SOURCE: "Behind 'Golden Barriers': Framing and Taming the Blessed Damozel," in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 77, Spring, 1990, pp. 13-16.

In the following essay, Leng investigates narrative technique and its relation to gender themes in "The Blessed Damozel."

Some time after 1866 Dante Gabriel Rossetti formulated this eroticized theory of ut pictura poesis:

Picture and poem bear the same relation to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection. (Works 606)¹

Most discussions of Rossetti and the sister arts mention this quotation: Richard Stein sees Rossetti's statement as a "fragment" which "seems to outline and analogy between an intellectualized concept of love and his composite art" (196-97); and Maryann Ainsworth believes it is particularly applicable to "the most successful instances of the picture-poem idea" which "came to him during his last ten years," that is, between 1872 and...