And now, thou elder nursling of the nest;Ere all the intertangled west Be one magnificence Of multitudinous blossoms that o'errun The flaming brazen bowl o' the burnished sun Which they do flower from, How shall I 'stablish THY memorial?
Nay, how or with what countenance shall I come To plead in my defence For loving thee at all?
I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech, Love their love, or mine own love to them teach;A bastard barred from their inheritance, Who seem, in this dim shape's uneasy nook, Some sun-flower's spirit which by luckless chance Has mournfully its tenement mistook;When it were better in its right abode, Heartless and happy lackeying its god.
How com'st thou, little tender thing of white, Whose very touch full scantly me beseems, How com'st thou resting on my vaporous dreams, Kindling a wraith there of earth's vernal green?
Even so as I have seen, In night's aerial sea with no wind blust'rous, A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite Curve a shored crescent wide;And on its slope marge shelving to the night The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous Medusa newly washed up from the tide, Lay in an oozy pool of its own deliquious light.
Yet hear how my excuses may prevail, Nor, tender white orb, be thou opposite!
Life and life's beauty only hold their revels In the abysmal ocean's luminous levels.
There, like the phantasms of a poet pale, The exquisite marvels sail:
Clarified silver; greens and azures frail As if the colours sighed themselves away, And blent in supersubtile interplay As if they swooned into each other's arms;Repured vermilion, Like ear-tips 'gainst the sun;And beings that, under night's swart pinion, Make every wave upon the harbour-bars A beaten yolk of stars.
But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps, Die out those lovely swarms;And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps.
Love and love's beauty only hold their revels In life's familiar, penetrable levels:
What of its ocean-floor?
I dwell there evermore.
From almost earliest youth I raised the lids o' the truth, And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight;Ever I knew me Beauty's eremite, In antre of this lowly body set.
Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.
Nathless I not forget How I have, even as the anchorite, I too, imperishing essences that console.
Under my ruined passions, fallen and sere, The wild dreams stir like little radiant girls, Whom in the moulted plumage of the year Their comrades sweet have buried to the curls.
Yet, though their dedicated amorist, How often do I bid my visions hist, Deaf to them, pleading all their piteous fills;Who weep, as weep the maidens of the mist Clinging the necks of the unheeding hills:
And their tears wash them lovelier than before, That from grief's self our sad delight grows more, Fair are the soul's uncrisped calms, indeed, Endiapered with many a spiritual form Of blosmy-tinctured weed;But scarce itself is conscious of the store Suckled by it, and only after storm Casts up its loosened thoughts upon the shore.
To this end my deeps are stirred;
And I deem well why life unshared Was ordained me of yore.
In pairing-time, we know, the bird Kindles to its deepmost splendour, And the tender Voice is tenderest in its throat;Were its love, for ever nigh it, Never by it, It might keep a vernal note, The crocean and amethystine In their pristine Lustre linger on its coat.
Therefore must my song-bower lone be, That my tone be Fresh with dewy pain alway;She, who scorns my dearest care ta'en, An uncertain Shadow of the sprite of May.
And is my song sweet, as they say?
Tis sweet for one whose voice has no reply, Save silence's sad cry:
And are its plumes a burning bright array?
They burn for an unincarnated eye A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure, Urges me glittering to aerial death, I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour;Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny Obeying of my heart's impetuous might.
The earth and all its planetary kin, Starry buds tangled in the whirling hair That flames round the Phoebean wassailer, Speed no more ignorant, more predestined flight, Than I, HER viewless tresses netted in.
As some most beautiful one, with lovely taunting, Her eyes of guileless guile o'ercanopies, Does her hid visage bow, And miserly your covetous gaze allow, By inchmeal, coy degrees, Saying--"Can you see me now?"Yet from the mouth's reflex you guess the wanting Smile of the coming eyes In all their upturned grievous witcheries, Before that sunbreak rise;And each still hidden feature view within Your mind, as eager scrutinies detail The moon's young rondure through the shamefast veil Drawn to her gleaming chin:
After this wise, From the enticing smile of earth and skies I dream my unknown Fair's refused gaze;And guessingly her love's close traits devise, Which she with subtile coquetries Through little human glimpses slow displays, Cozening my mateless days By sick, intolerable delays.
And so I keep mine uncompanioned ways;
And so my touch, to golden poesies Turning love's bread, is bought at hunger's price.
So,--in the inextinguishable wars Which roll song's Orient on the sullen night Whose ragged banners in their own despite Take on the tinges of the hated light, -So Sultan Phoebus has his Janizars.
But if mine unappeased cicatrices Might get them lawful ease;Were any gentle passion hallowed me, Who must none other breath of passion feel Save such as winnows to the fledged heel The tremulous Paradisal plumages;The conscious sacramental trees Which ever be Shaken celestially, Consentient with enamoured wings, might know my love for thee.
Yet is there more, whereat none guesseth, love!
