A few poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

'Even yet the rose-tree's verdure left alone Will flush all ruddy though the rose be gone'

[To my father, on his birthday. 28.05]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Boat of Love (1881)

Poems reproduced from the illustrated edition of Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by W. M. Rossetti (Vol. II, 1904).

Dawn on the night-journey

Till dawn the wind drove round me. It is past

And still, and leaves the air to lisp of bird,

And to the quiet that is almost heard

Of the new-risen day, as yet bound fast

In the first warmth of sunrise. When the last

Of the sun's hours to-day shall be fulfilled,

There shall another breath of time be stilled

For me, which now is to my senses cast

As much beyond me as eternity,

Unknown, kept secret. On the newborn air

The moth quivers in silence. It is vast,

Yea, even beyond the hills upon the sea,

The day whose end shall give this hour as sheer

As chaos to the irrevocable Past.

Transfigured life

As growth of form or momentary glance

In a child's features will recall to mind

The father's with the mother's face combin'd,—

Sweet interchange that memories still enhance:

And yet, as childhood's years and youth's advance,

The gradual mouldings leave one stamp behind,

Till in the blended likeness now we find

A separate man's or woman's countenance:—

So in the Song, the singer's Joy and Pain,

Its very parents, evermore expand

To bid the passion's fullgrown birth remain,

By Art's transfiguring essence subtly spann'd;

And from that song-cloud shaped as a man's hand

There comes the sound as of abundant rain.

Ardour and memory

The cuckoo-throb, the heartbeat of the Spring;

The rosebud's blush that leaves it as it grows

Into the full-eyed fair unblushing rose;

The summer clouds that visit every wing

With fires of sunrise and of sunsetting;

The furtive flickering streams to light re-born

'Mid airs new-fledged and valorous lusts of morn,

While all the daughters of the daybreak sing:—

These ardour loves, and memory: and when flown

All joys, and through dark forest-boughs in flight

The wind swoops onward brandishing the light,

Even yet the rose-tree's verdure left alone

Will flush all ruddy though the rose be gone;

With ditties and with dirges infinite.

The soul's sphere

Some prisoned moon in steep cloud-fastnesses,—

Throned queen and thralled; some dying sun whose pyre

Blazed with momentous memorable fire;—

Who hath not yearned and fed his heart with these?

Who, sleepless, hath not anguished to appease

Tragical shadow's realm of sound and sight

Conjectured in the lamentable night?. . . .

Lo! the soul's sphere of infinite images!

What sense shall count them? Whether it forecast

The rose-winged hours that flutter in the van

Of Love's unquestioning unrevealed span,—

Visions of golden futures: or that last

Wild pageant of the accumulated past

That clangs and flashes for a drowning man.

The Vase of Life

Around the vase of Life at your slow pace

He has not crept, but turned it with his hands,

And all its sides already understands.

There, girt, one breathes alert for some great race;

Whose road runs far by sands and fruitful Space;

Who laughs, yet through the jolly throng has pass'd;

Who weeps, nor stays for weeping; who at last,

A youth, stands somewhere crowned, with silent face.

And he has filled this vase with wine for blood,

With blood for tears, with spice for burning vow,

With watered flowers for buried love most fit;

And would have cast it shattered to the flood,

Yet in Fate's name has kept it whole; which now

Stands empty till his ashes fall in it.

John Keats

(From "Five English Poets")

The weltering London ways where children weep

And girls whom none call maidens laugh,—strange road

Miring his outward steps, who inly trode

The bright Castalian brink and Latmos' steep:—

Even such his life's cross-paths; till deathly deep

He toiled through sands of Lethe; and long pain,

Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,

In dead Rome's sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.

O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips

And heart-strung lyre awoke the Moon's eclipse,—

Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o'er,—

Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ

But rumour'd in water, while the fame of it

Along Time's flood goes echoing evermore.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

(Inscription for the couch, still preserved, on which he passed the last night of his life)

Twixt those twin words,—the world of Sleep, which gave

No dream to warn,—the tidal world of Death,

Which the earth's sea, as the earth, replenisheth,—

Shelley, Song's orient sun, to breast the wave,

Rose from this couch that morn. Ah! did he brave

Only the sea?—or did man's deed of hell

Engulph his bark 'mid mists impenetrable?...

No eye discerned, nor any power might save.

When that mist cleared, O Shelley! what dread veil

Was rent for thee, to whom far-darkling Truth

Reigned sovereign guide through thy brief ageless youth?

Was the Truth thy Truth, Shelley?—Hush! All-Hail,

Past doubt, thou gav'st it; and in Truth's bright sphere

Art first of praisers, being most praised here.

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