Complete Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti is laying out the contrasts of life. Additionally, one can find “Terror and mystery” who guard the shrine on which “Beauty” is “enthroned.” Under this arch is all manner of creatures, living and dead. The arching treetops form essential, an arch of Life. The reader might imagine that Rossetti’s speaker was out walking, perhaps in the woods (as if often the case in poetry), and is considering the foliage above him. His speaker describes a time in which he came upon, “the arch of Life.” Rossetti begins “Sonnet LXXVII” by painting a picture of a scene containing the embodiment of Life and Beauty. Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I sawīeauty enthroned and though her gaze struck awe,

Under the arch of Life, where love and death, They trail behind her, with the beating of their footsteps and hearts right on her heels. Those that follow her bend to her every whim, and will do whatever it takes to find her. She, the speaker says, controls all those around her. It is immediately clear that the speaker revers Beauty in all “her” forms and has a kind of religious fervor related to the manifestations of her. She is surrounded and protected by “Terror…mystery” as well as “love and death.” These elements of like are all a part of Beauty and she sits, enthroned under “the arch of Life.” The poem begins with the speaker coming upon the embodiment of Beauty. “Sonnet LXXVII” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti concerns aestheticism, or the manifestations of Beauty, as a form of religious obsession.

Complete Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti