Classic Love Poems

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was an English poet, illustrator, and artist. He was the older brother of poet Christina Rossetti. Though a major figure in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with his painting, Rossetti considered himself more of a poet than an artist. He wrote hundreds of poems. His most substantial literary achievement was the sonnet sequence, The House of Life (1881), a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship.

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“Beata Beatrix”
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, circa 1864
in memory of his wife, Elizabeth Siddall

“One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or
walks or leans . . .”

—Christina Rossetti
from IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO
on her brother’s painting
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Online Books

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Self-portrait
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1858

Resource Sites

• Old Poetry
• Poem Hunter
• Poetry Foundation
• Rossetti Archive
• Wikipedia

First Love Remembered

Peace in her chamber, wheresoe’er
It be, a holy place:
The thought still brings my soul such grace
As morning meadows wear.
Whether it still be small and light,
A maid’s who dreams alone,
As from her orchard-gate the moon
Its ceiling showed at night:
Or whether, in a shadow dense
As nuptial hymns invoke,
Innocent maidenhood awoke
To married innocence:
There still the thanks unheard await
The unconscious gift bequeathed:
For there my soul this hour has breathed
An air inviolate.

Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
‘Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
‘Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:
So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

Sonnet XXI: 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
In lacking which all these would lose their sweet:—
The 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?

Sonnet XXII: Heart’s Haven

Sometimes she is a child within mine arms,
Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,—
With still tears showering and averted face,
Inexplicably fill’d with faint alarms:
And oft from mine own spirit’s hurtling harms
I crave the refuge of her deep embrace,—
Against all ills the fortified strong place
And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms.
And Love, our light at night and shade at noon,
Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away
All shafts of shelterless tumultuous day.
Like the moon’s growth, his face gleams through his tune;
And as soft waters warble to the moon,
Our answering spirits chime one roundelay.