II
I hear you singing in my breast,
I hear you chanting in my mind.
Is it the wind?
I feel your form upon my eyes,
I feel your fingers press my sight.
Is it the night?
I hear the little noise of feet
And footsteps come and come again.
Is it the rain?
And all alone with memory
My brain grows anxious for the day.
You 're long away.
“Will you look down once more, just once?
Down to the ground and keep your veil
Drawn o'er your half-guessed countenance
And smile—so frail?
“Thank you! For I have had a friend
Whose image came most vividly
Upon my soul, when with that bend
You looked from me.
“Gone? Yes! you cannot think how far,
Beyond the uttermost of thought.
She 's grown, as far things do, a star
In heaven's hand caught.
“But stars, you know, are very cold
And always white. They never bless
Just you, and in the night's great fold
Grow vague and less.
“And so it's sweet to feel sometimes
A colour, gesture, sound—a turn
That makes the heart grow dull with rhymes
And the soul's lips burn.
“Yes! sometimes fast about my heart
Something troubles me that I knew;
I find a stranger made me start,
As now did you.
“So pray don't think me rude. That face—
For the mere memory I would die.
You 've warmed my life with your—her grace.
Good-night, good-bye.”
[1896]
If you should lightly, as I 've known you, come
And find me of an evening crying here
At open windows of a changing home,
While beyond garden, houses, tree, and dome
Fades out the day and year;
If you should gently touch my shoulder, and
Turning I'd see as with a sweet surprise
You there, above me and about me, stand,
While the warm sunset passed a lucid hand
Over your face and eyes;
If then you softly, as I 've heard you, said
That all was well, I know not what or why,
But just for words' sake told me; while your head
Moved round, you passed away; and in your stead
An autumn night came by:
Still would the happiness of having stood
With one so nearly you tho' gone so soon,
Bring to my solitude a little good,—
As one who 's gladdened in a midnight wood
For having seen the moon.
Sometimes you seem so far away,
The very noise of thinking lulls,
And, on my vision, colour dulls
To vapour with sick wings of gray.
I wander out of Time and Mind.
The sense of my own life is lost.
One thought goes touching like a ghost
That found yet knows not where to find.
And all I know is just the jar
Of chime that trembles in my ear;
And all I ask is if the year
Is never tired as others are.
You charm a window in the South,
Your brow seen by the golden star;
And through warm dreams the gentle war
Of thought lures laughter to your mouth.
The wind lulls in the olive grove
And all becomes a vaporous sigh—
Low preludes to your ecstasy
Who love too much to think of love.—
October is in midnight swound
With just a vague gray blot for moon,
And like a scum the rotting brown
Of dead leaves drifts along the ground;
While I sit waiting for a time
I know not how, and marvel forth
Upon the vastness of the North,
Till marvel mellows into rhyme.
I heard a dead leaf run. It crossed
My way. For dark I could not see.
It rattled crisp and thin with frost
Out to the lea.
My steps I hast'ned, I was lost
For all the grief that came to me.
For now and ever thro' the host
Of sounds that blow from shrub and tree,—
A little echo sharply tossed,—
The footsteps chills me of her ghost;
And knowing naught I weep most drearily.
