Hope, is this thy hand
Lies warm as life in mine?
Is this thy sign
Of peace none understand?
What! art thou not steadfast?
From off the blue air’s beach
Wilt lean and reach
The price of pity past?
I know not if I...
He was in love with Truth and knew her near—
Her comrade, not her suppliant on the knee:
She gave him wild melodious words to be
Made music that should haunt the atmosphere.
She drew him to her bosom, day-long dear,
And pointed to the stars and to the sea...
Swept by the hot wind, stark, untrackable,
The stony desert stretches to the sky.
Deep-printed shadows at the tent-door lie,
And camels slumber by the burning well.
One weeps within, wrinkled and dusk of face,
White-haired and lordly, o’er the new-brought...
Where all the winds were tranquil,
And all the odors sweet,
And rings of tumbling upland
Sloped down to kiss your feet:
There, in a nest of verdure,
You grew from bud to bough;
You heard the song at mid-day,—
At eve the plighted...
O dappled throat of white! Shy, hidden bird!
Perched in green dimness of the dewy wood,
And murmuring, in that lonely, lover mood,
Thy heart-ache, softly heard,
Sweetened by distance, over land and lake.
Why, like a kinsman, do I feel thy voice...
Our many years are made of clay and cloud,
And quick desire is but as morning dew;
And love and life, that linger and are proud,
Dissolve and are again the arching blue.
For who shall answer what the ages ask?
Or who undo a one-day-earlier bud?...
