Lovelocks
Walter de la Mare
I watched the Lady Caroline
Bind up her beauteous hair.
Her face was rosy in the glass,
And, ‘twixt the coils, her hands would pass,
White in the candleshine.
Her bottles on the table lay,
Stoppered, yet sweet of violet;
Her image in the mirror stooped
To view those locks as lightly looped
As cherry boughs in May.
The snowy night lay dim without,
I heard the Waits their sweet song sing;
The window smouldered keen with frost;
Yet still she twisted, sleeked and tossed
Her beauteous hair about.
Rossetti has such a unique style of painting women! They all seem to have the same face… (Jane Morris perhaps?) Anyhow, I am quite in love with Rossetti. The painter and the poet! actually!
De la Mare is so wonderful with depicting beauty in the natural! My favorite part of this poem is:
The snowy night lay dim without,
I heard the Waits their sweet song sing;
The window smouldered keen with frost;
Yet still she twisted, sleeked and tossed
Her beauteous hair about.
He always fascinates me! I feel in love with his writings the first time I read Silver.
She’s Elizabeth Sidall, I expect—Rossetti’s red-headed Muse. “One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans…” This from his sister Christina, in her poem “In an Artist’s Studio.”
I love de la Mare, as well. I recently bought a first edition of his collection *Bells and Grass,* which was recently reviewed at my blog *Privacy of Light.* His poems have a very dreamy musical quality.