And because you love me
think you you do not hate me?
Ha, since you love me to ecstasy
it follows you hate me to ecstasy.

Because when you hear me
go down the road outside the house
you must come to the window to watch me go,
do you think it is pure worship?

Because, when I sit in the room,
here, in my own house,
and you want to enlarge yourself with this friend of mine,
such a friend as he is,
yet you cannot get beyond your awareness of me
you are held back by my being in the same world with you,
do you think it is bliss alone?
sheer harmony?

No doubt if I were dead, you must
reach into death after me,
but would not your hate reach even more madly than your love?
your impassioned, unfinished hate?

Since you have a p...

O sweet sincerity! -
Where modern methods be
What scope for thine and thee?

Life may be sad past saying,
Its greens for ever graying,
Its faiths to dust decaying;

And youth may have foreknown it,
And riper seasons shown it,
But custom cries: "Disown it:

"Say ye rejoice, though grieving,
Believe, while unbelieving,
Behold, without perceiving!"

- Yet, would men look at true things,
And unilluded view things,
And count to bear undue things,

The real might mend the seeming,
Facts better their foredeeming,
And Life its disesteeming.

February 1899.

As Nancy at her toilette sat,
Admiring this, and blaming that,
Tell me, she said, but tell me true,
The nymph who could your heart subdue.
What sort of charms does she possess?
Absolve me, fair one, I'll confess
With pleasure, I replied: Her hair,
In ringlets rather dark than fair,
Does down her ivory bosom roll,
And hiding half adorns the whole,
In her high forehead's fair half round
Love sits, in open triumph crown'd;
He, in the dimple of her chin,
In private state, by friends is seen.
Her eyes are neither black nor grey,
Nor fierce nor feeble is their ray;
Their dubious lustre seems to show
Something that speaks nor yes nor no.
Her lips no living bard, I weet,
May say how red, how round, how sweet:
Old Homer only could indite
Their ...

Oft I remember those whom I have known
    In other days, to whom my heart was led
    As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
    But absent, and their memories overgrown
With other thoughts and troubles of my own,
    As graves with grasses are, and at their head
    The stone with moss and lichens so o'erspread,
    Nothing is legible but the name alone.
And is it so with them?    After long years,
    Do they remember me in the same way,
    And is the memory pleasant as to me?
I fear to ask; yet wherefore are my fears?
    Pleasures, like flowers, may wither and decay,
    And yet the root perennial may be.

What sight so lured him thro’ the fields he knew
As where earth’s green stole into heaven’s own hue,

Far–far–away?

What sound was dearest in his native dells?
The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells

Far–far–away.

What vague world-whisper, mystic pain or joy,
Thro’ those three words would haunt him when a boy,

Far–far–away?

A whisper from his dawn of life? a breath
From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death

Far–far–away?

Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of Birth,
The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth,

Far–far–away?

What charm in words, a charm no words could give?
O dying words, can Music make you live

Far–far–away?

Unquiet Childhood here by special grace
Forgets her nature, opening like a flower
That neither feeds nor wastes its vital power
In painful struggles. Months each other chase,
And nought untunes that Infant's voice; no trace
Of fretful temper sullies her pure cheek;
Prompt, lively, self-sufficing, yet so meek
That one enrapt with gazing on her face
(Which even the placid innocence of death
Could scarcely make more placid, heaven more bright)
Might learn to picture, for the eye of faith,
The Virgin, as she shone with kindred light;
A nursling couched upon her mother's knee,
Beneath some shady palm of Galilee.

I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one cleanly,
as with a new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.

'Tis pity, ev'ry maiden knows,
Just as she cools, Love warmer grows;
But, if the chill be too severe,
Trust me, he'll wither in a tear.

Thus will the spring-flow'r bud and blow,
Wrapp'd round in many a fold of snow;
But, if an ice-wind pierce the sky,
'Twill drop upon its bed, and die!

    O Sylvia, dost thou remember still
    That period of thy mortal life,
    When beauty so bewildering
    Shone in thy laughing, glancing eyes,
    As thou, so merry, yet so wise,
    Youth's threshold then wast entering?

    How did the quiet rooms,
    And all the paths around,
    With thy perpetual song resound,
    As thou didst sit, on woman's work intent,
    Abundantly content
    With the vague future, floating on thy mind!
    Thy custom thus to spend the day
    In that sweet time of youth and May!

    How could I, then, at times,
    In those fair days of youth,
    The only happy days I ever knew,
    My hard tasks dropping, or my careless rhymes,
    My station take, on father's balcony,
    And listen to thy voice'...

My mother's kiss, my mother's kiss,
    I feel its impress now;
As in the bright and happy days
    She pressed it on my brow.

You say it is a fancied thing
    Within my memory fraught;
To me it has a sacred place -
    The treasure house of thought.

Again, I feel her fingers glide
    Amid my clustering hair;
I see the love-light in her eyes,
    When all my life was fair.

Again, I hear her gentle voice
    In warning or in love.
How precious was the faith that taught
    My soul of things above.

The music of her voice is stilled,
    Her lips are paled in death.
As precious pearls I'll clasp her words
    Until my latest breath.

The world has scattered round my path
    Honor and wealth and fame;
B...

"Now who shall say he loves me not."

He wooed her first in an atmosphere
    Of tender and low-breathed sighs;
But the pang of her laugh went cutting clear
    To the soul of the enterprise;
"You beg so pert for the kiss you seek
    It reminds me, John," she said,
"Of a poodle pet that jumps to 'speak'
    For a crumb or a crust of bread."

And flashing up, with the blush that flushed
    His face like a tableau-light,
Came a bitter threat that his white lips hushed
    To a chill, hoarse-voiced "Good night!"
And again her laugh, like a knell that tolled,
    And a wide-eyed mock surprise, -
"Why, John," she said, "you have taken cold
    In the chill air of your sighs!"

And then he turned, and with teeth tight clenched,
    He told...

'T is evening: the black snail has got on his track,
And gone to its nest is the wren,
And the packman snail, too, with his home on his back,
Clings to the bowed bents like a wen.

The shepherd has made a rude mark with his foot
Where his shadow reached when he first came,
And it just touched the tree where his secret love cut
Two letters that stand for love's name.

The evening comes in with the wishes of love,
And the shepherd he looks on the flowers,
And thinks who would praise the soft song of the dove,
And meet joy in these dew-falling hours.

For Nature is love, and finds haunts for true love,
Where nothing can hear or intrude;
It hides from the eagle and joins with the dove,
In beautiful green solitude.

Slow buds the pink dawn like a rose
From out night's gray and cloudy sheath;
Softly and still it grows and grows,
Petal by petal, leaf by leaf;
Each sleep-imprisoned creature breaks
Its dreamy fetters, one by one,
And love awakes, and labor wakes,--
The morning comes before the sun.

What is this message from the light
So fairer far than light can be?
Youth stands a-tiptoe, eager, bright,
In haste the risen sun to see;
Ah! check thy lunging, restless heart,
Count the charmed moments as they run,
It is life's best and fairest part,
This morning hour before the sun.

When once thy day shall burst to flower,
When once the sun shall climb the sky,
And busy hour by busy hour,
The urgent noontide draws anigh;
When the long shadows creep...

I cannot raise my eyelids up from sleep,
But I am visited with thoughts of you;
Slumber has no refreshment half so deep
As the sweet morn, that wakes my heart anew.

I cannot put away life's trivial care,
But you straightway steal on me with delight:
My purest moments are your mirror fair;
My deepest thought finds you the truth most bright.

You are the lovely regent of my mind,
The constant sky to my unresting sea;
Yet, since 'tis you that rule me, I but find
A finer freedom in such tyranny.

Were the world's anxious kingdoms govern'd so,
Lost were their wrongs, and vanish'd half their woe!

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the g...

XI. Love's Ambition.


    I must invoke thee for my spirit's good,
    And prove myself un-guilty of the crime
    Of mere self-seeking, though with this imbued.
    I sing as sings the mavis in a wood,
    Content to be alive at harvest time.
    Had I its wings I should not be withstood!
    But I will weave my fancies into rhyme,
    And greet afar the heights I cannot climb.
    I will invoke thee, Love! though far away,
    And pay thee homage, as becomes a knight
    Who longs to keep his true-love in his sight.
    Yea, I will soar to thee, i...

"To-day" Oh! not to-day shall sound
Thy mild and gentle voice;
Nor yet "to-morrow" will it bid
My heart rejoice.

But one, one fondly treasured thing
Is left me 'mid decay,
This record, hallowed with thy thoughts
Of yesterday.

Chaste thoughts and holy, such as still
To purest hearts are given,
Breathing of Earth, yet wafting high
The soul to Heaven;

Soaring beyond the bounds of Time,
Beyond the blight of Death,
To worlds where "parting is no more,"
"Nor Life a breath."

'Tis true they whisper mournfully
Of buds too bright to bloom,
Of hopes that blossomed but to die
Around the tomb.

Still they are sweet remembrances
Of life's unclouded day
Sketches of mind, which death alone
Can wrench away;
<...

There is silence that saith, "Ah me!"
There is silence that nothing saith;
One the silence of life forlorn,
One the silence of death;
One is, and the other shall be.

One we know and have known for long,
One we know not, but we shall know,
All we who have ever been born;
Even so, be it so, -
There is silence, despite a song.

Sowing day is a silent day,
Resting night is a silent night;
But whoso reaps the ripened corn
Shall shout in his delight,
While silences vanish away.