I
I saw you smiling over broken flowers,
Yourself a flower unbroken and more rare
Than petals that make sweet the moonlit air,
And load with scent the Summer’s golden hours.
Your perfect head, the ripple of your hair,
Like the soft sun that shines through April showers,
Leans from a fairyland of twinkling towers,
And beckons me to an enchanted stair.
Your eyes, your eyes, divide me from my sleep;
The echo of your laughter makes me weep,
You fill the measureless world, you frailest thing!
And in the silence of my deepest dream,
Your beauty wanders like a whispering stream,
And brushes past me like an angel’s wing.
II
To-night the thoughts of you drift round my bed
Like thistledown; I weave them into rhymes;
And as I fall to sleep I hear their chimes
Building sweet music high above my head,
And prayers and poems all in praise of you;
And, happy in my fading dream, I say:
“There will be something ready with the day
To send to her, to speak for me, to sue.”
But when the morning comes, the nimble words
Have fled into the air like frightened birds,
That answer my soft whistle with a scream;
And only the recalcitrant thoughts remain;
The baffled blind desire to find again
The accents that were docile in my dream.