Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

All Poems Original Poems Translations

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Sonnet VI: 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.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Sonnet XIX: 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,

Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Blake

Epitaph

All beauty to pourtray,

Therein his duty lay,

And still through toilsome strife

Duty to him was life—

Most thankful still that duty

Lay in the paths of beauty.

To the memory of William Blake, a Painter and Poet,oldpoetry.com/authors/William%20Blake whose greatness may be named even here since it was equalled by his goodness, this tablet is now erected, — years after his death, at the age of sixty-eight, on August 12th, 1827, in poverty and neglect, by one who honours his life and works.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Sonnet CI: The One Hope

When vain desire at last and vain regret

Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,

What shall assuage the unforgotten pain

And teach the unforgetful to forget?

Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,—

Or may the soul at once in a green plain

Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain

And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

William Blake

THIS is the place. Even here the dauntless soul,

The unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook,

As on that very bed, his life partook

New birth, and passed. Yon river's dusky shoal,

Whereto the close-built coiling lanes unroll,

Faced his work-window, whence his eyes would stare,

Thought-wandering, unto nought that met them there,

But to the unfettered irreversible goal.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Last Love [Canzone]

Love hath a chamber all of imagery;

And there is one dim nook,

A little storied web wherein my heart

From leaf to leaf is read as in a book.

One part in the middle of the web begun and left unfinished;

a face with ravelled threads falling over it and hiding it. Love says

that the time has come to resume and finish this part of the web,

though much has come between since it was begun.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A Last Confession

Our Lombard country-girls along the coast

Wear daggers in their garters: for they know

That they might hate another girl to death

Or meet a German lover. Such a knife

I bought her, with a hilt of horn and pearl.

Father, you cannot know of all my thoughts

That day in going to meet her,—that last day

For the last time, she said;—of all the love

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The Woodspurge

THE wind flapped loose, the wind was still,

Shaken out dead from tree and hill:

I had walked on at the wind's will,—

I sat now, for the wind was still.

Between my knees my forehead was,—

My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!

My hair was over in the grass,

My naked ears heard the day pass.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The House Of Life

A Sonnet is a moment's monument,—

Memorial from the Soul's eternity

To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,

Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,

Of its own arduous fulness reverent:

Carve it in ivory or in ebony,

As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see

Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Limericks

THERE is a big artist named Val,

The roughs' and the prize—fighters' pal:

The mind of a groom

And the head of a broom

Were Nature's endowments to Val.

There is a Creator named God

Whose creations are sometimes quite odd:

I maintain—and I shall—

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Sonnett VI: A Nuptial Sleep

At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:

And as the last slow sudden drops are shed

From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,

So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.

Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start

Of married flowers to either side outspread

From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,

Fawned on each other where they lay apart.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Sonnet XLV: Secret Parting

Because our talk was of the cloud-control

And moon-track of the journeying face of Fate,

Her tremulous kisses faltered at love's gate

And her eyes dreamed against a distant goal:

But soon, remembering her how brief the whole

Of joy, which its own hours annihilate,

Her set gaze gathered, thirstier than of late,

And as she kissed, her mouth became her soul.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti