In Love

When did the starlight happier seem than now?
The evening’s quiet, when so full of peace?
How does heaven seem so near to me
Now, when I have wished away my heart?

Why has the night so sober been?
Why has my mind been reason’s moon?
That this poor sun has felt so long a night
The bark of last year’s growth has now unveiled
A green and stripling age of mind;
Eloping with this redder, browner blaze
Of hopeful, living love.

The two paintings above are by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828  – 1882).   His model, who he considered his muse, and who later became his wife, was Elizabeth Siddal (1829 – 1862). 

1. Three ‘Victorian Celebrity’ CLERIHEWS

A Clerihew is a comic verse consisting of two couplets and a specific rhyming scheme, aabb, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) at the age of 16. Normally the first line names a person, and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name of the person. (From: ‘Shadow Poetry’)

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Alfred Lord Tennyson
By gift and by benison,
Through His ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
The glory of defeat portrayed.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Could not be described as middling;
His output as a poet
Was immense, and don’t we know it!

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Might well have invented spaghetti;
As lover, Poet, painter
He was ever, the innovator.

IN LOVE

IN  LOVE

 

When did the starlight happier seem than now?
The evening’s quiet, when so full of peace?
How does heaven seem so near to me
Now, when I have wished away my heart?

 

Why has the night so sober been?
Why has my mind been reason’s moon?
That this poor sun has felt so long a night
The bark of last year’s growth has now unveiled
A green and stripling age of mind;
Eloping with this redder, browner blaze
Of hopeful, living love.

 

The two paintings above are by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828  – 1882).   His model, who he considered his muse, and who later became his wife, was Elizabeth Siddal (1829 – 1862). 

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