祝福されし乙女

Rossetti wrote the poem behind this picture when he was barely 20, imagining a dead girl leaning out from the edge of heaven to watch the lover she had left on earth. He came back to the subject as a painter decades later, in the 1870s, for the Glasgow collector William Graham. By then the woman he loved, Jane Morris, was married to his friend, so he used a professional model, Alexa Wilding, to stand in for her. The damozel leans on the rampart of heaven among embracing couples, three stars in her hair. Graham later paid extra for the strip along the bottom, where the lover lies alone in the autumn grass far below, looking up at a sky he cannot reach.