RPO -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti : Mary's Girlhood (for a Picture)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

Mary's Girlhood (for a Picture)

1This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect

2 God's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she

3 Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee.

4Unto God's will she brought devout respect,

5Profound simplicity of intellect,

6 And supreme patience. From her mother's knee

7 Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity;

8Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect.

9So held she through her girlhood; as it were

10 An angel-water'd lily, that near God

11 Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home,

12She woke in her white bed, and had no fear

13 At all,--yet wept till sunshine, and felt aw'd:

14 Because the fulness of the time was come.

Notes

1] Printed in the Catalogue of the Free Exhibition of Modern Art, Hyde Park Corner, 1849, to accompany Rossetti's first exhibited painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. Rossetti worked with equal ease in the two arts of painting and poetry, and frequently developed a single theme in the two media. He expressed a belief that art attains its highest form when picture and poem meet and approach identity.

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (London: Ellis and White, 1881). end R677 A155 1881 Fisher Rare Book Library (Toronto).
First publication date: 1849
RPO poem editor: Margaret Frances (Sister St. Francis) Nims
RP edition: 3RP 3.270.
Recent editing: 2:2002/3/13

Composition date: November 1848
Form: sonnet
Rhyme: abbaabbacdecde

Other poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti