• Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
    Enwrought with golden and silver light,
    The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
    Of night and light and the half-light,
    I would spread the cloths under your feet:
    But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
    I have spread my dreams under your feet;
    Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  • When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
    And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
    Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

    How many loved your moments of glad grace,
    And loved your beauty with love false or true,
    But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
    And loved the sorrows of your changing face...

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    I sing the body electric,
    The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
    They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
    And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

    Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
    And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the...

  • Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,
    And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
    Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
    The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
    Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
    And this day draw a veil over all deeds pass'd over,
    Yet their hands shall not tremble, their...

  • She dwelt among the untrodden ways
    Beside the springs of Dove,
    Maid whom there were none to praise
    And very few to love:

    A violet by a mosy tone
    Half hidden from the eye!
    ---Fair as a star, when only one
    Is shining in the sky.

    She lived unknown, and few could know
    When Lucy ceased to be;
    But she is in her grave, and, oh,
    The difference...

  • I thought once how Theocritus had sung
    Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
    Who each one in a gracious hand appears
    To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
    And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
    I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
    The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
    Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
    A shadow...

  • Heart, we will forget him!
    You an I, tonight!
    You may forget the warmth he gave,
    I will forget the light.

    When you have done, pray tell me
    That I my thoughts may dim;
    Haste! lest while you're lagging.
    I may remember him!

  • Proud of my broken heart since thou didst break it,
    Proud of the pain I did not feel till thee,
    Proud of my night since thou with moons dost slake it,
    Not to partake thy passion, my humility.

  • To lose thee, sweeter than to gain
    All other hearts I knew.
    ‘Tis true the drought is destitute
    But, then, I had the dew!
    The Caspian has its realms of sand,
    Its other realm of sea.
    Without this sterile perquisite
    No Caspian could be.

  • It's all I have to bring today--
    This, and my heart beside--
    This, and my heart, and all the fields--
    And all the meadows wide--
    Be sure you count--should I forget
    Some one the sum could tell--
    This, and my heart, and all the Bees
    Which in the Clover dwell.