love poem

Spring am I, too soft of heart
Much to speak ere I depart:
Ask the Summer-tide to prove
The abundance of my love.

Could you but give me all that I desire,
I should be richer, and you no more poor,
Companionship beside the household fire,
And common cares that train one to endure.
'Tis not your senses, but your self, I want,
Kinship of vision, sympathy of mind,
That so the bond be based on adamant,
And Love made fast by sanctities that bind.
Yet do not think insensible my gaze
To delicate loveliness of form and face,
But that I covet in the same embrace
The Spirit's yearnings with the body's grace.

I
She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
Wrote moving letters to me day by day;
The more she wrote, the more unmoved was I,
The more she gave, the less could I repay.
Therefore I grieve, not that I was not loved,
But that, being loved, I could not love again.
I liked, but like and love are far removed;
Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain.
For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell
That though I loved her in a certain sort,
Yet did I love too wisely but not well.

If to love, Madam, is to dream and long
and brood by day and night on means of pleasing you,
to be forgetful of all else, to wish to do nothing else
but adore and serve the beauty that wounds me,
If to love is to pursue a happiness which flies me,
to lose myself in loneliness, to suffer much pain,
to fear greatly and to hold my tongue,
to weep, to beg for pity, and to see myself sent away,
If to love is to live in you more than in myself,
to hide great weariness under a mask of joy,

As to some lovely temple, tenantless
Long since, that once was sweet with shivering brass,
Knowing well its altars ruined and the grass
Grown up between the stones, yet from excess
Of grief hard driven, or great loneliness,
The worshiper returns, and those who pass
Marvel him crying on a name that was,—
So is it now with me in my distress.
Your body was a temple to Delight;
Cold are its ashes whence the breath is fled,
Yet here one time your spirit was wont to move;
Here might I hope to find you day or night,

Not with libations, but with shouts and laughter
We drenched the altars of Love's sacred grove,
Shaking to earth green fruits, impatient after
The launching of the colored moths of Love.
Love's proper myrtle and his mother's zone
We bound about our irreligious brows,
And fettered him with garlands of our own,
And spread a banquet in his frugal house.
Not yet the god has spoken; but I fear
Though we should break our bodies in his flame,
And pour our blood upon his altar, here
Henceforward is a grove without a name,

Another day of rest, and I sit here
Among the trees, green mounds, and leaves as sere
As my own blasted hopes. There was a time
When Love and perfect Happiness did chime
Like two sweet sounds upon this blessed day;
But one has flown forever, far away
From this poor Earth's unsatisfied desires
To love eternal, and the sacred fires
With which the other lighted up my mind
Have faded out and left no trace behind,
But dust and bitter ashes. Like a bark
Becalmed, I anchor through the midnight dark,

I felt a spirit of love begin to stir
Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;
And saw Love coming towards me fair and fain
(That I scarce knew him for his joyful cheer),
Saying, 'Be now indeed my worshipper!'
And in his speech he laughed and laughed again.
Then, while it was his pleasure to remain,
I chanced to look the way he had drawn near,
And saw the Ladies Joan and Beatrice
Approach me, this the other following,
One and a second marvel instantly.
And even as now my memory speaketh this,

Oh! how I love, on a fair summer's eve,
When streams of light pour down the golden west,
And on the balmy zephyrs tranquil rest
The silver clouds, far -- far away to leave
All meaner thoughts, and take a sweet reprieve
From little cares; to find, with easy quest,
A fragrant wild, with Nature's beauty drest,
And there into delight my soul deceive.
There warm my breast with patriotic lore,
Musing on Milton's fate -- on Sydney's bier --
Till their stern forms before my mind arise:
Perhaps on wing of Poesy upsoar,

Love and the gentle heart are one same thing,
Even as the wise man in his ditty saith.
Each, of itself, would be such life in death
As rational soul bereft of reasoning.
'Tis Nature makes them when she loves: a king
Love is, whose palace where he sojourneth
Is call'd the Heart; there draws he quiet breath
At first, with brief or longer slumbering.
Then beauty seen in virtuous womankind
Will make the eyes desire, and through the heart
Send the desiring of the eyes again;
Where often it abides so long enshrined