference for writing about Platonic love rather than romance, and an intense focus on minute details as a means of providing insight into a larger character or event.
In "The Blessed Damozel," Rossetti plays with styles and forms that he borrowed from the past. In a letter to Charlotte Polidori, a close friend of his, Rossetti describes "The Blessed Damozel" as "a poem written in a kind of Gothic manner." D.M.R. Bentley outlines the gothic elements of the poem: 1) the antiquarian title, 2) the strict stanza form, and 3) the archaic diction, dramatis personae, and stage furniture of the poem. Bentley underscores the importance of these elements: "[T]he 'Gothic' manner of the poem, its stylistic idiom and vocal coloring, is the signpost that points to one of its fundamental raisons d'être: the imaginative recreation of the young Rossetti's conception of a medieval 'consciousness' and awareness."
Because the form of "The Blessed Damozel" is inherently musical, Rossetti's poem has gone on to inspire many musicians who have adapted it for composition. In 1888, Claude Debussy debuted "La Damoiselle élue," which was inspired by the poem. Several different adaptations of the poem appeared throughout the first decade of the 20th century in particular, with new versions premiering within two years of each other.
