I wish you were a beaker of Venetian glass
That I might fill you with most precious wine
And drink it, breathless—lo! the moments pass
Of that subliminal communion.
I take you from my lips, and crush you—so!—
Into a thousand shining particles;
So, at the last, my passionate greed shall know
That you were wholly mine.
I wish you were a rare, stringed instrument
Beneath my hand, and from you I would wring
Such unimagined music, as was sent
Never before, along the quivering nerves;
Such strange, sharp discords, out of which I'd mould
Music more sweet than the spring nightingale's;
Then, ere the magic of the sound was old,
Would I not rend each string?
Possess you? Ah, not with the world's possession,
You still, strange creature; neither force nor will
Could make you serve a man's mere earthly passion.
I would dissolve you, in one blinding flash,
Into a drop of elemental dew,
And let you trickle down the barren rock
Into the black abyss, if so I knew
That you henceforth were powerless to mock
My spirit with your smile.
THE ETERNAL FLUX
Let us hold April back
One splendid hour
To bless the passionate earth
With golden shower
Of sunlight from the blue;
Oh April skies,
That earth yearns up to; blue has burned to gold,
Gold pales and dies
In delicate faint rose,
Oh flowing time, oh flux eternal. Hold
The hour back. The April hour goes.
Then, let it be of May,
When sound and sight
And all that's beauty manifest
Through all the day,
Of deep on deep with green,
Of light on light
Across the waves of blossom, when the white
Is lovelier than the rose, except the rose
Is loveliest of all;
When through the day the cuckoo calls unseen,
And at nightfall
The nightingale, whose music no man knows
The magic heart of, sitting in the dark
Sings still the world-old way;
When all of these,
Flowers and birds, and sunset and pale skies
Seem gathered up in scent,
And all of sound and sight
Dissolved, ethereal, not of ears and eyes
But only the soul-beauty of the brain
Flows, in such waves of perfume, over all
—Or like a song in colour, of such strain
As spirits finer than our own must hear
(The beautiful made clear);
Then, then, when it is May,
Surely our hand must touch eternity.
Day pales to night, stars pale upon the day,
And May's last blossoming hour flows away.
Not of June either, though the hanging skies
Make but a little span
'Twixt light and growing light;
And when through that short darkness palely flies
The silent great white moth
—A spirit lost in the night,
A soul, without will or way—;
When the arch of trees
Is duskily green, and close as a builded house
Where love with love might stay,
Guarded and still, from sight;
When the hay is sweet in the fields
And love is as sweet as hay;
When the life-impulse of the wonderful untamed earth
Has reached its fulness and height,
Is broad and steady and wide
As sweeps into splendid bays the flowing tide;
When God might look on the land,
When God might look on the sea,
And say: "For ever be
Perfect, completed, achieved,
As now at this moment you stand."
Neither in June shall we stay the eternal flow
Nor grasp the present with pitiful, mortal hand,
For sliding past like water the June hours go.