 | Love-Songs |  |
I. AN EARTH-SONG.
I
That I could sing the splendour,And some account could render
Of all the joys of living like a man upon the earth;
The wonder of the daytime,
The greenery of May-time,
The mystery of death-time, the mystery of birth!
II
That I could pierce the ether,The earth—and plunge beneath her
Wide-rolling prairie-panoply of surface-smiles and flowers;
And get me to the centre,
And find the fires that rent her
Cliffs and chasms and mountain-tops, the live volcanic powers!
III
Returning to things human,I'd sing of man and woman,
And all the life of love-time, the glory of the land;
How man is handed over,
A child become a lover,
From woman unto woman, from tender hand to hand.
20
IV
Man leaves at last his mother,And findeth in another
A wondrous new development of love that ceaseth never;
More wonderful than dreams were,
Fulfilled with fairyland, fair
Fruition of the fancy-realm that seemed a myth for ever.
V
And as he sits a-dreaming,Along his brain is streaming
A river of recollection that linketh old and new;
He sees the realization
Of childhood's admiration
Of doughty deeds of heroes, of the beautiful and true.
VI
How clearly he remembersBy stirring up the embers
Of memory, how Woman first appeared in childish dreams;
A goddess of the ether
Who smiled on men beneath her,
All garmented in sunset, and bright with burning beams.
VII
Calm, crowned, an earthly centre,Her robes without a rent, her
21
With eyes of wondrous seeming,
With tenderness all gleaming,
And a light upon her raiment, and a glory in her hair.
VIII
One hardly likes to think of it,Again in dreams to drink of it,
A draught of joy so wonderful, a picture passing pure;
And yet, not all ungrateful,
We are glad that in the hateful
Dark lanes of later life a ray of light can still endure.
IX
A memory of the vision,The dream, the intuition,
The God-vouchsafed glimpses of the life that ought to be;
Ah me! the early river,
The flakes of light that quiver
Across its course miles upward from the weary weary sea!
X
It leaps along the sandbanksAnd laughs atween the fern-ranks,
With splashing and with dashing, and with sounds of happy glee;
It has not seen the town yet,
The grief is further down yet,
The child is not the model of the man that is to be.
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XI
Then come the town-pollutions:An æon of ablutions
Shall not restore the freshness of the stream above the town;
The Arve has joined the Rhone now,
With tardiness of flow now,
And weightier wave of water it for ever runneth down.
XII
On towards the sea though!Little does the stream know
All the wealth of wonderment awaiting it in death;
Dreams that it shall find there
All before it found fair,
Purity of raiment, and a joy that takes the breath.
XIII
Fullest restorationTo rightful rank and station;
Perfected development of all the dreams of youth;
Even for him a May-queen,
Fair, with eyes of grey-green,
And bloom of black-brown tresses, and the whiteness of the truth.
Good Friday, 1870.
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