1. In medieval legend a naked sword between lovers ensured chastity.
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MODERN LOVE / 1441
Looked wicked as some old dull murder spot. A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown The pit of infamy: and then again He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
15 To ape the magnanimity of love, And smote himself, a shuddering heap of pain.
17
At dinner, she is hostess, I am host. Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps The Topic over intellectual deeps In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
5 With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball: It is in truth a most contagious game: HIDING THE SKELETON, shall be its name . Such play as this the devils might appall! But here's the greater wonder: in that we,
io Enamored of an acting naught can tire. Each other, like true hypocrites, admire; Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemeridae,2 Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine. We waken envy of our happy lot.
15 Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage knot. Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light' shine.
49
He found her by the ocean's moaning verge, Nor any wicked change in her discerned; And she believed his old love had returned, Which was her exultation, and her scourge.
5 She took his hand, and walked with him, and seemed The wife he sought, though shadowlike and dry. She had one terror, lest her heart should sigh, And tell her loudly she no longer dreamed. She dared not say, 'This is my breast: look in.'
io But there's a strength to help the desperate weak. That night he learned how silence best can speak The awful things when Pity pleads for Sin. About the middle of the night her call Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed.
15 'Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!' she said. Lethe'1 had passed those lips, and he knew all.
50
Thus piteously Love closed what he begat: The union of this ever diverse pair! These two were rapid falcons in a snare,
2. Insects that live for one day only. believed to portend a funeral. 3. Phosphorescent light such as that seen in 4. River of forgetfulness in Hades, the Greek marshes. When appearing in a cemetery it was underworld.
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144 2 / DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.
Lovers beneath the singing sky of May,
They wandered once; clear as the dew on flowers:
Rut they fed not on the advancing hours:
Their hearts held cravings for the buried day.
Then each applied to each that fatal knife,
10 Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole.0 grief
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!?
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
is Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
1862
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
1828-1882
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the son of an Italian patriot and scholar whose political activities had led to his being exiled to England. The Rossetti household in London was one in which liberal politics and artistic topics were hotly debated; all four children? Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Georgina? wrote, drew, or engaged in scholarly pursuits from a young age. Displaying extraordinary early promise both as a painter and as a poet, Dante Gabriel luxuriated in colors and textures, and was especially drawn to feminine beauty. His view of life and art, derived in part from his close study of John Keats's poems and letters, anticipated by many years the aesthetic movement later to be represented by men such as Walter
Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the painter James McNeill Whistler, who insisted that art must be exclusively concerned with the beautiful, not with the useful or didactic.
The beauty that Rossetti admired in the faces of women was of a distinctive kind. In at least two of his models he found what he sought. The first was his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, whose suicide in 1862 haunted him with a sense of guilt for the rest of his life. The other was Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris. In Rossetti's paintings both of these models are shown with dreamy stares, as if they were breathless from visions of heaven;
