Classic Poem

That thou wilt faithful be, and full of love and sweetness;
That thou wilt let fair Love to exquisite completeness
Round off our marriage-song,
I pray. I pray that through the years that stretch before us
God's sun may ever shine with tenderer bounty o'er us:
I pray that my love's strength may make thee strong.

I pray that every day, as day past day goes gliding,
I may be at thy side with gentlest love and guiding,
With tenderest voice and heart,—
Bestowing upon thee the love that I have lavished
On stars and flowers and waves, bright-hearted things soon ravished
Away by time's hand as the years depart.

I pray that thou mayest know—that God himself may teach thee—
How vast a fight I fought to win thee, love, and reach thee;
How awful was the strain.
I pray that thou mayest know that if my soul hath won thee
The power that cast its spell around thine heart and on thee
Was just the power of love and desperate pain:—

The power that moves the stars,—that reaches God and binds him:
Yea, in the farthest bower of mistiest heaven it finds him
And brings him to our side:
The power that shone through Christ when on the blood-stamed gibbet
He hung for hours, that love might once for all exhibit
Its deathless kinghood through the man who died.

And oh that I may be for ever and for ever
Thy patient lover true—lose heart and sweet hope never—
For this, O love, I pray:
That I may win thine heart so utterly and sweetly
That thou mayest never need, content in me completely,
To turn, e'en for one hour, thine eyes away.

I pray that God will give my heart the power to hold thee
And my strong arms the right in tenderest clasp to fold thee
O sweetheart, O my queen!
I pray that I may be thy leader and thy poet
Bearing all pain for thee, that thou mayest then forego it
And mayest securely on my strong soul lean.

O darling of my heart,—if I to-day may name thee
So, once, and may for once by sweetest title claim thee—
O darling of my soul—
I pray that I may win from God the dreadful power
In spite of hell and death, to hold thee, O my flower,
And win for thee, with thee, new life's white goal.

That I may faithful be—to death if it be needed:
That ever by thy heart my love-voice may be heeded
I pray,—that I may be
Each morning more in love, and every morning truer,
Even as the sky to God is every morning bluer
And bluer all the strange depths of the sea.