Anyta and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

This sorrow-shadowed world would sparkle, bright
As painless Paradise to its new Eve,
If earth's love-woven threads were lines of light;
For not the basest bosom but 't will heave
At times love-laden, and the many grieve
Love-anguished daily, while to most is dear
Lone life through one or more to whom they cleave,
In thought tracking them hourly, far or near,
Sending Love warm o'er arctic trail or desert drear.

II.

And drearier than Sahara's starless waste,
When winds are playing billows with its sands,
Colder than frozen moonbeam, pallid traced
Through Greenland's slanting snows, the soul in bands
Of rigid self so fortressed it withstands
Hot summons of beleaguering troops of woe,
That myriad-tongued with thin briarian hands
Upwail and stretch from their dejection low,
And moan like tempests that through foundering cordage blow.

III.

If in such loveless cave could live a soul,
And not—in deep self-darkened dungeon pent,
Uncoupled from the sunn'd celestial whole—
Lose its immortal gait and hardiment,

And, forfeiting the limitless ascent
Of the undying, wane to earthy breath,
To vex the sea, with wintry blusterings blent,
Or creep plague-tainted lusty sheets beneath,
Or howl round hearths where love is weeping for a death.

IV.

Full blest is only he who warmly weeps;
And Love's most sacred fonts are brim with tears,
Through which grow visible his voiceless deeps,
As heaven's through night's blue gush of farthest spheres.
These drops are jewels stored in toilsome years,
Wherein Love glistens on his gala-days
Of sorrow, sad despair, and ardent fears,
That rouse great Love, who foremost pangs allays;
For his wide glow first fires then soothes them with his blaze,

V.

As the hot helpful Sun Spring's stormy rains,
Who with his tender bloom-enkindling heat
Strains them to joyous fruit and wipes their stains.
High partner of the sovereign Sun, Love's feet
Glide like Aurora's arrows that defeat
The flying darkness and uplight the dew:
Where'er he comes, life's beauties rise to greet
His flame: the faint expended old renew
Their juices, and the young pant for the good and true.

VI.

Love is the measure of the more or less
Of depth in deed, from the brave lonely fall
Of martyred saint to nursing lioness,
Who shields her cub with death. Upon the pall,
Folded in every heart, waiting the call

Of deathful selfishness, Love throws his spark,
And like benignant light that rends the wall
Of cloud to hang on high the exultant arc,
Love's ray cleaves the bleak tempest and the lurid dark.

VII.

The tender breath of timorous spring doth kiss
With Love's first joy the wishful earth, that drinks
The welcome warmth, and tokens of her bliss
Soon gives in blossomed lea, and on the brinks
Of quickened brooks, through hyacinths and pinks
And violets, in the new bridal coats
Of amorous flies, the clinking golden links
Of gleesome matin-minstrelsy, that floats
From groves thrilled by the quiring of love-swollen throats.

VIII.

Through the croaked plainings of this jangled life
No song doth sparkle but its melody

Is Love's, whose music sleeps in hottest strife,
And wakes to smooth destruction's deepening sea,
Wooes the palled ear of pining misery,
The sullen eye of outcast crime endears;
So strong, that, were Love banished, earth would be
One vast encampment of armed hates and fears,
A restless desolation, void of smiles and tears.

IX.

History's best beacons, her refulgent torches
By Love are lighted, whose empyrean fire
Makes Moses' sacred mountain smoke, and scorches
The bush, stifles the lower with a higher
Heroic heat in the doomed Brutus' sire,
Turns heavenward Dante's fruitful look that roams
Through Hell, deep tunes the wistful minstrel-choir,
And warmer glows than even in tenderest homes
In the dim vaulted sweep of great cathedral domes.

X.

The starry mazes peopling heaven are gifts
Of Love, and by their mystic light we read
The cipher of the eternal hand that lifts
The film of seeming chaos, plants the seed
That grows to suns, by whose great touch is freed
The joy of hopeful being, and momently
Are loosed souls multitudinous, of breed
So lordly they are born immortal, free,
Co-heirs from God of hope and faith and charity.

XI.

The soul's ascendant recompense 't is Love's
To heap, urging life's motion toward the heights
Where man puts on his majesty and moves
Erect, purged to unbarbèd free delights;
Where—feebler feebler grown the sordid fights
Of self—activities more calm and wide

And meedful by his breath are fed, and rights
To duties high deported so allied,
His pulses are with ceaseless benediction plied.

XII.

Tempered in us by Love is the great awe
That else would freeze the swelling thoughts that soar
To seek the all-holy source of life and law,
To which we then are nearest when we pour
Ourselves upon our fellows, and our core
Grows seedful ripe through self-forgetfulness,
And we, feeling Love's health through every pore,
Nearer and nearer to the godhead press,
And blessèd are in that we live to love and bless.