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Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription

Document Title: Letter to William Allingham, 23 January 1855, manuscript
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Date of Composition: 1855 January 23
Type of Manuscript: fair copy
Scribe: DGR

The full Rossetti Archive record for this transcribed document is available.

more about [Letter to William Allingham, 23 January 1855]
Transcription Gap: prose text of letter (to be added later)
Image of page [7] page: [7]
to me long ago, but not at all familiarly till now. I fancy one might read him much oftener and much later than Wordsworth than almost any one.
I must try & fill this paper. So I substitute one of my “clever” moments for the present helpless one & copy you my last sonnet.
more about A Dark Day
  • The gloom which breathes upon me with these airs
  • Is like the drops that strike the traveller's brow
  • Who knows not, darkling, if they menace now
  • Fresh storm, or be old rain the covert bears.
  • Ah! bodes this hour its harvest of new tares?
  • Or keeps remembrance of that day whose plough
  • Sowed hunger since,—that night at last when thou,
  • O prayer found vain! did'st fall from out my prayers?
  • How prickly were the griefs, which yet how smooth,
  • 10 On cobwebbed hedgerows of this journey shed,
  • Lie here and there till night & sleep may soothe,
  • Even as the thistledown from pathsides dead
  • Gleaned by a girl in autumns of her youth,
  • Which, one new year, makes soft her marriage bed.
Does it smack though of Tupper at all—it seems to, in copying. The last simile I heard as a fact common in some parts of the country.
Note: Remainder of letter written vertically, bottom to top, along the left margin. DGR had no more writing space on the rest of the page.
I wish I could see you again; I really do. When is it to happen? Let us write again regularly, now that I feel rehabilité about the block.
Yours DG Rossetti
Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: dgr.ltr.0537.rad.xml