Fie, foolish earth, think you the heaven wants glory
Because your shadows do yourself benight?
All's dark unto the blind, let them be sorry;
The heavens in themselves are ever bright.

Fie, fond desire, think you that love wants glory
Because your shadows do yourself benight?
The hopes and fears of lust may make men sorry,
But love still in herself finds her delight.

Then earth, stand fast, the sky that you benight
Will turn again and so restore your glory;
Desire, be steady, hope is your delight,

You little stars that live in skies
And glory in Apollo's glory,
In whose aspects conjoined lies,
The heaven's will and nature's story,
Joy to be likened to those eyes,
Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry;
For when you force thoughts from above,
These overrule your force by love.

And thou, O Love, which in these eyes
Hast married Reason with Affection,
And made them saints of Beauty's skies,
Where joys are shadows of perfection,
Lend me thy wings that I may rise
Up, not by worth, but thy election;

But into order falls our life at last,
Though in the retrospection jarred and blent.
Broken ambition, love misplaced or spent
Too soon, and slander busy with the past:
Sorrows too sweet to lose, or vexing joy.
But Time will bring oblivion of annoy,
And Silence bind the blows that words have lent;
And we will dwell, unheeding Love or Fame
Like him who has outlived a shining Name:
And Peace will come, as evening comes to him,
No leader now of men, no longer proud
But poor and private, watching the sun's rim;

O rest divine! O golden certainty
Of love! when love's half smile, illumining pain,
Bade all bright things immutable remain.
Dreaming I stand, the low brook drawling by,
Her flowerlike mien, her mountain step to mark.
Ah, I recall when her least look again
Could mar the music in my happy mind
And plunge me into doubt, her faintest sigh
Stir all the fixed pillars of my heaven,
Commingling them in mist and stormy dark!
And all together, as I have seen the rain
When the whole shower is swinging in the wind,

O hard endeavor, to blend in with these
Dark shadings of the past a darker grief
Or blur with stranger woes a wound so chief,
Though the great world turn slow with agonies.
What though the forest windflowers fell and died
And Gertrude sleeps at Gulielma's side?
They have their tears, nor turn to us their eyes:
But we pursue our dead with groans and cries
And bitter reclamations to the term
Of undiscerning darkness and the worm;
Then sit in silence down and darkly dwell
Through the slow years on all we loved, and tell

That lamp thou fill'st in Eros' name to-night,
O Hero, shall the Sestian augurs take
To-morrow, and for drowned Leander's sake
To Anteros its fireless lip shall plight.
Aye, waft the unspoken vow: yet dawn's first light
On ebbing storm and life twice ebb'd must break;
While 'neath no sunrise, by the Avernian Lake,
Lo where Love walks, Death's pallid neophyte.

That lamp within Anteros' shadowy shrine
Shall stand unlit (for so the gods decree)
Till some one man the happy issue see
Of a life's love, and bid its flame to shine:

Love to his singer held a glistening leaf,
And said: ‘The rose-tree and the apple-tree
Have fruits to vaunt or flowers to lure the bee;
And golden shafts are in the feathered sheaf
Of the great harvest-marshal, the year's chief,
Victorious Summer; aye and 'neath warm sea
Strange secret grasses lurk inviolably
Between the filtering channels of sunk reef.
All are my blooms; and all sweet blooms of love
To thee I gave while Spring and Summer sang;
But Autumn stops to listen, with some pang
From those worse things the wind is moaning of.

She loves him; for her infinite soul is Love,
And he her lodestar. Passion in her is
A glass facing his fire, where the bright bliss
Is mirrored, and the heat returned. Yet move
That glass, a stranger's amorous flame to prove
And it shall turn, by instant contraries,
Ice to the moon; while her pure fire to his
For whom it burns, clings close i' the heart's alcove.

Lo! they are one. With wifely breast to breast
And circling arms, she welcomes all command
Of love,—her soul to answering ardours fann'd:

The hour which might have been yet might not be,
 Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore
 Yet whereof life was barren,—on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea?
Bondchild of all consummate joys set free,
 It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before
 The house of Love, hears through the echoing door
His hours elect in choral consonancy.
But lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand
Together tread at last the immortal strand
 With eyes where burning memory lights love home?
Lo! how the little outcast hour has turned

Sweet Love,—but oh! most dread Desire of Love
Life-thwarted. Linked in gyves I saw them stand,
Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand:
And one was eyed as the blue vault above:
But hope tempestuous like a fire-cloud hove
I' the other's gaze, even as in his whose wand
Vainly all night with spell-wrought power has spann'd
The unyielding caves of some deep treasure-trove.

Also his lips, two writhen flakes of flame,
Made moan: ‘Alas O Love, thus leashed with me!
Wing-footed thou, wing-shouldered, once born free: