The Poetical Works of John Payne :: :: University of Virginia Library

TO part in midmost summer of our love,
When first the flower-scents and the linnets' tune
Have fallen into harmonies of June
About our lives new linked and all above
The flower-blue heaven lies for bliss aswoon,—
Were this not sad? Yet love must live by pain,
If one would win its fragrance to remain.

Were it not sadder, in the years to come,
To feel the hand-clasp slacken for long use,
The untuned heartstrings for long stress refuse
To yield old harmonies, the songs grow dumb
For weariness and all the old spells lose
The first enchantment? Yet this thing must be.
Love is but mortal, save in memory.

Too rare a flower it is, its bloom to keep
In the raw cold of our unlovely clime,
Too frail to thrive in this our weary time.
I would not have thy kisses, sweet, grow cheap
Nor thy dear looks round out an idle rhyme;
And so I hold that we loose hands and part.
Dear, with my hand you do not loose my heart.

Sweet is the fragrance of remembered love;
The memory of clasped hands is very sweet,
Joined lips that did not once too often meet
And never knew that saddest word ‘Enough!’
And so 'tis well that, ere our Springtime fleet,
Thus in the heyday of our love part we:
Farewell, and all white omens go with thee!

237

Is it not well that we should both retain
The early bloom of love, untouched and pure?
There is no way by which it may endure,
Save if we part before its sweetness wane
And wither; since that life is so impure
And love so frail, it may not blossom long,
Unscathed, in this our stress of care and wrong.

We were not sure of love, my sweet,—and yet
The fragrance of its Spring shall never die.
Sweetheart, we shall be sure of memory,
That amber of the years, where Time doth set
The dear-belovèd shapes of things gone by,
That so their gentle semblance may evade
The ills that lurk in eld's ungenial shade.

So, sweet, our love shall, in the death of it,
Relive, as corn that withers in the ground,
Yet with fresh blades doth presently abound
And yields full golden sheavage in time fit.
It may be that new flowers will too be found
Among the stubble and the pale sweet blooms
Of Autumn glorify our woodland glooms.

The memory of our kisses shall survive
And in Time's treasure-house be consecrate.
Our love shall with the distance grow more great
And shall for us be sweeter than alive,
When dead; for memory shall reduplicate
The sweetness of the past, till you and I
Cherish as angels' food each bygone sigh.