Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by David Southward

Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (England) 1868

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
 
A double artist, fit for brush or pen,
I swore off schools and taught myself to see      
by instinct - like those world-defining men        
that spur a boy to wonder, “What shall I be?”
 
My friends and I would sort bad art from good
on late-night rambles - living wide awake,
in tune with an artistic brotherhood
that urged its own to daydream, “What shall we make?”
 
But in my work a woman’s form appeared.
She came to haunt my canvases and rhyme,
her features so voluptuous and weird
they begged to be repeated. For all time
she will stare past your gaze, my spirit-wife,
with swimming eyes that ask, “Where is my life?”

David Southward

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His collections include Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020) and Apocrypha, a sonnet sequence based on the Gospels (Wipf & Stock 2018). David is a two-time winner of the Lorine Niedecker Prize and in 2019 his poem “Mary’s Visit” received the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. He resides in Milwaukee with his husband, Geoff, and their two beagles. Read more at davidsouthward.com.