Betrayal

Aura, che quelle chiome bionde e crespe.

HE ENVIES THE BREEZE WHICH SPORTS WITH HER, THE STREAM THAT FLOWS TOWARDS HER.


    Ye laughing gales, that sporting with my fair,
The silky tangles of her locks unbraid;
And down her breast their golden treasures spread;
Then in fresh mazes weave her curling hair,
You kiss those bright destructive eyes, that bear
The flaming darts by which my heart has bled;
My trembling heart! that oft has fondly stray'd
To seek the nymph, whose eyes such terrors wear.
Methinks she's found--but oh! 'tis fancy's cheat!
Methinks she's seen--but oh! 'tis love's deceit!
Methinks she's near--but truth cries "'tis not so!"
Go happy gale, and with my Laura dwell!
Go happy stream, and to my Laura tell
What envied joys in th...

When life looks drear and lonely, love,
    And pleasant fancies flee,
Then will the Muses only, love,
    Bestow a thought on me!
Mine is a harp which Pleasure, love,
    To waken strives in vain;
To Joy's entrancing measure, love,
    It ne'er can thrill again!--
            Why mock me, Bessy Bell?

Oh, do not ask me ever, love,
    For rapture-woven rhymes;
For vain is each endeavor, love,
    To sound Mirth's play-bell chimes!
Yet still believe me, dearest love,
    Though sad my song may be,
This heart still dotes sincerest, love,
    And grateful turns to thee--
            My once fond Bessy Bell!

Those eyes still rest upon me, love!
    I feel their magic spell!
With that same look you won me, love,
    Fair, gentle...

The fields are fair in autumn yet, and the sun’s still shining there,
But we bow our heads and we brood and fret, because of the masks we wear;
Or we nod and smile the social while, and we say we’re doing well,
But we break our hearts, oh, we break our hearts! for the things we must not tell.

There’s the old love wronged ere the new was won, there’s the light of long ago;
There’s the cruel lie that we suffer for, and the public must not know.
So we go through life with a ghastly mask, and we’re doing fairly well,
While they break our hearts, oh, they kill our hearts! do the things we must not tell.

We see but pride in a selfish breast, while a heart is breaking there;
Oh, the world would be such a kindly world if all men’s hearts lay bare!
We live and share the living lie, we a...

Hail Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour!
Not dull art Thou as undiscerning Night;
But studious only to remove from sight
Day's mutable distinctions. Ancient Power!
Thus did the waters gleam, the mountains lower,
To the rude Briton, when, in wolf-skin vest
Here roving wild, he laid him down to rest
On the bare rock, or through a leafy bower
Looked ere his eyes were closed. By him was seen
The self-same Vision which we now behold;
At thy meek bidding, shadowy Power! brought forth
These mighty barriers, and the gulf between;
The flood, the stars, a spectacle as old
As the beginning of the heavens and earth!

Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead:
Nor would you rise and hasten away,
Though you have the will of the wild birds,
But know your hair was bound and wound
About the stars and moon and sun:
O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one.

    The room is full of you!--As I came in
    And closed the door behind me, all at once
    A something in the air, intangible,
    Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!--

    Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
    Each other room's dear personality.
    The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,--
    The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death--
    Has strangled that habitual breath of home
    Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
    And wheresoe'er I look is hideous change.
    Save here.    Here 'twas as if a weed-choked gate
    Had opened at my touch, and I had stepped
    Into some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,
    Sweet garden of a thousand years ago
    And suddenly thought, "I have been here before!"

    You are not...

You can scorn more illustrious eyes,
sweet eyes of my child, through which there takes flight
something as good or as tender as night.
Turn to mine your charmed shadows, sweet eyes!

Great eyes of a child, adorable secrets,
you resemble those grottoes of magic
where, behind the dark and lethargic,
shine vague treasures the world forgets.

My child has veiled eyes, profound and vast,
and shining like you, Night, immense, above!
Their fires are of Trust, mixed with thoughts of Love,
that glitter in depths, voluptuous or chaste.

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Would that our scrupulous Sires had dared to leave
Less scanty measure of those graceful rites
And usages, whose due return invites
A stir of mind too natural to deceive;
Giving to Memory help when she would weave
A crown for Hope! I dread the boasted lights
That all too often are but fiery blights,
Killing the bud o'er which in vain we grieve.
Go, seek, when Christmas snows discomfort bring,
The counter Spirit found in some gay church
Green with fresh holly, every pew a perch
In which the linnet or the thrush might sing,
Merry and loud and safe from prying search,
Strains offered only to the genial Spring.

I am a Goddess of the ambrosial courts,
And save by Here, Queen of Pride, surpassed
By none whose temples whiten this the world.
Thro’ Heaven I roll my lucid moon along;
I shed in Hell o’er my pale people peace;
On Earth, I, caring for the creatures, guard
Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek.
And every feathered mother’s callow brood,
And all that love green haunts and loneliness.
Of men, the chaste adore me, hanging crowns
Of poppies red to blackness, bell and stem,
Upon my image at Athenai here;
And this dead Youth, Asclepios bends above,
Was dearest to me. He my buskined step
To follow thro’ the wild-wood leafy ways,
And chase the panting stag, or swift with darts
Stop the swift ounce, or lay the leopard low,
Neglected homage to another God:<...

        It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
        Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
        Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
        Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
        Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
        Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
        With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
        Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
        And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
        With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
        Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
        And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
        "Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
        "None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
  ...

Here at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
i{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?

No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Ha...

The Autumn's come again,
And the clouds descend in rain,
And the leaves are fast falling in the wood;
The Summer's voice is still,
Save the clacking of the mill
And the lowly-muttered thunder of the flood.

There's nothing in the mead
But the river's muddy speed,
And the willow leaves all littered by its side.
Sweet voices are all still
In the vale and on the hill,
And the Summer's blooms are withered in their pride.

Fled is the cuckoo's note
To countries far remote,
And the nightingale is vanished from the woods;
If you search the lordship round
There is not a blossom found,
And where the hay-cock scented is the flood.

My true love's fled away
Since we walked 'mid cocks of hay,
On the Sabbath in the Summer of the year;

    I so loved once, when Death came by I hid
    Away my face,
    And all my sweetheart's tresses she undid
    To make my hiding-place.

    The dread shade passed me thus unheeding; and
    I turned me then
    To calm my love - kiss down her shielding hand
    And comfort her again.

    And lo! she answered not: And she did sit
    All fixedly,
    With her fair face and the sweet smile of it,
    In love with Death, not me.

The drowsy day, with half-closed eyes,
Dreams in this quaint forgotten street,
That, like some old-world wreckage, lies,
Left by the sea's receding beat,
Far from the city's restless feet.

Abandoned pavements, that the trees'
Huge roots have wrecked, whose flagstones feel
No more the sweep of draperies;
And sunken curbs, whereon no wheel
Grinds, nor the gallant's spur-bound heel.

Old houses, walled with rotting brick,
Thick-creepered, dormered, weather-vaned,
Like withered faces, sad and sick,
Stare from each side, all broken paned,
With battered doors the rain has stained.

And though the day be white with heat,
Their ancient yards are dim and cold;
Where now the toad makes its retreat,
'Mid flower-pots green-caked with mold,
A...

After the Danish of Christian Winter.


Where, over heathen doom-rings and gray stones of the Horg,
In its little Christian city stands the church of Vordingborg,
In merry mood King Volmer sat, forgetful of his power,
As idle as the Goose of Gold that brooded on his tower.

Out spake the King to Henrik, his young and faithful squire
"Dar'st trust thy little Elsie, the maid of thy desire?"
"Of all the men in Denmark she loveth only me
As true to me is Elsie as thy Lily is to thee."

Loud laughed the king: "To-morrow shall bring another day,
When I myself will test her; she will not say me nay."
Thereat the lords and gallants, that round about him stood,
Wagged all their heads in concert and smiled as courtiers should.

The gray lark sings o'er ...

Thou hast constrained mine eyes, unholy Death,
To watch my dear child breathe her dying breath:
To watch thee shake the fruit unripe and clinging
While fear and grief her parents' hearts were wringing.
Ah, never, never could my well-loved child
Have died and left her father reconciled:
Never but with a heart like heavy lead
Could I have watched her go, abandoned.
And yet at no time could her death have brought
More cruel ache than now, nor bitterer thought;
For had God granted to her ample days
I might have walked with her down flowered ways
And left this life at last, content, descending
To realms of dark Persephone, the all-ending,
Without such grievous sorrow in my heart,
Of which earth holdeth not the counterpart.
I marvel not that Niobe, alone
Amid h...

Why weep ye in your innocent toil at all?
Sweet little hands, why halt and tremble so?
Full many a wrong note falls, but let it fall!
Each note to me is like a golden glow;
Each broken cadence like a morning call;
Nay, clear and smooth I would not have you go,
Soft little hands, upon the curtained threshold set
Of this long life of labour, and unrestful fret.

Soft sunlight flickers on the checkered green:
Warm winds are stirring round my dreaming seat:
Among the yellow pumpkin blooms, that lean
Their crumpled rims beneath the heavy heat,
The stripèd bees in lazy labour glean
From bell to bell with golden-feathered feet;
Yet even here the voices of hard life go by;
Outside, the city strains with its eternal cry.

Here, as I sit - the sunlight on my f...