SILENT WOOD ~ POEM BY ELIZABETH SIDDAL

O silent wood, I enter thee

With a heart so full of misery

For all the voices from the trees

And the ferns that cling about my knees.

In thy darkest shadow let me sit

When the grey owls about thee flit;

There will I ask of thee a boon,

That I may not faint or die or swoon.

Gazing through the gloom like one

Whose life and hopes are also done,

Frozen like a thing of stone

I sit in thy shadow – but not alone.

Can God bring back the day when we two stood

Beneath the clinging trees in that dark wood?

Photo of Elizabeth Siddal ca. 1860

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862) was an English artists’ model, poet and artist who was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais (including Millais’ 1852 painting Ophelia) and most of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early paintings of women. (Wikipedia)