Poem of the week: Sudden Light by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Sudden Light by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before, –
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turn’d so,
Some veil did fall, – I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
We’ve previously visited Rossetti’s sonnet sequence The House of Life on Poem of the week but this time the poem is more thoroughly lyrical in style. Sudden Light, probably written in 1853 or 4, and first published in 1863, was in fact subtitled Song IV when the revised version was collected in the 1870 edition of Rossetti’s Poems.
It was the third stanza that Rossetti changed: here for comparison is the earlier version:
Then, now, – perchance again! …
O round mine eyes your tresses shake!
Shall we not lie as we have lain
Thus for Love’s sake,
And sleep, and wake, yet never break the chain?
The revision is a clear improvement. That over-exclamatory first line has gone, replaced by the simple question, “Has this been thus before?” In echoing the first lines of the earlier stanzas, it enhances the poem’s songlike quality. Omitting the heavy and harsh sounds of “-ake” and “-ain” (“shake” “wake”, “brake”, “lain”, “chain”) seems a further good move, although there is still a trio of internal rhymes – “despite”, “night”, “delight” – to navigate in the new stanza. The loss of the dreamy eroticism of the second line helps the reader to focus a little more on the metaphysics, and perhaps the physics, of time itself. The syntax of the whole stanza is subtle and cohesive.
Sudden Light is centred on the realisation that time may not be, as we usually perceive it, linear. The present moment has already happened, and perhaps, fulfilling the lover’s deepest wish, it will continue happening. Rossetti’s thought is more complex than the romantic ideal of love’s continuation by the importation of souls into the afterlife, although love beyond the grave is a theme here, too.
Earthly context is important, of course. The first stanza judges the amount of detail exactly in its impressionistic description of the place where the first moment of illumination occured. Stanza two shifts to the direct address (“You have been mine before …”) and reveals itself as a love song. The mysterious dawn of familiarity on this occasion is captured in the way the lover’s neck has “turned so”. The “swallow’s soar” seems vaguely and perhaps not altogether successfully connected to that movement.
In the last stanza, the description of the bird’s flight as “eddying” cleverly suggests the looping movement attributable to time. Throughout the poem, the metrical patterning in each stanza creates an impression of fluctuation, while the repetitions and echoes help sound the concept of circularity. And the form crosses time in another way, recalling the metrical versatility of Elizabethan songs and madrigals.
The song of the internal rhyming is particularly beautiful in the first stanza, in the lines describing “The sweet keen smell, / The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.” A subtle combination of sensory impressions – the grass-smell, the sea’s sound, the distant and distance-marking lights – swiftly arouses the reader’s imagination. Throughout the poem, the direct questions, and plainly related but intense experiences, ground the metaphysics. The moments where perception is heightened by the “sudden light” of recurrence are familiar to almost everyone. It’s perhaps more commonly known as deja vu.
