love poem

Man frames his judgment on reason; but woman on love founds her verdict;
If her judgment loves not, woman already has judged.

Far away, where darkness reigneth,
All my dreams of bliss are flown;
Yet with love my gaze remaineth
Fixed on one fair star alone.
But, alas! that star so bright
Sheds no lustre save by night.

If in slumbers ending never,
Gloomy death had sealed thine eyes,
Thou hadst lived in memory ever--
Thou hadst lived still in my sighs;
But, alas! in light thou livest--
To my love no answer givest!

Can the sweet hopes love once cherished
Emma, can they transient prove?
What has passed away and perished--

(AFTER A PICTURE.)

Oh! thou bright-beaming god, the plains are thirsting,
Thirsting for freshening dew, and man is pining;
Wearily move on thy horses--
Let, then, thy chariot descend!

Seest thou her who, from ocean's crystal billows,
Lovingly nods and smiles?--Thy heart must know her!
Joyously speed on thy horses,--
Tethys, the goddess, 'tis nods!

Swiftly from out his flaming chariot leaping,
Into her arms he springs,--the reins takes Cupid,--
Quietly stand the horses,

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,

Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,
Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he
Loved horses. He himself was like a cob,
And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.

For the life in them he loved most living things,
But a tree chiefly. All along the lane
He planted elms where now the stormcock sings
That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.

Till then the track had never had a name
For all its thicket and the nightingales
That should have earned it. No one was to blame.
To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.

The space of the world is immense, before me and
around me;
If I turn quickly, I am terrified, feeling space
surround me;
Like a man in a boat on very clear, deep water,
space frightens and confounds me.

I see myself isolated in the universe, and wonder
What effect I can have. My hands wave under
The heavens like specks of dust that are floating
asunder.

I hold myself up, and feel a big wind blowing
Me like a gadfly into the dusk, without my know-
ing
Whither or why or even how I am going.

The night was a failure
but why not--?

In the darkness
with the pale dawn seething at the window
through the black frame
I could not be free,
not free myself from the past, those others--
and our love was a confusion,
there was a horror,
you recoiled away from me.

Now, in the morning
As we sit in the sunshine on the seat by the little
shrine,
And look at the mountain-walls,
Walls of blue shadow,
And see so near at our feet in the meadow
Myriads of dandelion pappus

It is Isis the mystery
Must be in love with me.

Here this round ball of earth
Where all the mountains sit
Solemn in groups,
And the bright rivers flit
Round them for girth.

Here the trees and troops
Darken the shining grass,
And many people pass
Plundered from heaven,
Many bright people pass,
Plunder from heaven.

What of the mistresses
What the beloved seven?
--They were but witnesses,
I was just driven.

Where is there peace for me?
Isis the mystery
Must be in love with me.

After much struggling and loss in love and in
the world of man, the protagonist throws in
his lot with a woman who is already married.
Together they go into another country, she
perforce leaving her children behind. The
conflict of love and hate goes on between the
man and the woman, and between these two
and the world around them, till it reaches
some sort of conclusion, they transcend into
some condition of blessedness

Beauty and love let no one separate,
Whom exact Nature did to each other fit,
Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate
And to Love beauty as true colour of it.
Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair,
But let none love outside the body’s thought,
So the seen couple’s togetherness shall bear
Truth to the beauty each in the other sought.
I could but love thee out of mockery
Of love and thee and mine own ugliness;
Therefore thy beauty I sing and wish not thee,
Thanking the Gods I long not out of place,