Sister Songs | Page 4

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