Poems | Page 4

Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long, Thou should'st forget
thy native song, And mar thy mortal melodies With broken stammer of
the skies.
Ah! let the sweet birds of the Lord With earth's waters make accord;
Teach how the crucifix may be Carven from the laurel-tree, Fruit of the
Hesperides Burnish take on Eden-trees, The Muses' sacred grove be
wet With the red dew of Olivet, And Sappho lay her burning brows In
white Cecilia's lap of snows!
Thy childhood must have felt the stings Of too divine o'ershadowings;
Its odorous heart have been a blossom That in darkness did unbosom,
Those fire-flies of God to invite, Burning spirits, which by night Bear
upon their laden wing To such hearts impregnating. For flowers that
night-wings fertilize Mock down the stars' unsteady eyes, And with a
happy, sleepless glance Gaze the moon out of countenance. I think thy
girlhood's watchers must Have took thy folded songs on trust, And felt
them, as one feels the stir Of still lightnings in the hair, When
conscious hush expects the cloud To speak the golden secret loud
Which tacit air is privy to; Flasked in the grape the wine they knew,
Ere thy poet-mouth was able For its first young starry babble. Keep'st
thou not yet that subtle grace? Yea, in this silent interspace, God sets
His poems in thy face!
The loom which mortal verse affords, Out of weak and mortal words,
Wovest thou thy singing-weed in, To a rune of thy far Eden. Vain are
all disguises! Ah, Heavenly incognita! Thy mien bewrayeth through

that wrong The great Uranian House of Song! As the vintages of earth
Taste of the sun that riped their birth, We know what never cadent Sun
Thy lamped clusters throbbed upon, What plumed feet the winepress
trod; Thy wine is flavorous of God. Whatever singing-robe thou wear
Has the Paradisal air; And some gold feather it has kept Shows what
Floor it lately swept!

"MANUS ANIMAM PINXIT"

Lady who hold'st on me dominion! Within your spirit's arms I stay me
fast Against the fell Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell; And claim
my right in you, most hardly won, Of chaste fidelity upon the chaste:
Hold me and hold by me, lest both should fall (O in high escalade high
companion!) Even in the breach of Heaven's assaulted wall. Like to a
wind-sown sapling grow I from The clift, Sweet, of your
skyward-jetting soul, - Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome By
all its clouds incumbent: O be true To your soul, dearest, as my life to
you! For if that soil grow sterile, then the whole Of me must shrivel,
from the topmost shoot Of climbing poesy, and my life, killed through,
Dry down and perish to the foodless root.
Sweet Summer! unto you this swallow drew, By secret instincts
inappeasable, That did direct him well, Lured from his gelid North
which wrought him wrong, Wintered of sunning song; - By happy
instincts inappeasable, Ah yes! that led him well, Lured to the untried
regions and the new Climes of auspicious you; To twitter there, and in
his singing dwell. But ah! if you, my Summer, should grow waste,
With grieving skies o'ercast, For such migration my poor wing was
strong But once; it has no power to fare again Forth o'er the heads of
men, Nor other Summers for its Sanctuary: But from your mind's
chilled sky It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings Among
your soul's forlornest things; A speck upon your memory, alack! A
dead fly in a dusty window-crack.
O therefore you who are What words, being to such mysteries As
raiment to the body is, Should rather hide than tell; Chaste and
intelligential love: Whose form is as a grove Hushed with the cooing of
an unseen dove; Whose spirit to my touch thrills purer far Than is the
tingling of a silver bell; Whose body other ladies well might bear As

soul,--yea, which it profanation were For all but you to take as fleshly
woof, Being spirit truest proof; Whose spirit sure is lineal to that Which
sang Magnificat: Chastest, since such you are, Take this curbed spirit
of mine, Which your own eyes invest with light divine, For lofty love
and high auxiliar In daily exalt emprise Which outsoars mortal eyes;
This soul which on your soul is laid, As maid's breast against breast of
maid; Beholding how your own I have engraved On it, and with what
purging thoughts have laved This love of mine from all mortality
Indeed the copy is a painful one, And with long labour done! O if you
doubt the thing you are, lady, Come then, and look in me; Your beauty,
Dian, dress and contemplate