on "Properzia Rossi"

I couldn’t tell at first who the poem was addressed to—because the note says she is showing the sculpture to the Roman Knight it seemed the speaker would be addressing him, and at first she seems to as she says “For thee alone” (7), and calls the work a “farewell triumph” (8). She creates the sculpture as an image of herself, one “whose melancholy love/On thee was lavish’d” (14-15) so it seems like she’s addressing the knight. It feels a bit different at the end of the first section, though, when she says “my spirit, wake!” (21) and almost seems to be telling instead the sculpture to come to life with her emotion in order to make the “he” (23) regret not loving her back. It appears as if she is switching addressees, or she could more just be addressing everyone---or maybe addressing the art---the painting that contains both the knight and the sculpture, or some version of herself as the artist through the art.

This poem features a lot of really evident layers and perhaps switches between them---it’s sort of doubly ekphrastic in that the sculpture inspires the painting which inspires the poem. Then there is also the emotion that inspires her to create the sculpture in the first place, and this emotion seems to also run through the poem. The sculpture and the poem are paralleled in this way—as they are both works of art and both act as vehicles for the artist’s emotion. She puts her “thought, heart, soul, to burn, to shine,/Thro’ the pale marble’s veins” (36-7) and, as she compares the building of the sculpture to a rose blooming, also adds “line by line” (35) which suggests that the growing sculpture aligns with the growing poem.

The idea that the speaker/artist’s love is in vain comes up a lot too: “lov’d so vainly” (9), “vain tenderness” (21), “in vain” (104). It offers art as a vehicle for such emotion—that which cannot be expressed in life, or is underappreciated/misunderstood. As much as she says that her love is in vain, after all, she also makes the distinction a lot between fame and happiness. Her love is thus not necessarily completely in vain—only in regard to happiness. The emotion does serve a purpose—namely, fame. While she calls her love for the night “Thine unrequited gift” (25) she later calls her fame “Earth’s gift” (114) to her, which presents fame as a replacement for love, even as she calls it “Worthless fame!” (85)---what the sculpture, and perhaps poem as well, attempts to accomplish. 

She uses the “name”/“fame” rhyme in lines 123 & 125, and it emphasizes the poem’s role in cementing her name via title and also hints at Hemans’s own name as the poet/actual creator of the art. The art here is very much a part of the artist---the entire work of art is a signature of her fame. The “deep thrill” (126) of vibration the speaker equates her name to calls back to the “dirge-like echoes” (79) in the section before.

Also, by the end of the poem, the fame seems to be a way for the speaker/poet/artist to be worthy of the knight’s/her addressee’s love---as though the fame is worthless unless it makes the knight proud of the fact that he was the object of her affection. Of course, that there seemed at least to me to be some confusion about who was being addressed in the poem complicates this ---and it can perhaps thus come to represent a larger authorial anxiety or fear of an indifferent reader---the  poet/reader relationship becoming one of unrequited love from the spurned poet to the apathetic reader. This perhaps would make sense especially for Hemans or just the female poet in general writing for a male audience.