Following on from yesterday’s post here is another painting by John Byam Shaw illustrating a different sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s entitled Silent Noon. I love this image by Byam Shaw and I can’t help but feel that he is one of the most intuitive interpreters of Rossetti’s poetry. He seems to feel Rossetti’s meaning so acutely and with such profound understanding. Needless to say that Silent Noon is also one of my favourite Rossetti poems.
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 groves, a dragon-fly
Hangs, like a blue thread loosened from the sky:-
So this winged 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.