page_title: Proserpine (Rossetti painting)
section_title: The inscribed sonnet
hierarchical_section_title: Proserpine (Rossetti painting) / The inscribed sonnet
caption_attribution_description: English: Eighth version of Rossetti's Proserpine at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. From their website "This version was painted for L. R. Valpy Esq. as a copy, on a reduced scale, of the Tate version. It was finished at Birchington, just a few days before Rossetti's death."
context_page_description: Proserpine is an oil painting on canvas by English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted in 1874 and now in Tate Britain.
context_section_description: On the top right of the canvas "Proserpina" is inscribed by the artist, followed by his sonnet in Italian. The same sonnet in English is inscribed on the frame:
  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 
  The painting is signed and dated on a scroll at lower left: 'DANTE GABRIELE ROSSETTI RITRASSE NEL CAPODANNO DEL 1874' (in Italian) (Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted this at the beginning of 1874). The frame, designed by Rossetti, has roundels which resemble a section of a pomegranate, reflecting the sliced pomegranate in Proserpine's hand.
caption: Rossetti's eighth and final version of Proserpine, now in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (1882)
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