SOURCE: Cervo, Nathan. “Rossetti's ‘Ave’.” Explicator 47, no. 4 (summer 1989): 37-40.

In the following essay, Cervo reads “Ave” in light of Il mister dell' amor platonico del medio evo, by Gabriele Rossetti (D. G. Rossetti's father.)

Despite appearances, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “Ave” is a complicated poem and remains opaque for critics. Thus Herbert L. Sussman, in Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State U P, 1979), speaks of the poem in terms of “iconic presentation” (65), “a medievalized picture” (66), “essentially pictorial form,” and “historical incidents' (67). In Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1983), David G. Riede calls “Ave” “a dramatic monologue without drama,” “an anachronism,” and “quaint” (21).

We can shed a good deal of light on “Ave” by reading it within the framework provided by the poet's father, Gabriele Rossetti, particularly against the backdrop of Il mistero...