Hawthorn and Lavender | Page 4

years ago!
XXIV
Only a freakish wisp of hair?--?Nay, but its wildest, its most frolic whorl?Stands for a slim, enamoured, sweet-fleshed girl!?And so, a tangle of dream and charm and fun,?Its every crook a promise and a snare,?Its every dowle, or genially gadding?Or crisply curled,?Heartening and madding,?Empales a novel and peculiar world?Of right, essential fantasies,?And shining acts as yet undone,?But in these wonder-working days?Soon, soon to ask our sovran Lord, the Sun,?For countenance and praise,?As of the best his storying eye hath seen,?And his vast memory can parallel,?Among the darling victories--?Beneficent, beautiful, inexpressible--?Of life on time!--
Yet have they flashed and been?In millions, since 'twas his to bring?The heaven-creating Spring,?An angel of adventure and delight,?In all her beauty and all her strength and worth,?With her great guerdons of romance and spright,?And those high needs that fill the flesh with might,?Home to the citizens of this good, green earth.
Poor souls--they have but time and place?To play their transient little play?And sing their singular little song,?Ere they are rushed away?Into the antient, undisclosing Night;?And none is left to tell of the clear eyes?That filled them with God's grace,?And turned the iron skies to skies of gold!?None; but the sweetest She herself grows old--?Grows old, and dies;?And, but for such a lovely snatch of hair?As this, none--none could guess, or know?That She was kind and fair,?And he had nights and days beyond compare--?How many dusty and silent years ago!
XXV
This is the moon of roses,
The lovely and flowerful time;?And, as white roses climb the wall,
Your dreams about me climb.
This is the moon of roses,
Glad and golden and blue;?And, as red roses drink of the sun,
My dreams they drink of you.
This is the moon of roses!
The cherishing South-West blows,?And life, dear heart, for me and you,
O, life's a rejoicing rose.
XXVI
June, and a warm, sweet rain;
June, and the call of a bird:?To a lover in pain
What lovelier word?
Two of each other fain
Happily heart on heart:?So in the wind and rain
Spring bears his part!
O, to be heart on heart
One with the warm June rain,?God with us from the start,
And no more pain!
XXVII
It was a bowl of roses:
There in the light they lay,?Languishing, glorying, glowing
Their life away.
And the soul of them rose like a presence,
Into me crept and grew,?And filled me with something--some one--
O, was it you?
XXVIII
Your feet as glad?And light as a dove's homing wings, you came--?Came with your sweets to fill my hands,?My sense with your perfume.
We closed with lips?Grown weary and fain with longing from afar,?The while your grave, enamoured eyes?Drank down the dream in mine.
Till the great need?So lovely and so instant grew, it seemed?The embodied Spirit of the Spring?Hung at me, heart on heart.
XXIX
A world of leafage murmurous and a-twinkle;?The green, delicious plenitude of June;?Love and laughter and song?The blue day long?Going to the same glad, golden tune--?The same glad tune!
Clouds on the dim, delighting skies a-sprinkle;?Poplars black in the wake of a setting moon;?Love and languor and sleep?And the star-sown deep?Going to the same good, golden tune--?The same good tune!
XXX
I send you roses--red, like love,
And white, like death, sweet friend:?Born in your bosom to rejoice,
Languish, and droop, and end.
If the white roses tell of death,
Let the red roses mend?The talk with true stories of love
Unchanging till the end.
Red and white roses, love and death--
What else is left to send??For what is life but love, the means,
And death, true Wife, the end?
XXXI
These glad, these great, these goodly days?Bewildering hope, outrunning praise,
The Earth, renewed by the great Sun's longing,?Utters her joy in a million ways!
What is there left, sweet Soul and true--?What, for us and our dream to do?
What but to take this mighty Summer?As it were made for me and you?
Take it and live it beam by beam,?Motes of light on a gleaming stream,
Glare by glare and glory on glory?Through to the ash of this flaming dream!
XXXII
The downs, like uplands in Eden,
Gleam in an afterglow?Like a rose-world ruining earthwards--
Mystical, wistful, slow!
Near and afar in the leafage,
That last glad call to the nest!?And the thought of you hangs and triumphs
With Hesper low in the west!
Till the song and the light and the colour,
The passion of earth and sky,?Are blent in a rapture of boding
Of the death we should one day die.
XXXIII
The time of the silence?Of birds is upon us:?Rust in the chestnut leaf,?Dust in the stubble:?The turn of the Year?And the call to decay.
Stately and splendid,?The Summer passes:?Sad with satiety,?Sick with fulfilment;?Spent and consumed,?But august till the end.
By wilting hedgerows?And white-hot highways,?Bearing its memories?Even as a burden,?The tired heart plods?For a place of rest.
XXXIV
There was no kiss that day??No intimate Yea-and-Nay,?No sweets in hand, no tender, lingering touch??None of those desperate, exquisite caresses,?So instant--O, so brief!--and yet so much,?The thought of the swiftest lifts and blesses??Nor any one of those great royal words,?Those sovran privacies of speech,?Frank as the call of April birds,?That, whispered, live a life