Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription

Document Title: Huntington Library (Revise Page Proofs for sonnets He and I and Love-Sweetness)
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Date of publication: 1870 March
Printer: Strangeways and Walden

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

Image of page [1] page: [1]
Manuscript Addition: House of Life
Editorial Description: DGR's note on the placement of the poem in the 1870 volume.
LOVE-SWEETNESS.
  • 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;
  • 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
  • 10 In lacking which all these would lose their sweet ? :
  • The full heart's confluent confident heart's still fervour: 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 . ?
Image of page [2] page: [2]
Manuscript Addition: House of Life
Editorial Description: DGR's note on the placement of the poem in the 1870 volume.
HE AND I.
  • Whence came his feet into my field, and why?
  • How is it that he sees it all so drear?
  • How do I see his seeing, and how hear
  • The name his bitter silence knows it by?
  • This was the little fold of separate sky
  • Whose pasturing clouds in the soul's atmosphere
  • Drew living light from one continual year:
  • How should he find it lifeless? He , or I?
  • Lo! this new Self now wanders round my field,
  • 10 With plaints for every flower, and for each tree
  • A moan, the sighing wind's auxiliary:
  • And o'er sweet waters of my life, that yield
  • Unto his lips no draught but tears unseal'd,
  • Even in my place he weeps. Even I, not he.
Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: hunt93736.rad.xml
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