love poems for her

O hide your eyes,
O turn your head away;
Are you so wise, so wise,
To watch unchanged this chemistry of clay?

It is not we,
It is another two;
Hide that you may not see
What flushed unlovely things their bodies do.

O think no grace
That I am glad of this:
I do not know your face,
It is not you but my own flesh I kiss.

Blind, blind your brow
And your too candid eyes:
You cannot love me now,
You cannot love what even love denies.

Things he had loved because he knew them lost,
Things he had loved and never yet had found—
The unintelligible beauty tossed
Back from a foolish dream—the smothered sound
Of laughter from a window swiftly barred
In some monk's chronicle—the ruined grace
Of carven marbles that old rains had marred—
Things he had lost and loved were in that place.

And she was like the voice of those lost things
Haunting the body that his arms held near,
And singing there of other loves as sings
The bird at evening of another year.

He had used love or lust or what's between
Long, long before. When he was still a boy
Old hairy love that hugs his knees for joy
And quavers tunes, ecstatic and obscene,
Grey goatish love that whistles to the fauns,
Had whistled fever through his aching flesh
And led him giddy down his nerves' dark mesh
To lie with empresses and leprechauns.

So he had used and after in a mood
Of sluggish melancholy and vague grief,
Ruffled with such warm rifts as in a wood
A sunny wind blows over leaf by leaf,

Yes, I know that you once were my lover,
But that sort of thing has an end,
And though love and its transports are over,
You know you can still be—my friend:
I was young, too, and foolish, remember
(Did you ever hear John Hardy sing?)—
It was then the fifteenth of November,
And this is the end of the spring!

You complain that you are not well-treated
By my suddenly altering so;
Can I help it?—you're very conceited,
If you think yourself equal to Joe.
Don't kneel at my feet, I implore you;

If I have fought my baser self and raised
My thoughts to high ideals, it is due
To this the love that I have found in you
As I in your dear eyes have longing gazed.
When I look back I find myself amazed
At what I was; what mire I floundered through,
So far I wandered from the pure and true
While all my good intentions fitful blazed.

A man is half a savage, and he needs
The woman's presence to arouse his soul.
Her love has given the world his noblest deeds,
She is the light that warns him from the shoal—

Once more I feel the breezes that I love
Of Spanish autumn stabbing leaf and flower,
Cold cuts the wind, the gray sky frowns above,
The world enjoys a gloomy hour.

I love thee, Autumn, ruthless harvester!
Thou dost permit my stagnant veins to flow,
And in my heart a Poet's feelings stir,
To thee a Poet's fruits I owe.

My boughs shall hang with ripened tribute due,
I will repay the life that in me lies,
The cold wind shakes off fruits the which if true,
Must gathered be by those sweet eyes.

I thank thee, dear, for words that fleet,
For looks that long endure,
For all caresses simply sweet
And passionately pure;

For blushes mutely understood,
For silence and for sighs,
For all the yearning womanhood
Of grey love-laden eyes.

Oh how in words to tell the rest?
My bird, my child, my dove!
Behold I render best for best,
I bring thee love for love.

Oh give to God the love again
Which had from him its birth,—
Oh bless him, for he sent the twain
Together on the earth.

LO, SONG and sleep I love. For song's susurrus
Is the soul's wine throughout the weary days:
And silent sleep, restorer of decays,
Smooths from the fretted brow the deepening furrows;
'Tis the true Fountain of Jouvence, unfound
By knight or troubadour in the far forest ground.

That absolute love which many women feel,
But men how few! Not winds which icily
Breathe freshness underneath a twilight sky,
When swift Apollo's burning chariot-wheel
Flies westward, bear to mortals such delight
As that most perfect love, unselfish, infinite.

More of the Garden than the Portico
Was his philosophy who dwelt therein.
He was not fain 'mid the mad world to win
Power or renown from the sparse overflow
Of Fortune's horn. To him three things were fair—
True Love, unfettered Song, and the wooing Summer-air.