From Love Sonnets of Proteus, poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

I am reading through poetry in a pair of anthologies I’d found at the library…here’s one, the first in the book.

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From Love Sonnets of Proteus

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

I see you, Juliet, still, with your straw hat
Loaded with vines, and with your dear pale face,
On which those thirty years so lightly sat,
And the white outline of your muslin dress.
You wore a fichu trimmed with lace
And crossed in front, as was the fashion then,
Bound at your waist with a broad band or sash,
All white and fresh and virginally plain.
There was a sound of shouting far way
Down in the valley, as they called to us,
And you, with hands clasped seeming to pray
Patience of fate, stood listening to me thus
With heaving bosom. There a rose lay curled.
It was the reddest rose in all the world.

from The Oxford Book of 20th Century Verse (1973)