For summers seventeen
This flower of spring
Scattered fragrance
That dwelt in its petals seventeen.
Seventeen song-hours,
A heart never weary;
A soul with honey of all flowers
A song as enchanting as stars.
A boy never grown old,
A lute never tiring to sing,
A mind ne'er chilled
Though Hunger's hand lay cold.
Steely-cold on his breast,
Yet the boy sang;
Loved as alone a poet can
Endlessly, without rest.
Just seventeen!
Ne'er old, though time passes;
A golden lyre-string
Has not yet ceased ringing:
Rings through the heart of time
O'er the summit of death
To the music of the Nine
Into the heart of Eternal Rhyme.
68
A summer song it was,
Counting of many unseen stars
In an intangible sky
Making new milky ways--
Silver-shadow-paths that lead
From sapphire abysses
Into deeper abysses still.
The deeps of our souls
Lit by passion's burning flowers
Tremulous, timorous flames of silver,
That with thousand hands
Our hearts sought to pluck and scatter,
Or make barbed garlands
For love's nuptial hour.
Nuptial hour, briefer than a moment,
Longer than Heaven's Eternal summer,
When each flower burns to soothe,
And each soothing petal burns anew;
Till myriad streams of fire
Strewn with countless flaming stars
Bear us to the far sea of Time
Where no summer dies,
Nor endure the stinging moments of love's winter.
69
"WHO KNOWS"
Time's torment,
Life's woes,
And sorrow's wan gaze
Are but shades
In a picture of light
Where nothing abides,
All things fade.
In fading there is beauty,
By shedding tears
We bathe our hearts--
Those crushed flowers full of smart--
For a deity not far from our souls.
Yet, no solace in prayer,
Pain has no largess;
Dark has stars,
But no barren earth its flowers.
All are dismal and fallow;
Yet, from the mountain's stony heart
Spring multitudinous rivers
Sparkling at dawn, and
Deepening night's gloom with mysterious murmurs;
And who knows?
These streams that pass
By the balcony of our past,
Through present's wilderness,
Into desolate future
May reach the land of the farthest star.
Who knows? Ah! who knows?
May these song-rills
From my heart's little hill
Empty their singing waters
Into a sea of song-making
Where nothing endures
But the sound and echo of singing.
Where sound, and echo are one,
A moonset vale of sunset land,
Where light is wedded to shade
Without death, full of dying, yet not dead.
70