GROUP I

Faraz

Sumaira

Umar Dante
Rossetti

Kamran

Waqas
 TITLE
“The House of Life”
A Complex Series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate
relationship
This was Rossetti’s Substantial Literary Achievement.
Choice I , II , and III were the Sonnets written under one title , THE HOUSE OF LIFE.
 BIOGRAPHY OF POET

• Born In 1828.
• Died In 1882.
• Illustrator , Painter , Translator.
• His Poetry had ‘A TING PERSONAL LIFE’.
• He Followed the “AESTHETIC Movement”.
• Aesthetic is the Study of ‘New Ways of Seeing and Perceiving of World’.
• He was the one of the member of “PRE-RAPHELITE BROTHERHOOD”.
 SOCIO-EC0-POLITICAL ASPECT OF VICTORIAN ERA

• Begin in 1837 & ended by 1900.

• Age of Queen Victoria.
• Suspension Animation of Politics.
• Paradigm Shift from Agricultural country into Manufacturing Country : England.
• Similar to Romantic Era in reference of birth of democracy (Political), Renaissance
effects (Art+ Religious),Industrialism (Economical), & Age of doubts (Religious), and
Pessimism (Social).
• Major Literary Figures: A . Tennyson, R . Browning, Mathew Arnold, C . Dicken, J .
Ruskin, T . Hardy, G . Eliot , T . Carlyle.
 LITERARY INFLUNCES

• His Early Poetry was greatly influenced by JOHN KEATS (The Poet of
Beauty).
• His Early poetry was characterized by its sensuality and it’s medieval
revivalism.
• His Later Poetry was influenced by JOHN RUSKIN (A Prolific British
Essayist).
• His Later Poetry was characterized by the complex interlinking of
thoughts and feelings, especially in the his sonnets’ sequence in “THE
HOUSE OF LIFE”.
 PRE RAPHAELITE
• Initiated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Mid of Sixteenth Century.
• It was an Artistic Movement.
• Apart from D.G.Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Millais, Thomas Woolner, And James
Collinson were the important members of this group.

• Features of PRE RAPHAELITE POETRY:

• Break with tradition
• Medievalism
• Devotion to detail.
• Sensuousness
• Fleshy School of poetry
• Metre and Music
 CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS POETRY
• Emphasis on Beautiful , Sensuous details.
• Nostalgic Feelings for a dream-like Medieval World.
• Longing to return to world of ‘medieval Christendom’.
• Symbolic meaning associated with common objects or situations.
• Use of Melodious Language
• Combination of ‘Anglican Piety’ and ‘Italian Impetuosity’.
• Attention to details.
• ‘Sister Arts’ of Painting and Poetry.
• His sonnets sequence THE HOUSE OF LIFE is an evocation of life representative, as
associated with aspiration and foreboding with aspiration or with ideal art and beauty.
 INTERPRETATION OF CHOICE I
• The major theme of choice 1 is change and fate.
• This poem was written when he was 19 or 20 years old.
• He has given constellation of ideas by combining the physical
enjoyment with spiritual fashion.
• 6-9 lines show angelic presences.
• concept of life and death.
• Imagining death
 THEMES

• Reunion of Love
• Theme of Love
• Theme of death
• Christian Belief
 REUNION OF LOVE

• The whole idea of the Rossetti’s poems revolve around the theme of
love and reunion of Love. This theme appears in his poem “The Blessed
Damozel”. As Rossetti describe that separated lovers are to be
rejoined/reunited in the heaven. The heaven that Rossetti painted in
the “ The Blessed Damozel” was warm with physical bodies and
beautiful angels full of love.
 CONTINUE…

• Rossetti described the ideas of love and Heaven very passionately

because he was young and immature at that time and he was unaware
of the ugliness and despair that love can bring, which he experienced
later in his life after the death of his true love Elizabeth Siddal. In the
poem the Damozel refers to herself and her lover as “we two” and
describes how they will be together again someday in heaven. She
further says that she wants their love to be same on earth with approval
of Christ The Lord.
 THEME OF LOVE

• Rossetti presents the theme of love in many aspects of his life in his
different poems/Sonnets. The theme of love appears in his Work “The
House of Life”.
• The 1870 “The House of Life” is a set of poems tracing the emotional
effects of a brief, but intense, relationship that is predominantly sexual
in nature. It arises directly out of Rossetti’s relationship with Elizabeth
Siddal. It begins with the birth of Love, which the poet adores in near-
sacrilegious fashion:
• “Unto my lips . . . present/ The body and blood of Love in sacrament”
(Sonnet 2).
 CONTINUE…

• The lovers meet, kiss, marry, and reach the “Supreme Surrender” in the
space of four sonnets, and spend day after day with each other: “The
hours of Love fill full the echoing space” (Sonnet 12).
• These hours are doomed to be short; in sonnet 15, Rossetti already
foresees the passing of their “Winged Hours,” and by the next sonnet
he has seen his beloved’s “golden hair undimmed in death.”
• The Blessed Damozel also portrays the theme of love. As he tells us
about the teo lovers who will meet again in heaven after leaving this
world.
 THEME OF DEATH

• Rossetti portrays the theme of death throughout his life because after
the death of his beloved wife Elizabeth Siddal, he falls into tearful grief.
In choice II and Choice III he explained the theme of death that one
should be aware of one’s steps and one should also aware of the deeds
which he is committing because God promised that one day you have
to die and no one knows when that day will come. He expressed that
our mornings, days and nights are passing very rapidly and we are not
aware of our next moments whether we will take breath or not.
 CONTINUE…

• But slowly and gradually he overcomes his grief and accepts the fate.
In Sonnet 27, It is the turning point of The House of Life, signaling
Rossetti’s acceptance of his fate and his departure on a journey toward
hope. His grief gives way to a meditation on death itself, rather than on
the death of his beloved.
 CHRISTIAN BELIEF

• Dante Rossetti used the ideas of Christian belief in order to write

his poems. Example; he expressed that two lovers or anyone will
be reunited once again in heaven. In many ways his poems are
both optimistic and idealistic.
• In Choice II III the poet talks about judgment day and world hear
after. The poet says that are you sure that even after doing all
wrong things will you be spared in hereafter? And are you that
much strong enough to bear the torments of hell? So watch your
steps before doing anything and fear God otherwise you have to
pay what you have done in this world.
 “DANTE` ROSSETTI”

• This poem is about the gradual movement of individual from

the earthly life to the heavenly life. The poet suggests that
life is too short and you have to do good deeds and watch
your steps before doing anything.
 CHOICE II

The poet warns that one has to watch one`s own step and fear God
because one day you have to die and you have no guarantee of life
because God promised that one day you have to die but no one knows
that when that day will come .
The time is passing too fast, the sun is vanishing, and the day and night
are switching one another. We are not sure that we will be alive next
day. All the happy and sad moments are part of life and they will pass
away but the thing we have to do is to be careful while doing anything.
 CONTINUE

• The poet says that are you sure that even after doing all wrong
things will you be spared in hereafter? And are you that much strong
enough to bear the torments of hell? So watch your steps before
doing anything and fear God otherwise you have to pay what you
have done in this world.
 THE BLESSED DAMOZEL

• Dante G. Rossetti was only eighteen when he wrote this poem “The
Blessed Damozel”. Although Rossetti was still young, the images and
themes in his poem have cought the attention of many critics
throughout the year.
• “The Blessed Damozel”, is a beautiful story of how two lovers are
separated by the death of the Damezol and how she can do so in the
company of her beloved.
 “ANALYSIS OF “THE BLESSED DAMOZEL”

• “The Blessed Damozel,” the most familiar of Rossetti’s early poems, illustrates
this pattern of imaginative effort and disillusionment. The “Damozel” leans out
“From the gold bar of Heaven,” looking down through space for her earthly
lover. Space, however, is vast. The moon itself is no more than, “a little feather/
Fluttering far down the gulf”. Because she cannot see him, she speaks,
imagining the reunion that will come “When round his head the aureole
clings.” Then,
Will I ask of Christ the Lord . . .
Only to live as once on earth/ With Love.
Imagination proves an unsatisfactory substitute for real love.
 CONTINUE…

• The poem turns on the old notion that lovers separated by death
can take comfort in the hope of meeting again in the world to
come. Rossetti, however, reverses the perspective. It is the lover in
heaven who longs for earth; it is the spiritual world that is
tormented by desire for the physical and remains for all its
beatitude, “warm.” Moreover, the consolation of hope is, it turns
out, no consolation. It merely leads to an intense awareness of loss
not only on the part of the “Damozel” but for the speaker of the
poem as well. For the “Damozel” is a fiction, and the parenthetical
first-person interjections ground the poem in the fantasy of the
earthly lover himself.
 CONTINUE…

• He claims to “see” “her smile” and “hear” “her tears,” but the
protestation emphasizes the wishfulness of his dream. If her
imagined reunion leads her to “tears,” his imagined “Damozel”
leads him to a heightened sense of separation from her. The
“Damozel” is, as his attempt to visualize her suggests,
unknowable. Her death is a barrier he cannot overcome by the
language of the poem. The sensuousness of his conception the
“fleshliness” of which Rossetti was later accused is not a radical
characterization of the afterlife, but an implicit mark of the
inadequacy of the earthly imagination.
 CONTINUE…
• The Blessed Damozel” specifies the opposition between language
and feeling as an opposition between poetry and eros. The poet’s
vision attempts to overcome the separation of lovers. His text is an
act of desire that confronts him with the fact of desirehence, of an
unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable need. The world of Rossetti’s
poetry is thus one in which desire generally sexual defines itself
by coming up against its own furthest limit the verge of
satisfaction. It asks the reader to experience the pain of near but
never complete realization. It offers a nightmare world, in which
all apparent realities are disclosed as expressions of the poet’s
desire.
 CHOICE III

• The primary objective of man’s life is the pursuit of truth . Search for
truth is important in every human’s life . Destiny depends on our action
. We should accomplish our dreams , thoughts , imagination before we
come to an end . We should try to culminate to zenith.
• We should not tire , bore or give up . We should continue our untiring
efforts, continue our struggle and movement for a positive change.
 CONTINUE…

• Poetry is metaphoric . He has used sun as a metaphor . Sun symbolizes

power . When there will be no sun , there will be power then there will
be no life . Man should rest after hard work , Because we can only
achieve our goals through hard work.
• .In this sonnet poet has described the reality of life .We should focus
on our action . Our actions should be fast because no one knows when
he is going to die , may be we shall die tomorrow . We should try to
bring positive change in our lives.
 CONTINUE…

• Never confine yourself to one place , free yourself from boundaries , go

beyond this world and galaxies or cosmos(all heavenly systems)
• Themes
• Death
• Fate/destiny
• Struggle
• Change
 ANALYSIS OF BRIDE’S PRELUDE

• The Bride’s Prelude,” which was begun in 1848 and returned to

later in the 1850’s but never completed, illustrates the link
between eros, guilt, and the failure of language. The poem, even in
its fragmentary form, is Rossetti’s longest narrative. It records the
conversation between two sisters in an unspecified medieval
setting: Aloÿse, the elder, whose wedding day it is, and Amelotte,
the younger, who is helping her dress.
 CONTINUE…

• Aloÿse is strangely silent; then, having knelt in prayer with her

sister, she reveals the story of her past life. She had, years before,
while her sister was being educated in a convent, fallen in love
with a young man, a distant cousin who had yet to make a name
for himself in the world, then staying with her powerful family.
When her family lost a political struggle and was forced
temporarily to flee its ancestral seat, the cousin had deserted
them, leaving her with child.
 CONTINUE…

• Discovering the situation, her father and brothers had reluctantly

spared her life but, it would seem the poem is deliberately vague
killed her illegitimate child. Now, circumstances have changed
again; the family is back in power, the cousin has returned, and it
is he Urscelyn whom she is about to marry. With this revelation,
the poem ends. Rossetti wrote a prose summary of a missing
conclusion, which his brother later published. Urscelyn, he
explains, having become a skilled soldier of fortune and therefore
of use to her family, wanting to ally himself with them once more,
has offered to marry Aloÿse.
 CONTINUE…

• . Aloÿse, meanwhile, had fallen in love with and secretly betrothed

herself to another man, whom Urscelyn, knowingly and
treacherously, killed in a tournament. Thus, the enormity of
marrying a man who had both betrayed her and murdered her
lover is the message she wishes to convey to her sister. In
conclusion, Rossetti states that “as the bridal procession appears,
perhaps it might become apparent that the brothers mean to kill
Urscelyn when he has married her.”
 CONTINUE…
• The “perhaps” tells all. “The Bride’s Prelude” is incomplete
because Rossetti was unable to imagine an appropriate ending,
and his prose summary is merely an evasion. The poem is also
Aloÿse’s story, and she, too, cannot bring her narrative to
completion. Significantly, the text as it stands makes no mention
of the second lover. Urscelyn’s flight labels him a betrayer—but
Aloÿse suggests that his motives were political and does not
indicate that he knew she was pregnant. In other words, without
Rossetti’s prose summary, what seems to block Aloÿse’s
happiness is less the character of Urscelyn than her own sense of
guilt.