Menu

satisfaction for artlovers – cultural magazine

Tag archive

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI ~ OCTOBER

in Poetry of Art by

OCTOBER

Crack your first nut and light your first fire;
Roast your first chestnut crisp on the bar;
Make the logs sparkle, stir the blaze higher,
Logs are cheery as sun or as star,
Logs we can find wherever we are.
Spring one soft day will open the leaves,
Spring one bright day will lure back the flowers;
Never fancy my whistling wind grieves,
Never fancy I’ve tears in my showers;
Dance, nights and days! And dance on, my hours!
Christina Rossetti,
from The Months: A Pageant.
Painting: Autumn Leaves
Sir John Everett Millais – 1855-1856

SILENT WOOD ~ POEM BY ELIZABETH SIDDAL

in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Victorian Avantgarde by

O silent wood, I enter thee
With a heart so full of misery
For all the voices from the trees
And the ferns that cling about my knees.

In thy darkest shadow let me sit
When the grey owls about thee flit;
There will I ask of thee a boon,
That I may not faint or die or swoon.

Gazing through the gloom like one
Whose life and hopes are also done,
Frozen like a thing of stone
I sit in thy shadow – but not alone.

Can God bring back the day when we two stood
Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood?

Photo of Elizabeth Siddal  ca. 1860

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862) was an English artists’ model, poet and artist who was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais (including Millais’ 1852 painting Ophelia) and most of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early paintings of women.   (Wikipedia)

MIRAGE ~ POEM BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

in Poetry of Art by

The hope I dreamed of was a dream,

Was but a dream; and now I wake

Exceeding  comfortless, and worn, and old,

For a dream’s sake.

I hang my harp upon a tree,

A weeping willow in a lake;

I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt

For a dream’s sake.

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;

My silent heart, lie still and break:

Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed

For a dream’s sake.

Mirage

Charles Conder (1889)

LAST FIRE ~ POEM BY DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

in Poetry of Art by

Love,through your spirit and mine what summer eve
Now glows with glory of all things possess’d,
Since this day’s sun of rapture filled the west
And the light sweetened as the fire took leave?
Awhile now softlier let your bosom heave,
As in Love’s harbour, even that loving breast,
All care takes refuge while we sink to rest,
And mutual dreams the bygone bliss retrieve.
Many the days that Winter keeps in store,
Sunless throughout, or whose brief sun-glimpses
Scarce shed the heaped snow through the naked trees,
This day at least was Summer’s paramour,
Sun-coloured to the imperishable core
With sweet well-being of love and full heart’s ease.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

painting Daydream by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Go to Top