I took this photo last summer and felt it went well with this poem. I feel that the subject of the photo is pensive yet melancholy. In the poem, Rossetti is describing an aspect of her life in which she has missed out on the good times. She is full of regret and remorse. Regret is something that drifts often through my own mind. I tend to over-analyze things past.

I have a few favorite quotations regarding regret:

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable." -Sydney J. Harris

But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. -Oscar Wilde

To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

-Oscar Wilde