Beloved

Rossetti: mystical icon  "Fire within fire, desire in deity." (see his poem The Kiss)

Ah, did you miss that symbol? You won't from now on. :)

When Rossetti speaks of Beauty, he's speaking of the Forms... from a more neo-platonic, Dantean, Sufic cant (love that word); the Hermetic as above, so below, as in his Blessed Damozel. And then there's his father's Speculative Freemasonry. (note)

Blake (whom Rossetti championed and helped see to print):

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3 Energy is Eternal Delight

note:

link Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Artist and poet and a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti was instrumental in the revival of interest in the work of William Blake in the 1860s and, with his brother William Michael Rossetti, he helped Anne Gilchrist to finish her husband Alexander’s Life of Blake after his death. He would have learned of Swedenborg through his interest in Blake, but the most important Swedenborgian influence on his own work, seen particularly in The Blessed Damozel (both a painting and a poem), came from Conjugial Love through his friend Robert Browning*, whose poetry he greatly admired. Rossetti was also a friend of Garth Wilkinson, who attended his wife the artist Lizzie Siddal on one occasion.

References: The Age of Rossetti,Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910(exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery Publishing, 1997), article by Robert Upstone at pages 191-3, and Clement James Wilkinson, James John Garth Wilkinson (1911).

(Actually, it wasn't Robert Browning who was into Swedenborg, so much as his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wogga-wogga one of the pair.)

Anyway -- The Bride / Beloved is part of the London exhibit:

London show explores Pre-Raphaelite radicals