Jeunes filles en fleur: il nubilato come periodo di transizione

Jeunes filles en fleur:
il nubilato come periodo di transizione
• Il concetto di romantic love esercitò grande influenza
sulla cultura vittoriana e diede origine a due fenomeni:
• 1. aumento vertiginoso di narrativa incentrata su
innamorati che coronano il loro segno d’amore nel
matrimonio;
• 2. riscoperta di amanti leggendari vittime di amori
contrastati, Romeo e Giulietta, Dante e Betarice,
Lancillotto e ginevra, Tristano e Isotta
• 3. I preraffaelliti scelsero di raffigurare il nubilato come
condizione transitoria ed avvilente. Cfr. Lisabetta da
Messina (Boccaccio)
John Everett Millais, Isabella 1848–9,
Millais: The Bridesmaid
Burne-Jones:
The Golden Stairs
1866-80
•
The Day-Dream
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
(1809-1892)
O Lady Flora, let me speak:
A pleasant hour has passed away
While, dreaming on your damask cheek,
The dewy sister-eyelids lay.
As by the lattice you reclined,
I went thro’ many wayward moods
To see you dreaming–and, behind,
A summer crisp with shining woods.
And I too dream’d, until at last
Across my fancy, brooding warm,
The reflex of a legend past,
And loosely settled into form.
And would you have the thought I had,
And see the vision that I saw,
Then take the broidery-frame, and add
A crimson to the quaint Macaw,
And I will tell it. Turn your face,
Nor look with that too-earnest eye–
The rhymes are dazzled from their place
And order’d words asunder fly.
'The Blessed Damozel', Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1875-88
• Original text: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (London: Ellis
and White, 1881).
First publication date: February 1850
Publication date note: The Germ (Feb. 1850)
Composition date: 1847
Rhyme: abcbdb
• The poem was revised for publication in The Oxford and
Cambridge Magazine in 1856, and again before its
appearance in Poems, 1870. Thirty years after its first
appearance Rossetti told Hall Caine that he had written
"The Blessed Damozel" as a sequel to Poe's "The Raven"
(published in 1845): "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it
was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and
so determined to reverse the conditions, and give
utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven."
Rossetti's early study of Dante, especially the Paradiso, has
influenced the general conception and many of the details
of the poem.
Ford
Ford Madox Brown,
Romeo and Juliet, 1870