Pre-Raphaelite's on Literature

Proserpine goddess of vegetation

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine

     

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 become 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 in fain to bring,

Continually together murmuring) —

'Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine'.

— D. G. Rossetti

Shakespeare's Ophelia from Hamlet

Sir John Everett Millais' Ophelia 

Gertrude's announcement of Ophelia's death: 

There is a Willow growes aslant a Brooke,

That shewes his hore leaues in the glassie streame:

There with fantasticke Garlands did she come,

Of Crow-flowers, Nettles, Daysies, and long Purples,

That liberall Shepheards giue a grosser name;

But our cold Maids doe Dead Mens Fingers call them:

There on the pendant boughes, her Coronet weeds

Clambring to hang; an enuious sliuer broke,

When downe the Weedy Trophies, and her selfe,

Fell in the weeping Brooke, her cloathes spred wide,

And Mermaid-like, a while they bore her vp,

Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes,

As one incapable of her owne distresse,

Or like a creature Natiue, and indued

Vnto that Element but long it could not be,

Till that her garments, heauy with her drinke,

Pul'd the poore wretch from her melodious lay,

To muddy death.

- Hamlet Act IV scene 7 

The Lady of Shalott 

Hunt's Lady of Shalott

She knows not what the curse may be,

And so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she,

The Lady of Shalott.

- Alfred Tennyson