Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Seven Poems

D a n t e   G a b r i e l   R o s s e t t i

(1828-1882)

S e v e n   P o e m s

 

Insomnia

Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit’s wind:
But in half-dreams that shift and roll
And still remember and forget,
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

Our lives, most dear, are never near,
Our thoughts are never far apart,
Though all that draws us heart to heart
Seems fainter now and now more clear.
To-night Love claims his full control,
And with desire and with regret
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

Is there a home where heavy earth
Melts to bright air that breathes no pain,
Where water leaves no thirst again
And springing fire is Love’s new birth?
If faith long bound to one true goal
May there at length its hope beget,
My soul that hour shall draw your soul
For ever nearer yet.

 

The Portrait

This is her picture as she was:
It seems a thing to wonder on,
As though mine image in the glass
Should tarry when myself am gone.
I gaze until she seems to stir,–
Until mine eyes almost aver
That now, even now, the sweet lips part
To breathe the words of the sweet heart:–
And yet the earth is over her.

Alas! even such the thin-drawn ray
That makes the prison-depths more rude,–
The drip of water night and day
Giving a tongue to solitude.
Yet only this, of love’s whole prize,
Remains; save what in mournful guise
Takes counsel with my soul alone,–
Save what is secret and unknown,
Below the earth, above the skies.

In painting her I shrin’d her face
Mid mystic trees, where light falls in
Hardly at all; a covert place
Where you might think to find a din
Of doubtful talk, and a live flame
Wandering, and many a shape whose name
Not itself knoweth, and old dew,
And your own footsteps meeting you,
And all things going as they came.

A deep dim wood; and there she stands
As in that wood that day: for so
Was the still movement of her hands
And such the pure line’s gracious flow.
And passing fair the type must seem,
Unknown the presence and the dream.
‘Tis she: though of herself, alas!
Less than her shadow on the grass
Or than her image in the stream.

That day we met there, I and she
One with the other all alone;
And we were blithe; yet memory
Saddens those hours, as when the moon
Looks upon daylight. And with her
I stoop’d to drink the spring-water,
Athirst where other waters sprang;
And where the echo is, she sang,–
My soul another echo there.

But when that hour my soul won strength
For words whose silence wastes and kills,
Dull raindrops smote us, and at length
Thunder’d the heat within the hills.
That eve I spoke those words again
Beside the pelted window-pane;
And there she hearken’d what I said,
With under-glances that survey’d
The empty pastures blind with rain.

Next day the memories of these things,
Like leaves through which a bird has flown,
Still vibrated with Love’s warm wings;
Till I must make them all my own
And paint this picture. So, ‘twixt ease
Of talk and sweet long silences,
She stood among the plants in bloom
At windows of a summer room,
To feign the shadow of the trees.

And as I wrought, while all above
And all around was fragrant air,
In the sick burthen of my love
It seem’d each sun-thrill’d blossom there
Beat like a heart among the leaves.
O heart that never beats nor heaves,
In that one darkness lying still,
What now to thee my love’s great will
Or the fine web the sunshine weaves?

For now doth daylight disavow
Those days,–nought left to see or hear.
Only in solemn whispers now
At night-time these things reach mine ear;
When the leaf-shadows at a breath
Shrink in the road, and all the heath,
Forest and water, far and wide,
In limpid starlight glorified,
Lie like the mystery of death.

Last night at last I could have slept,
And yet delay’d my sleep till dawn,
Still wandering. Then it was I wept:
For unawares I came upon
Those glades where once she walk’d with me:
And as I stood there suddenly,
All wan with traversing the night,
Upon the desolate verge of light
Yearn’d loud the iron-bosom’d sea.

Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears
The beating heart of Love’s own breast,–
Where round the secret of all spheres
All angels lay their wings to rest,–
How shall my soul stand rapt and aw’d,
When, by the new birth borne abroad
Throughout the music of the suns,
It enters in her soul at once
And knows the silence there for God!

Here with her face doth memory sit
Meanwhile, and wait the day’s decline,
Till other eyes shall look from it,
Eyes of the spirit’s Palestine,
Even than the old gaze tenderer:
While hopes and aims long lost with her
Stand round her image side by side,
Like tombs of pilgrims that have died
About the Holy Sepulchre.

The Kiss

What smouldering senses in death’s sick delay
Or seizure of malign vicissitude
Can rob this body of honour, or denude
This soul of wedding-raiment worn to-day?
For lo! even now my lady’s lips did play
With these my lips such consonant interlude
As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed
The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay.

I was a child beneath her touch, — a man
When breast to breast we clung, even I and she, —
A spirit when her spirit looked through me, —
A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our life-blood, till love’s emulous ardours ran,
Fire within fire, desire in deity.

Through Death To Love

Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee
From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,–
Like multiform circumfluence manifold
Of night’s flood-tide,–like terrors that agree
Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,–
Even such, within some glass dimm’d by our breath,
Our hearts discern wild images of Death,
Shadows and shoals that edge eternity.

Howbeit athwart Death’s imminent shade doth soar
One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove
Sweeter to glide around, to brood above.
Tell me, my heart,–what angel-greeted door
Or threshold of wing-winnow’d threshing-floor
Hath guest fire-fledg’d as thine, whose lord is Love?

The Gloom that Breathes Upon Me

The gloom that breathes upon me with these airs
Is like the drops which stike the traveller’s brow
Who knows not, darkling, if they bring him now
Fresh storm, or be old rain the covert bears.
Ah! bodes this hour some harvest of new tares,
Or hath but memory of the day whose plough
Sowed hunger once, — the night at length when thou,
O prayer found vain, didst fall from out my prayers?

How prickly were the growths which yet how smooth,
Along the hedgerows of this journey shed,
Lie by Time’s grace till night and sleep may soothe!
Even as the thisteldown from pathsides dead
Gleaned by a girl in autumns of her youth,
Which one new year makes soft her marriage-bed.

 

The Ballad of Dead Ladies

Tell me now in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman?
Where’s Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere–
She whose beauty was more than human?–
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Where’s Heloise, the learned nun,
For whose sake Abeillard, I ween,
Lost manhood and put priesthood on?
(From Love he won such dule and teen!)
And where, I pray you, is the Queen
Who willed that Buridan should steer
Sewed in a sack’s mouth down the Seine?–
But where are the snows of yester-year?

White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies,
With a voice like any mermaiden–
Bertha Broadfoot, Beatrice, Alice,
And Ermengarde the lady of Maine–
And that good Joan whom Englishmen
At Rouen doomed and burned her there–
Mother of God, where are they then?–
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword–
But where are the snows of yester-year?

 

 Life-In-Love

Not in thy body is thy life at all But in this lady’s lips and hands and eyes; Through these she yields thee life that vivifies What else were sorrow’s servant and death’s thrall. Look on thyself without her, and recall The waste remembrance and forlorn surmise That liv’d but in a dead-drawn breath of sighs O’er vanish’d hours and hours eventual.Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair Which, stor’d apart, is all love hath to show For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago; Even so much life endures unknown, even where, ‘Mid change the changeless night environeth, Lies all that golden hair undimm’d in death.

 

 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Seven Poems

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