Classic Poem

The Naiads . Come, ye sorrowful, and steep
Your tired brows in a nectarous sleep:
For our kisses lightlier run
Than the traceries of the sun
By the lolling water cast
Up grey precipices vast,
Lifting smooth and warm and steep
Out of the palely shimmering deep.

Come, ye sorrowful, and take
Kisses that are but half awake:
For here are eyes O softer far
Than the blossom of the star
Upon the mothy twilit waters,
And here are mouths whose gentle laughters.
Are but the echoes of the deep
Laughing and murmuring in its sleep.
Come, ye sorrowful, and see
The raindrops flaming goldenly
On the stream's eddies overhead
And dragonflies with drops of red
In the crisp surface of each wing
Threading slant rains that flash and sing,
Or under the water-lily's cup,
From darkling depths, roll slowly up
The bronze flanks of an ancient bream
Into the hot sun's shattered beam,
Or over a sunk tree's bubbled bole
The perch stream in a golden shoal:
Come, ye sorrowful; our deep
Holds dreams lovelier than sleep.

But if ye sons of Sorrow come
Only wishing to be numb:
Our eyes are sad as bluebell posies,
Our breasts are soft as silken roses,
And our hands are tenderer
Than the breaths that scarce can stir
The sunlit eglantine that is
Murmurous with hidden bees.
Come, ye sorrowful, and steep
Your tired brows in a nectarous sleep.

Come, ye sorrowful, for here
No voices sound but fond and clear
Of mouths as lorn as is the rose
That under water doth disclose,
Amid her crimson petals torn,
A heart as golden as the morn;
And here are tresses languorous
As the weeds wander over us,
And brows as holy and as bland
As the honey-coloured sand
Lying sun-entranced below
The lazy water's limpid flow:
Come, ye sorrowful, and steep
Your tired brows in a nectarous sleep.

Sweet water-voices! now must I
Unto your sorrowings reply.
But hark! or ever there can sound
On the lull air the first profound
Few murmurs of my lyre's grave strings,
A voice uprises. Who now sings
The noon's and his own tristfulness?
A slim youth — in a shepherd's dress,
Yet without sheep — who careless lies
Upon the hill. His shepherd guise
Tokens, perhaps, a poet's heart
Which joys in wandering apart
From the dinned ways where chariots roll,
From the shrill sophist with his shoal
Of gapers, from the angry mart,
From the full eyes and empty heart
Of babbling women, from the neat
Aridity of paven street,
A heart that wandering, musing, sings
The joy, depth, pain of simple things:

The Youth . The earth is still; only the white sun climbs
Through the green silence of the branching limes,
Whose linked flowers hanging from the still tree-top
Distil their soundless syrup drop by drop,
While 'twixt the starry bracket of their lips
The black bee drowsing floats and drowsing sips.
The flimsy leaves hang on the bright blue air
Calm-suspended. Deep peace is everywhere
Filled with the murmurous rumour of high noon.
Earth seems with open eyes to sink and swoon.
In the sky peace: where nothing moves
Save the sun that smiles and loves.
A quivering peace is on the grass.
Through the noon gloam butterflies pass,
White and hot blue, only to where
They can float flat and dream on the soft air. . . .
The trees are asleep, beautiful, slumbrous trees!
Stirred only by the passion of the breeze,
That, like a warm wave welling over rocks,
Loosens and lifts the mass of drowsing locks.
Earth, too, under the profound grass
Sleeps and sleeps, and softly heaves her slumbrous mass.
The earth sleeps. Sleeps the newly-buried clay
Or doth divinity trouble it to live alway?

No voice uplifts from under the rapt crust.
The dust cries to the unregarding dust.

Over the hill the stopped notes of twin reeds
Speak like drops from an old wound that bleeds:
A yokel's pipe an ancient pastoral sings
Above the innumerable murmur of hid wings.
I hear the cadence, sorrowful and sweet,
The oldest burthen of the earth repeat:
All love, all passion, all strife, all delight
Are but the dreams that haunt earth's visioned night.
In her eternal consciousness the stir
Of Alexander is no more to her
Than you or I: being all part of dreams,
The shadowiest shadow of a thing that seems,
The images the lone pipe-player sees,
Sitting and playing to the lone, noon breeze.
One note, one life!
They sleep: soon we as these!