Sudden Light
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.
– Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Sung by John Diamond
Date of Composition: December 30, 2003
Commentary: Rossetti was a prominent Victorian polymath: a poet, illustrator, painter, translator and one of the founders of the pre-Raphelite movement. His poem “Sudden Light” was written c. 1853, and first published in 1863. Diamond sets the first two of its three verses. The poet Carol Rumens has written of the poem: ” ‘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.”