Sedges, have you sung too much,
Sedges gray along the shore?
Can this autumn tempest touch
Answering chords in you no more?
Is the summer all forgot?--
Now the ice is dark and strong
That has bound you to the spot--
Did you die of too much song?
Something in me is a harp
Played by every wanton breeze.
Moaning soft and piping sharp
Are its wondrous melodies.
Is the playing over-fast
Though the answer now is strong?
Like the sedges at the last
Will it die of too much song?
[WHEREVER MY DREAMS GO]
Wherever my dreams go, you are always there,
And you and I have gone to many a land,
Seeing high hills at dawn and desert sand,
Temples and mosques and people bowed in prayer.
We too have prayed in many places where
Beauty has come as I have clasped your hand,
And through long silence learned to understand
The dumb sweet language of your eyes and hair.
We have been lovers in all fair romances
Beyond the rising or the sunken sun.
There have been foes to meet, and I have done
Great deeds beneath the splendor of your glances....
And yet I dreamed alone; you could not guess
What joy you brought into my loneliness.
[OUT OF THE LITTLENESS]
Out of the littleness that wraps my days,
The oppressive mist of gray and common things,
Sometimes my dream on its audacious wings,
Dripping with golden fire, above the haze,
Flashes and veers against the sudden blaze
Of sunlight. There no other wings may gleam
But only yours, companioning my dream
In its strange flight up new and radiant ways.
And once, I thought, in a far solitude,
The black waves moaned and broke unutterably
On a stern cliff where hand in hand we stood.
There were none near us when the dark had gone,--
Only the clean wind of a sailless sea,
And you and I alone in the great dawn.