HOPE
IN shadowy calm the boat
Sleeps by the dreaming oar,
The green hills are afloat
Beside the silver shore.
Youth hoists the white-winged sail,
Love takes the longing oar—
The oft-told fairy tale
Beside the silver shore.
Soft lip to lip, and heart
To heart, and hand to hand,
And wistful eyes depart
Unto another strand.
And lovely as a star
They tremble o'er the wave,
With eager wings afar,
Unto the joys they crave.
In a sweet trance they fare
Unto the wind and rain,
With wind-tossed waves of hair,
And ne'er return again.
And at the drifting side,
Changed faces in the deep
They see, a changing tide,
Like phantoms in a sleep.
Slow hands furl the torn sail
Without one silver-gleam,
And, sad and wan and pale,
They gaze into a dream.
From "CORYDON AND AMARYLLIS"
PALE melancholy, faithfully thou lov'st
The human soul when youth and passion fail;
How precious all things grow beneath thy smile!
Sad sister of the poet's lonely hours,
Thy clinging arms embrace us all, thy feet
Are in all paths, and Nature saddens 'neath
Thine eyes. The lotus and the poppy have
Thee in their dreamy veins; thine image dwells
For ever in the jewelled wine; thou art
The hungry beauty of Love's crescent eyes,
The tremor of white hands, the ashy gleam
Of noble brows, and thou dost startle Love's
Young dream into a dying swoon, and strew
A flowery sadness on some new-made grave.
From "DE PROFUNDIS"
I HEAR the wondrous lyre
Of the blind bard, and see the Grecian throng
About Troy's lofty walls, and Hector slain,
The white-stained face and blackened crest,
And great Achilles crumbling on his pyre.
Then comes Ulysses sighing for his home
Afar, leaving the ruins of old Troy
For Ithaca, where oft, a glad-faced boy,
He played amid the ripening vines and heard
His father's voice ere he began to roam
The weary waves. His heart is stirred
With thoughts of home, and son, and wife,
And ever Circe holds him in her arms.
How have I longed to drift on some fair isle,
Like thee, from feverish alarms,
And voices of reproach, and earth's vain strife—
Some urnless land beyond the wile
Of grief and gold, where man can quite forget
All pain, and sleep and dream not of regret.