Christina Georgina Rossetti He passed away on a day like today in 1894 in London. It was one of the great English poets, although fame was taken more by his brother, also a poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But Christina also stood out on her own merit in the victorian poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite movement. This is one selection of poems in your memory or to discover it.
Christina Rossetti - Poems
Beauty is vain
While the roses are red
while the lilies are so white,
Is a woman going to exalt her features
just to bring pleasure?
She is not as sweet as the rose
the lily is loftier and paler,
and if she was like red or white
it would be just one of several.
If she reddens in the summer of love
or in its winter it becomes parched,
if she flaunts her beauty
or hides behind a false blush,
she dresses in white or red silk,
and it looks crooked or like straight wood,
time always wins the race
that hides us under a shroud.
Then they will scream
It seems like an easy thing sometimes
feel like singing one day,
but the next day
we can't even talk.
Be sincerely silent
while the silence settles;
another day we'll both sing and say
Be silent, counting the time
to attack in the moment:
get ready for the sound,
our end is near.
Can't we sing or express ourselves?
In silence, then, let us pray,
and meditate on our love song
while we wait.
Song
When I'm dead my love
Don't sing sad songs for me
Don't plant roses on my tombstone
nor gloomy cypresses:
Be the green grass on me
with drops and dew, wet me.
And if you wither, remember;
And if you wither, forget.
I no longer have to see the shadows,
I will no longer feel the rain,
I will no longer hear the nightingale
singing his pain.
And dreaming in that twilight
that neither sets nor decreases,
Happily maybe I remember you
And happily maybe I'll forget you.
The only certainty
Vanity of vanities, says the preacher,
All things are vanity.
The eye and ear cannot be filled
With images and sounds.
Like the first dew, or the breath
Pale and sudden from the wind
Or the grass plucked from the mountain,
So is man,
Floating between hope and fear:
How small are your joys,
How tiny, how gloomy!
Until all things end
In the slow dust of oblivion.
Today is the same as yesterday
Tomorrow one of them has to be;
And there is nothing new under the sun;
Until the ancient race of time passes
The old hawthorn will grow on its weary trunk,
And the morning will be cold, and the twilight will be gray.
By the sea
Why does the sea mourn forever?
Out of heaven makes her cry
break against the border of the coast;
all the rivers of the earth cannot fill it;
the sea still drinks, insatiable.
Mere miracles of grace
they lie hidden in their unexpected bed:
anemones, salt, dispassionate
flowered petals; alive enough
to blow and multiply and prosper.
Picturesque snails with curves, points or spirals,
embedded living things like the eyes of Argos,
all equally beautiful, but all unequaled,
they are born without anguish, they die without pain,
and so they pass.
Remember
Remember me when I've gone away
far away, towards the silent land;
when my hand can no longer hold,
not even I, hesitating to leave, still want to stay.
Remember me when there is no more the everyday,
where you revealed to me our planned future:
just remind me, you know it well,
when it is too late for consolations, prayers.
And even if you must forget me for a moment
to later remind me, do not regret it:
for darkness and corruption leave
a vestige of the thoughts I had:
you better forget me and smile
that you must remember me in sadness.
Source: The Gothic Mirror