Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lilith

LILITH
OF Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told

Pre-Eve mythology

Jewish folklore tradition: Lilith was Adam's first wife, made from earth like him (not his rib). She left Eden after refusing to be subordinate. Rossetti uses the parenthetical to mark this as alternative scripture.

(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,

Eternal youth trick

She doesn't age while everything else does—vampire logic before Dracula. The comma splice makes 'young' and 'old' crash together in one line.

And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

Fatal flowers

Rose = erotic love, poppy = opium/sleep/death. Victorian flower language stacking seduction and oblivion together.

The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

The kill shot

That 'strangling golden hair'—singular. One hair is all it takes. The whole sonnet's seduction compressed into a garrote.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Rossetti's Lilith Obsession

Rossetti painted *Lady Lilith* the same year he wrote this sonnet (1868), using his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the model. The painting shows Lilith in a white gown, combing her massive golden hair in a mirror, surrounded by roses and poppies—she's literally weaving the 'bright web' of the poem. He was so obsessed he repainted her face in 1872 to look more like Alexa Wilding, another model he preferred.

The poem was written as a sonnet for a picture—meant to be read alongside the painting. Rossetti did this constantly, treating poems and paintings as paired art objects. The sonnet explains what the painting shows: Lilith as eternal femme fatale, 'subtly of herself contemplative,' checking herself out while men fall into her trap.

CONTEXT Lilith appears in Jewish mystical texts like the *Alphabet of Ben-Sira* (8th-10th century) as Adam's rebellious first wife who refused missionary position—literally. She said the prayer-name of God and flew away. Medieval texts cast her as a demon who strangles infants and seduces sleeping men. Rossetti strips the baby-killing, keeps the seduction, adds Victorian hair fetishism.

The Hair as Weapon

Victorian England was *obsessed* with women's hair—cutting it off was social death, letting it down was sexual signaling, and Rossetti painted it compulsively. Here, Lilith's hair is 'enchanted' (line 4), a 'bright web' (line 7), and finally 'one strangling golden hair' (line 14). It goes from adjective to metaphor to murder weapon.

Watch the grammar tighten: 'her enchanted hair was the first gold' (passive, mythic), then 'the bright web she can weave' (active, present tense—she's doing it now), then 'one strangling golden hair' (no verb needed, it just *is* strangling). The syntax mimics a noose closing.

The final image is absurdly specific: not her beauty or her spell in general, but one single hair wrapped around a heart. It's the Victorian equivalent of a slasher-film close-up—horror through precision. That youth's 'straight neck bent' is a hanged man. Rossetti turns Rapunzel's tower into a gallows.