Identity

They are not gone whose lives in beauty so unfolding
    Have left their own sweet impress everywhere;
Like flowers, while we linger in beholding,
    Diffusing fragrance on the summer air.

They are not gone, for grace and goodness can not perish,
    But must develop in immortal bloom;
The viewless soul, the real self we love and cherish,
    Shall live and flourish still beyond the tomb.

They are not gone though lost to observation,
    And dispossessed of those dear forms of clay,
Though dust and ashes speak of desolation;
    The spirit-presence - this is ours alway.

No more, my deare, no more these counsels trie;
O giue my passions leaue to run their race;
Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace;
Let folke orecharg'd with braine against me crie;
Let clouds bedimme my face, breake in mine eye;
Let me no steps but of lost labour trace;
Let all the earth with scorne recount my case,
But do not will me from my loue to flie.
I do not enuie Aristotless wit,
Nor do aspire to Cæsars bleeding fame;
Nor ought do care though some aboue me sit;
Nor hope, nor wish another course to frame
But that which once may win thy cruell hart:
Thou art my wit, and thou my vertue art.

No ship of all that under sail or steam
Have gathered people to us more and more
But Pilgrim-manned the Mayflower in a dream
Has been her anxious convoy in to shore.

On a golden dawn in the dawn sublime
Of years ere the stars had ceased to sing,
Beautiful out of the sea-deeps cold
Aphrodite arose, the Flower of Time,
That, dear till the day of her blossoming,
The old, old Sea had borne in his heart.
Around her worshipping waves did part
Tremulous, glowing in rose and gold.

And the birds broke forth into singing sweet,
And flowers born scentless breathed perfume:
Softly she smiled upon Man forlorn,
And the music of love in his wild heart beat,
And down to the pit went his gods of gloom,
And earth grew bright and fair as a bride,
And folk in star-worlds wondering cried,
“Lo in the skies a new star is born!”

O Beloved, thus on my small world you
Rose, flushing it all with rosy flame!
Changing sad thought...

Fuggendo la prigione ov' Amor m' ebbe.

HE LONGS TO RETURN TO THE CAPTIVITY OF LOVE.


    Fleeing the prison which had long detain'd,
Where Love dealt with me as to him seem'd well,
Ladies, the time were long indeed to tell,
How much my heart its new-found freedom pain'd.
I felt within I could not, so bereaved,
Live e'en a day: and, midway, on my eyes
That traitor rose in so complete disguise,
A wiser than myself had been deceived:
Whence oft I've said, deep sighing for the past,
Alas! the yoke and chains of old to me
Were sweeter far than thus released to be.
Me wretched! but to learn mine ill at last;
With what sore trial must I now forget
Errors that round my path myself have set.

MACGREGOR.

    Heaven and the sea attend the dying day,
    And in their sadness overflow and blend--
    Faint gold, and windy blue, and green and gray:
    Far out amid them my pale soul I send.

    For, as they mingle, so mix life and death;
    An hour draws near when my day too will die;
    Already I forecast unheaving breath,
    Eviction on the moorland of yon sky.

    Coldly and sadly lone, unhoused, alone,
    Twixt wind-broke wave and heaven's uncaring space!
    At board and hearth from this time forth unknown!
    Refuge no more in wife or daughter's face!

    Cold, cold and sad, lone as that desert sea!
    Sad, lonely, as that hopeless, patient sky!
    Forward I cannot go, nor backward flee!
    I am not dead; I live, and cannot die!

They are fools who kiss and tell",
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he'll only hold his tongue.


Jenny and Me were engaged, you see,
On the eve of the Fancy Ball;
So a kiss or two was nothing to you
Or any one else at all.

Menny would go in a domino,
Pretty and pink but warm;
While I attended, clad in a splendid
Austrian uniform.

Now we had arranged, through notes exchanged
Early that afternoon,
At Number Four to waltz no more,
But to sit in the dusk and spoon.

I wish you to see that Jenny and Me
Had barely exchanged our troth;
So a kiss or two was strictly due
By, from, and between us both.

When Three was over, an eager lover,
I fled to the gloom outside;
And a Domino...

Midnight; bells toll, and along the cloud-high towers
The golden lights go out . . .
The yellow windows darken, the shades are drawn,
In thousands of rooms we sleep, we await the dawn,
We lie face down, we dream,
We cry aloud with terror, half rise, or seem
To stare at the ceiling or walls . . .
Midnight . . . the last of shattering bell-notes falls.
A rush of silence whirls over the cloud-high towers,
A vortex of soundless hours.

‘The bells have just struck twelve: I should be sleeping.
But I cannot delay any longer to write and tell you.
The woman is dead.
She died, you know the way. Just as we planned.
Smiling, with open sunlit eyes.
Smiling upon the outstretched fatal hand . . .’

He folds his letter, steps softly down the stairs.
The doors...

Because my overcoat's in pawn,
I choose to take my glass
Within a little bistro on
The rue du Montparnasse;
The dusty bins with bottles shine,
The counter's lined with zinc,
And there I sit and drink my wine,
And think and think and think.

I think of hoary old Stamboul,
Of Moslem and of Greek,
Of Persian in coat of wool,
Of Kurd and Arab sheikh;
Of all the types of weal and woe,
And as I raise my glass,
Across Galata bridge I know
They pass and pass and pass.

I think of citron-trees aglow,
Of fan-palms shading down,
Of sailors dancing heel and toe
With wenches black and brown;
And though it's all an ocean far
From Yucatan to France,
I'll bet beside the old bazaar
They dance and dance and dance.

I...

Listless he eyes the palisades
And sentries in the glare;
'Tis barren as a pelican-beach
But his world is ended there.

Nothing to do; and vacant hands
Bring on the idiot-pain;
He tries to think--to recollect,
But the blur is on his brain.

Around him swarm the plaining ghosts
Like those on Virgil's shore--
A wilderness of faces dim,
And pale ones gashed and hoar.

A smiting sun. No shed, no tree;
He totters to his lair--
A den that sick hands dug in earth
Ere famine wasted there,

Or, dropping in his place, he swoons,
Walled in by throngs that press,
Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead--
Dead in his meagreness.

"'He cometh not,' she said."
- MARIANA

It will not be to-day and yet
I think and dream it will; and let
The slow uncertainty devise
So many sweet excuses, met
With the old doubt in hope's disguise.

The panes were sweated with the dawn;
Yet through their dimness, shriveled drawn,
The aigret of one princess-feather,
One monk's-hood tuft with oilets wan,
I glimpsed, dead in the slaying weather.

This morning, when my window's chintz
I drew, how gray the day was! - Since
I saw him, yea, all days are gray! -
I gazed out on my dripping quince,
Defruited, gnarled; then turned away

To weep, but did not weep: but felt
A colder anguish than did melt
About the tearful-visaged year! -
Then flung the lattice wide, and smelt...

A wearied pilgrim I have wander'd here,
Twice five-and-twenty, bate me but one year;
Long I have lasted in this world; 'tis true
But yet those years that I have lived, but few.
Who by his gray hairs doth his lustres tell,
Lives not those years, but he that lives them well:
One man has reach'd his sixty years, but he
Of all those three-score has not lived half three:
He lives who lives to virtue; men who cast
Their ends for pleasure, do not live, but last.

What will you say tonight, poor lonely soul,
What will you say old withered heart of mine,
To the most beautiful, the best, most dear,
Whose heavenly regard brings back your bloom?

We will assign our pride to sing her praise:
Nothing excels the sweetness of her will;
Her holy body has an angel's scent,
Her eye invests us with a cloak of light.

Whether it be in night and solitude,
Or in the streets among the multitude,
Her ghost before us dances like a torch.

It speaks out: 'I am lovely and command
That you will love only the Beautiful;
I am your Guardian, Madonna, Muse!'

Cool shades and dews are round my way,
And silence of the early day;
Mid the dark rocks that watch his bed,
Glitters the mighty Hudson spread,
Unrippled, save by drops that fall
From shrubs that fringe his mountain wall;
And o'er the clear still water swells
The music of the Sabbath bells.

All, save this little nook of land
Circled with trees, on which I stand;
All, save that line of hills which lie
Suspended in the mimic sky,
Seems a blue void, above, below,
Through which the white clouds come and go,
And from the green world's farthest steep
I gaze into the airy deep.

Loveliest of lovely things are they,
On earth, that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
Even love, lon...

        Spring-time is coming again, my dear;
            Sunshine and violets blue, you know;
        Crocuses lifting their sleepy heads
            Out of their sheets of snow.
        And I know a blossom sweeter by far
        That violets blue, or crocuses are,
            And bright as the sunbeam's glow.
        But how can I dare to look in her eyes,
            Colored with heaven's own hue?
        That wouldn't do at all, my dear,
            It really wouldn't do.

        Her hair is a rippling, tossing sea;
            In its golden depths the fairies play,
        Beckoning, dancing, mocking there,
            Luring my heart away.
        And her merry lips are the ripest red
        That ever addled a poor man's head,
            Or...

A precise woman with a short haircut brings order
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
the wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.

A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)

I

Descend ye Nine! descend and sing;
The breathing instruments inspire,
Wake into voice each silent string,
And sweep the sounding lyre!
In a sadly-pleasing strain
Let the warbling lute complain:
Let the loud trumpet sound,
'Till the roofs all around
The shrill echo's rebound:
While in more lengthen'd notes and slow,
The deep, majestic, solemn organs blow.
Hark! the numbers, soft and clear,
Gently steal upon the ear;
Now louder, and yet louder rise,
And fill with spreading sounds the skies;
Exulting in triumph now swell the bold notes,
In broken air, trembling, the wild music floats;
'Till, by degrees, remote and small,
The strains decay,
And melt away,
In a dying, dying fall.

II

By Music, minds an equal tem...

'Tis not the beam of her bright blue eye,
Nor the smile of her lip of rosy dye,
Nor the dark brown wreaths of her glossy hair,
Nor her changing cheek, so rich and rare.
Oh! these are the sweets of a fairy dream,
The changing hues of an April sky.
They fade like dew in the morning beam,
Or the passing zephyr's odour'd sigh.

'Tis a dearer spell that bids me kneel,
'Tis the heart to love, and the soul to feel:
'Tis the mind of light, and the spirit free,
And the bosom that heaves alone for me.
Oh! these are the sweets that kindly stay
From youth's gay morning to age's night;
When beauty's rainbow tints decay,
Love's torch still burns with a holy light.

Soon will the bloom of the fairest fade,
And love will droop in the cheerless shade,
Or if...