"Our hearts discern wild images of Death, Shadows and shoals that edge eternity. Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove Sweeter to glide around, to brood above. Tell me, my heart,—what angel-greeted door Or threshold of wing-winnow'd threshing-floor Hath guest fire-fledg'd as thine, whose lord is Love?"
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life: 41. Through Death to Love
Dante's Vita Nuova, the subject of Beata Beatrix, was one of numerous early Italian works that Ros-etti translated. Dante portrays himself in La Vita Nuova as a poet captivated by an unattainable love personified by Beatrice. After Beatrice's death, Dante, who cannot overcome his lingering love for her, resolves to express his love through his art. Rossetti found that the illusory imagery depicting idealized love interwoven throughout Dante's poem complemented his own taste for visual and literary narration. Thus Rossetti generally followed the themes of Dante's poem but interpreted the narrative freely to compose an image that asserts his personal conception of ideal love. Rossetti outlined the basic meaning of the pain- ting in a letter to William Graham of March 1873 in which he described the painting "not as a representation of the incident of the death of Beatrice, but as an ideal of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden spiritual transfi- guration. Beatrice is rapt visibly into Heaven, seeing as it were through her shut lids (as Dante says at the close of the Vita Nuova): 'Him who is Blessed throughout all ages'; and in sign of the supreme change, the radiant bird, a messenger of death, drops the white poppy between her open hands. In the background is the City which, as Dante says: 'sat solitary' in mourning for her death; and through whose street Dante himself is seen to pass gazing towards the figure of Love opposite, in whose hand the waning life of his lady flickers as a flame. On the sundial at her side the shadow falls on the hour of nine, which number Dante connects mys- tically in many ways with her and with her death. The date below the predella (3ist March 1300) is that of Dante's meeting Beatrice in the Garden of Eden. [The date 9 June 1290 heading the main panel represents the date of Beatrice's death.] The words, 'Veni, Sponsa De Libano' are sung at the meeting by the women in the train of Beatrice."