Between the wet trees and the sorry steeple,
Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt,
Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty;

Beauty's a sinking light, ah, none too faithful;
But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer,
Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it.

Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit,
Safe also on our earth, begetting ever
Some one love worth the ages and the nations!

Falleth no thing that seemed to thee eternal.
Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining,

Awake! awake! I'll make of thee
My comrade, sleeping butterfly.

O vocables of love,
O zones of dreamt responses
Where wing on wing folds in
The negro centuries of sleep
And the thick lips compress
Compendiums of silence—

Throats claw the mirror of blind triumph,
Eyes pursue sight into the heart of terror.
Call within call
Succumbs to the indistinguishable
Wall within wall
Embracing the last crushed vocable,
The spoken unity of efforts.

O vocables of love,
The end of an end is an echo,
A last cry follows a last cry.
Finality of finality
Is perfection's touch of folly.
Ruin unfolds from ruin.

The snail and I cling to the rock,
We two alone by the glassy sea
That under the sun draws silently
Its breath, then breaks with spumy shock;
We two; for even the briny pool
Has not one shambling crab that moves;
But in its granite glossy grooves
The pent tide-water warms its face
And still weeds hang their idle lace
On looms of mosses green and cool.

The snail and I cling to the rock;
The tide is slipping inward slow.
Here to our clefts it soon will flow,
At his shell-house alone to knock.
The tide that daily comes with food

According to tradition
The place where sweethearts meet
Is meadowland and hillside,
And not the city street.
Love lingers when you say it
By lake and moonlight glow:
The poets all O. K. it—
It may be better so!

And yet I keep my trysting
In the department stores;
I always wait for Emma
At the revolving doors.
It might dismay the poets,
And yet it's wholly true—
My heart leaps when I know it's
My Emma, pushing through!

It may be more romantic
By brook or waterfall,
Yet better meet on pavements
Than never meet at all;

Days of my youth, ye fleet away,
As fades the bright Sun's cheering ray,
And scarce my infant hours are gone,
Ere Manhood's troubled step comes on.
My infant hours return no more
And all their happiness is o'er;
The stormy sea of life appears,
A scene of tumult and of tears.

Wit, whither wilt thou? Woe is me!
Always musing, fie for shame!
Sorry I am the same to see,
That love hath brought thee out of frame—
Out of frame and temper too;
This can love and fancy do!

Once I knew thee well advised;
But now, I am sure, 'tis nothing so.
Love thy senses hath disguised,
And her beauty bred thy woe—
Thy woe, thy time, thy downfall too;
This can love and fancy do!

Pale, and wan, and worn with care,
And all to melancholy bent:
Thus doth madmen use to fare
When their wits with love are spent—

With kisses I'll awake you love
So tenderly at morn,
The pledges of my fealty
Diurnally reborn.

We'll thread life's way together love,
And when the fading light
Dips softly over western hills
I'll kiss your eyes good-night.

There is another way to enter an apple:
a worm's way.
The small, round door
closes behind her. The world
and all its necessities
ripen around her like a room.

In the sweet marrow of a bone,
the maggot does not remember
the wingspread
of the mother, the green
shine of her body, nor even
the last breath of the dying deer.

I, too, have forgotten
how I came here, breathing
this sweet wind, drinking rain,
encased by the limits
of what I can imagine
and by a husk of stars.

The vast, vague dreams that are of little worth
I leave to dreamsome men,
And live well pleased the life of this good Earth—
The only world I ken.

And haply 'tis as fair as the orbs above,
That take with such a flaunted unconcern
My adoration, and the all-pure love
That asked for no return!