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The opening poem of Rossetti's first book, "The Blessed Damozel," which is understood to have been written very early, though afterwards wrought up by touches both of his love for his wife while living and of his regret for her when dead, is almost a typical example of the whole style and school, though it is individualised by the strong pictorial element rarely absent from his work.
What a murrain on them! do they portend, flitting round and round, and skirting off, as if the devil's broomstick was behind them! By the Mass! they have frighted away the damozel, and I am not sorry for it. They have left me small heart for the part of Sir Launval."
This is the only kind of picture one ought to do—just copying the materials, and no more: all others are too much trouble.’ It is not difficult to understand that the painter of a ‘Proserpine’ and a ‘Ghirlandata’ would occasionally feel the luxury of a mood intellectually lazy, and would be minded to give voice to it—as in this instance—in terms wilfully extreme; keeping his mental eye none the less steadily directed to a ‘Roman Widow’ or a ‘Blessed Damozel’ in the near future.
After the practical plumber had been asking what he expected to make by this here science of his, re-reading her letters was balsamic. He liked Rossetti the exquisite sense of separation in "The Blessed Damozel" touched him. But, on the whole, he was a little surprised at Miss Heydinger's taste in poetry. Rossetti was so sensuous ... so florid. He had scarcely expected that sort of thing.
Bergson himself quotes this remark of Plato, and seems to have a vision like that of Rosetti's "Blessed Damozel," who ...... "saw Time like a pulse shake fierce Through all the worlds."
This gray-haired carle puts my heart in a tremble. Moreover, buy me a gittern a brave one for the damozel. She is too proud to take money, and, 'fore Heaven, I have small doubts the old wizard could turn my hose into nobles an' he had a mind for such gear. Wagons without horses, ships without sails, quotha!"
I sprang up, but not in arms, and went to a window. "The blessed damozel leaned out >From the gold bar of heaven," and reconnoitered from behind the blinds. "The wonder was not yet quite gone >From that still look of hers," when an armed man and a legged dog appeared ir the opening. I was vigilantly watching him. . . . . "And now She spoke through the still weather."
"Dear little Blessed Damozel, I love you a lot even though you are high-minded and think I'm a snob." She had been in her room for some minutes, Lorry already in bed with a light at her elbow and a book in her hand, when she reappeared in the doorway. The pins were gone from her hair and it lay in a yellow tangle on her shoulders, bare and milk-white.
With the production at Paris in the spring of 1902 of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, based on the play of Maeterlinck, the history of music turned a new and surprising page. "It is necessary," declared an acute French critic, M. Jean Marnold, writing shortly after the event, "to go back perhaps to Tristan to find in the opera house an event so important in certain respects for the evolution of musical art." The assertion strikes one to-day, five years after, as, if anything, over-cautious. Pelléas et Mélisande exhibited not simply a new manner of writing opera, but a new kind of music a new way of evolving and combining tones, a new order of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structure. The style of it was absolutely new and absolutely distinctive: the thing had never been done before, save, in a lesser degree, by Debussy himself in his then little known earlier work. Prior to the appearance of Pelléas et Mélisande, he had put forth, without appreciably disturbing the musical waters, all of the extraordinary and individual music with which his fame is now associated, except the three orchestral "sketches," La Mer (composed in 1903-1905 and published in the latter year), the piano pieces Estampes , and Images, Masques, l'Île joyeuse , and a few songs. Certain audiences in Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel" (La Demoiselle Élue), a "lyric poem" for two solo voices, female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year his string quartet was played by Ysaÿe and his associates; in 1894 his Prélude
I had used but twenty-two years of my life, there were fifty left to write in, and what couldn't you write in fifty years! Often, sitting here at night, I would get an idea and begin to work, and I would keep on until at last the enormous old woman who kept the café we called her "The Blessed Damozel" would come lumbering out and good humoredly growl, "Couches-toi donc. Une heure vient de sonner."
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