Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Damozel” and “Troy Town,” and perhaps “Eden Bower,” which is about Adam’s first love—not with Eve, but rather with Lilith, the demon or serpent.

CLASS 21

    ROSSETTI'S POEM. ROSSETTI AS SEEN BY MAX NORDAU. "THE BLESSED DAMOZEL," "EDEN BOWER," AND "TROY TOWN."

    MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1966
    In the previous class we looked at some of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s minor poems—minor in length, though no less worthy. His most famous poem, archaically titled “The Blessed Damozel”—“damozel” is a Norman word that means young lady, or
demoiselle
, and is usually translated into Spanish as “
La Doncella bienaventurada
,” which, as you know, is both a painting and a poem by Rossetti. The plot of “The Blessed Damozel” is strange. It is about the misfortunes of a person, of a soul in heaven. It is about her misfortunes because she is awaiting the arrival of another soul. The blessed damsel has sinned, but her sin has been forgiven, and when the poem begins, she is in heaven; but—and this first detail is significant—she has her back to heaven. She is leaning over the gold bar from which she can see the sun and the earth below. That is, she is so high that she sees the sun far below her, as if lost, and she also sees a kind of pulse that beats throughout the universe.
    Now, this poem, like almost all of Rossetti’s, is extraordinarily visual. Heaven is not vague. Everything is extraordinarily vivid, everything has an increasingly ominous—and at the end a bit terrible—quality, but it is never simplistic. The first stanza says:
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
    That is:
La Doncella Bienaventurada se inclinó
sobre la baranda de oro del Cielo;
sus ojos eran más profundos que la hondura
de aguas aquietadas al atardecer;
tenía tres lirios en la mano
y las estrellas de su pelo eran siete.
    The poet does not say “she had three lilies in her hand and seven stars in her hair” but rather “the stars in her hair were seven.” Then he says that the blessed damsel feels as if only one day had passed since she arrived in heaven, but years had passed, because in Heaven time does not pass as it does on Earth, time is different. This reminds us of that Muslim legend about Muhammad being carried up to heaven by Burak, the mare. 1 The mare, when she starts flying with him—she is a kind of winged Pegasus, with the feathers of a peacock, I think—pushes over a water jug. Then she carries Muhammad to heaven, to the Seventh Heaven. There he talks to the angels and passes through where the angels live. Finally he talks to the Lord. He feels a kind of chill when the Lord’s hand touches his shoulder, and then he returns to Earth. And when he returns, the whole journey has seemed to take so long to him—the opposite happens in Rossetti’s poem—but all the water has still not spilled out of the jug. On the contrary, in Rossetti’s poem, the damsel believes that she has spent a short time in heaven, and years have passed. That damsel knows she is in heaven, her companions are described, their names are given, some kind of garden and palaces are described. But she turns her back on heaven and looks toward Earth, because the lover with whom she has sinned is on Earth, and she thinks that he will not be long in coming. She thinks that she will take him by the hand to the Virgin, that the Virgin will understand and his sin will be forgiven. Then Rossetti describes heaven. There are some details that are rather terrible. For example, there is a tree with deep, dark foliage, and sometimes one feels that the dove lives inside that tree, the dove that is the Holy Spirit, and the leaves seem to whisper his name. The poem is interrupted by parentheses, and these parentheses correspond to what the lover on Earth is thinking and feeling. The lover is in a square and looks up, because he also is looking for her as she is looking for him from the heights of paradise. And then she thinks about the delights they will share when he is in heaven, and she thinks that they will journey together into the deep wells of light. She thinks that there they will bathe together in God’s sight. And then it says, “all this will be when he comes, for surely he will come.” But because the poem is long, we see that all this hope is futile, that he will not be forgiven and