The Blessed Damozel Essay Questions

Refer to the opening two stanzas (lines 1-12) of "The Blessed Damozel." What is the function of these lines? Do these lines do an effective job of preparing us for what is to come in the rest of the poem?

The first two stanzas of "The Blessed Damozel" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti act effectively as a still-life within the beginning of the poem. Before the reader can get started on the rest of the poem, they first need to see the damozel in all of her glory and be able to picture her in their mind's eye. The first two stanzas also help to set up the tone of the poem, which remains melancholic and gloomy throughout the entire poem. The speaker is also introduced to the "gold bar" keeping the damozel in Heaven in this poem, which immediately clues the reader in to the fact that she might be trapped in Heaven and she might wish she could be somewhere else.

How would you describe the setting of "The Blessed Damozel"? What does how it is described by the speaker tell us about Heaven and the poem as a whole?

"The Blessed Damozel" contains an ambiguous and vague setting, in which a damozel is up in Heaven and her lover is down on Earth. To the damozel, the Earth looks like nothing more than an anxious fly. But obviously, for her lover, who still lives there, Earth is a vast planet marking the boundaries of his possible experience. Rossetti keeps the settings of Heaven and the cosmos vague on purpose in this poem. First, the descriptions of Heaven in the Bible itself are hazy and ambiguous. They are not easy to pin down and are even harder to reproduce in a literary work like this one. Additionally, by making the setting so hazy, Rossetti is asking his reader to take a leap of faith when reading the poem. In this way, the poem itself enacts a leap of faith that bridges the gap between Heaven and Earth.