RPO -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti : Sudden Light

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

Sudden Light

1 I have been here before,

2 But when or how I cannot tell:

3 I know the grass beyond the door,

4 The sweet keen smell,

5The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

6 You have been mine before,--

7 How long ago I may not know:

8 But just when at that swallow's soar

9 Your neck turn'd so,

10Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.

11 Has this been thus before?

12 And shall not thus time's eddying flight

13 Still with our lives our love restore

14 In death's despite,

15And day and night yield one delight once more?

Notes

1] In Poems, 1870, this lyric and "The Woodspurge" were included in a group entitled "Sonnets and Songs towards a work to be called The House of Life." Before the publication of Poems, 1881, however, Rossetti's design for The House of Life had changed, and these two lyrics appeared as independent poems.

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: Poems: An Offering to Lancashire (1863). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (London: Ellis and White, 1881). end R677 A155 1881 Fisher Rare Book Library (Toronto).
First publication date: 1863
RPO poem editor: Margaret Frances (Sister St. Francis) Nims
RP edition: 3RP 3.277.
Recent editing: 2:2002/3/13

Composition date: 1854
Rhyme: ababa

Other poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti