Poem of the Day: ‘The Heart of the Night’
Over the course of three decades, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote and amended his extensive, introspective sonnet sequence, ‘The House of Life,’ from which today’s poem is taken.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), brother to the poet Christina Rossetti and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, repaired to a house in Chelsea after the death of his wife and artist’s model, Elizabeth Siddal, and began to collect wombats and other exotic pets. Over the course of three decades, he wrote and amended his extensive, introspective sonnet sequence, “The House of Life,” from which today’s poem is taken. This Petrarchan sonnet acknowledges, in its abbaabba octet, the soul’s reluctance to “accept her primal immortality” and lay down the familiar flesh in death. The sestet’s response is a prayer; its cdecde rhyme scheme effects a transformation in the speaker’s vision of the God to whom he prays.
The Heart of the Night
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
From child to youth; from youth to arduous man;
From lethargy to fever of the heart;
From faithful life to dream-dower’d days apart;
From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;—
Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran
Till now. Alas, the soul!—how soon must she
Accept her primal immortality,—
The flesh resume its dust whence it began?
O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!
O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,
Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath:
That when the peace is garner’d in from strife,
The work retriev’d, the will regenerate,
This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
