Younger than spring, without the faintest trace Of disappointment, weariness, or tear Those close-wound ropes of pearl (Or common beads made precious by their use) Seem heavy for so slight a throat to wear; Even so, the loops and globes And jet Hung, in the stately way of old, On festivals and Lord's-day of the week, But startling the close gazer with the sense As a moth beats sidewise And up and over, and tries To skirt the irresistible lure Of the flame that has him sure, My spirit, that is none too strong to-day, Pausing to wonder at the perfect lips, But powerless to stem the tide-race bright, The vehement peace which drifts it toward the light Where soon ah, now, with cries Of grief and giving-up unto its gain But dips Hurriedly home to the exquisite heart of pain, And all is well, for I have seen them plain, We children gathered jealously to share That this should be, even this, The patient head Which suffered years ago the dreary change! That these so dewy lips should be the same As those I stooped to kiss And heard my harrowing half-spoken name, A little ere the one who bowed above her, Our father and her very constant lover, Rose stoical, and we knew that she was dead. Then I, who could not understand or share His antique nobleness, Being unapt to bear The insults which time flings us for our proof, Fled from the horrible roof Into the alien sunshine merciless, The shrill satiric fields ghastly with day Raging to front God in his pride of sway And hurl across the lifted swords of fate That ringed Him where He sat My puny gage of scorn and desolate hate Which somehow should undo Him, after all! That this girl face, expectant, virginal, Which gazes out at me Boon as a sweetheart, as if nothing loth (Save for the eyes, with other presage stored) To pledge me troth, And in the kingdom where the heart is lord Take sail on the terrible gladness of the deep Whose winds the gray Norns keep, That this should be indeed The flesh which caught my soul, a flying seed, Out of the to and fro Of scattering hands where the seedsman Stooping from star to star and age to age That underneath this breast Nine moons I fed Deep of divine unrest, While over and over in the dark she said, "Blessed! but not as happier children blessed " That this should be Even she . God, how with time and change They play upon me, and it is not so Then kiss and clear the score; A gypsy run-the-fields, A little liberal daughter of the earth, Good for what hour of truancy and mirth The careless season yields Hither-side the flood of the year and yonder of the neap; Then thank you, thanks again, and twenty light good-byes, O shrined above the skies, Darken not, holy eyes !! Thou knowest well I know that it is thou Only to save from such memories As would unman me quite, Here in this web of strangeness caught And prey to troubled thought Do I devise These foolish shifts and slight; Only to shield me from the afflicting sense Of some waste influence Which from this morning face and lustrous hair Breathes on me sudden ruin and despair. With any but this girlish depth of gaze, Your coming had not so unsealed and poured The dusty amphoras where I had stored Now in their unawakened virgin time, And dream even now, unconsciously, Upon each soaring peak and sky-hung lea You pictured I should climb. Broken premonitions come, |