"The Blessed Damozel" is about a damozel who, as it turns out, just so happens to be blessed. Got it? Nothing more to see here? Well…not quite. This title is certainly no great mystery, but it's still worth thinking about in terms of language and description.
The first thing that probably throws you about this title is the word "damozel," as in "Just what in the Sam Hill is a 'damozel' anyway?" As we explain over in the "Summary," a "damozel" is just a very old word meaning "damsel," which is itself an old word meaning "young woman." Clearly, Rossetti wanted to introduce an old-school vibe here with this word choice.
In fact, Rossetti was big on the old school. As a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (check out "In a Nutshell" for more), we know that he and his buddies were looking to take literature and art back to a time before the Renaissance artist Raphael and his ilk showed up and ruined everything (in their view) with their fuzziness and lack of detail. So, the word "damozel" seems to intentionally draw us back into a distant, classical past.
As for the word "blessed," we have to admit: after reading nearly 150 lines of her pining away for her lost love back on Earth, we're not so inclined to agree. Again, though, Rossetti's introducing an older association of the word "blessed" here. He's not talking about a hashtag you drop on Facebook when you hit a five-dollar scratch-off ticket. Nope—here he means simply that the damsel is up in heaven. Sure, she's not have much fun up there—what with all the crying and the leaning over the railing to study Earth—but she's technically "blessed" just being in heaven. After all, it's not something that her lover can say yet. And when you think of it in those terms, the damozel's condition of being "blessed" pretty much sums up the poem's central problem.