• UPON the landscape of his coming life
• A youth high-gifted gazed, and found it fair:
• The heights of work, the floods of praise, were there.
• What friendships, what desires, what love, what wife?—
• All things to come. The fanned springtide was rife
• With imminent solstice; and the ardent air
• Had summer sweets and autumn fires to bear;—
• Heart's ease full-pulsed with perfect strength for strife.

• A mist has risen: we see the youth no more:
• 10 Does he see on and strive on? And may we
• Late-tottering worldworn hence, find his to be
• The young strong hand which helps us up that shore?
• Or, echoing the No More with Nevermore,
• Must Night be ours and his? We hope: and he?

By D. G. Rossetti    

• HOW large that thrush looks on the bare thorn-tree!
• A swarm of such, three little months ago,
• Had hidden in the leaves and let none know
• Save by the outburst of their minstrelsy.
• A white flake here and there—a snow-lily
• Of last night's frost—our naked flower-beds hold;
• And for a rose-flower on the darkling mould
• The hungry redbreast gleams. No bloom, no bee.

• The current shudders to its ice-bound sedge:
• 10 Nipped in their bath, the stark reeds one by one
• Flash each its clinging diamond in the sun:
• 'Neath winds which for this Winter's sovereign pledge
• Shall curb great king-masts to the ocean's edge
• And leave memorial forest-king's o'erthrown.

   

• SOFT-LITTERED is the new-year's lambing-fold,
• And in the hollowed haystack at its side
• The shepherd lies o'nights now, wakeful-eyed
• Added TextThe heedful shepherd now will fold
• At the ewes' travailing call through the dark cold.
• Added TextWhile the ewes' travailing calls/travailing ewes are heard through the dark clear cold.
• The young rooks cheep 'mid the thick caw o'the old:
• And near unpeopled stream-sides, on the ground,
• By her spring-cry the moorhen's nest is found,
• Where the drained flood-lands flaunt their marigold.

• Chill are the gusts to which the pastures cower,
• 10 And chill the current where the young reeds stand
• As green and close as the young wheat on land:
• Yet here the cuckoo and the cuckoo-flower
• Plight to the heart Spring's perfect imminent hour
• Whose breath shall soothe you like your dear one's hand.

By D. G. Rossetti