Why do I listen to the song
Of pine-boughs singing all day long?
The secret that their songs unfold
Ten thousand bards have left untold.
WILD GRAPE
WILD GRAPE
Beneath the crawling shadow
Of a crumbling temple to gods long-forgotten,
The wild grape twines amid the fragments
Of shattered pillars prone upon the ground,
And its dark leaves hide from sight the broken sculptures
Of faun and youth and maiden,
That once stood in the temple pediment,
Young, naked, beautiful.
In wild freedom it climbs over the carved acanthus
leaves of the crumbling columns,
And weaves a funeral wreath over their dead beauty.
The wild bees hum and buzz
Among the grape-flowers, heavy with honeyed perfume,
Under the drowsy noonday sun,
That spills its amber wine from a full goblet over the thirsting hillside.
Wanton and wild,
Like an unhappy lover
Clinging to the breast of his dead mistress,
The vine clings in voluptuous embrace
About the naked, pallid forms,
And mingles there with the eternal beauty
Of youth and age
And life and death.
TO A GREEK STATUE
Beautiful statue of Parian marble,
Dreaming alone in the northern sunlight,
Ivory-tinted, your slender arms beckon;
I follow, I follow.
Slender and white is your beautiful body,
Gleaming against the gray walls that surround you;
Like hyacinth-flowers beneath the snow sleeping
Is the dream you emprison;—
A dream of beauty that lingers forever,
A dream of the amethyst sky of midnight,
A dream of the jacinth blue of still waters,
Reflecting white temples.