Sufi parable | I will lift up mine eyes | Zen | Dover Beach | Divine Love | Jesuit prayer | Song of the Broad-axe
Love bade me welcome | Silent Noon |  Congruence | Clouds | Why?

View southwest from Palaeo-Paphos, Cyprus, seat of the ancient cult of Aphrodite, July 1995

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, 
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:

Your eyes smile peace.

The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosen'd from the sky:

So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, 
This close-companion'd inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882)

This classic English song is the second in a cycle of six sonnets by the Pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams as The House of Life.

It is the apotheosis of erotic love, as the lover and his beloved lie together in a meadow beneath the summer sun.  In Cyprus, the sun is perhaps too strident at mid-day.  The sense of peace is the same.  

The song cycle reminds us that the calm and joy of physical contentment does not endure.  Death will take away the beloved for which you must see Sonnet V Death in Love and Sonnet VI Love's Last Gift.

Please also visit Love Bade Me Welcome, another poem set to music by Vaughan-Williams, which is a companion to this page.  The stillness and tenderness of the music evoke the relief to spiritual suffering, which is found in love.  Dover Beach, by contrast, is a bleak testament.  Humanity can only sustain its integrity by committing itself freely, even in the face of absurdity.

This recording by Thomas Allen, baritone, accompanied by Geoffrey Parsons, was published by Virgin Classics in 1990: VC 7 91105-2, but may no longer be in print.

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