The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

Inscribed with the first verse from Rossetti's poem The Blessed Damozel.
The subject wass treated again by Burne-Jones in the late 1880s to 90s and appears twice in the Secret Book of Designs (British Museum Collection).

The design illustrated the opening stanza of Rossetti's most famous poem, written when he was only 19. The text is taken from the version published in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856, whi9ch differs from that of the poem as first published in The Germ, 1850, and as it later appears in the Poems of 1870. The illustration is similar in conception to a painting of the subject commissioned from Burne-Jones by the Leeds stockbroker T. E. Plint in March 1857. two version o this exist, an unfinished oil and a watercolour, completed in 1860, in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.