_Ode on Beauty._
Infinite peace is hanging in the air,
Infinite peace is resting on mine eyes,
That just an hour ago learnt how to bear
Seeing your body's flaming harmonies.
The grey clouds flecked with orange are and gold,
Birds unto rest are falling, falling, falling,
And all the earth goes slowly into night,
Steadily turning from the harshly bright
Sunset. And now the wind is growing cold
And in my heart a hidden voice is calling.
Say, is our sense of beauty mixed with earth
When lip on lip and breast on breast we cling,
When ecstasy brings short bright sobs to birth
And all our pulses, both our bodies sing?
When through the haze that gathers on my sight
I see your eyelids, know the eyes behind
See me and half not see me, when our blood
Goes roaring like a deep tremendous flood,
Calm and terrific in unhasty might,
Is then our inner sight sealed up and blind?
Or could it be that when our blood was colder
And side by side we sat with lips disparted
I saw the perfect line of your resting shoulder,
Your mouth, your peaceful throat with fuller-hearted,
More splendid joy? Ah poignant joys all these!
And rest can stab the heart as well as passion.
Yea, I have known sobs choke my heart to see
Your honey-coloured hair move languorously,
Ruffled, not by my hands, but by the breeze,
And I have prayed the rough air for compassion.
Yea, I have knelt to the unpiteous air
And knelt to gods I knew not, to remove
The viewless hands whose sight I could not bear
Out of the wind-blown head of her I love.
Ecstasy enters me and cannot speak,
Seizes my hands and smites my fainting eyes
And sends through all my veins a dim despair
Of never apprehending all so fair
And I have stood, unnerved and numb and weak,
Watching your breathing bosom fall and rise.
Ah no! This joy is empty, incomplete,
And sullied with a sense of too much longing,
Where thoughts and fancies, sweet and bitter-sweet,
And old regrets and new-born hopes come thronging.
Man can see beauty for a moment's space
And live, having seen her with an unfilmed eye,
If all his body and all his soul in one
Instant are tuned by passion to unison
And I can image in your kissing face
The eternal meaning of the earth and sky.
_Song in Time of Waiting._
Because the days are long for you and me,
I make this song to lighten their slow time,
So that the weary waiting fruitful be
Or blossomed only by my limping rhyme.
The days are very long
And may not shortened be by any chime
Of measured words or any fleeting song.
Yet let us gather blossoms while we wait
And sing brave tunes against the face of fate.
Day after day goes by: the exquisite
Procession of the variable year,
Summer, a sheaf with flowers bound up in it,
And autumn, tender till the frosts appear
And dry the humid skies;
And winter following on, aloof, austere,
Clad in the garments of a frore sunrise;
And spring again. May not too many a spring
Make both our voices tremble as we sing!
The days are empty, empty, and the nights
Are cold and void; there is no single gleam
Across the space unpeopled of delights,
Save only now and then some thin-blood dream,
Some stray of summer weather;
The tedious hours like slow-foot laggarts seem,
When you and I, my love, are not together
And when I hold you in my arms at last
The minutes go like April cloudlets past.
And yet no hidden charm, no desperate spell
Can make these minutes longer, those less long:
No force there is that yearning can impel
Against the callous years which do us wrong.
No words, no whispered rune,
No witchery and no Thessalian song
Can make that far-off, misty day more soon.
The bravest tune, the most courageous rhyme
Fall broken from the bastions of time.
A long and dusty road it is to tread;
Few are the wayside flowers and far apart
And are no sooner plucked than withered,
When yearning heart is torn from yearning heart.
A weary road it is
And yet far off I see clear waters start
And clean sweet grass and tangled traceries
Of whispering leaves, that laugh to see us come,
And there one day ... one day shall be our home.
The day will come. O dearest, do not doubt!
It is not born as yet but I shall see
Some day the fearless sunrise flashing out
And know the night will give you up to me.
O heart, my heart, be glad,
Because the time will come at last when we
Shall leave all grief and unlearn all things sad
And know the joy than which none sweeter is
And I shall sing a happier song than this.
_Sonnets on Separation._