University of Virginia Library

Before I lose Love's being, and my heart
Ceases to feel the pressure of his dart,
I would return, once only, to my love,
As to the sweet nest of a mountain dove
Her amorous mate returns with eager cries;
So would I once more gird me, and arise,
And seek, rejecting fiercely milder pleas,
Th' unaltered and imperishable seas,
Where, with that soft-haired woman for my bride,
I dreamed upon the silver-flowing tide.

All presents to her feet, and songs, I brought,
And wayward golden gifts transcending thought,
And all the blossom of a hoped-for name,
And passion, as a beautiful large flame
Aspiring, with red increase of clear top,
To mountain-summits, where God's eagles stop
Upon their journey to the heavenly city;
All tenderness, and fair renown, and pity,
And goodness, and the eternal hope of life,
I spread before her sweet embroidered knife,
That she might slay the very heart of me,
Like a white breaker tumbling in mid-sea
Upon the tiny fabric of a boat;
So was I willing never more to float
Upon the yeasty tempest of life's tide,
But rather prayed that, clasping a cold bride,
I might awake, with flourish of cold horn,
The mists and melancholy planets born
Among the icy mountain-tops of death;
Yea, had her sweet and honey-scented breath
But mingled, as a flowing stream, with mine,
We had not been as mortals, but divine,
Made one for ever with th' unyielding gods,
And all their fame, and glitter of their rods,
Mixed in some mystic undivided way,
And ruling, with indisputable sway,
The plumage of the forest, and the corn,
And all the flowers from Sol's sweet breathing born,
The poppies red that fragrant Ceres wears,
And myrtle that full-bosomed Venus bears,
And every tiny blossom of the field—
Some such a sceptre we had come to wield.

And we had ridden as sea-birds on the foam,
And made the azure height a ready home,
And trodden the mystic islands that divide
With white brows the soft Caribbean tide,
Where are all fair shapes, and the water flows
As from some trembling sunset-fount that glows
Against the pearly bosom of the sky.

O sweet breast! once brought tenderly most nigh
To my own yearning spirit in a dream,
I try the breasts of women, but they seem
But as cold shapes in colder marble dressed
Compared with that tense vision which possessed
My heart, and mind, and body to the feet.

For all the room was filled with fragrance sweet,
An odour so ineffable and strange,
That to no purpose doth my fancy range
The hollows of fair diction, to describe
A nature so ethereal—next a tribe
Of soft flowers, as it were—I saw them not—
Or spirits dressed as soft flowers, free from spot,
Flowed over me, and with clear gentle hands
Removed each stain contracted in these lands
Of poverty, and foul disease, and death;
But, over and above, I felt thy breath,
My sweet lost lady, as a silver stream,
Or odorous music fainting thro' a dream,
Pervading and possessing all my flesh
And all the tissues of my soul, with mesh
Most delicate, and vibratory, and fine;
Past sins and blessings in a clear great line
Stood white before my clear transfigured gaze,
No longer hampered with the fog and haze
Of this our dull mortality, but keen
As the true emerald glances of my queen;
Then came the wonder of your spirit-form,
Riding superb upon a flowery storm
Of snows, and mists, and roses, and soft things,
With dainty flutter of seraphic wings,
Creating, like rapt Jacob, in that spot
A jewelled altar excellently wrought,
So that I said, although I was alone,
“How soft you are, sweet, and how soft a tone
Hath pierced my melting bosom through and through.”
As with the touch of circumambient blue,
Your spirit then encircled me—I wept,
And all my involuntary senses crept
For very awe at the unaccustomed sight
Of so superb a lady robed in white
Dividing the thick vapour of my room
With wings and body equal in white bloom,
And breasts whereon the scarlet blossoms smiled
Like the soft breasts and beauty of a child,
When thou wast very near—and then I rose,
Desiring this strange vision to disclose
Its inner sense; but not a word was said,
It was as if I held a woman dead.
After, I slept, but in my hollow dreams
You walked my brain's mute chamber, clad in beams
Spun from the argent tissues of the moon,
And clothed me with so silvery a swoon
That, when I woke, my face was like a god
From whose fair cheeks a splendour has o'erflowed.
I slept, and woke, and slept and woke again,
But all the time you watched me, and the pain,
And dismal solitude, and groans of years,
Fled to a lone abyss, dissolved in tears,
And all the murky vapour of despair;—
O thou most delicate, O thou most fair,
With sweet short flower-lips, and the emerald eyes,
Hear these last glimmering snatches as they rise,
Recalling all the wondrous things I felt
When spirit into spirit seemed to melt!
And yet you loved another, and our doom
Is separate, and that garden of choice bloom
Was but a dreamy Paradise in air,
Supremely unreal, and so, supremely fair.
For every craving then was satisfied,
A golden god had found a silver bride,
And the sweet torrents flowing from your mouth,
Like inundating streamlets in the south,
Washed quickly with a moist delicious breath
Each sin and every feebleness to death.
Because the dream was fair, it was not true,
I am divided wholly, sweet, from you,
And on this windy earth we meet no more,
Neither upon the large eternal shore
Where Dante's pallid ghost for ever sits,
And near him Beatrice, a sea-bird, flits,
Striving in vain with amorous beat of wings
To re-awaken perished former things,
For loves sink wholly, and their end is death,
And no joy re-arouses their spent breath.
Love, I was tender then—but now I know,
Since thou hast fled and left my spirit so,
That iron, for red ichor, fills my veins
That bubble with intolerable pains
And sick desires swift-hastening to the tomb—
Ah! as I think, my lady's white wings loom
From the sad corners of Time's hollow cave,
And in the air her banished pennons wave,
As once above the tumbling northern seas
She fluttered, like a white bird in the breeze,
Leading her panting follower quickly on:
Since that date many novel plumes have shone,
But none possess the power to move the stone
That Death's perpetual energy has thrown
Over the entrance of our risen life,
Or loosen his implacable red knife.

Sweet poets round their mistresses have flung
The mantle of the lyre from which they sung;
With some such melody, had I the skill,
The coming years and lustres I would fill,
Sending thy name, like Dante, in a song,
The eternal haunts and billowy meads among,
That so the untested ages might be 'ware
Of thine own glittering maze of black-brown hair
Which drew me, as a tender forest draws
A fairy cognizant of its sweet laws,
Desirous there to penetrate, and hide
Washed bosom in the green tumultuous tide,
Plunging, as in a delicate loud stream,
Into that moving mass of leaflets—theme
Delicious! so would I have plunged my sorrow
Deep in those tresses lost for many a morrow,
Removing 'mid their delicate perfume
Each trace of former treachery and gloom.
O passion! passion! passion! now I die
Hurled from thy blazing and voluptuous sky,
Even as an eagle-claw might hurl a lark
Into a waste of deep abysses dark,
Or cleave the broken spirit of a quail
Who sought his azure pasture to assail;—
But once voluptuously my spirit trode,
Armed like a blazing and abundant god,
The fields that now I fail, alas! to reach,
Downdropping towards a miserable, low beach.
O passion! passion! passion!—once as flame
The holy impress of thy finger came,
Resolving into one tempestuous night
Thy former potency, and pristine might,
And all thy former store of Love's young flowers,
And honey mixed in frequent meads and bowers,
But now thou art but as a woman fled,
Leaving her lover cast away and dead!
For all the world, and heaven, is nothing now,
Not Caucasus with white careering brow,
Nor monstrous marble-pillared Apennines,
Nor tresses of the moist Italian vines,
Nor cities seated in the fickle North
Where rain and sunstrokes dart, alternate, forth,
Nor tumult of the happy bounding seas,
Nor blessings flying on a summer breeze,
Nor all the talk of birds, and lips of flowers,
And lips of young girls in their rose-hung bowers,
And laughter, and their happy smiling faces—
I feel the loss of thee in all such places—
And, from the loss of thee, I rise and wail
Like billows on an autumn evening pale
Lamenting the departure of the sun.
O thou most delicate! whose lips were spun
From roses culled by Venus in some nook
Desirable, beside a bubbling brook,
And whose fair cheeks Apollo's glory gave,
And locks were plaited in a nymph-filled cave,
And whose white arms sweet Juno's self alone
Plucked from the handles of her ivory throne,
And for whose eyes swart Vulcan searched the deep
Where gods their emeralds and diamonds keep,
And whose soft limbs were moulded by divine
Dexterity from snows and eglantine,
So that a lover felt thy bosom cold
And liquid, mixed with those sweet flowers of gold,
Pervade his trembling body through and through,
Not otherwise than the descending dew
Drips gently on the slow rejoicing lawns,
As with ten thousand steps of tiny fawns,
Or as the horse-chestnut showers upon the ground
Sweet blossoms, with a tender rippling sound—
O thou most delicate and dainty bird!
Whose voice in the unknown avenues I heard,
Mixed with the tender dreams and sobs of youth,
For whose sake I aspired towards perfect truth,
Seeking with ardent vision to discern
The higher instinct at my every turn,
And follow it through trouble unto death—
I say that heaven, if robbed of thy sweet breath,
Is but a listless, hopeless heaven to me,
Where I shall all indifferently be!
Oh! songs, and vast abounding tunes that smote
My spirit, sailing as a crystal boat
Through oceans and abysses of fair dreams,
How far away your giant concert seems;—
When all the sky was as a hollow bell,
And earth was as a vale, in which there fell
The abundant clamour and soft-sandalled feet
Of music mystically tongued and sweet,
Proclaiming vanished visions past recall,
With Immortality beyond them all,
Clear as a gate beyond the setting sun
When labour and its turbulence is done,
And through that barrier with a gentle touch
We pass, emerging from Death's icy clutch
Into a bright array of newer things—
O memory of each delight that clings
Still to me with a frantic craving hand,
Vanish, for 'tis her desolate command!
In heaven if we should meet, I know not how
To gaze upon thee with untroubled brow;
For thou wast unto me as Beatrice,
Although thine own heart was of foam or ice,
Or as the fickle sea-weed that is tossed
From amorous wave to wave, and straightway lost;
But I was faithful, and I mixed thy name
With sounding currents of prophetic fame,
And, when I walked in woods, and by swift streams,
I saw thy garments vanish 'mid pale beams,
Clothed in alluring drapery of mist;
The branches were divided by thy wrist,
As, in the dainty fables of old Greece,
Nymphs' shoulders, whiter than a lamb's white fleece,
Were fair against the bending branches green;
So, with all fair thoughts mingled I, my queen,
Thy spirit, and thy laughter, and thy form,
Whether with purple pulse of thunder-storm,
Or vast irradiance of the gleaming sky,
And through sleep's lanes and meadows ardently
I fluttered forth, as to a trysting-place
Where I should meet some silver-footed grace,
Who, with full bosom and with rosy mouth,
Should pacify the dread perpetual drouth
Of my parched being—all the mountain-spurs
Clothed grandly with illimitable firs,
And with designs and marble shades inwrought,
Were yours, by virtue of my fresh young thought,
And, underneath the starry heaven and moon,
I heard your voice, as an entrancing tune,
And when I pressed my face against a rose,
It was as if the breath that no man knows
Delighted and enslaved me in a dream,
And when the first sun cast his first gold beam
Across the glittering pastures from the east,
I held with thee a lone delicious feast;
For thou didst so possess me that I felt
All pleasures through thy violent body melt,
As through the violence of an organ-tune
Stream, stars, and sun, and palpitating moon,
All joys and sorrows of humanity
Merged in the tumult of one raving sea,
That shakes the trembling spirit till it groans,
As purple mists of muffled undertones
Swathe body, and soul, and sinews, and dumb flesh,
In one resounding vibratory mesh,
Commingling and dispersing all things fair
As with a current of intensest air,
So that our nerves do creep upon the chords,
Pierced, as it were, by exquisite sharp swords,
Till, if we could, our very souls should leap
Into the abyss of that organ-deep,
Made one for ever with the eternal sound,
And wandering as ghostly shades around
The interior, whence the ghostly concert springs,
Swept onward on inevitable strings;—
So, lady, doth my spirit fly to thee,
Horsed on the thunders of loose melody,
Ignorant, and craving only to be found
Within the barriers of that mystic sound,
At whose surpassing high command I build
Fair crowns and colonnades with which I gild
The trembling, holy precincts of my dream;—
O thou most delicate! O thou whose beam
Of maiden moonlight never fell across
The ocean of my spirit! what a loss
And huge eternal undoing is mine,
That thou wast never present, sweet, to twine
The undying garlands of thy perfumed hands
Around me, save upon the fruitless sands
Of one immeasurably fragrant dream;
Through heaven thy weird departing beauties gleam,
And through that heaven,—most hollow, and sad, and pale,—
I still pursue, with wet remorseless sail,
The shadow of the gliding of thy bark,
Diminished now to a tremulous small spark
Splashing the slender waves that crisp heaven's sea;
I am not ready to abandon thee,
And by thine eyes' own emerald sparkling light
I track thee through the terrors of Time's night.

Yea, as the music smites my earnest soul
With rapt intelligence beyond control,
I leave the city, and these southern plains,
And all my fancy wings itself, and strains
Bright plumes to meet the northern piercing blast,
Pregnant with fair suggestions of the past.
I stream along the windy echoing chords,
Nursing the assistance that the tune affords,
And feel heaven opened, as my spirit sails
By flowery banks, and through responsive vales,
And many forests, goodly, dark, and dim,
And silver waters bubbling to the brim,
And lanes made bright with yellow eglantine,
And meads impurpled with the heavy vine;
Through these I wander, searching for my love,
As the grey, winged desires of a sad dove
Flit over mounts, and valleys, and tall trees,
In search of the receding mate she sees,
Till they meet softly in a mossy nest,
And all desires and troubles fade to rest.
So do I, lifting wings of fancy large,
Pursue by meadow, and wide lake, and marge
Of the resounding, pitiless, broad sea,
The flying phantom that I christen thee,
Following through endless ranks of hollow corn,
From eventide till the triumphant morn
Sits on the mountains with a rosy cheek.
But I—I find not the fair boon I seek,
Not 'mid the moist abundant apple-groves,
Spotted with grey disturbing wings of doves;
Not 'mid the vine-leaves, nor the wet long grass
Through which, with tears and diligence, I pass;
Not in the sunset, nor the gleams of day;
Nor art thou hidden in twilight shadows grey.
I may not see thee; but I fling my song
To rustle, like a floating star, among
The billows of abundant black-brown hair,
I found the sweetest gift of all gifts fair.
Yea, well it was, my love, in very deed,
That thou didst deign but passing little heed
To my desire, for I had found thy breast
A poisonous and over-bearing nest
To dwell in—thou hadst burnt me through and through
As with a fiery rain of velvet dew,
Leaving no mortal fabric to survive
The immersion in that over-luscious hive.
Yea, even as bees are drowned in honey sweet,
I had swooned, a dead man, at thy fair, kind feet;
But, since they are cruel, my torn life is left,
That otherwise had been so sweetly reft,
So sweetly murdered. Ah! these women find
Dumb targets for their daggers in mankind,
And when they see us bleeding, they rejoice
With even a tenderer, more placid voice,
And softer movement of white steady hands;
Their victims redden seas, and capes, and lands,
And still the old passion seizes upon all
Who step within the plastic earthly ball;—
Surely their breasts are whiter, so I say,
Whose locks are tinged with age-announcing grey—
Surely their breasts are sweeter than of old,
And hair of far more wonderful deep gold
Than when I walked among them as a youth;
Their lips are riper now, in very truth,
And eyes of far more wonderful bright blue,
Or the unexampled tender hazel hue
That filled the liquid glances of my queen;
The future differs not from what has been,
But love and sorrow do divide our breath,
And light us on the lonely march to death.
O Death, most bountiful! O Death, most good!
I wonder, art thou as a green-girt wood,
Filled with the singing of rejoicing birds,
And angels eloquent with risen words?
Or art thou as some icy hollow cave,
Or moss-built circle of a sleepy grave?
Or art thou as the thunders of the deep
Wherethrough the sharp-finned monstrous dolphins leap?
Or art thou as a soft and budding bank
Lighted with ruby flowers and grasses rank,
Whereon two talking lovers may abide
From happy morning till cool eventide?

I leave the old meadows, mistress, and I fly
To some more taciturn and peaceful sky;
But yet again the old raptures that I felt
Do burn me, and throughout me storm and melt,
And therefore, weeping, with these many words
I summon up the past—my future girds
Fresh vigorous loins to adventure novel things,
And soon I change the measure of my strings.
The cup o'er which so often I have grieved,
Which from thine hands I primarily received,
Resolveth now its sacred golden form,
Like some changed genius in a thunder-storm,
Into the gilded brackish vase of art,
Containing no solution for the heart;
Love's crystal thus is changed; my hand receives
A vessel dank with withered autumn leaves—
For that sweet vase my lady touched with lips
Sweeter than any flower the red bee sips.
O wonderful and delicate perfume!
That filled the faint recesses of the room
When, like a gliding ghost, my lady came
Riding on joyous curve of silvery flame,
I wonder is there anything so sweet
In heaven for the dying sense to meet?
For surely then my spirit would have fled
Gladly, to join the harp-strings of the dead;
Yea, over the pale river then I passed,
Horsed like a prophet on a whirlwind blast,
And plucked fair endless blossoms from beside
Immortal Life's unceasing silver tide,
Where, seated on that quiet thymy bank,
She waited for me, 'mid the rushes rank,
To give the kiss for which in tears I wait
Now, till I cross the limit of Death's gate.