love poem

Whene'er I see soft hazel eyes
And nut-brown curls
I think of those bright days I spent
Among the Limerick girls;
When up through Cratla woods I went
Nutting with thee,
And we plucked the glossy clustering fruit
From many a bending tree.

Beneath the hazel boughs we sat,
Thou, love, and I,
And the gathered nuts lay in thy lap,
Beneath thy downcast eye;
But little we thought of the store we'd won,
I, love, or thou;
For our hearts were full, and we dared not own
The love that's spoken now.

What tender love name can I call you by?
Not that of every hour and every one;
I would not take what others have begun
To soil by common use; nay, I would try

To lift our loving to some far-hung sky,
To bear it swift beyond each blazing sun
And in a demi-dark divinely spun
Of silver moons, to syllable it shy.

I yield to none; your mother's early way
Of calling you; your name in heaven writ clear,
These stand for holiness; but mine must be
Other, and more: its very sound must say:

E VA , thy beauty comes to me
To solace and to save;
A marvel and a mystery,
A beacon o'er the wave,—
A star above the jasper sea,
A hope beyond the grave.

Oft, when thy harp-tones wild and sweet
The waves of passion move,
Methinks pale Sappho's songs I hear
Murmuring of Phaon's love,—
Pale Sappho's passion songs I hear
Lamenting her lost love.

But in those tender, thoughtful eyes,
That look so far away,
A pleading Pysche bids me rise
To realms of purer day,—
A Psyche soaring to the skies,

She dreams of Love upon the temple stair,—
About her feet the lithe green lizards play
In all the drowsy, warm, Sicilian air.

The winds have loosed the fillet from her hair,
Sea winds, salt-lipped, that laugh and seem to say,
“She dreams of Love, upon the temple stair.

“Then let us twine soft fingers, here and there,
Amid the gleaming threads that drift and stray
In all the drowsy, warm, Sicilian air,

“And let us weave of them a subtle snare
To cast about and bind her, as to-day

Here in this room where first we met,
And where we said farewell with tears,
Here, where you swore “Though you forget,
My love shall deeper grow with years,”

Here, where the pictures on the wall,
The very rugs upon the floor,
The smallest objects you recall,—
I am awaiting you once more.

The books that we together read,—
From off their shelves they beckon me.
All here seems living! What is dead?
What is the ghost I fear to see?

Unchanged am I. Did you despise
My love as “small”?—it fills my heart!

Come snow, come hail, come darkness drear;
Brood over earth God's darkest cloud,
While fiercely strikes the lightning's spear
And thunder echoes loud.

I shall not falter in my ways,
He will not stay me save by death,
Through all my pains I'll sing her praise
As long as I have breath.

Love is His lord as well as mine,
In golden rain He once did pour,
Obedient to love's word divine,
And pierced the brazen bower.

A youth was walking in the early hours
Of life, along a garden-alley fair,
When on a sudden, lo! a rose was there,—
Unseen by him before among the flowers
That wove a many-coloured mist of bowers,
And redolent of sweetness made the air.
He came the next day, but would hardly dare
To hope the night's attendant band of showers
Had spared the rose; but lo! the rose was red,
And fragrant, far more fragrant than before,
And fuller petals had unfolded more,
And round about it brighter bloom was shed:

Not through the rose-hung honeyed ways
Of kisses soft and songs and lays
Thou followest me,—
But by far lonely foam-filled bays
Of sorrow's sea.

Through self-denial and the extreme
Repression of love's fiery dream
Thou followest on:
Far heights before us rise and gleam,—
We climb alone.

Not ours the daily chequered life,
Chequered but sweet, of man and wife,
But ours the strange
Wild ways of lonely constant strife
That knows no change.

Not ours to meet save in the bliss

The spring has passed,—the spring-time of my strain,
The spring of thy fair life. Now summer round us
Beams, and the laughing-eyed swift loves have found us
Who gaily tread in his impassioned train.
Thine hair is fragrant with the smell of flowers
Still,—but no flowers of simpler spring remain;
Still art thou beauteous as in those first hours
Of love,—but no lost hours again we gain.

We pass towards perfect summer. Our delight
Is hidden for us among the full-leaved trees,
And 'mid the passion of the August night,

Would God that it were holiday!
Hey derry down, down derry,
That with my Love I might go play;
With woe my heart is weary;
My whole delight is in her sight,
Would God I had her company,
Her company,
Hey derry down, down adown.

My Love is fine, my Love is fair,
Hey derry down, down derry,
No maid with her may well compare,
In Kent or Canterbury;
From me my Love shall never move,
Would God I had her company,
Her company,
Hey derry down, down adown.

To see her laugh, to see her smile,