At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
Will they pass to where—by death, fools
think, imprisoned—
Low he lies who once so loved you whom you loved so,
—Pity
me?
Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!
What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel
—Being—who?
10
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho’ right were worsted, wrong
would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight
better,
Sleep
to wake.
No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should
be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry “Speed,—fight
on, fare ever
There
as here!”
20
* * * *
“DE GUSTIBUS—”
Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane,
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice—
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,—
The happier they!
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon.
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
10
With the beanflower’s
boon,
And the blackbird’s
tune,
And May, and June!
What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O’ the grave, and loose my spirit’s bands,
And come again to the land of lands)—
20
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree—’tis a cypress—stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Bough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o’ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water’s edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, forever crumbles
30
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there’s news to-day—the
king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
—She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary’s saying serves for me—
40
(When fortune’s malice
Lost her, Calais)
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, “Italy.”
Such lovers old are I and she:
So it always was, so shall ever be!
* * *
*
