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The Kissed Mouth
1. Rossetti Alone
b. Elements [Rossetti]

Water, water, earth and water,
Earth and air and earth and fire
And heaven’s blue
And bowers’ green
And golden Heaven’s bar:

These things I know,
These things I’ve seen in life or in a dream
And figured forth in painting and in rhyme
And time
And time
And Time’s resolved to tear them from me....

Through all I’ve known,
These women — Beauteous stunners, lost to me
Those stunners, but reflections, only shadows
Beauteous shadows,
Beauteous shadows,
Dreamt or kissed, beloved shadows

One I have loved: and she I married:
Dead and buried, dead and buried

One I have loved, she wed to another:
A vision, a myst’ry, a wife and a mother
Living, she left me....

In beauty I have placed all my trust, all my troth
Those two were as portals, I painted them both
As the third, whom I’ve loved all my days as a dreamer:
Centuries gone, my namesake’s redeemer....

One thing once learnt remains to me:
The woodspurge has a cup of three
And so these three I always see
    Now and nightly
    Now and nightly

 

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Notes and Sources   

a fool in the forest

  • The personal & cultural web journal of George M. Wallace, an attorney practicing in Pasadena, California.
    An Index of Enthusiasms.

Epigraphs

  • A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the
        forest,
    A motley fool; a miserable world!
    As I do live by food, I met a fool
    Who laid him down and bask'd him
        in the sun,
    And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good
        terms,
    In good set terms and yet a motley
        fool.

    As You Like It,
    Act II, Scene 7


    L'homme y passe à travers des
        forêts de symboles
    Qui l'observent avec des regards
        familiers.

    Les Fleurs du Mal,
    “Correspondances”


    [T]here is almost no subject-matter, and what little one can disentangle is foolish....
    One would call the style verbose, except that by definition verbosity is the use of words in excess of the occasion, and there seems to be no occasion.

    Yvor Winters,
    Forms of Discovery, Ch. 7

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