XI
Ah what avails the sceptred race,
Ah what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
XII
With rosy hand a little girl prest down
A boss of fresh-cull’d cowslips in a rill:
Often as they sprang up again, a frown
Show’d she disliked resistance to her will:
But when they droopt their heads and shone much less,
She shook them to and fro, and threw them by,
And tript away. ‘Ye loathe the heaviness
Ye love to cause, my little girls!’ thought I,
‘And what had shone for you, by you must die.’
XIII
Ternissa! you are fled!
I say not to the dead,
But to the happy ones who rest below:
For, surely, surely, where
Your voice and graces are,
Nothing of death can any feel or know.
Girls who delight to dwell
Where grows most asphodel,
Gather to their calm breasts each word you speak:
The mild Persephone
Places you on her knee,
And your cool palm smooths down stern Pluto’s cheek.
XIV
Various the roads of life; in one
All terminate, one lonely way
We go; and ‘Is he gone?’
Is all our best friends say.
XV
Yes; I write verses now and then,
But blunt and flaccid is my pen,
No longer talkt of by young men
As rather clever: