Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription
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![Image of page [1r]](http://www.rossettiarchive.org/img/2-1847.duke.jpg)
- Mother of the fair Delight,
- From the azure standing white
- And looking golden in the light;—
- With the shadow of the Heaven-roof
- Upon thy hands lifted aloof
- And a mystic quiet in thine eyes
- Born of the hush of Paradise,
- Seated beside the Ancient Three,
- Thyself a woman-Trinity—
- 10 Being the dear daughter of God,
- Mother of Christ, from stall to rood,
- And wife unto the Holy Ghost;—
- Oh when our need is uttermost
- And the sorrow we have seemeth to last,—
- Though the future falls not to the past
- In the race that the Great Cycle runs,
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- Through one, years since hanged and forgot,
- Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
- Here lieth one who—while Time's stream
- Runneth, as God hath taught her,
- Bearing man's fame to men,—will have
- His great name writ in water.
* Nowadays, when the Poems of John Keats are
in every library, and the Quarterly Review
at
every butterman's and fishmonger's, (by the way,
it is surprising that these worthy
people are not
afraid of dirtying their goods by the contact,)
my reader is
almost sure to remember that
the young poet, lying worldsick on his
deathbed,
requested that his epitaph might be:—“Here
lies one whose name was writ in
water.”