After a short illness, Rossetti died at Birchington on Easter Day, 9th April 1882, surrounded by family and friends. The funeral held at Birchington church on 14th April, was almost a private affair, its situation appreciated by one of the mourners: ‘A sweet, open spot.’ Rossetti’s immediate family paid for the erection of a grave-cross and memorial window in the church. The cross, designed by Rossetti’s friend Ford Madox Brown, marks the grave on the south side of the church close to the porch. It is in the Celtic style and shows three scenes – the temptation in Eden, the marriage of Dante and the death of St. Luke – all subjects relevant to Rossetti’s work. The window in the south aisle, designed by another of Rossetti’s friends, Frederic Shields, is partly based on one of Rossetti’s own paintings, ‘Passover in the Holy Family‘.
The grave long remained a place of pilgrimage with ‘one lady fainting‘. One visitor, however, noted the irony of the situation; ‘Rossetti was a frank atheist, yet see, he has come to the consecrated ground and the cross and the memorial window.’
None the less, such recurrent bouts of illness, occurring near the end of his life, continued to affect Rossetti’s confidence in his artistic ability, and he turned more towards the kind of poetry he had produced in his Poems (1870), often expressing his symbolic writing in ballad form, as in 'Ballads and Sonnets' (1881)...
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