Proserpine Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1874 Persephone in Mythology

Proserpine Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874

Persephone in Mythology • Daughter of Zeus and Demeter • Abducted into the Underworld • Return to Underworld four months per year • Pomegranate, coming of Spring

Dual Feminine Nature • Queen of Underworld vs. Goddess of Spring • Innocent Maiden vs. Experienced Lover • Imagined ideal vs. let down of reality Persephone is bound to her husband only allowed to be free for a certain part of the year, much like DGR and Jane Morris or Persephone is a beautiful woman condemned to live in the underworld, stuck in a loveless marriage

The Blanzifiore (Snowdrops) • Spring flowers vs. pomegranate

PROSERPINA. (FOR A PICTURE. ) Afar away the light that brings cold cheer Unto this wall, —one instant and no more Admitted at my distant palace-door. Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here. Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey That chills me: and afar, how far away, The nights that shall be from the days that were. Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign: And still some heart unto some soul doth pine, (Whose sounds mine inner sense is fain to bring, Continually together murmuring, )— “Woe's me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!” Ballads and Sonnets, DGR, 1881

“She is represented in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her from some inlet suddenly opened, and admitting for a moment the light of the upper world; and she glances furtively toward it, immersed in thought. The incense-burner stands behind her as the attribute of a goddess. The ivy-branch in the background (a decorative appendage to the sonnet inscribed on the label) may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory. ” DGR, 1878 Idea that art’s imaginative sources are located in the underworld (Beatrice & Dante)