Rossetti+Analysis

Analysis

This poem is about a painter who always paints the same girl in all of his paintings. He paints her in different settings, poses, and outfits but it’s always the same thing. His paintings show how he wants to see her, “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” The girl in his paintings never ages, nor does she accurately represent the girl she is painted after.

The entire time, she patiently waits for him to see her as she is. “Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim.” Every time he looks at her and sees her the way he wants to see her and not as she is, she looks back with kind eyes, as “joyful as the light.”

Since Rossetti has a history of writing about anti-feminism matters, it is easy to see the girl as being objectified in this poem. It is possible that Rossetti is illustrating the inequality of men and women by describing the girl as simply a model of beauty, while the man sees in her only what he wants to dream of about her. However, there is evidence in the poem of the love between the two. She patiently looks at him with true kind eyes, and he “feeds upon her face by day and night.”



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