English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. |
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| 719. Silent Noon |
| | | Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) |
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| 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. | |
| All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, | 5 |
| Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge | |
| Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn hedge. | |
| ’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. | |
| Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly | |
| Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky,— | 10 |
| So this wing’d 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. | |
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