dots-menu
×

Home  »  Poetica Erotica  »  Sonnet LVI. True Woman: I. Herself

T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.

Sonnet LVI. True Woman: I. Herself

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
 
(From The House of Life, 1881)

TO be a sweetness more desired than Spring;
  A bodily beauty more acceptable
  Than the wild rose-tree’s arch that crowns the fell;
To be an essence more environing
Than wine’s drained juice; a music ravishing        5
  More than the passionate pulse of Philomel;—
  To be all this ’neath one soft bosom’s swell
That is the flower of life:—how strange a thing!
 
How strange a thing to be what Man can know
  But as a sacred secret! Heaven’s own screen        10
Hides her soul’s purest depth and loveliest glow;
  Closely withheld, as all things most unseen,—
  The wave-bowered pearl,—the heart-shaped seal of green
That flecks the snowdrop underneath the snow.