Elizabeth Siddall (1829-1862)
A Year and a Day
1Slow days have passed that make a year,
2 Slow hours that make a day,
3Since I could take my first dear love
4 And kiss him the old way;
5Yet the green leaves touch me on the cheek,
6 Dear Christ, this month of May.
7I lie among the tall green grass
8 That bends above my head
9And covers up my wasted face
10 And folds me in its bed
11Tenderly and lovingly
12 Like grass above the dead.
13Dim phantoms of an unknown ill
14 Float through my tired brain;
15The unformed visions of my life
16 Pass by in ghostly train;
17Some pause to touch me on the cheek,
18 Some scatter tears like rain.
19A shadow falls along the grass
20 And lingers at my feet;
21A new face lies between my hands --
22 Dear Christ, if I could weep
23Tears to shut out the summer leaves
24 When this new face I greet.
25Still it is but the memory
26 Of something I have seen
27In the dreamy summer weather
28 When the green leaves came between:
29The shadow of my dear love's face --
30 So far and strange it seems.
31The river ever running down
32 Between its grassy bed,
33The voices of a thousand birds
34 That clang above my head,
35Shall bring to me a sadder dream
36 When this sad dream is dead.
37A silence falls upon my heart
38 And hushes all its pain.
39I stretch my hands in the long grass
40 And fall to sleep again,
41There to lie empty of all love
42 Like beaten corn of grain.
Notes
14] tired: `tiring' in 1895.
19] Lines 19-30 are not in 1895.
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 and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal,
ed. Roger C. Lewis and Mark Samuels Lasner (Wolfville, N.S.: Wombat Press, 1978): 16-17.
B-11 5641 Fisher Rare Books Library
First publication date:
1895
Publication date note: Dante Gabriel Rossetti: his Family-letters,
with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis and Elvey,
1895): I, 176-77. PR 5246 A4 1895 Robarts Library
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: 2001
Recent editing: 1:2002/10/5
Composition date:
1857
Composition date note: summer 1857? (Lewis and Lasner 24)
Rhyme: abcbdb
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