love poem

VERSE

Though my position is of low degree
And all the others may look down on me,
I'll go smiling through,
That's if I have you.
I am the happiest of troubadours
Thinking of you while I'm massaging floors,
At my leisure time,
I made up this rhyme:

REFRAIN 1

I will be the oil mop
If you'll be the oil,
Then we both could mingle
Ev'ry time we toil.
I will be the washboard
If you'll be the tub,
Think of all the Mondays,

Lovely boy! thou art not dead,
But from earth to heaven fled;
For base earth was far unfit
For thy beauty, grace, and wit.

Love, the great master of true eloquence,
Disdain the tribute of a vulgar tongue:
Cold are the words, and vain the affected song
Of him whose boasted passion is pretense.
The favored few that to his court belong
With noblest gifts the mighty god presents;
Their vigorous accents chain the admiring sense,
And their warm words in torrents stream along.
Oft too — O wondrous excellence of Love! —
Unuttered vows and sighs and accents broken
With far more force the gentle bosom move

Love that is alone with love
Makes solitudes of throngs;
Then why not songs of silences, —
Sweet silences of songs?

Parts need words: the perfect whole
Is silent as the dead;
When I offered you my soul
Heard you what I said ?

Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly tree--
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly's sheen,
That when December blights thy brow
He still may leave thy garland green.

Love is cruel, Love is sweet,
Cruel sweet!
Lovers sigh till lovers meet,
Sigh and meet.
Sigh and meet and sigh again,
Cruel sweet! O sweetest pain!

Love is blind, but Love is shy,
Blind and shy;
Thoughts are bold but words are shy,
Bold and shy.
Bold and shy and bold again,
Sweet is boldness, shyness, pain.

Love is begot by Fancy, bred
By Ignorance, by Expectation fed,
Destroy'd by Knowledge, and at best
Lost in the moment 't is possest.

Love equals swift and slow
— — And high and low —
Racer and lame —
— — The hunter and his game.

Lord, who am I to teach the way
To little children day by day,
So prone myself to go astray?

I teach them KNOWLEDGE, but I know
How faint they flicker and how low
The candles of my knowledge glow.

I teach them POWER to will and do,
But only now to learn anew
My own great weakness through and through.

I teach them LOVE for all mankind
And all God's creatures, but I find
My love comes lagging far behind.

Lord, if their guide I still must be,
Oh, let the little children see

VERSE

I've been married and married,
And often I've sighed,
I'm never a bridesmaid,
I'm always the bride.
I never divorced them —
I hadn't the heart.
Yet remember these sweet words
" Till death do us part. "

REFRAIN 1

I married many men,
A ton of them,
And yet I was untrue to none of them
Because I bumped off ev'ry one of them
To keep my love alive.
Sir Paul was frail;
He looked a wreck to me.
At night he was a horse's neck to me.