English

You are not sorrowful, closed eyes, sad feet;
O drooping head, it is not sorrow.
Pale outstretched hands that have let all things go from you,
O outstretched hands receiving all things to you,
Dominion cannot be over you of our confusion,
O unrequiring, unresisting strength!

You have gone beyond sorrow,
You have gone beyond sorrow,
You have known the end of all longing,
All strife;
Not meekness is upon you, but submission
That of its own will has yielded its will.

Oh, take me into that abandon!

I took my sorrow into the forest—
Oh, do not hurt the forest with your sorrow!

I took my bitterness to the sea,
But the sea answered,
The brine of my own bitterness is bitter enough.

I could not reach into the sky's height and calm;
I was ashamed to lay my weeping on the bosom of the earth.

— A hog who had been an alderman —

For dainties I've had of them all,
At taverns, Lord Mayor's, and Guildhall,
Where the purveyors, nothing stingy,
To fill the wallet,
And pamper the palate,
Have rarities brought from India.

Then what signifies what one takes in,
For, when one's cram'd up to the chin,
Why, really, good friend to my thinking,
If on venison and wines,
Or on hogwash, one dines,
At last 'tis but eating and drinking.

Besides, I've no books I arrange,

Dear Anna, hast ne'er heard it told
How florists have the curious power
To graft on some rude garden-plant
A tender and exquisite flower?
Thus are our natures made as one,
In union mystic and divine;
Thus, sweetest rose of womanhood,
Thy life is blooming into mine.

" Forget " thee! Whence the childish fear?
Ah, vain would be such heart-recalling!
Have I not felt thine angel smiles, —
Thy tears upon my bosom falling?
How oft, when, through our lattice stealing,
The moonlight came in quivering gleams,

I.

No passionless creature of duty,
No child of capricious delay,
Our love, like the goddess of beauty,
Sprang into warm life in a day!
Around us her magic spells flinging,
She smiled as she saw we adored,
And then, in a burst of wild singing,
Her soul's morning raptures outpoured.

Ah, soon changed that song, born in heaven,
To farewells and passionate sighs!

A rose once pressed against thy lips,
Then gayly flung to me,
Is all the gift I treasure up
In memory of thee;
It bringeth back that golden time,
Too beautiful to last,
The glad and love-lit past, Therese,
The glad and love-lit past!

Then comes the memory of the change
Which fell upon thy heart,
As falls the frost upon the rose
When summer suns depart;
And now returns that weary time
With doubts and glooms o'ercast,
The sad and mournful past, Therese,
The sad and mournful past!

Why have you gone down in me,
O light of life, sun of the world?
Why is your radiance gone from me?
The path of my life wherein I walked
So unfaltering
Has stopped under my feet;
The shadows are heavy about me,
There is no direction or end; I stumble.

It is only you can make the path sure;
Reason and foresight go ever round and round,
And our continual confusion and noisy seeking of the will
Only you can set in eager forward ways.

Come, deceive me again into happiness!

What has become of me? My self is fallen in pieces.
The walls of my house, the corridors where I walked,
The towers and high rooms that looked out —
Have been shaken till they are fallen in ruins;
The timbers are loosened from each other,
Hanging disjoined, against emptiness, broken;
I drift as a ghost over the rafters,
The crumbled roof.

What does the rock on which the waves of the sea beat know of the sea?
The rock beholds the broken surface of the water, the hurling spray,
But he has no sight of the quiet, unmarred,
The deep places of treasure.
He feels the caresses of the sea, hears the passionate cry
Of the sea's song at his feet, breaking upon him,
And to the rock it appears
That it is the rock who draws the sea's caresses, her desire.
But it is only the driving of the moon, that drives all seas.
Whatever rock the sea touches upon,
That the tides urge her upon,

Love has given me my singing, —
Take then what you have taken.
All the longing and denial,
The unrest my life has shaken,
I forgive. Much sorrow love can bring,
But it was love that stirred my lips to sing!

Oh, you taught to me my hunger,
You may claim me by that token;
But the word my hunger taught me
That my hunger might be spoken —
This to me, to me — not you — belongs;
You had my love, but mine shall be my songs!