ASTARTE.
When the latest strife is lost, and all is done with,
Ere we slumber in the spirit and the brain,
We drowse back, in dreams, to days that life begun with,
And their tender light returns to us again.
I have cast away the tangle and the torment
Of the cords that bound my life up in a mesh;
And the pulse begins to throb that long lay dormant
'Neath their pressure; and the old wounds bleed afresh.
I am touched again with shades of early sadness,
Like the summer-cloud's light shadow in my hair;
I am thrilled again with breaths of boyish gladness,
Like the scent of some last primrose on the air.
And again she comes, with all her silent graces,
The lost woman of my youth, yet unpossessed;
And her cold face so unlike the other faces
Of the women whose dead lips I since have pressed.
The motion and the fragrance of her garments
Seem about me, all the day long, in the room;
And her face, with its bewildering old endearments,
Comes at night, between the curtains, in the gloom.
When vain dreams are stirred with sighing, near the morning,
To my own her phantom lips I feel approach;
And her smile, at eve, breaks o'er me without warning
From its speechless, pale, perpetual reproach.
When life's dawning glimmer yet had all the tint there
Of the orient, in the freshness of the grass
(Ah, what feet since then have trodden out the print there!)
Did her soft, her silent footsteps fall, and pass.
They fell lightly, as the dew falls, 'mid ungathered
Meadow-flowers, and lightly lingered with the dew.
But the dew is gone, the grass is dried and withered,
And the traces of those steps have faded too.
Other footsteps fall about me,—faint, uncertain,
In the shadow of the world, as it recedes;
Other forms peer through the half-uplifted curtain
Of that mystery which hangs behind the creeds.