Its gates are deaf to Love, high summoner;
Yea, Love’s great warrant runs not there:
You are your prisoner.
Yourself are with yourself the sole consortress
In that unleaguerable fortress;
It knows you not for portress
Its keys are at the cincture hung of God;
Its gates are trepidant to His nod;
By Him its floors are trod.
And if His feet shall rock those floors in wrath,
Or blest aspersion sleek His path,
Is only choice it hath.
Yea, in that ultimate heart’s occult abode
To lie as in an oubliette of God,
Or as a bower untrod,
Built by a secret Lover for His Spouse;—
Sole choice is this your life allows,
Sad tree, whose perishing boughs
So few birds house!
DREAM-TRYST.
The breaths of kissing night and day
Were mingled in the eastern Heaven:
Throbbing with unheard melody
Shook Lyra all its star-chord seven:
When dusk shrunk cold, and light trod shy,
And dawn’s grey eyes were troubled grey;
And souls went palely up the sky,
And mine to Lucidé.
There was no change in her sweet eyes
Since last I saw those sweet eyes shine;
There was no change in her deep heart
Since last that deep heart knocked at mine.
Her eyes were clear, her eyes were Hope’s,
Wherein did ever come and go
The sparkle of the fountain-drops
From her sweet soul below.
The chambers in the house of dreams
Are fed with so divine an air,
That Time’s hoar wings grow young therein,
And they who walk there are most fair.
I joyed for me, I joyed for her,
Who with the Past meet girt about:
Where our last kiss still warms the air,
Nor can her eyes go out.