University of Virginia Library

False love, sweet love, false love, thy primrose lands
Are bitten by a sea that gnaws and stains:
False love, thy river may have golden sands,
Yet rocks it sighing on thro' flinty plains.
The low continual forest hears of love:
The cloud-crest tells the under lake of him.
He wakes the plaint of rainbow-breasted dove,
The glowworm lights her torch, his herald dim,
The March wind is his furious trumpeter,
The cuckoo is his clear remembrancer.
Yet will I nothing of this herdsman Love,
This god of bread and cheese,
This paragon of ploughgirls: at mine ease,
Saint and serene above
Their trivial kisses, with the stars I write
The oracles of God,
Sown on the windy pinnacles of night.
My Life shall be
An Alpine morning o'er a tideless sea
Of avalanches bright.
As some peak never trod,
Rosy and pure in crystal ether set,
And from the world's foundation icebound yet:
Auroral, sweet, and inaccessible,
That rock shall be my sign. The terrible
Hand of the Sun shall fall in harmless glows,
Nor melt one wreath of calm aërial snows;
Not Titan's golden hour
Can melt my Danae tower:
Nor rain of richest beams
Unfreeze the frozen seams
Of ice and cloud, that veil me in my bower.
Fate gives me beauty, God has given me scorn.
I will be first or none:
To hew the wood of life I was not born;
Flowers are my hands, my robe a tissue spun.
Shall I be jumbled up with market wives,
The herd and trash of maidens, who accept
Their long laborious lives,
Bewailing and bewept?
And wear away their sordid household days,
Much as the steers, who pull the plough or graze.
I will not put my mouth up to some fool,
And be unvirgined for the kiss of him.
I will remain damsel of God, and rule
My worst thought purer than the morning rim.
I am locked up with God, and earthly yearning,
In eyes as unresponsive to desire,
Passes, as puppets in a peepshow turning,
Gestures of painted passion, wood and wire.
What is this homespun comedy of Love,
Rank with the furrow-cleaving herdsman's toil?
What is this vineyard lodge, this red alcove,
Reed-roofed among the orchards of the oil?
The floor is purple with the broken grape:
The vats are foamed with ferment. Hand in hand,
Red to the knee, each Bacchanalian shape
Tramples the rich blood of the vineyard land.
Or in some croft, half hid by rustic eaves,
The milkmaid rests her pail among the leaves,
And the pied stirk with comfortable sound
Crops the abounding ground.
There, if some uncouth Thyrsis chance to pass,
He comes and sits him by this freckled lass,
And puts his brows to hers, this cow-girl queen,
Coarse-grained and stained with summer, as some green
Crude orchard apple, striped abrupt in hue;
And takes her rough hand fondly, where the grass
Shoots up in timothies and ox-eyes too,
And the rathe sorrel reddest of spring's crew;
And heaven finds echoes in the speedwell's blue:
And pale green spikes are everywhere around,
And chirping things give sound,
Hid in the ambush of the hay; the quail
Is darnel-tangled, and the water-rail
Cheeps from the mere befringed with galingale:
And mighty Pan breathes o'er the vernal ground.
So deep in grass, as two hid meadow birds,
They sing again their threadbare song, whose words
Are kisses: and in arrogance suppose
Their horny rushlight lantern can enclose
The radiant sun of demigod Desire.
What is this fen-fire, framed of mud and mire?
Love, what is Love, the solace of the clown,
That makes the wise man frown?
A ribbon in the milkmaid's frowsy hairs,
A few dog-roses in a field of tares,
A little laughter and a long disdain;
Blind and unfit to reign,
The deity of pain;
Silenus of the swineherds is his name,
The ploughboy Eros with his face of shame,
His woolly coat, his sheepdog at his side;
Shall I unlock to such a mongrel god
The porches of my pride,
Or my serene abode?
Throned on the cloud above such earthborn coil,
I rule by right of beauty such as toil.
I am the lily without fleck or soil.
Avaunt, thou son of mire,
No Tempe gave thee birth;
Ether I am and fire.
I rise as flame, I rise,
Above this atmosphere of sighs
Beyond the reek of earth:
And Pythoness aspire,
Helmed with an angel's mirth:
Where star-dew steeps my beaming crest and hair,
Listening what cadence rare,
And on gross earth unheard,
The planets make in sphering. With what word
The morning star comes dripping back to God,
When he the sea at early morn has trod.
With what a beautiful clear even-song
Recurrent Vesper surges back among
The small pure rounded lights, which in the rain
Of light around him, pale and dumb, refrain
Their sparkling throng.
Shall I, whose meteor beauty makes the plain
Of the blue night mute with amazement, deign
To drop the corner of an eye at Love,
From golden spheres above?

Take my disdain, false Love, and hence begone,
Stained with rude wreck and clay;
Poor pipe of earthly passion, in whose tone
There only lives the discord of a day.
Leave me my isolation, grand and calm,
While fond adoring nations bend the knee,
Exclaiming, she is worthy of the palm,
As Dryad fair or mermaid of the sea.
Let their triumphant psalm
Acclaim me loveliest of the things that be.
Let them adore afar;
And worship, as they please:
Love, if they choose; but I am as the star
Out of the reach of these.