While browsing a second hand bookstore I found a volume of poetry by Rossetti; the great artist and poet that is, not his sister Christina who was merely just a great poet! The book was tatty and torn but as it was published over a hundred years ago I forgive the book its appearance and purchased it. At home, while leafing through the book something fell out into my lap. It was a page from a notebook and upon this page was a sonnet written in a feminine hand.
Does anyone recognise this sonnet and know who wrote it? Or is it the work of some anonymous teacher, written as she sat gazing out the window as she dreamt of her lover? Finding such gems proves what Virginia Woolf said about second-hand books -
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books, they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which domesticated volumes of the library lack.
--
Thoughts of an Examination Invigilator on a winter’s afternoon.
Beneath the lights and sombre walls they strive
To resurrect the babblings of past days.
Outside, the tree-etched winter, greens and greys
Border horizons beyond the puddled drive.
Here sits a lad, wrestling with Nazi wrongs
There a lass perched, pondering the Welsh dream,
Harrying the splendour through the dullest gleam,
Turning to turgid prose the fervid songs.
But I, sat here surveying all their trials
Have visions far more splendid to survey.
Before much time has fled or many miles
Beyond the hill I and my love will stay,
Far from this strife and Academe’s alarms
To a lover’s bed and to a lover’s arms.
Does anyone recognise this sonnet and know who wrote it? Or is it the work of some anonymous teacher, written as she sat gazing out the window as she dreamt of her lover? Finding such gems proves what Virginia Woolf said about second-hand books -
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books, they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which domesticated volumes of the library lack.
--
Thoughts of an Examination Invigilator on a winter’s afternoon.
Beneath the lights and sombre walls they strive
To resurrect the babblings of past days.
Outside, the tree-etched winter, greens and greys
Border horizons beyond the puddled drive.
Here sits a lad, wrestling with Nazi wrongs
There a lass perched, pondering the Welsh dream,
Harrying the splendour through the dullest gleam,
Turning to turgid prose the fervid songs.
But I, sat here surveying all their trials
Have visions far more splendid to survey.
Before much time has fled or many miles
Beyond the hill I and my love will stay,
Far from this strife and Academe’s alarms
To a lover’s bed and to a lover’s arms.
