Poetry Exhibit → Collection Intro → Browse Collection → Document → → Transcript

Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription

Document Title: Manuscript Pieces: Ashley A3862
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Date of Composition: 1873, 1881
Type of Manuscript: manuscript letter with enclosed verse and prose note

The full Rossetti Archive record for this transcribed document is available.

more about this work
Note: Letter to Theodore Watts-Dunton, 23 February 1873. DGR adds two new stanzas for his poem “The Cloud Confines” to the end of his letter.
Image of page [1] page: [1]
Transcription Gap: two manuscript pages of a letter to Watts (available in print)
Image of page [2] page: [2]
Image of page [3] page: [3]
more about The Cloud Confines
Note: DGR intended these to be stanzas 3 and 4 of the poem, and asks Watts immediately below them: “Do you think these stanzas a gain or not?” He has numbered them accordingly.
3
  • The Present is but one coil
  • Of a snake wherewith we strive:
  • It clings to all things alive
  • But drops then dead to the soil:
  • And yet it keeps as it goes
  • Some print of our moulding throes,
  • Some change from the vanished foes
  • Whose crown it wears for a spoil.
  • Still we say as we go, —
  • &c.—
4
  • 10Even as we writhe and strain,
  • The Future is onward roll'd
  • In the snake's course, fold on fold:
  • Yet ah! do we 'scape the chain?
  • Or shall not each life forth-hurl'd
  • Again in new flesh be furl'd,
  • And what we made of the world
  • Fall back on ourselves again?
  • Still we say as we go,—
  • &c.—
Image of page [4] page: [4]
Note: This is an advertisement DGR wrote but never used for the publication of his two 1881 volumes of poetry.
more about this work
Mr. D. G. R. has in the press a volume

of Ball entitled “Ballads and Sonnets.”

It consists of ballads romantic and histrorical,

and of the a completed series of the

House of Life, with other sonnets and lyrics.

The issue/first volume of “Poems” by the

same author will also be immediately

reissued An augmented reissue of the

same author's prior volume of “Poems” is

also in preparation, ? the book having

been for some time out of print.
Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: ashleya3862.rad.xml
Copyright: By permission of The British Library