Poems from the coffin

I bumped into Millais' painting about Ophelia the other day and it occurred to me the death of the model of the picture was not a usual one either.

Elizabeth Siddal was the wife of Rossetti the painter and poet. Not long after their marriage Elizabeth became ill and died. Rosetti was devastated and at the funeral she put a small book containing the only copy of his poems under the hair of his wife lying in the coffin.

Later Rossetti had alcohol and drug problems and he thought he could not paint anymore, so he started writing poems again. He wanted to publish his old poems together with the new ones, so he petitioned the authorities for an exhumation. The book was retrieved from the coffin, the only problem was a worm burrowed through it, so some of the poems were hard to read, but he overcome this difficulty and published the poems. They were not well received, because they were too erotic, so they didn't bring success to Rossetti and, to make things worse, the memory of the exhumation haunted him until the end of his life.

Such a nice, romantic story, isn't it? :P