The Synergies of Mind and Muse: Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Thought and a Comparative Analysis of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poem and Painting the Blessed Damozel and Claude Debussy’s La Damoiselle Elue

Abstract

This paper intends to explore the ekphrastic and melopoetic aspects of poetry, and for this purpose will concentrate on a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, entitled “The Blessed Damozel,” which is representative of the late nineteenth century — a period intensely preoccupied with the orchestration of the arts. I have chosen this poem for two reasons: Firstly, “The Blessed Damozel” is best read within the context of visual and musical art: Between 1871 and 1879 Rossetti himself executed a painting on the same subject, and when Debussy came across the poem in a collection of English verse translated by Gabriel Sarrazin, Les Poetes modernes de l’Angleterre, it inspired him to compose La Damoiselle elue, first performed at the Societe Nationale in April 1893 and subtitled a poeme lyrique. Secondly, I will argue that the poem is highly ambiguous: Abounding in visual and auditive images, its central curve of feeling is paradoxically the annihilation of sound and sight. If Mikhail Bakhtin argued in an early essay that the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine, both of which Debussy had also set to music, exemplifies the disintegration of the lyric into lyrical mannerism, characterised by the failure of a voice that “suddenly feels itself to be outside any chorus,”1 a similar process is taking place in Rossetti’s poem: Voice and figure become utterly solipsistic through the dismantling of melos and opsis.