THE year may change its time,
But still I climb
The cliff above the sea,
And look with eyes half dim with rain,
To know if God has brought again
My lover back to me.
When darkness downward glides
And slowly hides
The fading hills of blue,
I never bar the cottage door
Without one look across the moor,
A look of hope for you.
Sometimes when I am free
I seek the quay
Soon after break of day,
And find a newly harboured boat,
And ask if you are still afloat
Near home or far away.
I ask if you are well,
And they can tell
My heart is set on you:
And then they call me just a fool,
A baby in the world’s hard school
To give you love so true.
You promised me silk gowns
From Lowland towns,
And rings of twisted gold;
And, best of all, your picture bound
With stones to hem its beauty round
That I might kiss and hold.
My love is not the flower
Of one short hour;
You were my childhood’s pride;
Your image is my dream by night,
By day if ever put to flight
It comes back like the tide.
The swan upon the lake
When robbers take
Her young, is left to moan;
None tends her wounds or heeds her cry,
She wails her loss and waits to die:
Like her I cry alone.
XVII
NEAR HAARLEM
TRIUMPHANTLY it soars, that full-domed sky,
Of lucent turquoise fading into pearl;
And here the happy birds their brown wings furl
By waters that lisp seaward dreamily.
Beyond these plains of silver and of green,
Amid the floating vapours of the town
The vast grey church uplifts its belfry crown,
A chiselled shrine through incense dimly seen.
The burdened barges trust the smiling flood,
Calm wraps the distance of reclining dunes,
The tower rings peace in soft alternate tones.
And who that hears the bells’ low luting tunes,
Now thinks of Haarlem’s siege and starving moans,
Or how these brooks once bubbled with brave blood?
XVIII
THE TOMB OF ST. AUGUSTINE AT PAVIA
BENEATH the low barbaric Lombard apse
It rises like a ridge of Alpine snow,
And wry-wheeled ages with uneasy lapse
Creak past its majesty, and go.
Such music as leaves Milan’s marble spires
To mount towards a greater whiter throne,
Or tempts to earth again seraphic choirs,
Is at Augustine’s shrine unknown.
No wave of pilgrim footsteps surges here,
No sheaf of tapers lifts its votive gleam,
The half-taught critic comes not with his sneer,
When I draw nigh, dear saint, to dream.
Enough if far-off sounds of children’s glee
Bid me to “take and read” God’s open call,
Or some sad Monnica pray here to see
Her son, like thee, a second Paul.
XIX
MODERN FLORENCE
HARD by the home of Dante’s infant life
I saw a Yankee “Kake Walk” advertised;
Within San Miniato’s pillared aisle
A Japanese was peering unsurprised;
Where Michelangelo set “Dawn” and “Night,”
And her, most blest, whose softly sculptured smile
Glows with a maiden’s and a mother’s light,
A German Jew was nagging with his wife.
XX
TO DANTE
THE Church divided and the Empire fell,
Grave Dante, but thy verse in magic grows
And charms men upward to the snow-white Rose
Of heaven from the mire and grief of hell.
No lonely isle of dull forgetfulness
Hides Beatrice within its shadowed gloom,
For ’mid the petals of thy Rose’s bloom
Time’s hand has set that pearl of loveliness.
Though patched and powdered poets could not taste
Thy limpid sweetness, and exposed thy fame
To meet the leering Frenchman’s cynic air,
Thy love was fair without brocade or paste,
Thyself too great to need a gilded name;
Thy Comedy and God survive Voltaire.
XXI
TO PETRARCH
YES, Petrarch, we most certainly believe
That you who wore your heart upon your sleeve,
Did love your love for Laura, and the eye
Of public fame, at which your sonnets fly,
Like skyward larks that court the genial sun;
And o’er the tears you treasured one by one
You downward bent with all a statue’s grace
To see reflections of your tearful face.
But none redeemed by love will e’er consent
To say you tasted of love’s sacrament.
XXII
TO A LADY OF
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY