Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Victorian Poet: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)

“Silent Noon”

YOUR hands lie open in the long, fresh grass,—          
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:           
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
’Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.   
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,                5
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge        
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn hedge.       
’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.          
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly          
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky,—                 10
So this wing’d hour is dropped to us from above.         
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,          
This close-companioned inarticulate hour          
When twofold silence was the song of love.      





“Love-Sweetness”

SWEET dimness of her loosened hair’s downfall          
About thy face; her sweet hands round thy head           
In gracious fostering union garlanded;   
Her tremulous smiles; her glances’ sweet recall 
Of love; her murmuring sighs memorial;                           5
Her mouth’s culled sweetness by thy kisses shed          
On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led     
Back to her mouth, which answers there for all:—        
What sweeter than these things, except the thing           
In lacking which all these would lose their sweet:—                10
The confident heart’s still fervor: the swift beat  
And soft subsidence of the spirit’s wing,           
Then when it feels, in cloud-girt wayfaring,        
The breath of kindred plumes against its feet?

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