Robert Schumann
German, 1810–1856
Dichterliebe (“A Poet’s Love,” 1840)
I. “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (In the beautiful month of May)
Recommended recording: Ian Bostridge, tenor; Julius Drake, piano (EMI Classics, 1998)
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
British, 1828–1882
The Day Dream (1880)
Oil on canvas
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Rossetti’s The Day Dream illustrates the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English artists and art critics who rejected what they saw as the artificial, formulaic style of contemporary academic painting. They aimed to return to what they considered a more authentic, morally serious, and emotionally honest approach to art, inspired by early Renaissance painters before Raphael.
The Pre-Raphaelites drew inspiration from literary, medieval, and biblical sources to create works that are at once meticulously detailed and strangely dreamlike. Their canvases abound with symbolic detail and jewel-like colors, set within a flattened picture space that eschews traditional perspective.
The Day Dream depicts Jane Morris, Rossetti’s frequent muse and the wife of his close associate William Morris, seated within the dense branches of a tree. She holds a sprig of honeysuckle, a Victorian emblem of love, and rests her hand upon a book, yet both of these objects are forgotten as her gaze shifts downward, unfocused and withdrawn from the external world. The deep greens of the surrounding foliage envelop her, rendering her less a visitor to the natural world than an emanation of it.
Light filtering through the canopy creates a softly luminous atmosphere, enhancing the sense that she exists in a liminal space between wakefulness and imagination. The painting reads less as a depiction of a moment than as a sustained meditation on interiority, devoid of narrative, drama, or clear resolution.
A comparable suspension of emotional and formal resolution characterizes Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (In the beautiful month of May), the opening song of Dichterliebe, set to a poem by Heinrich Heine (translation mine):
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,
Als alle Knospen sprangen,
Da ist in meinem Herzen
Die Liebe aufgegangen.
In the beautiful month of May,
When all the buds were bursting,
Then in my heart
Love blossomed.
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,
Als alle Vögel sangen,
Da hab’ ich ihr gestanden
Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.
In the beautiful month of May,
When all the birds were singing,
Then I confessed to her
My longing and desire.
The poem itself is disarmingly simple, evoking the awakening of love through images of spring—blooming flowers and singing birds—yet its seeming clarity is complicated by an undercurrent of emotional uncertainty: the speaker’s confession of love appears in retrospect, without any indication of fulfillment or narrative continuation.
Schumann conveys this ambiguity through a musical language that resists closure from the outset, establishing a mood of expectation that remains unresolved. The piano introduction suggests F-sharp minor without firmly establishing it, and when the voice enters, the music shifts toward A major on the word “Mai” (0:18 in the recording by Ian Bostridge), producing a momentary sense of resolution that never fully stabilizes. Throughout the brief span of the song, Schumann avoids definitive cadences, allowing chromatic inflections and shifting tonal centers to create a prolonged sense of suspension.
The most striking moment occurs at the end, where the music comes to rest not on a tonic resolution but on an unresolved dominant seventh chord (1:23), leaving the listener in a state of expectancy. This refusal of closure mirrors the poem’s thematic focus on the beginning of love as an uncertain, incomplete experience, capturing not the fulfillment of emotion but its emergence—fragile, tentative, and unresolved.
Rossetti’s painting and Schumann’s song both situate their subjects within the symbolic framework of spring and nature, yet in each case, these elements function less as settings than as manifestations of an inward emotional state. Just as Rossetti uses the dense, enveloping foliage to isolate Jane Morris in a state of perpetual introspection, Schumann employs harmonic instability to anchor the listener in a moment of emotional hovering. In both works, resolution is deferred, and meaning remains open, inviting the viewer or listener to inhabit the space between anticipation and realization.
© 2026 Troy Etter