Ulalume

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Date: c. 1848

Materials: Pen and black and brown ink on green paper

Edgar Allan Poe 

Most of Rossetti's earliest drawings take their subject either from the works of Dante, which remained a lifelong obsession, or from romantic literature, such as Goethe's 'Faust', old English ballads and the poems of Sir Walter Scott.

He also admired the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, and between 1846 and 1848 produced a group of drawings illustrating both 'The Raven' and 'Ulalume'.

Supernatural stories 

For Rossetti, the recurrence in Poe's verse of images of supernatural forces bridging the divide between life and death struck an exact chord with his own visual and poetic imagination.

In 'Ulalume', the narrator encounters his own soul in the form of a winged angel and is re-united with his dead lover, walking together into a 'ghoul-haunted woodland' on the anniversary of her death.

He could also see the absurd side of such fancies, however, his brother William recording in the P.R.B. Journal for 30 November 1850 that "Gabriel finished, all but the last verse, his parody on 'Ulalume'."