On we pass, and onward oar
To yon long lip of ragged shore,
Where from yon rock spouts, babbling frore
A ferny spring; where dodging by
Rests sulphur-disced that butterfly;
Mallows, rank crowded in for room,
'Mid wild bean and wild mustard bloom;
Where fishers 'neath those cottonwoods
Last Spring encamped those ashes say
And charcoal boughs.—'T is long till buds!—
Here who in August misses May?
3.
He speaks, resting.
Here the shores are irised; grasses
Clump the water gray that glasses
Broken wood and deepened distance:
Far the musical persistence
Of a field-lark lingers low
In the west where tulips blow.
White before us flames one pointed
Star; and Day hath Night anointed
King; from out her azure ewer
Pouring starry fire, truer
Than true gold. Star-crowned he stands
With the starlight in his hands.
Will the moon bleach through the ragged
Tree-tops ere we reach yon jagged
Rock, that rises gradually?
Pharos of our homeward valley.
Down the dusk burns golden-red;
Embers are the stars o'erhead.
At my soul some Protean elf is:
You 're Simaetha, I am Delphis;
You are Sappho and her Phaon—
I. We love. There lies a ray on
All the dark Æolian seas
'Round the violet Lesbian leas.
On we drift. He loves you. Nearer
Looms our island. Rosier, clearer
The Leucadian cliff we follow,
Where the temple of Apollo
Lifts a pale and pillared fire—
Strike, oh, strike the Lydian lyre;
Out of Hellas blows the breeze
Singing to the Sapphic seas.
4.
He sings.
Night, Night, 't is night. The moon before to love us,
And all the moonlight tangled in the stream:
Love, love, my love, and all the stars above us,
The stars above and every star a dream.
In odorous purple, where the falling warble
Of water cascades and the plunged foam glows,
A columned ruin heaps its sculptured marble
Curled with the chiselled rebeck and the rose.