Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Proserpina

PROSERPINA
AFAR away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall,—one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door.

Enna's flowers

Enna was the Sicilian meadow where Proserpina picked flowers before Pluto abducted her. The myth says she was gathering narcissus when the earth opened.

Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.

The binding fruit

Pomegranate seeds. Eating underworld food binds you there permanently—Proserpina ate six seeds, so she must spend six months per year in Hades.

Tartarean grey

Tartarus is the deepest pit of the underworld, below even Hades. The adjective makes the greyness specifically hellish, not just dim.

Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar, how far away,
The nights that shall be from 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 is fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring,)—
"Woe's me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!"

Third-person lament

She hears herself mourned in third person—'Proserpine' instead of 'me.' The distance between self and name mirrors her split existence.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Sonnet's Speaker

Rossetti gives Proserpina her own voice—unusual for Victorian retellings of the myth. She speaks from the underworld in the moment after eating the pomegranate, aware she's just bound herself to Pluto's realm. The painting Rossetti made alongside this poem (1874) shows her holding the bitten fruit, one hand touching the wall, trapped mid-realization.

The sonnet form matters here. It's not a standard Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet—Rossetti uses 14 lines but breaks the volta (turn) differently. The octave lists everything now afar (the word hammers seven times in eight lines), then the sestet shifts to psychological splitting: "Afar from mine own self I seem." The final couplet isn't a resolution but a haunting—she hears herself mourned as if already dead.

"Tasted once, must thrall me here"—the passive construction hides who's doing the thralling. Not Pluto (he's barely present), not the fruit itself, but the irreversible rule. Rossetti's Proserpina is trapped by cosmic law, not a captor. The poem's claustrophobia comes from that: there's no one to argue with, nothing to fight. Just distance multiplying in every direction.

Rossetti's Biographical Echo

Rossetti painted and wrote this after his wife Elizabeth Siddal's suicide by laudanum in 1862. He'd buried his manuscript poems with her, then exhumed them in 1869—a literal retrieval from the underworld that haunted him. His model for Proserpina was Jane Morris, wife of his friend William Morris, with whom Rossetti had an intense, unconsummated relationship.

The "distant palace-door" and "one instant and no more" of light suggest the underworld's architecture, but also the social architecture of Victorian affairs—stolen moments, permanent separation. Jane Morris sat for multiple Proserpina paintings (Rossetti obsessively repainted her face). The poem's splitting—"Afar from mine own self"—mirrors the divided life of forbidden love.

"Some heart unto some soul doth pine"—the vague pronouns are strange. Not "my heart" or "your soul" but some and some, as if she's overhearing a grief that might be hers, might be another's. The final line's shift to third person ("thee, unhappy Proserpine") completes the dissociation. She's become a myth to herself, a name in someone else's lament. Rossetti knew that feeling—he'd turned Lizzie Siddal into Beatrice, Jane Morris into Proserpina, himself into a man who couldn't stop painting the faces of the dead and the unreachable.