Where It All Goes Down
"The Blessed Damozel" offers up three settings for the price of one—such a bargain. It's like buying one ticket but visiting three destinations. Let us explain:
Destination 1: Heaven
"Heaven," sang the Talking Heads, "is a place, where nothing ever happens." That's kind of true in this poem. Our title character just kind of sits around heaven all day (okay, stands around), looking down at Earth and, well, waiting.
While she waits for her lover to join her, we get a lot of detail about her surroundings:
It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on:
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is Space begun;
So high, that looking downward thence
She scarce could see the sun. (25-30)
Most of those details, like the ones provided here, remind us just how far removed heaven is from Earth. As a result, we feel more keenly just how isolated the damozel is from her still-living lover boy. He's stuck, after all, back on…
Destination 2: Earth
The Earth may seem like a pretty broad setting, but it's a key element in the poem's description of the distance between the dead damsel and the living lover. Check it out:
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge. (33-36)
In other words, the Earth looks like a little bug ("midge"), because it's really, really far away from heaven. It's interesting to note, actually, that the key difference in these two settings comes down to physical distance. Most literature contrasts the joy and peace of heaven with the suffering and misery of the mortal world, but "The Blessed Damozel" is more interested in showing us just how literally far apart they are. The only way to bridge that enormous gap, in fact, is through…
Destination 3: Fantasy Land
Fantasy is something that both the damozel and her lover engage in. You could argue (hey, we are arguing) that these fantasies create a distinct, third setting in the poem. It allows the damsel, for example, to imagine taking her lover on a field trip to
[…] the shadow of
That living mystic tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove
Is sometimes felt to be, (85-88)
For his part, the lover imagines that, back on Earth, the damsel "lean'd o'er me—her hair/ Fell all about my face" (21-22). Of course, neither scenario is actually true in the poem. Instead, they show us how imagination keeps love alive. This fantasy setting allows the separated lovers to keep their thoughts trained on one another in the hopes that somehow, some way, some day they'll be able to share a setting together again.