Yea, I must love thee though I fall and die!
Yea, hath my heart become for Love a lyre,
And he hath syllabled thy name, and I
Fill in each silence with a song; aspire
To rival in my rapture Euterpe.
For life or death, Elysium or Doom,
We soar and sink together through the vast
And unrevealed, dim reaches of the Room
Whose walls are Night, and its wide portals three—
The Future, and the Present, and the Past!
IV
Leave thou thy chamber and its spectral glooms;
Rise like the morn upon the mountains; stand,
My Rose of Dawn, among all lesser blooms,
And with white lilies mate each slender hand,
And let the sky grow glorious and blue
To match thine eyes! ... Come, Queen, and my Adored,
Clothed in thy splendour as I saw thee first!
Oh, come, ere I thwart Cæsar on my sword,
And with my body pay him what is due!
Quench with thy lips on mine, O Heart, love's thirst.
V
Why dost thou linger, thou the miracle
Among all marvels? Hither call the birds;
The faint, far song of rivers; silver bell
And pause of twilight, when the crooning words
Of mothers bending over babes awake
Echoes of whispers through the reeds and grass:
Let these and other voices vie with thine,
And lo! the god who vanquished Marsyas
Yields thee his harp, and one by one forsake
The nymphs their singing for thy voice divine.
VI
O beauty, beauty that can never die!
O music, music meeting on thy mouth!
Challenge the wings of morning, bid them fly
Over the earth, east, west, north, and south,
To find one other woman fair as thou;
One other woman in whom harmonies
Rise up like fountains singing in the sun.
Supernal Wonder! thou art more than these
Frail jars of perfumed balsams from the bough
Of Life's tree, emptied ere the day be done.
VII
Since thou wast born, the dreamy lotus blows
Its blossomed buds no more in vales of ease;
Mnemosyne revives where Lethe flows
Past sad, lost souls; for he who beauty sees,
That moment lives forever, and the sight
Shatters the crystal chalices of dream;
While phantom faces form, and legions wan
And ghostly gather from the dark to stream
Out through the wide, star-studded gates of night,
Claiming the open portals of the dawn!
VIII