II
O sweet my sometime loved and worshipt one
A day thou gavest me
That rose full-orbed in starlike happiness
And lit our heaven that other stars had none:—
Sole as that westering sphere companionless
When twilight is begun
And the dead sun transfigureth the sea:
A day so bright
Methought the very shadow, from its light
Thrown, were enough to bless
(Albeit with but a shadow's benison)
The unborn days its dark posterity.
Methought our love, though dead, should be
Fair as in life, by memory
Embalmed, a rose with bloom for aye unblown.
But lo the forest is with faded leaves
And our two hearts with faded loves bestrown,
And in mine ear the weak wind grieves
And uttereth moan:
"Shed leaves and fallen, fallen loves and shed,
And those are dead and these are more than dead;
And those have known
The springtime, these the lovetime, overthrown,
With all fair times and pleasureful that be."
And shall not we, O Time, and shall not we
Thy strong self see
Brought low and vanquishèd,
And made to bow the knee
And bow the head
To one that is when thou and thine are fled,
The silent-eyed austere Eternity?
III
Behold a new song still the lark doth sing
Each morning when he riseth from the grass,
And no man sigheth for the song that was,
The melody that yestermorn did bring.
The rose dies and the lily, and no man mourns
That nevermore the selfsame flower returns:
For well we know a thousand flowers will spring,
A thousand birds make music on the wing.
Ay me! fair things and sweet are birds and flowers,
The scent of lily and rose in gardens still,
The babble of beakèd mouths that speak no ill:
And love is sweeter yet than flower or bird,
Or any odor smelled or ditty heard—
Love is another and a sweeter thing.
But when the music ceaseth in Love's bowers,
Who listeneth well shall hear the silence stirred
With aftermoan of many a fretful string:
For when Love harpeth to the hollow hours,
His gladdest notes make saddest echoing.
VANISHINGS
As one whose eyes have watched the stricken day
Swoon to its crimson death adown the sea,
Turning his face to eastward suddenly
Sees a lack-lustre world all chill and gray,—
Then, wandering sunless whitherso he may,
Feels the first dubious dumb obscurity,
And vague foregloomings of the Dark to be,
Close like a sadness round his glimmering way;
So I, from drifting dreambound on and on
About strange isles of utter bliss, in seas
Whose waves are unimagined melodies,
Rose and beheld the dreamless world anew:
Sad were the fields, and dim with splendours gone
The strait sky-glimpses fugitive and few.
BEETHOVEN
O Master, if immortals suffer aught
Of sadness like to ours, and in like sighs
And with like overflow of darkened eyes
Disburden them, I know not; but methought,
What time to day mine ear the utterance caught
Whereby in manifold melodious wise
Thy heart's unrestful infelicities
Rose like a sea with easeless winds distraught,
That thine seemed angel's grieving, as of one
Strayed somewhere out of heaven, and uttering
Lone moan and alien wail: because he hath
Failed to remember the remounting path,
And singing, weeping, can but weep and sing
Ever, through vasts forgotten of the sun.
GOD-SEEKING
God-seeking thou hast journeyed far and nigh.
On dawn-lit mountain-tops thy soul did yearn
To hear His trailing garments wander by;
And where 'mid thunderous glooms great sunsets burn,
Vainly thou sought'st His shadow on sea and sky;
Or gazing up, at noontide, could'st discern
Only a neutral heaven's indifferent eye
And countenance austerely taciturn.