AS ye came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How should I know your true love,
That have met many a one
As I came from the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?
She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath her form divine
In the earth or the air.
Such a one did I meet, good sir,
As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies
O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
soft curving.
It is good to be weary from that brilliant work
It is being God to feel your breathing under me
A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.
To give life you must take life,
and as our grief falls flat and hollow
upon the billion-blooded sea
I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed
with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures
lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes.
Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow
did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be
young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.
I hated you when it would have taken less courage
to love.
960
As plan for Noon and plan for Night
So differ Life and Death
In positive Prospective—
The Foot upon the Earth
At Distance, and Achievement, strains,
The Foot upon the Grave
Makes effort at conclusion
Assisted faint of Love.
Different days,
Different hours,
Many faces,
bouqutes of flowers,
Fantisies,
And mists,
Of dreams,
Lost away,
Onto the ways,
Of yesterday,
See the future,
Past untold,
In his arms,
Is her hold,
Watch the moments,
See me through,
As my love,
Moves on with you..
88
As by the dead we love to sit,
Become so wondrous dear—
As for the lost we grapple
Tho' all the rest are here—
In broken mathematics
We estimate our prize
Vast—in its fading ration
To our penurious eyes!
In the feathergrass steppe
Sources lie buried,
The thirsty sun knows
Life isn't raspberries.
In barren haymeadows
A child tarries,
Walnut crosier
Outstretched, gold-eyed,
The bracing treasure,
Slender, streams.
They bubble deep,
Both song and splashes, -
In the live coppice
An April peal.
More wondrous than God's lightning bolts,
The artesian well fills
The sham spays' dry dugs
With love's hypogean milk.
1
What precious thing are you making fast
In all these silken lines?
And where and to whom will it go at last?
Such subtle knots and twines!
I am tying up all my love in this,
With all its hopes and fears,
With all its anguish and all its bliss,
And its hours as heavy as years.
I am going to send it afar, afar,
To I know not where above;
To that sphere beyond the highest star
Where dwells the soul of my Love.
But in vain, in vain, would I make it fast
With countless subtle twines;
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs