Do you believe that you’ve lived before?

Sudden Light

Everyone has experienced déjà vu—that eerie feeling of “I have been here before.” It strikes at any time in response to the most trivial sights. A cloud pattern. A cat licking its paws. A line of cars stuck in a traffic jam. We do a doubletake because we don’t just see what is in front of us, we remember it—though how that’s possible we haven’t got a clue.

Rossetti registers that shock of recognition and, collecting his thoughts, describes the scene around him. There’s a “sweet smell,” a “sighing sound,” and “lights.” So where are we? It’s not until the final word of the first stanza that we realize these sensations arise from the ocean.  Up to that point, they could suggest a heavenly landscape. As he looks “beyond the door,” Rossetti is indeed on the threshold of conventional reality and the transcendental.

In the second stanza we move from “I” to “you.” The self recognizes its complement. A casual  turn of the head—the kind of gesture we glorify in those we cherish—rips down the veil of forgetfulness that has separated the lovers.

In the third stanza, the couple’s romantic ecstasy yields to a vision of eternity. “Before” becomes “once more.” This isn’t simply the idea that the soul is reborn after death, but that we endlessly return to this current life, as day follows night. Is this notion liberating or tragic?Would you act differently if you knew you were coming back to this exact second again and again? Could you face coming back to the same partner!

This scene reminds me of Tarkovsky’s dreamy film “Solaris,” in which a sentient sea on an alien planet conjures up a copy of a cosmonaut’s dead wife. Given a second chance, the two are doomed to repeat their failed relationship. In the closing frames, his parental
home emerges from the waters. His destination has become his origin.

The poem’s varied rhythm captures the movement of consciousness as it begins to discern something of its nature. Each stanza flickers across the page, expands, steadies, and retracts, creating a sense of expectation before the slow, insistent, spreading final line—like the wave that breaks upon the beach or the throbbing of the heart at peace. The use of rhyme suggests a chain of being that binds together all of creation.

For a modern reader, the poem’s play of light and time may bring to mind Einstein’s theory of relativity, which states that time is not an absolute. It’s an amazing fact that the night sky is a graveyard of stars long since burnt out, but whose light continues to irradiate across the universe. Every evening, the past becomes the present.

For neurologists, déjà vu is due to a delay of electric signals in the brain. Be that as it may, Rossetti’s poem shows how a mundane, though mystifying, occurrence provides us with a rich source of imaginative speculation.