Poem of the Day: ‘The Heart of the Night’

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), brother to the poet Christina Rossetti and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, repaired to a house in Chelsea after the death of his wife and artist’s model, Elizabeth Siddal, and began to collect wombats and other exotic pets. Over the course of three decades, he wrote and amended his extensive, introspective sonnet sequence, “The House of Life,” from which today’s poem is taken. This Petrarchan sonnet acknowledges, in its abbaabba octet, the soul’s reluctance to “accept her primal immortality” and lay down the familiar flesh in death. The sestet’s response is a prayer; its cdecde rhyme scheme effects a transformation in the speaker’s vision of the God to whom he prays.