Heartbreak

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved<...

Dear little Slavic Sappho, we had thought,
Hearing thy songs so sweetly, deftly wrought,
That thou shouldst have an heritage one day
Beyond thy father's lands: his lute to play.
For not an hour of daylight's joyous round
But thou didst fill it full of lovely sound,
Just as the nightingale doth scatter pleasure
Upon the dark, in glad unstinted measure.
Then Death came stalking near thee, timid thing,
And thou in sudden terror tookest wing.
Ah, that delight, it was not overlong
And I pay dear with sorrow for brief song.
Thou still wert singing when thou cam'st to die;
Kissing thy mother, thus thou saidst good-bye:
        "My mother, I shall serve thee now no more
Nor sit about thy table's charming store;
I must lay down my keys to go from here,
To leave th...

The song of the water
Doomed ever to roam,
A beautiful exile,
Afar from its home.

The cliffs on the mountain,
The grand and the gray,
They took the bright creature
And hurled it away!

I heard the wild downfall,
And knew it must spill
A passionate heart out
All over the hill.

Oh! was it a daughter
Of sorrow and sin,
That they threw it so madly
Down into the lynn?

.    .    .    .    .

And listen, my Sister,
For this is the song
The Waterfall taught me
The ridges among:

“Oh where are the shadows
So cool and so sweet
And the rocks,” saith the water,
“With the moss on their feet?

“Oh, where are my playmates
The wind and the flowers
The golden and purple
Of honey-s...

I

"Soul! Shall I see thy face," she said,
"In one brief hour?
And away with thee from a loveless bed
To a far-off sun, to a vine-wrapt bower,
And be thine own unseparated,
And challenge the world's white glower?

II

She quickened her feet, and met him where
They had predesigned:
And they clasped, and mounted, and cleft the air
Upon whirling wheels; till the will to bind
Her life with his made the moments there
Efface the years behind.

III

Miles slid, and the sight of the port upgrew
As they sped on;
When slipping its bond the bracelet flew
From her fondled arm. Replaced anon,
Its cameo of the abjured one drew
Her musings thereupon.

IV

The gaud with his image once had been
A gift from h...

Why do I speak of joy or write of love,
When my heart is the very den of horror,
And in my soul the pains of hell I prove,
With all his torments and infernal terror?
    What should I say? what yet remains to do?
My brain is dry with weeping all too long;
My sighs be spent in utt'ring of my woe,
And I want words wherewith to tell my wrong.
    But still distracted in love's lunacy,
And bedlam-like thus raving in my grief,
Now rail upon her hair, then on her eye,
Now call her goddess, then I call her thief;
    Now I deny her, then I do confess her,
    Now do I curse her, then again I bless her.

On page of thine I cannot trace
The cold and heartless commonplace,
A statue's fixed and marble grace.

For ever as these lines I penned,
Still with the thought of thee will blend
That of some loved and common friend,

Who in life's desert track has made
His pilgrim tent with mine, or strayed
Beneath the same remembered shade.

And hence my pen unfettered moves
In freedom which the heart approves,
The negligence which friendship loves.

And wilt thou prize my poor gift less
For simple air and rustic dress,
And sign of haste and carelessness?

Oh, more than specious counterfeit
Of sentiment or studied wit,
A heart like thine should value it.

Yet half I fear my gift will be
Unto thy book, if not to thee,
Of more...

A song in a cornfield
    Where corn begins to fall,
Where reapers are reaping,
    Reaping one, reaping all.
Sing pretty Lettice,
    Sing Rachel, sing May;
Only Marian cannot sing
    While her sweetheart's away.

Where is he gone to
    And why does he stay?
He came across the green sea
    But for a day,
Across the deep green sea
    To help with the hay.

His hair was curly yellow
    And his eyes were grey,
He laughed a merry laugh
    And said a sweet say.
Where is he gone to
    That he comes not home?
To-day or to-morrow
    He surely will come.
Let him haste to joy
    Lest he lag for sorrow,
For one weeps to-day
    Who'll not weep to-morrow:
To-day she must weep
    For gnawing sorrow...

The kine of my rather, they are straying from my keeping;
        The young goat’s at mischief, but little can I do:
For all through the night did I hear the Banshee keening;
        O youth of my loving, and is it well with you?

All through the night sat my mother with my sorrow;
        “Whisht, it is the wind, O one childeen of my heart!”
My hair with the wind, and my two hands clasped in anguish;
        Black head of my darling! too long are we apart.

Were your grave at my feet, I would think it half a blessing;
        I could herd then the cattle, and drive the goats away;
Many a Paternoster I would say for your safe keeping;
        I could sleep above your heart, until the dawn of day.

I see you on the prairie, hot with thirst and faint with hunger;

Like him who met his own eyes in the river,
    The poet trembles at his own long gaze
    That meets him through the changing nights and days
From out great Nature; all her waters quiver
With his fair image facing him for ever;
    The music that he listens to betrays
    His own heart to his ears; by trackless ways
His wild thoughts tend to him in long endeavour.

His dreams are far among the silent hills;
    His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain
With winds at night; strange recognition thrills
    His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;
He knows his sweet mirth in the mountain rills,
    His weary tears that touch him with the rain.

1.
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

2.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play -
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.

1.
I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.

2.
There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxslips; tender bluebells, at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets -
Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth -
Its mother's face with Heaven's collected tears,
When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.

3.
And in th...

Path beside the silver waters, flashing in October’s sun
Walk, by green and golden margins where the sister streamlets run
Twenty shining springs have vanished, full of flower, and leaf, and bird,
Since the step of Mary Rivers in your lawny dell was heard!
Twenty white-haired Junes have left us grey with frost and bleak with gale
Since the hand of her we loved so plucked the blossoms in your dale.
Twenty summers, twenty autumns, from the grand old hills have passed,
With their robes of royal colour, since we saw the darling last.

Morning comes the blessed morning! and the slow song of the sea,
Like a psalm from radiant altars, floats across a rose-red lea;
Then the fair, strong noonday blossoms, and the reaper seeks the cool
Valley of the moss and myrtle, and the glimmering wate...

I have beheld two lovers in a night
Hatched o'er with moonshine from their stolen delight
(When this to that, and that to this, had given
A kiss to such a jewel of the heaven,
Or while that each from other's breath did drink
Health to the rose, the violet, or pink),
Call'd on the sudden by the jealous mother,
Some stricter mistress or suspicious other,
Urging divorcement (worse than death to these)
By the soon jingling of some sleepy keys,
Part with a hasty kiss; and in that show
How stay they would, yet forced they are to go.
Even such are we, and in our parting do
No otherwise than as those former two
Natures like ours, we who have spent our time
Both from the morning to the evening chime.
Nay, till the bellman of the night had tolled
Past noon of night...

Take back the sigh, thy lips of art
In passion's moment breathed to me;
Yet, no--it must not, will not part,
'Tis now the life-breath of my heart,
And has become too pure for thee.

Take back the kiss, that faithless sigh
    With all the warmth of truth imprest;
Yet, no--the fatal kiss may lie,
Upon thy lip its sweets would die,
    Or bloom to make a rival blest.

Take back the vows that, night and day,
    My heart received, I thought, from thine;
Yet, no--allow them still to stay,
They might some other heart betray,
    As sweetly as they've ruined mine.

He made him a love o' dreams--
He raised for his heart's delight--
(As the heart of June a crescent moon)
A frail, fair spirit of light.

He gave her the gift of joy--
The gift of the dancing feet--
He made her a thing of very Spring--
Virginal--wild and sweet.

But when he would draw her near
To his eager heart's content,
As a sunbeam slips from the finger-tips
She slipped from his hold and went.

Virginal--wild--and sweet--
So she eludes him still--
The love that he made of dawn and shade
Of dominant want and will.

For ever the dream of man
Is more than the dreamer is;
Though he form it whole of his inmost soul,
Yet never 'tis wholly his.

Only is given to him
The right to follow and yearn
The lovelines...

I was a queen, and I have lost my crown;
A wife, and I have broken all my vows;
A lover, and I ruined him I loved:,
There is no other havoc left to do.

A little month ago I was a queen,
And mothers held their babies up to see
When I came riding out of Camelot.
The women smiled, and all the world smiled too.

And now, what woman's eyes would smile on me?
I still am beautiful, and yet what child
Would think of me as some high, heaven-sent thing,
An angel, clad in gold and miniver?

The world would run from me, and yet am I
No different from the queen they used to love.
If water, flowing silver over stones,
Is forded, and beneath the horses' feet
Grows turbid suddenly, it clears again,
And men will drink it with no thought of harm.
Yet I...

And you're the poet of this concern?
    I've seed your name in print
A dozen times, but I'll be dern
    I'd 'a' never 'a' took the hint
O' the size you are - fer I'd pictured you
    A kind of a tallish man -
Dark-complected and sallor too,
    And on the consumpted plan.

'Stid o' that you're little and small,
    With a milk-and-water face -
'Thout no snap in your eyes at all,
    Er nothin' to suit the case!
Kind o'look like a - I don't know -
    One o' these fair-ground chaps
That runs a thingamajig to blow,
    Er a candy-stand perhaps.

'Ll I've allus thought that poetry
    Was a sort of a - some disease -
Fer I knowed a poet once, and he
    Was techy and hard to please,
And moody-like, and kindo' sad
    And didn'...

        Love, should I set my heart upon a crown,
            Squander my years, and gain it,
        What recompense of pleasure could I own?
            For youth's red drops would stain it.

        Much have I thought on what our lives may mean,
            And what their best endeavor,
        Seeing we may not come again to glean,
            But, losing, lose forever.

        Seeing how zealots, making choice of pain,
            From home and country parted,
        Have thought it life to leave their fellows slain,
            Their women broken-hearted;

        How teasing truth a thousand faces claims,
            As in a broken mirror,
        And what a father died for in the flames
            His own son scorns as error;

 ...