Sunday Poetry - Christina Rossetti

Today I've chosen a favourite poem from a favourite poet, Christina Rossetti. Her work ranges from poems & stories for children to the amazing Goblin Market. I like her quietly intense love poems like this one, called Echo in my anthology, & her sonnet sequence, Monna Innominata, written in admiring admiration of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
Of memory, hope, love of finished years.


Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.


Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago!