Sonnet LIX: Love’s Last Gift
Love to his singer held a glistening leaf,
And said: “The rose-tree and the apple-tree
Have fruits to vaunt or flowers to lure the bee;
And golden shafts are in the feathered sheaf
Of the great harvest-marshal, the year’s chief,
Victorious summer; aye, and ’neath warm sea
Strange secret grasses lurk inviolably
Between the filtering channels of sunk reef.
All are my blooms; and all sweet blooms of love
To thee I gave while Spring and Summer sang;
But Autumn stops to listen, with some pang
From those worse things the wind is moaning of.
Only this laurel dreads no winter days:
Take my last gift; thy heart hath sung my praise.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 7, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Love’s Last Gift” concludes Part One, titled “Youth and Change,” of his collection The House of Life, first published in 1869 and expanded in 1870, 1881, and 1894, respectively. The poem, as it is excerpted here, appears in The Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Little, Brown, and Company, 1910), edited by William Michael Rossetti, an art critic and editor, as well as the brother of both Dante and Christina Rossetti.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
