English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. |
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| 720. Love-Sweetness |
| | | Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) |
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| SWEET dimness of her loosened hair’s downfall | |
| About thy face; her sweet hands round thy head | |
| In gracious fostering union garlanded; | |
| Her tremulous smiles; her glances’ sweet recall | |
| Of love; her murmuring sighs memorial; | 5 |
| Her mouth’s culled sweetness by thy kisses shed | |
| On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led | |
| Back to her mouth, which answers there for all:— | |
| What sweeter than these things, except the thing | |
| In lacking which all these would lose their sweet:— | 10 |
| The confident heart’s still fervor: the swift beat | |
| And soft subsidence of the spirit’s wing, | |
| Then when it feels, in cloud-girt wayfaring, | |
| The breath of kindred plumes against its feet? | |
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