<meta>
<author>
<name>Alfred, Lord <index>Tennyson</index></name>
<date>1809-1892</date>
</author>
<title>Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White</title>
<date>ca. 1849</date>
<source>Originally appeared in <worktitle>The Princess</worktitle>
(1847-1853). Appears in several places on the net, including
<uri>http://www.bartleby.com/42/629.html</uri>.</source>
<remark>While this poem is only roughly a sonnet, defying the sonnet form in
its variation, in a typically Tennysonian way it is also a masterpiece of
the form. The <called>couplet</called> here is radically revised, taking
the form of a grammatical unit of two lines finishing with the rhyming
word <quote>me</quote>, and rather than simply turning after an octave,
the sonnet <stress>folds</stress> onto itself: rhetorically a seven-seven
would work as well as a four-six-four, the poem turning on the dazzling
phrase (with its internal rhyme) <quote>Danaë to the stars / And all thy
heart lies open</quote>. In this view, the poem's phantasmagoric
representation of beauty in confusion, as identities fuse, the
<called>thou</called>, <called>she</called> and <called>me</called> all
in the air, begins to exert its own intimate attraction. The gender of the
speaker is ambiguous and irrelevant, as we are suspended by the
vacillation of images between active and passive, and find ourselves
wondering how much of this ambiguity is deliberate. The confusion is
further energized by the mirroring of frame-narratives in which this lyric
appears, in Tennyson's little-read, brilliant and politically incorrect
faux-epic, <worktitle>The Princess</worktitle>: a male author (Tennyson)
has published a long poem encapsulating a story told by a man to a group
of friends, including a particular woman who punctuates the story with
exclamations and commentary; in this story-within-a-story, a female
character (the Princess of the frame's title) reads this lyric from a book
to a male character (a suitor whom she finally accepts).</remark>
</meta>
<sonnet>
<quatrain>
<line>Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;</line>
<line>Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;</line>
<line>Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:</line>
<line>The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with <rhyme on="a">me</rhyme>.</line>
</quatrain>
<sestet>
<couplet>
<line>Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,</line>
<line>And like a ghost she glimmers on to <rhyme on="a">me</rhyme>.</line>
</couplet>
<couplet>
<line>Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,</line>
<line>And all thy heart lies open unto <rhyme on="a">me</rhyme>.</line>
</couplet>
<couplet>
<line>Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves</line>
<line>A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in <rhyme on="a">me</rhyme>.</line>
</couplet>
</sestet>
<quatrain>
<line>Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,</line>
<line>And slips into the bosom of the lake:</line>
<line>So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip</line>
<line>Into my bosom and be lost in <rhyme on="a">me</rhyme>.</line>
</quatrain>
</sonnet>
