Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Love hath a chamber all of imagery;
And there is one dim nook,
A little storied web wherein my
From leaf to leaf is read as in a book

'Twixt those twin worlds,—the world of Sleep, which
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,

When vain desire at last and vain
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What shall assuage the unforgotten
And teach the unforgetful to forget

IS is the place
Even here the dauntless soul,
The unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook,
As on that very bed, his life

The blessed damozel leaned
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the
Of waters stilled at even;

The
Piled deep below the screening apple-branch They lie with bitter apples in their hands:
And some are only ancient bones that blanch,
And some had ships that last year's wind did launch,

To all the spirits of Love that wander
Along his love-sown harvest-field of
My lady lies apparent; and the
Calls to the deep; and no man sees but I

IS Soul fared forth (as from the deep
The father-songster plies the hour-long quest),
To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
But his warm Heart, the mother-bird,

Even as a child, of sorrow that we
The dead, but little in his heart can find,
Since without need of thought to his clear
Their turn it is to die and his to live:—Even so the winged New Love smiles to

By what word's power, the key of paths untrod,
Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,
Till parted waves of Song yield up the
Even as that sea which Israel crossed dryshod

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:
At length the long-ungranted
Of weary eyelids
The pain nought else might yet relieve

On the first day the priest Could find no heart in the beast,
And two on the second day

RE'S a female bard, grim as a fakier,
Who daily grows shakier and shakier

Because our talk was of the
And moon-track of the journeying face of Fate,
Her tremulous kisses faltered at love's
And her eyes dreamed against a distant goal:

In whomsoe'er, since Poesy began,
A Poet most of all men we may scan,
Burns of all poets is the most a Man

AH yes, exactly so; but when a man Has trundled out of England into France And half through Belgium, always in this prance Of steam, and still has stuck to his first plan— Blank verse or sonnets; and as he began Would end;—why, even the blankest v...