 | Lays of France |  |
—O men and women, Love is king
Upon the earth; summer and spring
Will serve him in the year to come
With all new rapture, when the blast
Of many a long-drawn autumn day,
Made golden with fair thought and dumb
Remembering of the perfect past,
Shall have swept utterly away
The dry dead leaves of summer and spring
That spent themselves with worshipping
His latest godhead perfectly:
His realms are all the lands that lie
Beneath yon distant unknown sky—
Where only freed souls go unseen
To different dooms: his are the green
Of grass, the blue of seas, the red
Of passionate roses,—each frail life
Of rose and bird and slight thing rife
With sunlight is but sweetly led
By him to its sweet life and death.
But, more than all, while ye have breath
And rosy relic of the rose
Born with you—men and women, lo,
Your rich eternal hearts that grow
Like widening flowers that cannot close
Their leaves—are Love's, to turn and use,
And work upon as he may choose.
Upon the earth; summer and spring
Will serve him in the year to come
With all new rapture, when the blast
Of many a long-drawn autumn day,
Made golden with fair thought and dumb
Remembering of the perfect past,
Shall have swept utterly away
The dry dead leaves of summer and spring
109
His latest godhead perfectly:
His realms are all the lands that lie
Beneath yon distant unknown sky—
Where only freed souls go unseen
To different dooms: his are the green
Of grass, the blue of seas, the red
Of passionate roses,—each frail life
Of rose and bird and slight thing rife
With sunlight is but sweetly led
By him to its sweet life and death.
But, more than all, while ye have breath
And rosy relic of the rose
Born with you—men and women, lo,
Your rich eternal hearts that grow
Like widening flowers that cannot close
Their leaves—are Love's, to turn and use,
And work upon as he may choose.
| Lays of France | |