Where flushed Eve with shining fingers
For an instant keeps
Back the curtained dark, and lingers,
Lovely, ere she sleeps.
So upon the beachy margent
Love a moment stands,
Takes the ocean and the argent
Starlight on the sands;
Takes the sunset slowly whitening
From its golden bloom,
Takes the cloud-girt summer lightning
And the distant gloom;
Orbs them all from world-mutation,
Whole and unforgot,
Into his divine creation
Of immortal thought;
Where, like essences supernal,
They nor pass nor range,
Lifted high in Love’s eternal
O’er eternal change.
IN THE GRASS
BY A MONAD (OF LEIBNITZ)
Here in the grass they laid me long ago,
Far from the tumult and the tears of men,
Soft in the summer grass, forlorn and low—
The face of all the world is changed since then.
Here, on my back and scarce beneath the turf,
To lie and lie for many a summer day,
Hearing the faint far ocean-sweeping surf,
Seeing the blue midnoon and twilight grey.
Yea, though you seek and find me not at all
In these wide meadows and the shoreward plain,
Though in the ground and tangled grasses tall
No vestige of my mortal part remain.
Yet, peradventure, where you plant your heel
And heedless start the lizard on the sand,
I am, and all day watch wild duck and teal
Fly northward in a blue-enamelled band.