Sissinghurst was published by the Hogarth Press in 1931, shortly after Vita and Harold Nicolson purchased the ruined Elizabethan castle and its surrounding farmland in 1930. The poem captures the moment of first possession — before the famous garden existed, before the restoration began, when Sissinghurst was nothing but a romantic ruin: a surviving tower, crumbling walls, a cottage, and acres of wilderness.
The poem is an elegy for the house’s past lives (it had been an Elizabethan mansion, a prison for French sailors during the Seven Years’ War, a parish workhouse) and a declaration of intent for its future. Vita addresses the building directly, promising to restore it, to honor its past while making it live again. The intensity of address recalls her writing about Knole — but with a crucial difference: Sissinghurst she could actually possess and shape.
The poem is significant as a document of the garden’s pre-history: it records what Sissinghurst was before the Nicolsons transformed it — a record of potential, of imaginative projection, of the moment when a vision exists only in the mind. Everything that followed — one of England’s most beloved gardens, a National Trust property visited by hundreds of thousands — grew from the passion recorded in this poem.
Collecting Sissinghurst
First edition (Hogarth Press, London, 1931): Slim pamphlet/chapbook format.
Market values:
- First edition: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100
- Hogarth Press limited publication — relatively scarce