The House of Life: 36. Life-in-Love

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828–1882 Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Not in thy body is thy life at all

But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes;

Through these she yields thee life that vivifies

What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall.

Look on thyself without her, and recall

The waste remembrance and forlorn surmise

That liv'd but in a dead-drawn breath of sighs

O'er vanish'd hours and hours eventual.

Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair

Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show

For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago;

Even so much life endures unknown, even where,

'Mid change the changeless night environeth,

Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.

Biography

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born 12 May 1828 in London, the second child and eldest son of Italian expatriates. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a Dante scholar, who had been exiled from Naples for writing poetry in support of the Neapolitan Constitution of 1819. Rossetti’s mother had trained as a governess and supervised her children's early education. Few Victorian families were as gifted as the Rossettis: the oldest child, . . .

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