Monday, May 21, 2012

Dream Land

Dream Love
A Rossetti poem illustration
by Emma Harrison, 1910

Very little is known about the artist Emma Harrison, including the exact dates of her birth and death. There are no portraits of her. She worked from about 1877-1925 and is remembered mostly as an illustrator of books of poems by Christina Rossetti, Tennyson and William Morris.  Her work has that highly collectible (and valuable) Pre-Raphaelite style.

Dream Land
by Christina Georgina Rossetti
 
Where sunless rivers weep
Their waves into the deep,
She sleeps a charmèd sleep:
Awake her not.
 
Led by a single star,
She came from very far
To seek where shadows are
Her pleasant lot.

She left the rosy morn,
She left the fields of corn,
For twilight cold and lorn
And water springs.

Through sleep, as through a veil,
She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.

Rest, rest, a perfect rest
Shed over brow and breast;
Her face is toward the west,
The purple land...

Rest, rest at the heart’s core
Till time shall cease:
Sleep that no pain shall wake;
Night that no morn shall break
Till joy shall overtake
Her perfect peace.


Dream Land
Poem illustration by Emma Harrison, 1910

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