Liz's Blog Post 2

“The Portrait”: An Image of Galatea

            In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1870 poem, “The Portrait,” the narrator laments the loss of a young woman, likely his lover and muse. The portrait that he created of her is all that remains, though she still has a certain control over him, while “the earth is over her.” Throughout the poem, the narrator goes on to detail his perhaps secret relations with this woman and their meetings in the secluded woods. After speaking for numerous stanzas of his anguish at his lady’s death, the narrator finishes with:

“Here with her face doth memory sit...

While hopes and aims long lost with her

Stand round her image side by side,

Like tombs of pilgrims that have died

About the Holy Sepulchre” (12).

It appears to me that the “hopes and aims long lost” were clearly those of the narrator; his lover has taken his hopes and dreams - and therefore his reason for living - away from him upon her death.

            The notion of someone imbuing their own hopes and dreams into something or someone reminded me immediately of the mythological figure Pygmalion, his ivory creation of a woman, Galatea, and Aphrodite’s gift of life to Galatea. Like Pygmalion, the narrator is an artist, writing that, “In painting her I shrined her face...where light falls in” (2.2).  Both Pygmalion and the narrator in “The Portrait” work to create an immortal representation of something; Pygmalion wants to create the perfect woman while the narrator wishes to preserve the memory of a loved one. There is one big difference between the stories: Pygmalion’s dream is realized and the narrator’s is not. The goddess Aphrodite gives life to the statue Galatea and she and Pygmalion presumably live happily ever after, while the narrator’s lover has already lived her life and has also managed to lose it. The narrator paints her image knowing that he cannot bring her back to life, yet there is a subconscious hope that she will become alive again from some mystic force just as it happened to Galatea.

            In our class, we looked briefly at Edward Burne-Jones’ series of Pygmalion and Galatea (Figure 1). During this time and still today, the story of Pygmalion and Galatea was a well-known myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Contemporary audiences would have viewed the paintings and immediately understood the context of the piece. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea has even continued up until today as there have been direct interpretations of this story as well as numerous films, operas, and plays modeled off of it. My generation would likely be most familiar with George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which was later adapted into the musical My Fair Lady. Thus, the practice of modeling and re-appropriating this ancient myth of Pygmalion and Galatea was popular through the Pre-Raphaelite era up until modern day, as evidenced by “The Portrait,” by Rossetti and numerous modern examples.

 

Figure 1. Burne-Jones, Pygmalion and Galatea IV: The Soul Attains, 1875-1878

Works Cited:

Ovid. “The Story of Pygmalion and the Statue.” Metamorphoses.            

 http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/ovid/garth/garthb10p96.html

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “The Portrait.” 1870.       

 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174289