Silent Noon from Three Songs for Nature - James W. Knox

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Written for SATB, Strings & Piano

The poem describes a couple lying together in a meadow, completely still, as nature surrounds them in its summer fullness. Rossetti blends sensual detail (hands in grass, eyes smiling peace) with natural imagery (golden kingcups, dragonfly, billowing skies) to create a vision of love that is harmonious with the earth.

Love here is quiet and deep, not flashy or loud. The lovers’ silence becomes its own music— “twofold silence” — where their bond is felt more than spoken.
Nature is not just a backdrop; it mirrors the perfection of their union. The meadow’s beauty reflects the purity and serenity of their love, and the moment feels eternal — a “deathless dower” (an inheritance beyond time).
In essence, Silent Noon is about how the natural world can cradle and intensify love, making a single moment of stillness feel like forever.

Silent Noon by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,—
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
’Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—
So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.