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Pre-Raphaelites

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

JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS ~ PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTER

in Quoting the Artist ~ Thoughts and Thinking... by

“I may honestly say that I have never consciously placed an idle touch upon canvas…”

John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896)

Ophelia, 1851-1852

Portrait of a Girl (Sophie Gray), 1857

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)

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