5
O Love, I complain,
Complain of thee often,
Because thou dost soften
My being to pain:
Thou makest me fear
The mind that createth,
That loves not nor hateth
In justice austere;
Who, ere he make one,
With millions toyeth,
And lightly destroyeth
Whatever is begun.
An’ wer’t not for thee,
My glorious passion,
My heart I could fashion
To sternness, as he.
But thee, Love, he made
Lest man should defy him,
Connive and outvie him,
And not be afraid:
Nay, thee, Love, he gave
His terrors to cover,
And turn to a lover
His insolent slave.
6
THE SOUTH WIND
The south wind rose at dusk of the winter day,
The warm breath of the western sea
Circling wrapp’d the isle with his cloke of cloud,
And it now reach’d even to me, at dusk of the day,
And moan’d in the branches aloud:
While here and there, in patches of dark space,
A star shone forth from its heavenly place,
As a spark that is borne in the smoky chase;
And, looking up, there fell on my face—
Could it be drops of rain
Soft as the wind, that fell on my face?
Gossamers light as threads of the summer dawn,
Suck’d by the sun from midmost calms of the main,
From groves of coral islands secretly drawn,
O’er half the round of earth to be driven,
Now to fall on my face
In silky skeins spun from the mists of heaven.
Who art thou, in wind and darkness and soft rain
Thyself that robest, that bendest in sighing pines
To whisper thy truth? that usest for signs
A hurried glimpse of the moon, the glance of a star
In the rifted sky?
Who art thou, that with thee I
Woo and am wooed?
That robing thyself in darkness and soft rain
Choosest my chosen solitude,
Coming so far
To tell thy secret again,
As a mother her child, in her folding arm
Of a winter night by a flickering fire,
Telleth the same tale o’er and o’er
With gentle voice, and I never tire,
So imperceptibly changeth the charm,
As Love on buried ecstasy buildeth his tower,
—Like as the stem that beareth the flower
By trembling is knit to power;—
Ah! long ago
In thy first rapture I renounced my lot,
The vanity, the despondency and the woe,
And seeking thee to know
Well was’t for me, and evermore
I am thine, I know not what.
For me thou seekest ever, me wondering a day
In the eternal alternations, me
Free for a stolen moment of chance
To dream a beautiful dream
In the everlasting dance
Of speechless worlds, the unsearchable scheme,
To me thou findest the way,
Me and whomsoe’er
I have found my dream to share
Still with thy charm encircling; even to-night
To me and my love in darkness and soft rain
Under the sighing pines thou comest again,
And staying our speech with mystery of delight,
Of the kiss that I give a wonder thou makest,
And the kiss that I take thou takest.