ACTA UNIVERSITATIS SAPIENTIAE, PHILOLOGICA, 7, 1 (2015) 29–43

DOI: 10.1515/ausp-2015-0033

The Pre-Raphaelite Journey into the Middle Ages

A Quest for Spiritual Experience
Zsuzsanna UJSZÁSZI
Independent scholar (Nyíregyháza, Hungary)
[email protected]

Abstract. The Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets rejected contemporary

conventional style in art, and did not concern themselves with the
representation of contemporary life either. They viewed the surrounding
social life as sordid, and reached back to the Middle Ages both for technique
and subject matter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Everett
Millais, and later William Morris found inspiration in late medieval art and
literature. They took their subjects from history, legend, religion or poetry,
focusing on moral or psychological issues, and expressed fascination for
beauty as a value of spiritual nature. This paper examines three of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s medieval fantasy pictures (The Tune of Seven Towers,
The Blue Closet and A Christmas Carol), which prompt a meditative and
imaginative response through their enigmatic references, and thus attest the
mysterious feature of Pre-Raphaelite medieval imagery. The paper discusses
their enigmatic nature in the light of William Morris’s early dream poems
The Tune of Seven Towers and The Blue Closet, written on the relevant
Rossetti pictures. A parallel reading of poem and picture evidences how
Pre-Raphaelite medievalism in painting can invite the onlooker for an inner
journey through exploring an imagined referential background.

Keywords: cult of the medieval, fantasy picture, mysterious quality

Introduction
Everybody knows the experience of being immersed in a work of art, and
how such an experience results in a feeling of spiritual enlargement, i.e. in an
experience of understanding some important meaning not only intellectually,
but with one’s whole self involved. The term “spiritual experience” in this paper
refers to non-religious experience, something similar to what readers experience
when projecting their minds into the world of a novel, relating to characters and
scenes in a way that they gain new insights into truths. Spiritual experience is
examined here as the artist striving to discover truths through artistic creation

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30 Zsuzsanna UJSZÁSZI

and show life as meaningful. The Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists1 often chose
medieval subjects and settings as inspiration to contemplate life’s values, and
also to mediate them in their works.

Medievalism and the Pre-Raphaelites

In mid-19th century, the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm for the Middle Ages was
closely related to a general cult of the medieval in contemporary culture both
in England and on the Continent. A reaction against industrialism, architecture
from the late 18th century had been dominated by Gothic Revival style, whose
most famous project was the Palace of Westminster (1840–70), designed by
Augustus Pugin. In his theoretical works Pugin claims that medieval architecture
REmECTS AND TRANSMITS A MORAL FORCE  THE PRINCIPLES OF #HRISTIANITY  AS THE VERY
title of his treatise shows: #ONTRASTSOR!0ARALLELBETWEENTHE.OBLE%DIlCESOF
the Middle Ages and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present
Decay of Taste (1836).
Architectural Gothic Revival inspired medieval themes in art, and when the
interior design of the Palace of Westminster had to be decided, it was suggested
that the artists rely on Malory as a source for national subjects. For a building
of political importance, this represented national identity, as well as historical
and political legitimacy. As his three-volume treatise on Venetian art and
ARCHITECTURETESTIlES The Stones of Venice,lRSTPUBLISHEDFROMTO THE
art critic John Ruskin, a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, was an ardent supporter
of the Gothic Revival in architecture. He admired the individuality of medieval
craftsmanship, as opposed to the mass production of his industrialized age.
The cult of the medieval pervaded everyday life in 19th century England to an
extent that there was a trend of collecting medieval art objects, so overwhelming
that old illuminated manuscripts were dismembered, their miniatures removed
and sold individually – not even Ruskin left his collection manuscripts intact.
(Fliegal 2002)
In art and poetry, a similar interest for the medieval was a romantic quest
FORTHEIDEAL THELOSTVIRTUESOFCHIVALRY SUCHASFRIENDSHIP CHASTITY SACRIlCE 
COURTESY  AND HONOUR 4HE lRST DECADES OF THE th century saw the popularity
of the novels of Walter Scott, and the poetry of Keats, Shelley and Tennyson,
who also drew on medieval subjects, and their works represented an ideal for

1 The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of seven artists and critics between 1848 and 1853:
John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti,
Thomas Woolner, Frederick George Stephens and James Collinson. Their major common artistic
principle was the return to the style, technique and subject matter of late medieval and early
Renaissance art as a source of inspiration. From the late 1850s Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward
Burne-Jones and William Morris formed the second generation of Pre-Raphaelitism.

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the Pre-Raphaelites. When in 1857 the Moxon illustrated edition of Tennyson’s

Poems was published, it included 30 woodcut illustrations by the three leading
Pre-Raphaelite artists – Dante Gabriel Rossetti contributed 4, John Everett Millais
18, and Holman Hunt 7 – besides the 24 illustrations by four other Victorian
artists. Other notable pictures on medieval subjects painted by Pre-Raphaelite
artists in the late 1840s and early 1850s were John Everett Millais: A Dream of
the Past – Sir Isumbras at the Ford, inspired by a short, metrical Middle English
romance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Wedding of St George and Princess Sabra,
based on the medieval legend of St George, and Holman Hunt: Rienzi Vowing to
Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother Slain in a Skirmish between the
Colonna and the Orsini faction, REFERRINGTOTHESAMESTORYOFAPOLITICALlGUREIN
14th century Italy as the libretto of Wagner’s early opera. In 1857, Rossetti offered
to paint the ten bays of the Union Society Debating Hall in Oxford with designs
from subjects in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. In this “Jovial Campaign,” (McGann, 2)
he painted the murals with his new friends, William Morris and Edward-Burne
Jones, whom he met the previous year, and they together formed the second
generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The Pre-Raphaelite fascination with the medieval might have been more than
what it is usually considered, i.e. idealization of a past culture as a form of dissent,
rejection of the industrialized contemporary world, which they considered dirty,
and dominated by material interests, a reason why they hardly ever painted
contemporary subjects. It was certainly related with their desire to paint pictures
that had reference beyond themselves, to stories from literature or the past.
However, the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the medieval was possibly also due to
the rich symbolism of medieval culture. Symbolism of numbers, colours, shapes,
ANIMALSANDmOWERS ETC INHERALDRYANDRELIGION PERMEATEDEVERYDAYLIFEINTHE
medieval age, and was also present in frescoes, manuscript books and paintings,
thus providing a treasury for the Pre-Raphaelite artists in their endeavours to
visualize subjective experience and suggest its inscrutability at the same time.
Medieval symbols carried a certain element of mysteriousness to the 19th century,
both because of the time gap, i.e. some of the intellectual background to interpret
them had been lost, and because many symbols were polysemic, i.e. had more
than one or two meanings, and sometimes had contradictory meanings, so their
interpretation was context-dependent and free. The Pre-Raphaelite artists chose
to view the human world through the lens of mysterious medieval symbolism,
as it suggested more than could be revealed by the modern viewer accustomed
to lifelike representation of reality in landscape painting, portraiture and still
studies, or to representation of stories and characters from the Bible.

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Fantasy pictures – Rossetti’s watercolours of 1857

Most Pre-Raphaelite paintings had recognizable subjects, from Arthurian legends,
Shakespeare, and Dante, but the following three watercolours of 1857 by Rossetti
are known as fantasy pictures with no referential background: The Tune of Seven
Towers, A Christmas Carol, and The Blue Closet. As to their subject, the most
easily recognizable common features of these fantasy pictures are the presence
of enigmatic characters in situations suggesting a narrative background which,
HOWEVER  REMAINS UNIDENTIlABLE  OF CHARACTERS DEPICTED IN THE VISUAL CONTEXT
of decorative objects carrying symbolic meanings. In these pictures the artist
seeks to evoke a sensation induced by the music that the characters are playing,
however, without the intense sensuality of Rossetti’s art in the 1860s and 1870s,
when many of his pictures show female beauty with a musical instrument. As to
their composition, these small watercolours were painted in the style of medieval
frescoes, or perhaps more importantly, in the style of manuscript illuminations
WITH WARM AND RICH COLOURS  USING mATTENED FORMS  WHERE THE ELEMENTS ARE
crammed into narrow spaces with no shadows, so the tight arrangement of the
compositional elements creates an almost claustrophobic image (Faxon 1992,
59). The three watercolours can be seen as the artist’s attempts to create a kind
of art where the message is communicated through formal qualities rather than
through a narrative or didactic content.
Although its narrative background is unclear, The Tune of Seven Towers has
AMOREORLESSIDENTIlABLESUBJECT)TSTITLEREFERSTOAFORTRESS9EDIKULE&ORTRESS 
in Istanbul built in 1458, with dungeons for prisoners. Its subject, a doomed love
affair, is decipherable through symbolic elements in the picture: there is a pennon
on a lance, on the left, with the images of the seven towers; the lance is stuck in a
bucket, and cuts diagonally across the entire picture, which is thus half crossed;
there is a boy in the window placing a bough of holly, a symbol of marriage, on
the lady’s bed, which contrasts the sadness on the faces of all the three central
characters, who have no eye-contact; the woman behind the seated lady, in a servile
posture, obviously has some fatal illness, as suggested by the skin of her face; the
knight is resting his arms in deep thought on the handle of his sword stuck in the
mOOR WHILEHISBUILTLOOKSRATHERSTRONGINCONTRASTTOTHEPOORTHINLADYPLAYING
THEZITHER WHOSEHAGGARDBODYANDFRAILlNGERSALSOSUGGESTIMMINENCEOFDEATH
The composition bears some resemblance to Renaissance Ecce Homo paintings,
like Andrea Solari’s Ecce Homo or Titian’s Ecce Homo portraits. These images are
cut diagonally by the reed “they smote him [Christ] on the head with,” as written
in Mark 15, 19 (King James Bible), suggesting that Christ is destined to die, and
show Christ with an averted gaze, looking away from the centre, which conveys
his sorrow over the doomed fate of humanity for its rejecting salvation. The averted
gaze of Christ is similar to how Rossetti represents the woeful melancholy of his

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characters in the three fantasy pictures. The onlooker familiar with the artist’s
biography is in an easier position to recognize the theme of The Tune of Seven
Towers, since the model of the lady, Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti’s wife later on, was a
laudanum addict, who died two years after their marriage, in 1862.
A Christmas Carol shows a young woman, also modelled by Siddal, dressed in
red and seated in the centre. While playing a clavichord, she is having her hair
combed by two damzels standing in symmetrical arrangement, just like the two
holly trees in barrels striped red and black, to the left and right. The clavichord
in the centre is decorated with some sprigs of green leaves as well as with scenes
of the Annunciation and Nativity. Together with the colour arrangement of black
ANDGOLDTAPESTRYBEHINDTHECENTRALlGURE WHICHTHENFORMSACARPETBENEATH
her feet, the composition suggests harmony. The characters’ delicate melancholy
GAZESREmECTTHEIRSELF ABSORBEDDELIGHTINTHEIRACTIVITYANDTHE#HRISTMASMUSIC
played by the young woman.
A Christmas CarolINSPIREDTHElRSTTENLINESOF#HARLES3WINBURNEPOEMOF
THESAMETITLE-ARILLIER  AND7ILLIAM-ORRIS THElRSTOWNEROFTHETWO
other watercolours, wrote a poem of the same name both to The Tune of Seven
Towers and to The Blue Closet. Rossetti, however, said that Morris’s poems were
“the results of the pictures but do not tally to any purpose with them, though
beautiful in themselves” (Rossetti, William 1889, 44). Obviously, William Morris
focused on the effect of the macabre in the painting, and composed his song,
The Tune of Seven Towers, with a similar ambience: fair Yoland sends her lover,
Oliver to the Tune of Seven Towers, allegedly to fetch her clothes, in fact, her
purpose is to cause his death.
What do these watercolours have to do with spiritual experience? Before
examining The Blue Closet, it might prove worthwhile to consider Rossetti’s
ARTISTICMANIFESTOASDElNED INHISEARLYPROSETALEHand and Soul. Written in
 AND PUBLISHED IN THE lRST ISSUE OF The Germ, the monthly journal of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the tale features a young Italian artist Chiaro, who is
SEARCHINGFORTRUEART&IRSTHElNDSITINRELIGIOUSDEVOTION ANDTHENINBEAUTY 
UNTIL lNALLY HE HAS A VISION OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN  WHO SAYS TO HIM  h) AM AN
image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee. See me and know me as I am”
(Rossetti 2003, 314), and later she adds, “Chiaro, servant of God, take now thine
Art unto thee, and paint me thus as I am...” (316). At this moment, as if in an
epiphany, he understands the purpose of art, which is to represent the artist’s soul
through expression of beauty. That partly explains why almost all of Rossetti’s
PAINTINGSFEATUREBEAUTIFULWOMEN4HEPRIMESIGNIlCANCEOF#HIAROSEXPERIENCE
for us, interested in traces of spiritual experience in Pre-Raphaelite art, is how his
insight into the true purpose of art happens to him.
#HIAROSEXPERIENCESEEMSVERYMUCHTOCORRESPONDTOTHE@PROCESSDElNITION
of spiritual experience used in mental health counselling. Author of books on

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COUNSELLING PSYCHOLOGY %LlE (INTERKOPF PROPOSES THE DElNITION OF SPIRITUAL

experience as an event of the following three phases:
– First there appears “a subtle, bodily feeling with vague meanings” which can
be located in the body,
– Then this bodily feeling with vague meanings “brings new, clearer meanings”,
i.e. the client may receive a new, explicit meaning in an act of epiphany, which
may include transpersonal experiences,
– Finally, “a spiritual experience involves a transcendent growth process.”
Exactly the same happens to Chiaro, who is sitting in intense contemplation of
his art, and experiences bodily sensations:
– “…the fever encroached slowly on his veins, till he could sit no longer and
would have risen; but suddenly he found awe within him, and held his head
bowed, without stirring. The warmth of the air was not shaken; but there seemed
a pulse in the light, and a living freshness, like rain. The silence was a painful
music, that made the blood ache in his temples” (314).
– Chiaro has a transpersonal experience, accompanied with strong bodily
sensations, when his soul appears to him in a vision as a beautiful woman. She
tells him that she is an image of his own soul, and he has a feeling of oneness with
the vision, “as he looked, Chiaro’s spirit appeared abashed of its own intimate
presence; and his lips shook with the thrill of tears” (314). The woman says to
him: “seek thine own conscience (not thy mind’s conscience, but thine heart’s),
ANDALLSHALLAPPROVEANDSUFlCEv ,ATERONSHEINSTRUCTS#HIARO hxTAKE
now thine Art unto thee, and paint me thus, as I am, to know me […] Do this; so
shall thy soul stand before thee always, and perplex thee no more” (316).
– Chiaro manages to move beyond his former view of art, and the narrator
makes clear the effect of his growth process, as he describes how Chiaro spent
the rest of the day working with intense introspection: “And Chiaro did as she
bade him. While he worked, his face grew solemn with knowledge” (316). After
his work was done, he felt “like one just come out of a dusk, hollow country,
bewildered with echoes, where he had lost himself” (316), which means that
he learnt to work with the same all-consuming concentration. All this is a
description of how intense focusing results in a spiritual experience producing a
transcendent growth process.
The comparison between a sensation of being immersed in the process of
artistic creation and being “lost” makes one wonder if such a peculiar state of
mind, necessary, as Rossetti states, for producing meaningful art, can be attained
by conscious effort. As all aspects of the human mind are mediated by the brain,
there has been a growing interest in neuroscience between the connection of
SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE AND THE WORKING OF THE BRAIN  WHICH IS TESTIlED BY THE
researches of Fenwick (2004), Newberg (2010),Wildman (2011) and a recently
published volume of studies on this subject edited by Walach, Schmidt and

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7AYNE )NHISDElNITIONOFINTENSEEXPERIENCES7ILDMANUNDERLINESTHE
neural aspect of the experience:

Intense experiences involve strong and broad neural activation,

corresponding to existential potency and wide awareness, involving
both strength of feeling and interconnectedness of ideas, memories, and
emotions in such a way as to engage a person with ultimate existential
ANDSPIRITUALCONCERNSANDLEVERAGESIGNIlCANTPERSONALCHANGEANDSOCIAL
effects. (Wildman 2011, 104)

Newberg, who researches religious experience, relies on computed tomography

images to show how the human brain is affected by concentration. The frontal
lobes of the brain are involved in focusing attention and the parietal lobes are
responsible for the sense of orientation in space and time. The various parts of
the brain are, however, interconnected, so a high degree of concentration blocks
sensory and cognitive input in parietal lobes, which results in a decreased sense of
space and time (Newberg 2010). This seems to explain why intense introspection
or immersion in a subject creates a feeling of being “lost,” as described by the
narrator of Hand and Soul. Rossetti’s artistic manifesto drew on the artist’s
intense introspective concentration that would enable him to paint his own soul.
Consequently, the student of Rossetti’s art is intrigued by the question whether the
ARTISTSINTENSEINTROSPECTIVECONCENTRATIONISREmECTEDINTHECOMPOSITIONINANY
way. Is it possible to examine Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s third watercolour of 1857,
The Blue Closet FROMTHISPERSPECTIVE7HATARETHEBENElTSOFTHISAPPROACH

4HEARTISTSINTENSEINTROSPECTIONREmECTEDINTHE
composition of The Blue Closet

As The Blue Closet does not refer to anything proper beyond what it represents,
yet suggests a lot more, the theme of the picture remains enigmatic. It invites
interpretation through contemplation or intense focusing, but will remain elusive
ENOUGH NOT TO ALLOW ITS MEANING TO BE SPECIlED &OUR LADIES ARE DEPICTED IN
symmetrical arrangement of shapes and colours, with two playing the clavichord,
and two standing against a blue tiled wall, singing from musical notes. In a letter,
Rossetti referred to the subject of this picture simply as “some people playing
music” (Hill 1897, 201). Rossetti’s contemporary and friend Frederick George
Stephens interpreted the theme of The Blue Closet in terms of synaesthesia,
as association of colour with music, and supported his idea by linking certain
colours in the picture with the visualized musical instruments. To Stephens, the

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scarlet and green evoke the unheard sound of the bell, and the softer crimson,
purple and white correspond with the notes of the lute and the clavichord, while
THEBLUEONTHEWALLSANDmOORACCORDWITHTHEmUTE LIKEVOICESOFTHEGIRLS 
42). Associations between colour and music, based on the shared emotions that
they evoke, have fascinated humans since the ancient Greeks, and there have
even been attempts at artistic syntheses of colour and music grounded in the
correspondences between them, e.g. the opera The Bluebeard Castle by Béla
Bartók. Whereas it is generally believed that colour and music can independently
carry emotional valence, though most often subjective, it is rarely individual
colours and sounds that trigger a psychic response, but their combination in
a context. In Rossetti’s picture the arrangement of colours and instruments is
indeed suggestive of their linkage, as Stephens pointed out. Seen against the
backdrop of the artist’s cult of the medieval, however, the picture offers a broader
perspective of interpretation.
The compositions of two of Rossetti’s 1857 watercolours, A Christmas Carol and
The Blue Closet, were clearly inspired by medieval visual arts, such as manuscript
psalters with ornamental initials of musicians, or manuscript song books like the
Portuguese Cantigas de Santa Maria, which include detailed miniatures besides
ILLUMINATED INITIALS DEPICTING MUSICIANS 4HE INmUENCE OF SUCH MINIATURES IS
recognizable in the composition and technique of Rossetti’s late 1850s watercolours
(Braesel 2004, 41–42). Another obvious source of inspiration is Italian altarpieces
with musical angels; e.g. Bernardo Daddi’s Four Musical Angels has a similar
SYMMETRICALARRANGEMENTOFlGURES4HE0RE 2APHAELITEARTISTSREGARDEDPAINTING
and poetry as sister arts, and were masters of both, but they did not emphasize
a similar sister art link between music and painting, so there must be a message
different from this linkage in the two Rossetti watercolours.
In The Blue Closet the scene is placed in an enclosed space with almost no depth,
THUSTHEFOCUSISENCOMPASSEDONTHEFOURlGURESANDTHESURROUNDINGSYMBOLIC
objects close to them. The two pairs of women are arranged symmetrically so
ASTOCOMPLEMENTEACHOTHERINCOLOURS lGURESANDACTIONS4HETWOMAIDENS
singing from musical notes behind the instrumentalists form a mirror-like image
due to their head positions and gazes. The two instrumentalists, standing facing
each other, are playing with their right hands a double-keyed clavichord placed
between them, which suggests a mirror-like image, also underscored by the
crossed legs of their instrument. The mirror image of the women is, however,
MODIlEDBYAPAIROFVERTICALLYPLACEDBUTDIFFERENTINSTRUMENTSONEOFTHEWOMEN
pulls the string of little bells, while the other woman pinches the strings of a harp
next to the bells. The sleeves of the women’s clothes are of the same design but
of different colours, and the colour of the green sleeves on the left is repeated in
the garment of the woman singing on the right. The oriental style headwear of the
WOMENONTHELEFTEVOKETHE%AST WHEREASTHETWOOTHERlGURESONTHERIGHTARE

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wearing a crown and a horned head-dress, typical of the West. The blue tiles of
THEBACKGROUNDWALLAREREPEATEDONTHEmOOR SUGGESTINGCONTINUITYANDINTEGRITY
This compositional complementation of symmetrical grouping, echoed poses,
colours and complementary clothing styles suggests oneness and equilibrium,
the prime quality of polyphonic music, which was invented in the Middle Ages.
Polyphonic style means the harmonious cooperation of individual voices with
none subordinated to any other, simultaneous lines of independent melody. The
spiritual experience that the painting communicates though its composition is a
sensation of oneness with music by singing and playing it, the experience of what
it is like being within music.
The sensation of oneness seems to be supported by the complementary
symbols in the picture: the sprigs of holly at the top of the bells and the harp,
COMPLEMENTEDBYANORANGELILYSPRUNGUPFROMTHEmOOR EVOKE#HRISTMASAND
fertility. The blue emblem at the top of the bells looks like a western coat of arms,
whereas the emblem at the bottom of the harp shows a crescent and star in a blue
lELD ASYMBOLOFTHE%ASTALSOINMEDIEVALART!SANEXAMPLE THECOATOFARM
of Balthazar, one of the three Magi who visited Jesus at his birth, who is known
in legend to have been King of Ethiopia, includes a crescent and star in a 1555
manuscript armorial by Virgilius Solis. The star and the moon at the bottom of
the harp in Rossetti’s picture are counterbalanced by emblems of the sun in a
YELLOW lELD AT THE TOP OF THE HARP AND ON THE CLAVICHORD ON THE LEFT %AST AND
West, the Moon and the Sun together suggest the universe, the oneness of the
world, whereas the bells are symbolic of time, a major dimension of the world.
There still remain, however, some elements in the picture, whose identity and
symbolic sense remain obscure. Is the wheel on the left a part of the instrument
or a painted pattern? What is the emblem above the wheel? What birds and other
animals are painted on the right hand side of the clavichord? There seems to be
a pelican among those shapes, a medieval Christian symbol of protection and
SACRIlCE ECHOINGTHE0ELICAN0ORTRAITOF1UEEN%LIZABETH)BY.ICHOLAS(ILLIARD
The uncertainty of some of the symbolic objects allows the picture to remain a
visual image of delicate mysteriousness.
Mysteriousness is a quality that fascinated romantic artists and poets, and
2OSSETTIS lRST ILLUSTRATION WAS MADE TO A POEM WHOSE MAIN EFFECT RESTS ON THE
mystical link of interference between supernatural events and earthly actions.
The 1855 edition of William Allingham’s book of poems, Day and Night Songs
and The Music Master, includes Rossetti’s illustration for The Maids of Elfen Mere
(Allingham 1860, 202–204). The poem is a ballad telling about the apparition of
three maids, who always come at night, wearing the same white clothes, and
sing songs while spinning until eleven o’clock, when they disappear. What
links this illustration of 1855 with Rossetti’s watercolour The Blue Closet? The
compositional arrangement and concept is somewhat similar. The maids of Elfen

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-ERE SHARE THE SAME FACE  lGURE AND CLOTHES  THEIR AVERTED GAZES ARE DIRECTED
into some distant space beyond the spinning room and the time in the village.
They are in a timeless, trance-like state, looking half-conscious of their present,
being absorbed in the shared activity of spinning and singing. The characters
form a semi-circle, and the harmony of their communion is conveyed through
THEIRIDENTICALFACES lGURES CLOTHINGANDPOSTURE
Introspective concentration is suggested in the composition of The Blue
Closet through the symmetrical and complementary arrangement of elements,
lGURES OBJECTS COLOURSANDEMBLEMS BUTTHEMAINMESSAGECOMMUNICATEDBY
the painting, oneness with music, is visualized also in the facial expression of
THEFOURFEMALElGURES4HEWOMENSINGINGWHILEHOLDINGSHEETSOFMUSICGAZE
outward, away from the centre, the woman on the left gazes downward, but not
on her instrument, and the woman on the right is listening to the soft sounds
OFHERHARPWITHHEREYESHALFCLOSED4HEGAZESOFTHEFOURWOMENREmECTTHEIR
self-absorbed presence, as each of them focuses on her part in the music, and
at the same time participates in it in communion with the others. The lack of
eye-contact between them shifts the emphasis from their physical community of
making music to their spiritual unity in the melody, inaudible to the onlooker,
which they are performing. One is left wondering what kind of music the women
are playing; the holly and the lily hint at Christmas, but rather than the joy
associated with Christmas, the emotion of awe is visualized in the image.

Between Death and Heaven – the interpretation

of Rossetti’s picture by William Morris in
The Blue Closet (1857)

The mysterious quality of Rossetti’s image allowed William Morris to interpret the
painted scene in accord with his own sensation, received while focusing on the
characters in the picture, which explains why Rossetti called the poem “stunning”
(Doughty 1960, 210). To Morris, the averted gazes of the women in the picture
communicated a melancholy mood, a sensation of anticipating with fear and
hope, and his interpretation in the poem The Blue Closet was obviously triggered
by this imagined sadness of the characters. The poem with its fairytale-like story
is aimed at an insight into the four women’s psyche: they are in a state between
death and afterlife, waiting for the return of Lord Arthur, the lover of Lady Louise,
and are only allowed to sing once a year at Christmas. The characters singing by
THEWALLINTHE2OSSETTIPICTUREAREIDENTIlEDBY-ORRISASTHEDamozels, whereas
the two other women playing the clavichord are Lady Alice and Lady Louise.
All the four are singing praise to the Lord, “Laudate pueri,” i.e. Psalm 113. There

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 The Pre-Raphaelite Journey into the Middle Ages... 39

are two more speakers, the narrator and Lord Arthur, and there is also one silent
character, an evil mermaid, who is not named but simply referred to as ‘she’. This
mysterious creature, probably a character inspired by the tales of the Brothers
Grimm or Benjamin Thorpe’s Yuletide Stories, keeps Arthur’s tears in a casket, so
he cannot weep for his Queen. Lady Louis remembers how in the past Lord Arthur
came to this tower, knelt down, and sprinkled snow over her head. Lord Arthur
complains that he is controlled by a ‘she,’ and cannot weep for Louise, his eyes
have become grey and small, he himself has grown old and feeble. Lady Louise
wonders whether Arthur is still alive, and prays to God to let him come to her, as it
does not matter to her if his appearance has changed. Arthur arrives, with his eyes
blind though blue as in the happy time, bringing the key to Heaven, and invites
the women to cross with him the bridge leading to the golden land.
This narrative structure of current situation, preceding events, action and
solution is wrapped in an intricate ballad-like texture of varying communicative
forms. This is the means by which the poet recreates in the verbal medium
of a ballad the evocative quality of both the complex visual relationships and
the mysterious symbolism in Rossetti’s image. What communicative forms are
employed? How are they related to the time levels of the narrative?
In a ballad, action is both dramatized and narrated. The following two major
dramatic communicative forms can be distinguished, with shifting relations
between the present and the past:
1. Interactive utterances (to elicit responses, either verbal or non-verbal, from
a partner whose presence is implied from the context):
– Requests, e.g. the Damozels addressing the two Queens, “We are ready to
sing, if you so please;/So lay your hands on the keys,” Lady Louise saying, “
Sister, let the measure swell/Not too loud,” and Lord Arthur, “O sisters, cross the
bridge with me.”
– Dialogue, e.g. between Arthur and Louise: “O, love Louise, have you waited
long?” – “O, my lord Arthur, yea.”
2. Monologues:
– Narrating, e.g. Lady Louise recalling the past event of Arthur sprinkling snow
on her head.
– Complaining, e.g. Lady Alice describing the current situation, “And there
is none to let us go,/To break the locks of the doors below,” and Lord Arthur, “I
cannot weep for thee, poor love Louise,/For my tears are all hidden deep under
the seas.”
Meditating with fear, e.g. Lady Louise exclaiming, “O! is he sleeping, my scarf
round his head?/Or did they strangle him as he lay there,/With the long scarlet
scarf I used to wear?”
Expressing desire by praying, e.g. Lady Louise saying, “Only I pray thee, Lord,
let him come here!”

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40 Zsuzsanna UJSZÁSZI

The intricate combination of varying communicative forms in the ballad-like

TEXTURE OF THE POEM IS FURTHER COMPLICATED BY BLENDING lRST PERSON AND THIRD
person viewpoints, like in the opening four lines of Lady Alice’s monologue.
In this respect, the narrator’s line in the middle of the poem, “They sing all
together,” marks a division, a departure from the situation depicted in Rossetti’s
painting. From this line on, the verbal texture of its imaginative enhancement by
the poet becomes increasingly more complex by the several unmarked shifts of
viewpoints. The voices shift, unmarked, between Lady Louise and Lord Arthur,
some nine times, which adds to the quality of uncertainty in the poem.
Narration is provided by the narrator’s lines, in six rhyming triplets, all
written in past tense form. Representing an external viewpoint, the narrator is,
however, far from being a reliable, objective storyteller of happenings; instead,
he restricts his description to what could be heard and seen, and doubles the
uncertainty of the characters about anything beyond the obvious facts. Besides
loosely interlacing the line of present happenings, the function of the narrator
can be seen in this, in being a means of creating some mystical obscurity. When
!RTHURISlRSTMENTIONEDBY,ADY,OUISE HEISREFERREDTOAS@HE ANDTHENARRATOR
simply repeats the pronominal reference instead of naming the character in his
verse. Typically, the narrator recedes, instead of coming forward to make the
situation of the characters clear, which thus remains enigmatic. Although the
narrator’s repeated references to the knell of the great bell for the dead suggest
that the women are dead, Lady Alice talks about their state as captivity, “And
there is none to let us go;/To break the locks of the doors below,/Or shovel
away the heaped-up snow.” Moreover, she continues, “And when we die no
man will know/That we are dead,” implying that they are not dead yet. The
women are “between the wash of the tumbling seas,” as the Damozels claim in
their second line. First Lady Alice speaks as if they are locked in a tower where
there is none “to shovel away the heaped-up snow,” a few lines later, however,
she exclaims, “But, alas! the sea-salt oozes through/The chinks of the tiles of
THE#LOSET"LUEv4HEEXACTLOCATIONOFTHEWOMENSCAPTIVITYISNOTCLARIlEDBY
the narrator either. It seems that to the Pre-Raphaelite poet, mystery was more
captivating than a clear narrative.
There is another way of the narrator adding to the mysterious quality of the
poem, which is applying past tense forms consistently, as if all were settled and
lNISHED YETHEAVOIDSPROVIDINGCOMMENTSTOCLARIFYWHATHAPPENED)NALLHIS
verses the narrator refers to death, but in a mysterious manner. There was a great
bell in the Ladies’ tower booming the knell for the dead, because the wind played
on the bell, “And ever the great bell overhead/Boom’d in the wind a knell for
the dead,/Though no one toll’d it, a knell for the dead.” Through some obscure
reason, there is a connection between the wind and the death of the characters, as
the reader is allowed to conclude, and this creates suspense. Thus the peak point

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 The Pre-Raphaelite Journey into the Middle Ages... 41

in the ballad is when suddenly the narrator says, “…the great knell overhead/
Left off his pealing for the dead,/Perchance, because the wind was dead,” which
is simultaneous with Lady Louise’s meditating and praying with fear and desire.
7ILL!RTHURRETURN ORISHEDEADFOREVER!REDLILYTHATSHOTUPTHROUGHTHEmOOR
in the narrator’s verse marks a turning point in the narrative: Arthur comes back
to help the women cross the bridge to heaven.

Conclusion
The Pre-Raphaelite artists were inheritors of the romantic age. They almost never
painted contemporary life, and turned to medieval subjects and art for more
meaningful spiritual values. They composed art and poetry with a deliberate
attempt to leave the audience guessing, so they painted subjects in medieval
settings in search for the effect of mysteriousness. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early
WATERCOLOURSCANBESEENASTHEARTISTSATTEMPTSTOCREATEARTREmECTINGTHEARTISTS
interior world and spiritual experience. Spiritual experience requires intensity of
attention, and always ends in an act of learning, i.e. becoming conscious of some
SIGNIlCANTTRUTH4HE0RE 2APHAELITEARTISTSANDPOETSREGARDEDARTANDPOETRYAS
closely related modes of expressing artistic and poetic visions. A comparison of
poem and image linked by inspiration evidences, as is the case with The Blue
Closet, that it takes intense imaginative focusing and introspection to comprehend
and experience meaning in art and poetry.

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42 Zsuzsanna UJSZÁSZI

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