Much longer than these lilies, you or I,
This book lives on mysterious memory
Of an enchanted place to which you lent
A fragrance that will render somnolent?
--Sweet poisons are narcotics for our tears!
Our ressurected past through dreams appears
An angel standing by an empty tomb.
What sadder thing may Time spin on her loom
Than words?--Return to that once petaled door
Through which Love passed--adding a few leaves more
To the strange book of life: open its covers
Only to the worn page where we were lovers
Lost in fair imageries, there to forget
Our hearts that weep as little children yet!
LINES TAKEN FROM POEMS
I SHALL NOT WRITE
Love, all our colours
Fade into shadows
--Shadows, but empty
Forms of the darkness?
Pale with the spring-time,
Wandering without you--
Sick with love-sickness!
To sigh upon this chill air of December,
To wonder why, and wondering why, remember!
As through the air
Her little fan-shaped feet
What beauty in the way the light fell on her eye-brows....
These pages are as silent as drowned cries....
Come back, my Love, and with more fervent eyes
Than pity, Lips that bear the ivy-leaf
Once chose for emblem Love that never dies?
Bow thy head, O shadow on the wall,
And weep a shadows grief.
... And so the rain arrived instead of you!
Its falling tears on the seas bitterness....
... But I, who am loves prodigal and fool,
What right have I to that high horse of verse?
Whose wings in cadenced soaring sweep the sky
Taking the waning moons for virgin dawns!
Etherial beast to find a home in clouds
And pasture on the plenteous voids of heaven!
... Small are these in love and in understanding ...
Lift your voice in song, you alone can sing me
Songs as white and strong as the marble columns
Of Mitylene
Songs as pure pure as stars on the silver midnights,
Near as moonbeams over the limbs of lovers,
Strange as sleep in fields of lethean stillness
Heavy with summer.
You alone can waken my soul to sorrow,
You alone can mend all the broken music:
Subtler tones of thought than this shattered singing
Words have divided!
I cannot weep for you as others weep.
My last and dearest dead,
For all my tears on lesser griefs are shed!