Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Found

"FOUND"

Keats quotation

From Keats's "To Homer"—but Rossetti misquotes it. Keats wrote "There is a budding morrow in *the* midnight," about poetic inspiration. Rossetti changes it to suit a darker purpose.

THERE is a budding morrow in midnight:"—
So sang our Keats, our English nightingale.
And here, as lamps across the bridge turn pale
In London's smokeless resurrection-light,
Dark breaks to dawn. But o'er the deadly blight
Of Love deflowered and sorrow of none avail,

Love deflowered

Victorian code for lost virginity. The woman has been sexually ruined—in 1850s terms, unmarriageable, socially dead.

Which makes this man gasp and this woman quail,
Can day from darkness ever again take flight?
Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge,

Under one mantle

Bundling—courting couples wrapped together in a cloak. A recognized pre-engagement intimacy that here led to sex and abandonment.

Under one mantle sheltered 'neath the hedge
In gloaming courtship? And, O God! to-day
He only knows he holds her;—but what part
Can life now take ? She cries in her locked heart,—

Locked heart

She's disassociating. He's trying to rescue her from prostitution, but trauma has severed recognition. She can't acknowledge him or their past.

"Leave me—I do not know you—go away!"
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Unfinished Painting

Rossetti wrote this sonnet for his most famous unfinished painting of the same name—a canvas he worked on for decades and never completed. The painting shows a young man (a farmer) discovering his former sweetheart working as a prostitute at dawn in London. He's brought a cart with a calf tangled in netting; she turns her face to the wall. Rossetti began it in 1854, reworked it obsessively, and it remained incomplete at his death in 1882.

The poem exists because the painting wouldn't resolve. Where the image froze the moment of recognition, the sonnet pushes past it into psychological aftermath. "He only knows he holds her"—physically present but emotionally unreachable. "I do not know you"—the Victorian fallen woman's only defense is to sever her past self completely.

CONTEXT This wasn't abstract moralizing for Rossetti. In 1858, he met Fanny Cornforth, a working-class woman likely involved in prostitution, who became his model and mistress. In 1862, his wife Elizabeth Siddal died of laudanum overdose, possibly suicide. The painting's incompleteness maps onto his inability to reconcile Victorian sexual morality with his own life.

Misquoting Keats

The opening line deliberately corrupts Keats. The original—**"There is a budding morrow in *the* midnight"**—celebrates how darkness births poetic vision. Rossetti drops the article ("*the*") and inverts the meaning. His "midnight" isn't creative; it's moral darkness. His "dawn" isn't hope; it's "London's smokeless resurrection-light"—the cold exposure of shame at daybreak when the streetlamps pale.

Watch how the octave sets up false hope ("Dark breaks to dawn") then demolishes it: "But o'er the deadly blight / Of Love deflowered"—that "But" is the poem's hinge. Dawn doesn't redeem; it reveals. The sestet answers the octave's question ("Can day from darkness ever again take flight?") with a devastating "no." The past (courtship under the hedge) can't be recovered. The present is mutual unrecognition.

The final line—"Leave me—I do not know you—go away!"—uses internal quotation marks because she doesn't speak it aloud. It's trapped in her "locked heart." Rossetti understood that Victorian sexual ruin operated at the level of identity destruction. She can't acknowledge him because acknowledging their courtship would mean acknowledging what she's become.