In the quiet evening hours

Here's a Christina Rossetti poem about love and death (taken from the pictured 1973 collection) ...

... it was written in 1849, but speaks to you as clearly as if it was scripted yesterday:


An End

Love, strong as Death, is dead.
Come, let us make his bed
Among the dying flowers:
A green turf at his head;
And a stone at his feet,
Whereon we may sit
In the quiet evening hours.

He was born in the Spring,
And died before the harvesting:
On the last warm summer day
He left us; he would not stay
For Autumn twilight cold and grey.
Sit we by his grave, and sing
He is gone away.

To few chords and sad and low
Sing we so:
Be our eyes fixed on the grass
Shadow-veiled as the years pass,
While we think of all that was
In the long ago.

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Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

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