A Jongleur Strayed | Page 3

hear her laughter,?The moment after,?Making of me her laughing-stock?Within her hidden house.
The young moon with her wand of pearl?Taps on her hidden door,?Bids her beauty flower?In that woodland bower,?All white like a mortal girl,?With moonshine hallowed o'er.
Yet were there thrice ten thousand trees?To hide her face from me,?Not all her fleeing?Should 'scape my seeing,?Nor all her ambushed sorceries?Secure concealment be?For her bright being.
Yea! should she by the laddered pine?Steal to the stars on high,?Her fairy whiteness,?Hidden in brightness,?Her hiding-place would so out-shine?The constellated sky,?She could not 'scape the eye?Of my pursuing,?Nor her fawn-foot lightness?Out-speed my wooing.
MAY IS BACK
May is back, and You and I?Are at the stream again--?The leaves are out,?And all about?The building birds begin?To make a merry din:?May is back, and You and I?Are at the dream again.
May is back, and You and I?Lie in the grass again,--?The butterfly?Flits painted by,?The bee brings sudden fear,?Like people talking near;?May is back, and You and I?Are lad and lass again.
May is back, and You and I?Are heart to heart again,--?In God's green house?We make our vows?Of summer love that stays?Faithful through winter days;?May is back, and You and I?Shall never part again.
MOON-MARKETING
Let's go to market in the moon,?And buy some dreams together,?Slip on your little silver shoon,?And don your cap and feather;?No need of petticoat or stocking--?No one up there will think it shocking.
Across the dew,?Just I and you,?With all the world behind us;?Away from rules,?Away from fools,?Where nobody can find us.
TWO BIRTHDAYS
Your birthday, sweetheart, is my birthday too,?For, had you not been born,?I who began to live beholding you?Up early as the morn,?That day in June beside the rose-hung stream,?Had never lived at all--?We stood, do you remember? in a dream?There by the water-fall.
You were as still as all the other flowers?Under the morning's spell;?Sudden two lives were one, and all things "ours"--?How we can never tell.?Surely it had been fated long ago--?What else, dear, could we think??It seemed that we had stood for ever so,?There by the river's brink.
And all the days that followed seemed as days?Lived side by side before,?Strangely familiar all your looks and ways,?The very frock you wore;?Nothing seemed strange, yet all divinely new;?Known to your finger tips,?Yet filled with wonder every part of you,?Your hair, your eyes, your lips.
The wise in love say love was ever thus?Through endless Time and Space,?Heart linked to heart, beloved, as with us,?Only one face--one face--?Our own to love, however fair the rest;?'Tis so true lovers are,?For ever breast to breast,?On--on--from star to star.
SONG
My eye upon your eyes--?So was I born,?One far-off day in Paradise,?A summer morn;?I had not lived till then,?But, wildered, went,?Like other wandering men,?Nor what Life meant?Knew I till then.
My hand within your hand--?So would I live,?Nor would I ask to understand?Why God did give?Your loveliness to me,?But I would pray?Worthier of it to be,?By night and day,?Unworthy me!
My heart upon your heart--?So would I die,?I cannot think that God will part?Us, you and I;?The work he did undo,?That summer morn;?I lived, and would die too,?Where I was born,?Beloved, in you.
THE FAITHFUL LOVER
All beauty is but thee in echo-shapes,?No lovely thing but echoes some of thee,?Vainly some touch of thy perfection apes,?Sighing as fair as thou thyself to be;?Therefore, be not disquieted that I?On other forms turn oft my wandering gaze,?Nor deem it anywise disloyalty:?Nay! 'tis the pious fervour of my eye,?That seeks thy face in every other face.?As in the mirrored salon of a queen,?Flashes from glass to glass, as she walks by,?In sweet reiteration still--the queen!?So is the world for thee to walk in, sweet;?But to see thee is all things to have seen.?And, as the moon in every crystal lake,?Walking the heaven with little silver feet,?Sees each bright copy her reflection take,?And every dew-drop holds its little glass,?To catch her loveliness as she doth pass,?So do all things make haste to copy thee.?I, then, to see thee thus over and over,?Am wistful too all lovely shapes to see,?For each thus makes me more and more thy lover.
LOVE'S TENDERNESS
Deem not my love is only for the bloom,?The honey and the marble, that is You;?Tis so, Belovéd, common loves consume?Their treasury, and vanish like the dew.?Nay, but my love's a thing that's far more true;?For little loves a little hour hath room,?But not for us their brief and trivial doom,?In a far richer soil our loving grew,?From deeper wells of being it upsprings;?Nor shall the wildest kiss that makes one mouth,?Draining all nectar from the flowered world,?Slake its divine unfathomable drouth;?And, when your wings against my heart lie furled,?With what a tenderness it dreams and sings!
ANIMA MUNDI
Let all things vanish, if but you remain;?For if you stay, beloved, what is gone??Yet, should you go, all permanence is vain,?And all the piled abundance is as none.
With you beside me in the desert sand,?Your smile upon me,