2
So sleeping, so aroused from sleep
Thro’ sunny decads new and strange,
Or gay quinquenniads would we reap
The flower and quintessence of change.
3
Ah, yet would I—and would I might!
So much your eyes my fancy take—
Be still the first to leap to light
That I might kiss those eyes awake!
For, am I right or am I wrong,
To choose your own you did not care;
You’d have my moral from the song,
And I will take my pleasure there:
And, am I right or am I wrong,
My fancy, ranging thro’ and thro’,
To search a meaning for the song,
Perforce will still revert to you;
Nor finds a closer truth than this
All-graceful head, so richly curl’d,
And evermore a costly kiss
The prelude to some brighter world.
4
For since the time when Adam first
Embraced his Eve in happy hour,
And every bird of Eden burst
In carol, every bud to flower,
What eyes, like thine, have waken’d hopes?
What lips, like thine, so sweetly join’d?
Where on the double rosebud droops
The fullness of the pensive mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved,[[1]]
Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,
That lets thee[[2]] neither hear nor see:
But break it. In the name of wife,
And in the rights that name may give,
Are clasp’d the moral of thy life,
And that for which I care to live.
[1] 1842. The pensive mind that, self-involved.
[2] 1842. Which lets thee.
Epilogue
(No alteration since 1842.)