A Year and a Day by Elizabeth Siddal

Slow days have passed that make a year,
Slow hours that make a day,
Since I could take my first dear love
And kiss him the old way;
Yet the green leaves touch me on the cheek,
Dear Christ, this month of May.

I lie among the tall green grass
That bends above my head
And covers up my wasted face
And folds me in its bed
Tenderly and lovingly
Like grass above the dead.

Dim phantoms of an unknown ill
Float through my tired brain;
The unformed visions of my life
Pass by in ghostly train;
Some pause to touch me on the cheek,
Some scatter tears like rain.

A shadow falls along the grass
And lingers at my feet;
A new face lies between my hands —
Dear Christ, if I could weep
Tears to shut out the summer leaves
When this new face I greet.

Still it is but the memory
Of something I have seen
In the dreamy summer weather
When the green leaves came between:
The shadow of my dear love’s face —
So far and strange it seems.

The river ever running down
Between its grassy bed,
The voices of a thousand birds
That clang above my head,
Shall bring to me a sadder dream
When this sad dream is dead.

A silence falls upon my heart
And hushes all its pain.
I stretch my hands in the long grass
And fall to sleep again,
There to lie empty of all love
Like beaten corn of grain.

Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862)

One year and one day (A Year and a Day) is a Pre-Raphaelite poem by the English model and writer Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1861), composed in 1855 and published in the 1978 anthology: Poems of Elizabeth Siddal.

A Year and a Day, probably one of Elizabeth Siddal’s best love poems, was written during the height of her romantic relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti; however, all the characteristics of an irreversible melancholy can be seen in it.

Some speculate that Elizabeth Siddal suffered from clinical depression, given that years later she would end up taking her own life by drinking a lethal dose of laudanum; However, her poetic work transcends that state of permanent anguish, alienation, instability, and participates in the most exquisite jewels of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.