IT shifts and shifts from form to form,
It drifts and darkles, gleams and glows;
It is the passion of the storm,
The poignance of the rose;
Through changing shapes, through devious
ways,
By noon or night, through cloud or flame,
My heart has followed all my days
Something I cannot name.
In sunlight on some woman's hair,
Or starlight in some woman's eyne,
Or in low laughter smothered where
Her red lips wedded mine,
My heart hath known, and thrilled to know,
This unnamed presence that it sought;
And when my heart hath found it so,
"Love is the name," I thought.
Sometimes when sudden afterglows
In futile glory storm the skies
Within their transient gold and rose
The secret stirs and dies;
Or when the trampling morn walks o'er
The troubled seas, with feet of flame,
My awed heart whispers, "Ask no more,
For Beauty is the name!"
Or dreaming in old chapels where
The dim aisles pulse with murmurings
That part are music, part are prayer—
(Or rush of hidden wings)
Sometimes I lift a startled head
To some saint's carven countenance,
Half fancying that the lips have said,
All names mean God, perchance!"
THE BIRTH
THERE is a legend that the love of God
So quickened under Mary's heart it wrought
Her very maidenhood to holier stuff….
However that may be, the birth befell
Upon a night when all the Syrian stars
Swayed tremulous before one lordlier orb
That rose in gradual splendor,
Paused,
Flooding the firmament with mystic light,
And dropped upon the breathing hills
A sudden music
Like a distillation from its gleams;
A rain of spirit and a dew of song!
A MOOD OF PAVLOWA
THE soul of the Spring through its body of earth
Bursts in a bloom of fire,
And the crocuses come in a rainbow riot of mirth….
They flutter, they burn, they take wing, they
aspire….
Wings, motion and music and flame,
Flower, woman and laughter, and all these the
same!
She is light and first love and the youth of the
world,
She is sandaled with joy … she is lifted and
whirled,
She is flung, she is swirled, she is driven along
By the carnival winds that have torn her away
From the coronal bloom on the brow of the
May….
She is youth, she is foam, she is flame, she is
visible Song!
THE POOL
REACH over, my Undine, and clutch me a reed—
Nymph of mine idleness, notch me a pipe—
For I am fulfilled of the silence, and long
For to utter the sense of the silence in song.