Classic Poem

The sweet face loved within the city's smoke
Is not the face that, under birch or oak,
The poet loves and sings.
The wingless love of cities changes form
When mixed with ardour of the wild sea-storm,
And takes the sea-bird's wings.

This gives to love its splendour and its bloom,
This, the background of landscape. Love for home
Hath all the world indeed.
The maiden loved within a wood of firs
Is not the maiden of the lone hill-spurs
Or austere mountain-mead.

Change place, change power of loving. — Each new place
Hath its presiding tutelary grace,
Its woman-spirit there.
The bower of roses gives the poet love:
But lordlier passion thrills the peaks above
And the large roseless air.

The quiet garden gives the poet rest;
The spot where, lip to lip, and breast to breast,
Lilies and wall-flowers grow:
But passion revels 'mid the curves of seas,
Deeper and vaster than the waves of trees,
Crested with furious snow.

So who would make the landscape of his heart
Superb in aspect, perfect in each part,
Must add pure line to line:
Must love not only maidens of the sea
But maidens born where the cloud-shadows flee
O'er rolling slopes of pine.

Thus varying Nature adds a nameless charm
To beauty of dark eyes and curve of arm:
In each place each is new.
Nor did yon beechwood ever seem so fair
As when we met that mountain-maiden there
With eyes of mountain-blue.

For woman adds to Nature charm as well.
She adds the witchery to the ferny dell:
Without her all is nought.
Without the brightness of her eyes, the night
Misses and mourns its stars. The lily white
With lovelier touch she wrought.

She gives and she receives. The charm is hers
In truth that adds such magic to those firs
Upon the green hill-side.
The laughter of those branches in the woods
Follows and corresponds to all her moods,
Her love, her joy, her pride.

When boyhood's simpler hours are left behind,
The man at first seems deaf and dull and blind
To Nature's unchanged grace.
The boy saw wondrous beauty in the woods:
The man sees only leafy solitudes;
He longs for form and face.

But, later on, he catches further sight
Of woman — feels her in the snow-storm white,
In the hills' starlit sleep.
His growing worship of the royal rose
Is worship of the royal mouth that glows
Within the petals deep.

Never again is Nature wholly free
From woman now. Man knows her in the sea,
For Venus nestled there.
Man feels with magic and unspoken thrill
Her beauty in the beauty of the hill,
Her charm i' the sunset air.

Nature is woman's minister and slave.
The man resumes the worship that he gave
To Nature in years gone by.
He takes his homage back from flower and tree
And sunlit lake and thunder-shadowed sea
And star-embroidered sky.

He takes again the worship that he gave:
The lovely silver laugh o' the leaping wave
To woman he transfers.
She is the universe: she sways the whole.
For her the waters lift their tides and roll.
The witching moon is hers.

All things are hers, her own, by day, by night.
The man again revels in Nature's light,
But now loves what he knows.
The flowers are no more what the boy's heart dreamed
For something sweeter than the rose has gleamed
As it were within the rose.