The Pre-Raphaelites- From Rossetti to Ruskin

by Dinah Roe

  They had no vision amazing

  Of the goodly house they are raising;

  35 They had no divine foreshowing

  Of the land to which they are going:

  But on one man’s soul it hath broken,

  A light that doth not depart;

  And his look, or a word he hath spoken,

  40 Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

  And therefore to-day is thrilling

  With a past day’s late fulfilling;

  And the multitudes are enlisted

  In the faith that their fathers resisted,

  45 And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,

  Are bringing to pass, as they may,

  In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,

  The dream that was scorned yesterday.

  But we, with our dreaming and singing,

  50 Ceaseless and sorrowless we!

  The glory about us clinging

  Of the glorious futures we see,

  Our souls with high music ringing:

  O men! it must ever be

  55 That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,

  A little apart from ye.

  For we are afar with the dawning

  And the suns that are not yet high,

  And out of the infinite morning

  60 Intrepid you hear us cry –

  How, spite of your human scorning,

  Once more God’s future draws nigh,

  And already goes forth the warning

  That ye of the past must die.

  65 Great hail! we cry to the comers

  From the dazzling unknown shore;

  Bring us hither your sun and your summers,

  And renew our world as of yore;

  You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,

  70 And things that we dreamed not before:

  Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,

  And a singer who sings no more.

  Song

  I made another garden, yea,

  For my new love;

  I left the dead rose where it lay,

  And set the new above.

  5 Why did the summer not begin?

  Why did my heart not haste?

  My old love came and walked therein,

  And laid the garden waste.

  She entered with her weary smile,

  10 Just as of old;

  She looked around a little while,

  And shivered at the cold.

  Her passing touch was death to all,

  Her passing look a blight:

  15 She made the white rose-petals fall,

  And turned the red rose white.

  Her pale robe, clinging to the grass,

  Seemed like a snake

  That bit the grass and ground, alas!

  20 And a sad trail did make.

  She went up slowly to the gate;

  And there, just as of yore,

  She turned back at the last to wait,

  And say farewell once more.

  Song

  I went to her who loveth me no more,

  And prayed her bear with me, if so she might;

  For I had found day after day too sore,

  And tears that would not cease night after night.

  5 And so I prayed her, weeping, that she bore

  To let me be with her a little; yea,

  To soothe myself a little with her sight,

  Who loved me once, ah! many a night and day.

  Then she who loveth me no more, maybe

  10 She pitied somewhat: and I took a chain

  To bind myself to her, and her to me;

  Yea, so that I might call her mine again.

  Lo! she forbade me not; but I and she

  Fettered her fair limbs, and her neck more fair,

  15 Chained the fair wasted white of love’s domain,

  And put gold fetters on her golden hair.

  Oh! the vain joy it is to see her lie

  Beside me once again; beyond release,

  Her hair, her hand, her body, till she die,

  20 All mine, for me to do with as I please!

  For, after all, I find no chain whereby

  To chain her heart to love me as before,

  Nor fetter for her lips, to make them cease

  From saying still she loveth me no more.

  The Great Encounter

  Such as I am become, I walked one day

  Along a sombre and descending way,

  Not boldly, but with dull and desperate thought:

  Then one who seemed an angel – for ’twas He,

  5 My old aspiring self, no longer Me –

  Came up against me terrible, and sought

  To slay me with the dread I had to see

  His sinless and exalted brow. We fought;

  And, full of hate, he smote me, saying, ‘Thee

  10 I curse this hour: go downward to thine hell.’

  And in that hour I felt his curse and fell.

  Living Marble

  When her large, fair, reluctant eyelids fell,

  And dreams o’erthrew her blond head mutinous,

  That lollingly surrendered to the spell

  Of sleep’s warm death, whose tomb is odorous

  5 And made of recent roses; then unchid

  I gazed more rapturously than I may tell

  On that vain-hearted queen with whom I dwell,

  The wayward Venus who for days hath hid

  Her peerless, priceless beauty, and forbid,

  10 With impious shames and child-like airs perverse,

  My great, fond soul from worshipping the sight

  That gives religion to my day and night –

  Her shape sublime that should be none of hers.

  The wonder of her nakedness, unspoiled

  15 By fear or feigning, showed each passionate limb

  In reckless grace that failed not nor recoiled;

  And all the sweet, rebellious body, slim,

  Exuberant, lay abandoned to the whim

  And miracle of unabashed repose.

  20 I joyed to see her glorious side left bare,

  Each snow-born flow’ret of her breast displayed,

  One white hand vaguely touching one red rose,

  One white arm gleaming through thick golden hair.

  I gazed; then broke the marble I had made,

  25 And yearned, restraining heart and holding breath,

  That sleep indeed were endless, even as death.

  The Line of Beauty

  When mountains crumble and rivers all run dry,

  When every flower has fallen and summer fails

  To come again, when the sun’s splendour pales,

  And earth with lagging footsteps seems well-nigh

  5 Spent in her annual circuit through the sky;

  When love is a quenched flame, and nought avails

  To save decrepit man, who feebly wails

  And lies down lost in the great grave to die;

  What is eternal? What escapes decay?

  10 A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line,

  Curving consummate. Death, Eternity,

  Add nought to it, from it take nought away;

  ’Twas all God’s gift and all man’s mastery,

  God become human and man grown divine.

  Pentelicos

  In dark days bitter between dream and dream,

  I go bowed down with many a load of pain,

  Increasing memory gathers to remain

  From paths where now, all snakelike, lurk and gleam

  5 Love’s last deceits that loveliest did seem,

  Or hurrying on with hope and thought astrain,

  To reunite love’s worn just broken chain,

  Whose links fall through my fingers in a stream;

  When, sometimes, mid these semblances of love,

  10 Pursued with feverish joy or mad despair,

  There flashes suddenly on my unrest

  Some marble
shape of Venus, high above

  All pain or changing, fair above all fair,

  Still more and more desired, still unpossest.

  Paros

  When I took clay – with eager passionate hand

  Inspired by love – to mould the yielding curves

  Of all her shape consummate that deserves,

  Immortal in the sight of heaven, to stand;

  5 Then, undismayed, as at a god’s command,

  Laborious, with the obedient tool that serves

  The sculptor’s mighty art and never swerves,

  Beside the crumbling form I carved the grand

  Imperishable marble. Henceforth – seeing

  10 The glory of her nakedness divine –

  My heart is raised, I bend the knee and deem her

  Not simply woman and not merely mine,

  But goddess, as the future age shall deem her,

  Ideal love of man’s eternal being.

  Carrara

  I am the body purified by fire;

  A man shall look on me without desire,

  But rather think what miracles of faith

  Made me to trample without fear or scathe

  5 The burning shares; the thick-set bristling paths

  Of martyrdom; to lie on painful laths

  Under the torturer’s malice; to be torn

  And racked and broken, all-victorious scorn

  Strengthening the inward spirit to reject

  10 The frame of flesh, with sins and lusts infect,

  Whose punishment, like to the sin, was gross,

  And man the executioner. I arose

  Changed from those beds of pain, and shriven at last

  From the whole shameful history of the past –

  15 Of earth-bound pride and revelry; yea, shriven

  From Love, at first the one sin, and forgiven:

  Beauty that other, with the vanity

  That set me crowned before humanity;

  So I was led, a priestess or a saint,

  20 Robed solemnly, leaving the latest taint

  Of earthliness in some far desert cell

  Ascetic; and the hand late used to tell

  Rough rosaries, the hand for ever chilled

  With fingering the death-symbol, feels unthrilled

  25 With any passionate luxury forbidden

  The world’s new wedlock. Man and woman chidden

  For all their life on earth wed timorously,

  And full of shames, fearing lest each should see

  The other’s greater sin; so they unite,

  30 Two penitential spirits, to take flight,

  In one ethereal vision sanctified,

  Two bodies for the grave. I am the bride

  Who clings with terror, suppliant and pale,

  And fears the lifting of her virgin veil,

  35 Because the shrinking form, spite of her prayers,

  Has grown to know its earthliness, and bears

  The names of sins that gave up shameful ghosts

  On antique crosses. Raised now amid the hosts

  Of living men, my effigy is grown

  40 Passionless, speechless through the postured stone

  That holds one changeless meaning in its pose;

  The murmuring myriads pass, and each man knows

  And sees me with a cold thought at his heart;

  For I am that from which the soul must part.

  PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON

  Love’s Shrines

  All places that have known my love at all

  Have grown as sympathetic friends to me,

  And each for song has some dear memory,

  Some perfume of her presence clings to all;

  5 How then, to me, O love, shall it befall,

  When I no longer in my life shall see

  The places that through love have grown to be

  Of buried dreams the mute memorial?

  Then surely shall I seem as one who stands

  10 Exiled from home in unfamiliar lands,

  And strains across the weary sea and long

  His desolate sad eyes, and wrings his hands,

  While round him press an undiscerning throng

  Of strange men talking in an alien tongue.

  Love Past Utterance

  I am a painter, and I love you so

  I cannot paint your face for very love;

  My heart is like a sea the tempests move

  Wherein no ship a certain path may know;

  5 I can but gaze upon you till you grow

  Lovely and distant as the skies above:

  How then to man shall I my worship prove,

  And unto coming worlds your beauty show?

  I am a poet, and my love is such

  10 I cannot tell the marvel of your voice,

  Or show the laugh that thrills me like a kiss;

  The very recollection of your touch

  O’ercomes me like a sudden tide of joys,

  And my heart gasps for breath ’twixt waves of bliss.

  Shake Hands and Go

  Come now, behold, how small a thing is love;

  How long ago is it since, side by side,

  We stood together, in that summer-tide,

  And heard the June sea, blue, and deep, and wide,

  5 Murmuring as one that in her dreams doth move

  To thoughts of love’s first kiss and beauty’s pride?

  How long is it? But one brief year ago;

  One autumn, and one winter, and one spring;

  Now, as last year, the birds awake and sing,

  10 Once more unto the hills the hill-flowers cling;

  How is it with you? What heart you have, I know,

  Changes with every comer and fresh thing.

  And yet, I think, you loved me for a space;

  At all events you loved my love of you:

  15 Whether to me or that, your love was due

  I know not; while it lived perchance ’twas true;

  But you forget each season and each face,

  And love the new as long as it is new.

  Scan o’er that time, as at the close of day

  20 One thinks what he has done or left undone;

  Know you those days when noontide heats of sun

  Smote full upon us, and we strove to shun

  Their flaming force, and took the sheltered way

  Of shading trees with green leaves softly spun?

  25 There in an island of dim green and shade

  We stretched, while round, like a great silent sea,

  Lay the blue, blinding, burning day; but we

  Knew nothing save our own life’s melody,

  And there, until the day was done, delayed;

  30 Then homeward wended o’er the dewy lea.

  Know you those moonlit nights spent on the sand –

  The golden sand beside the lucid deep –

  Where soft waves rippled as they sang in sleep;

  How there we sowed what I alone shall reap?

  35 Nay, feign not thus to draw away your hand,

  Nor droop your lids; I know you cannot weep.

  O pliant crimson lips and bright cold eyes,

  Lips that my lips have pressed, and fingers sweet

  That lay about my neck, or soft, would meet

  40 Around my eyes to screen them from the heat,

  Where are your words, where is our paradise?

  Your love was warm as summer – and as fleet.

  And yet, behold, with some how strong is love;

  How helpless is the dupe that boasts a heart!

  45 I know you now – and yet regret to part:

  Fairer than ever, in the marriage mart

  You’ll fetch your price; time’s dealings that are rough

  With nature, leave untouched the works of art.

  Well, kiss once more as in the gone-by time,

  50 Let your hair mix with mine, take hands again;

  Your kiss is sweet – and do yo
u only feign?

  There, look once more on jutting cliff and main;

  And now go hence, while I in some sad rhyme

  Weave our love’s tale – its brief joy, lasting pain.

  55 Go, go thy way; return not to the gates

  Of the fair past, forsake the dear dead days;

  I know thou wilt. I to some distant place

  May wander and forget your voice and face:

  No anger, say ‘Good-bye!’ I know one waits:

  60 He paid his price and for his purchase stays.

  Love’s Warfare

  ‘And are these cold, light words your last?’ he said,

  And rose, his face made pale with outraged love.

  She answered gaily, ‘Are they not enough?’

  And lightly laughed until his spirit bled,

  5 While snake-like on his grief her beauty fed.

  He looked upon her face once more for proof,

  Then through and through his lips the sharp teeth drove,

  Till with the bitter dew of blood made red.

  At length he said, ‘And so ’twas but a jest,

  10 A well-conceived, well-executed plan;

  Yet now may God forgive you, if God can!’

  And, passing, left her calm and self-possessed.

  She watched him cross the lawn with eyes bent low,

  Where she had kissed his face one hour ago.

  Stronger Than Sleep

  Weary, my limbs upon my couch I laid,

  And dreamt; and in my dream I seemed to see

  My lady, who was soon my bride to be,

  Silently standing, gazing on my bed,

  5 A crown of bright red roses on her head.

  I said, ‘O love! this hour is sweet to me;

  Stretch out your throat and let us kiss.’ Then she

  Bowed down her body and brows garlanded.

  ‘Stretch out your hand and feel,’ her deep eyes said:

  10 I touched, and through soft raiment felt her form

  Panting and glowing with the want of love.

  Then all the waves of pleasure, deep and warm,

  Burst through my veins. My eyes love’s hot tears bled,

  And I awoke, too weak to speak or move.