The Blessed Damozel

Rossetti wrote the poem behind this picture when he was 19, imagining a dead young woman leaning out from heaven and aching for the lover she had left alive on earth. He carried the idea for more than 30 years before painting it like this, and by the late 1870s he was a sick and reclusive man, dependent on the sedative chloral. She leans on the gold barrier of heaven, three stars in her hair and lilies in her arms, souls of reunited lovers drifting behind her. In the narrow strip below, her living lover lies among dark autumn leaves, gazing up at a sky he cannot cross. This is the second version he made, painted for the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland.