The version of this poem used to create this guide appears in: Siddal, Elizabeth and Serena Trowbridge (Ed.). My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall. Victorian Secrets, 2018.

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

Elizabeth Siddal was an English artist, poet, and artist's model. She is best known for modeling for a number of Pre-Raphaelite works of art, but her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, eventually prohibited her from modeling for other artists and claimed her exclusively as his muse. Siddal was an artist in her own right, producing work that itself corresponded with the styles and themes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Her poetry was not published until after her death (she died young, at age 32), and critics are divided on its merits. Some see her poetry as lacking in complexity, while others praise it for its simplicity and earnestness. Christina Rossetti, Siddal's sister-in-law and fellow poet, described her work as "almost too hopelessly sad for publication en masse."

"Dead Love" is one of Siddal's more well-known poems. It is composed of three stanzas, each six lines long. In the poem, and unnamed speaker cautions her addressee not to be too affected by a lost, or "dead" love (1). According to the speaker, love is often false and fickle, and rarely fulfills the expectations that people place on it. She therefore encourages her addressee to reject the notion that true love can ever exist in real life.