(What do you suppose Christina called him?� Dante is hardly an everyday name.)
Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Silent Noon from The House of Life, no.2
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 sunsearch’d growth the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosen’d 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 companion’d inarticulate hour,
When twofold silence was the song of love.