August 8 Alfred Lord Tennyson

The same imagery of a summer night is seen in Tennyson’s lyric from “The Princess”, an early excursion into the world of women’s liberation:
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the earth all Danaё to the stars
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Danaё was won by Jupiter disguised as a shower of gold, a form of wooing not unknown in later times. Gold is the metal of poetry, as the colour of the sun-god Apollo, its divine singer and patron, and so ‘the realms of gold are the kingdom of poetry.

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