English

When you were weary, roaming the wide world over,
I gave my fickle heart to a new lover.
Now they tell me that you are lying dead:
O mountains fall on me and hide my head!

When you lay burning in the throes of fever,
He vowed me love by the willow-margined river:
Death smote you there—here was your trust betrayed,
O darkness, cover me, I am afraid!

Yea, in the hour of your supremest trial,
I laughed with him! The shadows on the dial
Stayed not, aghast at my dread ignorance:
Nor man nor angel looked at me askance.
…

Not the light of the long blue Summer,
Nor the flowery huntress, Spring,
Nor the chilly and moaning Winter,
Doth peace to my bosom bring,
Like the hazy and red October,
When the woods stand bare and brown,
And into the lap of the south land,
The flowers are blowing down;
When all night long, in the moonlight,
The boughs of the roof-tree chafe,
And the wind, like a wandering poet,
Is singing a mournful waif;
And all day through the cloud-armies,
The sunbeams like sentinels move—
For then in my path first unfolded

My walls outside must have some flowers,
—My walls within must have some books;
A house that's small; a garden large,
—And in it leafy nooks:

A little gold that's sure each week;
—That comes not from my living kind,
But from a dead man in his grave,
—Who cannot change his mind:

A lovely wife, and gentle too;
—Contented that no eyes but mine
Can see her many charms, nor voice
—To call her beauty fine:

Where she would in that stone cage live,
—A self-made prisoner, with me;

List! O list, to the sound of the music
Whispering low to the murmuring sea,
List to the thrill of the quivering harp-strings,
List to their ravishing melody.
Gaze on the flushes of crimson and purple,
Watch the red sun as it passes from sight,
See the gay nobles in gliding gondolas,
Bathed in the softness and beauty of night!

Stand to your oars, O ye brave gondoliers,
Silent, that sweetly may fall on our ears
Music like warbles from nightingales' throats,
Or echoes of Orpheus' rapturous notes!

They came from Persia to the Sacred Way
—And rode in Pompey's triumph, side by side
—With odalisques and idols, plumes flung wide.
A flame of gems in the chill Roman day.
They that were brought as captives came to stay,
—To flaunt in beauty, mystery and pride,
—To preen before the emperors deified,
Symbols of their magnificent decay.

Then there was madness and a scourge of swords.
—Imperial purple mouldered into dust.
But the immortal peacocks stung new lords
—To furies of insatiable lust.

She stood like Spring before my Winter door,
Paler than dawn, wind-swept and delicate;
And her small hands, clasped like twin fragile shells,
Were white as Spring skies faintly veined with blue.

Years had she flown upon the moorland's edge,
Graven upon some sleeping ploughland scene;
And I with parted lips would stand and gaze,
While clouds breathed huge still outlines in the sky:

And she was not on moor or field or hill;
Perhaps a plough was dark against the air;
And night would come, and the pale blossoming moon

When I was seventeen I heard
From each censorious tongue,
“I 'd not do that if I were you;
You see you 're rather young.”

Now that I number forty years,
I'm quite as often told
Of this or that I should n't do
Because I 'm quite too old.

O carping world! If there 's an age
Where youth and manhood keep
An equal poise, alas! I must
Have passed it in my sleep.

Tis night: the grape juice mantles high
in cups of gold galore;
We set to drink—but now the bugle
sounds to horse once more
Oh marvel not if drunken we
lie strewed about the plain;
How few of all who see the fight
shall e'er come back again!

There were those at the close of a hunting day,
When the fields were dim and the woods were wet,
Who would search the road for a brown or bay
And the flash of a star or a coronet;
Who would hear the tap of a distant shoe
And see the pools in the pale light gleam
As the moon swung up in the misty blue
And changed the world to a world of dream.

The old oak leans to the lioned gate
With a leafless bough as it leant of yore,
But to-night there are watchers there who wait
For the sound of a hoof that comes no more;

On his little grave and wild,
Faustinus, the martyr child,
Candytuft and mustards grow.
Ah, how many a June has smiled
On the turf he lies below.

Ages gone they laid him there.
Quit of sun and wholesome air,
Broken flesh and tortured limb;
Leaving all his faith the heir
Of his gentle hope and him.

Yonder, under pagan skies,
Bleached by rains, the circus lies,
Where they brought him from his play.
Comeliest his of sacrifice,
Youth and tender April day.

“Art thou not the shepherd's son?—