io The soul?its converse, to what Power 'tis due?
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's1 palm it pay the toll to Death.
9. A Greek fertility god, whose symbol was the 1. In classical mythology the ferryman who, for a phallus. fee, rowed the souls of the dead across the river 1. In Greek mythology a maiden whom Zeus vis-Styx. ited in the form of a shower of gold.
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145 8 / DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Nuptial Sleep2
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.
5
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.
Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,
10 And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away.
Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams
Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.
19. 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.
5 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 hourglass.
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
io Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky?
So this winged hour is dropped to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.
77. Soul's Beauty3 Under the arch of Life, where love and death,
Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw
Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath.
5 Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath,
The sky and sea bend on thee,?which can draw,
2. In 'The Fleshly School of Poetry' (1871), Rob-sonnets' original titles. The original title of 'Soul's ert Buchanan made this poem the focus of his Beauty' was 'Sibylla Palmifera,' or 'palm-bearing attack on what he felt was Rossetti's lewd sensu-sibyl.' Sibyls are prophetesses; one of them, the ality in the 1870 volume Poems. In 1881, when Sibyl of Cumae, wrote her prophecies on palm Rossetti published his next collection of poems, he leaves. The original title of 'Body's Beauty' was omitted this sonnet from The House of Life. 'Lilith'; in Talmudic legend Lilith, Adam's first 3. This sonnet and the next were not originally wife, ran away from her husband and became a part of The House of Life, but were composed to witch. accompany paintings with the same names as the
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