A BIRTHDAY.
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work in it gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
But, as a rule, her thoughts of love are clouded by some dark sense of loss, of having missed the satisfaction that the hungering soul might claim. Take two sonnets:
REMEMBER.
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land,
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned;
Only remember me. You understand,
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet, if you should forget me for a while,
And afterwards remember, do not grieve;
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile,
Than that you should remember and be sad.
AFTER DEATH.
The curtains were half-drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes; rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say,
"Poor child, poor child!" and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head.
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm, though I am cold.
In these sonnets the veil of some pathetic possibility unfulfilled is drawn reverently aside, and the soul-history is written in plain characters. But again the poet is more reticent; and only in sad allusions, incessantly recurring, in unhappy hints, she reveals the hunger of the spirit, the hand that was held out in hope for the heavenly bread, and closed upon a stone. After this the mood becomes one of reluctant certainty, with little bitterness or recrimination; the surrender is accepted, but the thought of what might have been is for ever present.
Then, as in some desolate estuary, the tide begins to set strongly in from the vast and wholesome sea. Sometimes a stoic note is struck of pure desolation, as in the noble lyric;—