Love

Love hath the wings of the butterfly,
Oh, clasp him but gently,
Pausing and dipping and fluttering by
Inconsequently.
Stir not his poise with the breath of a sigh;
Love hath the wings of the butterfly.

Love hath the wings of the eagle bold,
Cling to him strongly--
What if the look of the world be cold,
And life go wrongly?
Rest on his pinions, for broad is their fold;
Love hath the wings of the eagle bold.

Love hath the voice of the nightingale,
Hearken his trilling--
List to his song when the moonlight is pale,--
Passionate, thrilling.
Cherish the lay, ere the lilt of it fail;
Love hath the voice of the nightingale.

Love hath the voice of the storm at night,
Wildly defiant.
Hear him and yield up your soul to his might,

I want more lives in which to love
    This world so full of beauty,
I want more days to use the ways
    I know of doing duty;
I ask no greater joy than this
    (So much I am life's lover),
When I reach age to turn the page
    And read the story over.
    (O love, stay near!)

O rapturous promise of the Spring!
    O June fulfilling after!
If Autumns sigh, when Summers die,
    'Tis drowned in Winter's laughter.
O maiden dawns, O wifely noons,
    O siren sweet, sweet nights,
I'd want no heaven could earth be given
    Again with its delights
    (If love stayed near).

There are such glories for the eye,
    Such pleasures for the ear,
The senses reel with all they feel
    And see and taste and hear;
There are such ...

Dost thou remember, Love, those hours
Shot o'er with random rainy showers,
When the bold sun would woo coy May?
She smiled, then wept - and looked another way.

We, learning from the sun and season,
Together plotted joyous treason
'Gainst maiden majesty, to give
Each other troth, and henceforth wedded live.

But love, ah, love we know is blind!
Not always what they seek they find
When, groping through dim-lighted natures,
Fond lovers look for old, ideal statures.

What then? Is all our purpose lost?
The balance broken, since Fate tossed
Uneven weights? Oh well beware
That thought, my sweet: 't were neither fit nor fair!

Seek not for any grafted fruits
From souls so wedded at the roots;
But whatsoe'er our fibres hold,
Let tha...

My love for thee is like a winged seed
    Blown from the heart of thy rare beauty's flower,
    And deftly guided by some breezy power
To fall and rest, where I should never heed,
In deepest caves of memory. There, indeed,
    With virtue rife of many a sunny hoar, -
    Ev'n making cold neglect and darkness dower
Its roots with life, - swiftly it 'gan to breed,
Till now wide-branching tendrils it outspreads
    Like circling arms, to prison its own prison,
Fretting the walls with blooms by myriads,
    And blazoning in my brain full summer-season:
Thy face, whose dearness presence had not taught.
In absence multiplies, and fills all thought.

An old sweetheart of mine! - Is this her presence here with me,
Or but a vain creation of a lover's memory?
A fair, illusive vision that would vanish into air
Dared I even touch the silence with the whisper of a prayer?

Nay, let me then believe in all the blended false and true -
The semblance of the OLD love and the substance of the NEW, -
The THEN of changeless sunny days - the NOW of shower and shine -
But Love forever smiling - as that old sweetheart of mine.

This ever-restful sense of HOME, though shouts ring in the hall. -
The easy chair - the old book-shelves and prints along the wall;
The rare HABANAS in their box, or gaunt church-warden-stem
That often wags, above the jar, derisively at them.

As one who cons at evening o'er an album, all alone,
And...

Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
- Shelley.


Love knoweth every form of air,
And every shape of earth,
And comes, unbidden, everywhere,
Like thought’s mysterious birth.
The moonlit sea and the sunset sky
Are written with Love’s words,
And you hear his voice unceasingly,
Like song in the time of birds.

He peeps into the warrior’s heart
From the tip of a stooping plume
And the serried spears, and the many men,
May not deny him room.
He’ll come to his tent in the weary night,
And be busy in his dream;
And he’ll float to his eye in morning light
Like a fay on a silver beam.

He hears the sound of the hunter’s gun,
And rides on the echo back,
And sighs in his ear, like a stirring...

    I

Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces,
The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays
And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places,
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais?

The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters
Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned.
Out of the starry south provoking rumors brought us
Far promise of the spring already northward turned.

And breast drew near to breast, and round its soft desire
My arm uncertain stole and clung there unrepelled.
I thought that nevermore my heart would hover nigher
To the last flower of bliss that Nature's garden held.

There, in your beauty's sweet abandonment to pleasure,
The mute, half-open lips and tender, wondering ...

O once I had a true love,
As blest as I could be:
Patty was my turtle dove,
And Patty she loved me.
We walked the fields together,
By roses and woodbine,
In Summer's sunshine weather,
And Patty she was mine.

We stopped to gather primroses,
And violets white and blue,
In pastures and green closes
All glistening with the dew.
We sat upon green mole-hills,
Among the daisy flowers,
To hear the small birds' merry trills,
And share the sunny hours.

The blackbird on her grassy nest
We would not scare away,
Who nuzzling sat with brooding breast
On her eggs for half the day.
The chaffinch chirruped on the thorn,
And a pretty nest had she;
The magpie chattered all the morn
From her perch upon the tree.

And I woul...

The twilight's inner flame grows blue and deep,
And in my Lesbos, over leagues of sea,
The temples glimmer moon-wise in the trees.
Twilight has veiled the little flower-face
Here on my heart, but still the night is kind
And leaves her warm sweet weight against my breast.
Am I that Sappho who would run at dusk
Along the surges creeping up the shore
When tides came in to ease the hungry beach,
And running, running till the night was black,
Would fall forespent upon the chilly sand
And quiver with the winds from off the sea?
Ah quietly the shingle waits the tides
Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me
Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.
I crept and touched the foam with fevered hands
And cried to love, from whom the sea is sweet,
From whom the ...

Oh, the days were ever shiny
    When I ran to meet my love;
When I press'd her hand so tiny
    Through her tiny tiny glove.
Was I very deeply smitten?
    Oh, I loved like anything!
But my love she is a kitten,
    And my heart's a ball of string.

She was pleasingly poetic,
    And she loved my little rhymes;
For our tastes were sympathetic,
    In the old and happy times.
Oh, the ballads I have written,
    And have taught my love to sing!
But my love she is a kitten,
    And my heart's a ball of string.

Would she listen to my offer,
    On my knees I would impart
A sincere and ready proffer
    Of my hand and of my heart.
And below her dainty mitten
    I would fix a wedding ring,
But my love she is a kitten...

What can I do to drive away
Remembrance from my eyes? for they have seen,
Aye, an hour ago, my brilliant Queen!
Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free
In my old liberty?
When every fair one that I saw was fair
Enough to catch me in but half a snare,
Not keep me there:
When, howe'er poor or particolour'd things,
My muse had wings,
And ever ready was to take her course
Whither I bent her force,
Unintellectual, yet divine to me;
Divine, I say! What sea-bird o'er the sea
Is a philosopher the while he goes
Winging along where the great water throes?

How shall I do
To get anew
Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more
Above, above
The reach of fluttering Love,
And make him cower lowly while...

I

Ah, yes, 't is sweet still to remember,
Though 'twere less painful to forget;
For while my heart glows like an ember,
Mine eyes with sorrow's drops are wet,
And, oh, my heart is aching yet.
It is a law of mortal pain
That old wounds, long accounted well,
Beneath the memory's potent spell,
Will wake to life and bleed again.

So 't is with me; it might be better
If I should turn no look behind,--
If I could curb my heart, and fetter
From reminiscent gaze my mind,
Or let my soul go blind--go blind!
But would I do it if I could?
Nay! ease at such a price were spurned;
For, since my love was once returned,
All that I suffer seemeth good.

I know, I know it is the fashion,
When love has left some heart distressed,
To weight...

I - THE MOTHER'S KISS

Love breathed a secret to her listening heart,
    And said "Be silent."    Though she guarded it,
And dwelt as one within a world apart,
    Yet sun and star seemed by that secret lit.
And where she passed, each whispering wind ablow,
    And every little blossom in the sod,
Called joyously to her, "We know, we know,
    For are we not the intimates of God?"
Life grew so radiant, and so opulent,
    That when her fragile body and her brain
By mortal throes of agony were rent,
    She felt a curious rapture in her pain.
Then, after anguish, came the supreme bliss -
They brought the little baby, for her kiss!

II - THE BETROTHAL

There was a little pause between the dances;
    Without, somewhere, a tinkling fountain p...

Ben può talor col mio.


Sometimes my love I dare to entertain
        With soaring hope not over-credulous;
        Since if all human loves were impious,
        Unto what end did God the world ordain?
For loving thee what license is more plain
        Than that I praise thereby the glorious
        Source of all joys divine, that comfort us
        In thee, and with chaste fires our soul sustain?
False hope belongs unto that love alone
        Which with declining beauty wanes and dies,
        And, like the face it worships, fades away.
That hope is true which the pure heart hath known,
        Which alters not with time or death's decay,
        Yielding on earth earnest of Paradise.

I love thee, Nature, with a boundless love!
The calm of earth, the storm of roaring woods!
The winds breathe happiness where'er I rove!
There's life's own music in the swelling floods!
My heart is in the thunder-melting clouds,
The snow-cap't mountain, and the rolling sea!
And hear ye not the voice where darkness shrouds
The heavens? There lives happiness for me!

My pulse beats calmer while His lightnings play!
My eye, with earth's delusions waxing dim,
Clears with the brightness of eternal day!
The elements crash round me! It is He!
Calmly I hear His voice and never start.
From Eve's posterity I stand quite free,
Nor feel her curses rankle round my heart.

Love is not here. Hope is, and at His voice--
The rolling thunder and the roaring sea--
...

'Oh, sad thy lot before I came,
    But sadder when I go;
My presence but a flash of flame,
    A transitory glow
    Between two barren wastes like snow.
What wilt thou do when I am gone,
    Where wilt thou rest, my dear?
For cold thy bed to rest upon,
    And cold the falling year
    Whose withered leaves are lost and sere.'

She hushed the baby at her breast,
    She rocked it on her knee:
'And I will rest my lonely rest,
    Warmed with the thought of thee,
    Rest lulled to rest by memory.'
She hushed the baby with her kiss,
    She hushed it with her breast:
'Is death so sadder much than this -
    Sure death that builds a nest
    For those who elsewhere cannot rest?'

'Oh, sad thy note, my mateless dove,
    With t...

I play my sweet old airs -
    The airs he knew
    When our love was true -
    But he does not balk
    His determined walk,
And passes up the stairs.

I sing my songs once more,
    And presently hear
    His footstep near
    As if it would stay;
    But he goes his way,
And shuts a distant door.

So I wait for another morn
    And another night
    In this soul-sick blight;
    And I wonder much
    As I sit, why such
A woman as I was born!

A Shepherd's Boy (he seeks no better name)
Led forth his flocks along the silver Thame,
Where dancing sun-beams n the waters play'd,
And verdant alders form'd a quiv'ring shade.
Soft as he mourn'd, the streams forgot to flow,
The flocks around a dumb compassion show,
The Naiads wept in ev'ry wat'ry bow'r,
And Jove consented in a silent show'r.
Accept, O Garth, the Muse's early lays,
That adds this wreath of Ivy to thy Bays;
Hear what from Love unpractis'd hearts endure,
From Love, the sole disease thou canst not cure.
Ye shady beeches, and ye cooling streams,
Defence from Phoebus, not from Cupid's beams,
To you I mourn, nor to the deaf I sing,
The woods shall answer, and their echo ring.
The gills and rocks attend my doleful lay,
Why art thou prouder and ...