Ferment (1863-1870)
theme is the transitoriness of love, the realization of which comes suddenly upon a husband at dawn, when he sees his wife as one of the common crowd, and not a prize, but a blank in life's lottery. The Dawn After the Dance, written in the same year and at the same place, is remarkable for its rather colloquial language, and its swinging measures, somewhat like those of Locksley Hall, but with the addition of ingenious internal rhymes. Disillusion is again the keynote, this time the reflection that the last year’s vows of man and maid have proven "frail as filmy gossamere."
The last poem which can be definitely included in this early group is the sonnet The Minute Before Meeting (1871), a pure lyric, expressing the pain of lovers' past and future separation and the ecstasy of "expectance" as the time of meeting approaches. In thought and expression it seems to possess spiritual kinship with the amorous verses of the greater sonneteers of the Elizabethan epoch:
Seemed hopeless hills my strength must faint to climb,
But they are gone; and now I would detain
The few clock-beats that part us; rein back Time
In change for far expectance closed at last,
So harshly has expectance been imposed
On my long need while these slow blank months passed.
Will all have been in O, so short a space!
I read beyond it my despondency
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