The Blessed Damozel  1875

Rossetti was a poet as well as an artist. His poem “The Blessed Damozel” was first composed in 1847, when he was nineteen, and he continued to revise it until just before his death. William Graham, one of the artist’s most faithful patrons, commissioned a painting of its subject in 1871. The poem uses archaic language to describe the damozel, or damsel, leaning out of heav...