The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems | Page 2

of your hair.
How long the sunlight and the sea?Wove and re-wove this rippling gold?To rhythms of eternity;?And many a flashing thing grew old,?Waiting this miracle to be;?And painted marvels manifold,
Still with his work unsatisfied,?Eager each new effect to try,?The solemn artist cast aside,?Rainbow and shell and butterfly,?As some stern blacksmith scatters wide?The sparks that from his anvil fly.
How many shells, whorl within whorl,?Litter the marges of the sphere?With wrack of unregarded pearl,?To shape that little thing your ear:?Creation, just to make one girl,?Hath travailed with exceeding fear.
The moonlight of forgotten seas?Dwells in your eyes, and on your tongue?The honey of a million bees,?And all the sorrows of all song:?You are the ending of all these,?The world grew old to make you young.
All time hath traveled to this rose;?To the strange making of this face?Came agonies of fires and snows;?And Death and April, nights and days?Unnumbered, unimagined throes,?Find in this flower their meeting place.
Strange artist, to my aching thought?Give answer: all the patient power?That to this perfect ending wrought,?Shall it mean nothing but an hour??Say not that it is all for nought?Time brings Eternity a flower.
All the words in all the world?Cannot tell you how I love you,?All the little stars that shine?To make a silver crown above you;
"ALL THE WORDS IN ALL THE WORLD"
All the flowers cannot weave?A garland worthy of your hair,?Not a bird in the four winds?Can sing of you that is so fair.
Only the spheres can sing of you;?Some planet in celestial space,?Hallowed and lonely in the dawn,?Shall sing the poem of your face.
"I SAID--I CARE NOT"
I said--I care not if I can?But look into her eyes again,?But lay my hand within her hand?Just once again.
Though all the world be filled with snow?And fire and cataclysmal storm,?I'll cross it just to lay my head?Upon her bosom warm.
Ah! bosom made of April flowers,?Might I but bring this aching brain,?This foolish head, and lay it down?On April once again!
"ALL THE WIDE WORLD IS BUT THE THOUGHT OF YOU"
All the wide world is but the thought of you:?Who made you out of wonder and of dew??Was it some god with tears in his deep eyes,?Who loved a woman white and over-wise,?That strangely put all violets in your hair--?And put into your face all distance too?
"LIGHTNINGS MAY FLICKER ROUND MY HEAD"
Lightnings may flicker round my head,?And all the world seem doom,?If you, like a wild rose, will walk?Strangely into the room.
If only my sad heart may hear?Your voice of faery laughter--?What matters though the heavens fall,?And hell come thundering after.
"THE AFTERNOON IS LONELY FOR YOUR FACE"
The afternoon is lonely for your face,?The pampered morning mocks the day's decline--?I was so rich at noon, the sun was mine,?Mine the sad sea that in that rocky place?Girded us round with blue betrothal ring.?Because your heart was mine, your heart, that precious thing.
The night will be a desert till the dawn,?Unless you take some ferry-boat of dreams,?And glide to me, a glory of silver beams,?Under my eyelids, like sad curtains drawn;?So, by good hap, my heart can find its way?Where all your sweetness lies in fragrant disarray.
Ah! but with morn the world begins anew,?Again the sea shall sing up to your feet,?And earth and all the heavens call you sweet,?You all alone with me, I all alone with you,?And all the business of the laurelled hours?Shyly to gaze on that betrothal ring of ours.
"SORE IN NEED WAS I OF A FAITHFUL FRIEND"
Sore in need was I of a faithful friend,?And it seemed to me that life?Had come to its much desired end--?Just then God gave me a wife.
I had seen the beauty of fairy things,?And seen the women walk;?I had heard the voice of the seven sins?And all the wonderful talk.
Ah, the promising earth that seems so kind,?And the comrades with outstretched hand--?But did you ever stand alone?In a black, forsaken land??Then the wonderful things that God can do?One comes to understand:
How He turns the desert dust to a dream,?And the lonely wind to a friend,?And makes a bright beginning?Of what had seemed the end:?'Twas in such an hour God placed in mine?The moonbeam hand of a friend.
"I THOUGHT, BEFORE MY SUNLIT TWENTIETH YEAR"
I thought, before my sunlit twentieth year,?That I knew Love, and Death that goes with it;?And my young broken heart in little songs,?Dew-like, I poured, and waited for my end?Wildly--and waited--being then nineteen.?I walked a little longer on my way,?Alive, 'gainst expectation and desire,?And, being then past twenty, I beheld?The face of all the faces of the world?Dewily opening on its stem for me.?Ah! so it seemed, and, each succeeding year,?Thus hath some woman blossom of the divine?Flowered in my path, and made a frail delay?In my true journey--to my home in thee.
October 27, 1911.
II
TO A BIRD AT DAWN
O bird that somewhere yonder sings,?In the dim hour 'twixt dreams and dawn,?Lone