Silent Noon

Thompson/Ford

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

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

(To find just the right illustration/photo/painting – almost impossible! I have loved this poem for so long, it’s frustrating not to pair it the way I want to. However! This poem.) This poem is about as close to perfection as  you can get.  When you read something and it’s like second nature, like a second skin, an articulation of your experience – it’s magic. I read this poem and it could be me. I have done this, been here, thought this, and yet – Rossetti wrote it. How can it be? He lived nearly 200 years ago. A world and time away. The difference between my world and the world of the person walking down the sidewalk toward me is spectacular enough – Rossetti? And yet here we are – occupying the same moment, the same place, the same mind. I just shake my head. “This close-companioned inarticulate hour/When twofold silence was the the song of love.” So help me, I hear these words in person – I mean, as if Rossetti were speaking to us, reaching his hand across the years, calling us his close-companions. If there is anything beneficial about poetry (!) this is right up there, this connecting of minds and lives, this, yes, I will say it at the risk of sounding maudlin, love.