PERSUASION

I

At any moment love unheralded

Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall

Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread

Are withered in untimely burial,

So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by,

And as a beggar walks unfriended ways,

With but remembered beauty to defy

The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.

Or in that later travelling he comes

Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells

Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs

Are all now that love was, and blindly spells

His royal state of old a glory cursed,

Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.

Georgian poetry, 1920-22 · 第 63 / 188 题