Deathless dower.

Sonnet XIX - 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.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

These are the words set to music in a piece by the same name by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I'll put a recording up if someone will show me how and/or find me somewhere to leave it for a bit. I was going to sing it in a recital that never happened. The words only tell half of the beauty of this - the music is something amazing. I cling to moments remembered, trying to live in them and extend them beyond their natural length. The poem isn't about that; it's about enjoying a perfect moment with someone else with no mention of what happens after that. But when that moment is gone, what else can you do but hold on to it, for a never-dying promise between the two of you? Even if it falls away and apart, intangible, if you hold too tight.

I saw a play this evening. I need to write about that, too, but it's late.

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Yay! Carl sorted me out with somewhere to put some mp3s for a bit - recording here.