| WITH our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked, | |
| As often before, the April fields till star-light | |
| Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness | |
| Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood, | |
| Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing | 5 |
| Like notes of music that run together, into winning, | |
| In the inspired improvisation of love! | |
| But to put back of us as a canticle ended | |
| The rapt enchantment of the flesh, | |
| In which our souls swooned, down, down, | 10 |
| Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves— | |
| Annihilated in love! | |
| To leave these behind for a room with lamps: | |
| And to stand with our Secret mocking itself, | |
| And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins, | 15 |
| Stared at by all between salad and coffee. | |
| And to see him tremble, and feel myself | |
| Prescient, as one who signs a bond— | |
| Not flaming with gifts and pledges heaped | |
| With rosy hands over his brow. | 20 |
| And then, O night! deliberate! unlovely! | |
| With all of our wooing blotted out by the winning, | |
| In a chosen room in an hour that was known to all! | |
| Next day he sat so listless, almost cold, | |
| So strangely changed, wondering why I wept, | 25 |
| Till a kind of sick despair and voluptuous madness | |
| Seized us to make the pact of death. | |
| |
| A stalk of the earth-sphere, | |
| Frail as star-light; | |
| Waiting to be drawn once again | 30 |
| Into creation’s stream. | |
| But next time to be given birth | |
| Gazed at by Raphael and St. Francis | |
| Sometimes as they pass. | |
| For I am their little brother, | 35 |
| To be known clearly face to face | |
| Through a cycle of birth hereafter run. | |
| You may know the seed and the soil; | |
| You may feel the cold rain fall, | |
| But only the earth-sphere, only heaven | 40 |
| Knows the secret of the seed | |
| In the nuptial chamber under the soil. | |
| Throw me into the stream again, | |
| Give me another trial— | |
| Save me, Shelley! | 45 |
