How long ago it is since we went Maying!
Since she and I went Maying long ago!
The years have left my forehead lined, I know,
Have thinned my hair around the temples graying.
Ah, time will change us: yea, I hear it saying—
“She, too, grows old: the face of rose and snow
Has lost its freshness: in the hair’s brown glow
Some strands of silver sadly, too, are straying.
The form you knew, whose beauty so enspelled,
Has lost the litheness of its loveliness:
And all the gladness that her blue eyes held
Tears and the world have hardened with distress.”—
“True! true!” I answer, “O ye years that part!
These things are changed—but is her heart, her heart?”
LOVE, THE INTERPRETER
Thou art the music that I hear in sleep,
The poetry that lures me on in dreams;
The magic, thou, that holds my thought with themes
Of young romance in revery’s mystic keep.—
The lily’s aura, and the damask deep
That clothes the rose; the whispering soul that seems
To haunt the wind; the rainbow light that streams,
Like some wild spirit, ’thwart the cataract’s leap—
Are glimmerings of thee and thy loveliness,
Pervading all my world; interpreting
The marvel and the wonder these disclose:
For, lacking thee, to me were meaningless
Life, love, and hope, the joy of everything,
And all the beauty that the wide world knows.
LOVE DESPISED
Why not resolve and hunt it from one’s heart?
This love, this god and fiend, that makes a hell
Of all one’s life, in ways no tongue can tell,
No mind divine, nor any word impart.
Would not one think the slights that make hearts smart,
The ice of love’s disdain, the wintry well
Of love’s disfavor, otherwise would quell?
Or school one’s nature, too, to its own art?
Why will men cringe and cry forever here
For that which, once obtained, may prove a curse?
Why not remember that, however fair,
Decay is wed to Beauty? that each year
Robs somewhat from the riches of her purse,
Until at last her house of pride stands bare?
PEARLS
Baroque, but beautiful, between the lunes,
The valves of nacre of a mussel-shell,
Behold, a pearl! shaped like the burnished bell
Of some strange blossom that long afternoons
Of summer coax to open: all the moon’s
Chaste lustre in it; hues that only dwell
With purity.... It takes me, like a spell,
Back to a day when, whistling truant tunes,
A barefoot boy I waded ’mid the rocks,
Searching for shells strewn in the creek’s slow swirl,
Unconscious of the pearls that round me lay:
While, ’mid wild-roses,—all her tomboy locks
Blond-blowing,—stood, unnoticed then, a girl,
My sweetheart once, the pearl I flung away.