love poems

My love was real,
yet treated as a joke—
in that long ago
childhood,
how I felt it!

Loving the spring evening alone, I step down to the garden,
a breeze, a soft moon, both comely and fair.
Were my clothes not to become soaked with dew,
I'd lie under cherry blossoms until the day breaks.

I WHO love this land, who love this wide valley,
The straight high temples of the hills, the river's curve,
The smooth unbroken water, the fertile meadows,
What is my love, what is this memory I serve?

I, a stranger from another land, a newcomer
Of two brief centuries ago, alien and pale,
Talking a strange tongue, looking over this vastness
With short-seeing eyes, dimly, behind a veil;

What should I, who was bred in square houses
With fear and a flintlock always ready at hand,

It was never more than a face,
An impression merely; a bit
Of failing landscape — her grace
Just caught as the rain-cloud split
And the air grew warm a space.

And now it is many years,
And I, with my thin hair gray,
Face wrinkled — perhaps by tears! —
'Tis strange how my yesterday
Of dead youth reappears.

I wonder if after all
I've any right to complain!
As the shadows weave on the wall,
And we feel the wash of rain
Through the light grown thin and small;

O Love, there is no beauty,
No sorrowful beauty, but I have seen;
There is no island that has gathered sound
Into dim stone from many reeded waters
But we have known.
Heart of my sorrowful heart,
Beauty fades out from sleepy pool to pool
And there is a crying of wings about me
And a crying in me lest I lose you. Glimmer
Around me; sound, O weir, within my heart;
Bring calm on many waters, for I will be hearing
The salmon shatter the air into silver when
The chill grass ends their leaping.
As I was dreaming

Do not repent, mine own love, that thou so soon didst surrender!
Trust me, I deem thee not bold! reverence only I feel.
Manifold workings the darts of Amor possess; some but scratching,
Yet with insidious effect, poison the bosom for years.
Others mightily feather'd, with fresh and newly-born sharpness
Pierce to the innermost bone, kindle the blood into flame.
In the heroical times, when loved each god and each goddess,
Longing attended on sight; then with fruition was bless'd.

Wonder we that the highest star above
Sprang forth to thy embrace,
O Leda! wonder we, when daring Love
Turn'd thy averted face?

Smiles he had seen in Hebe, such as won
Him of the poplar crown.
Jove, until then half-envious of his son,
Then threw his scepter down.

Loose hung his eagle's wings; on either side
A dove thrust in her head:
Eagle had lost his fierceness, Jove his pride . .
And Leda what? . . her dread.

Carelessly over the plain away,
Where by the boldest man no path
Cut before thee thou canst discern,
Make for thyself a path!

Silence, loved one, my heart!
Cracking, let it not break!
Breaking, break not with thee!

Thus roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes,
Now serious am, now seek to please;
Now love and hate in turns one sees;
The motives now are those, now these;
Now nothings, now realities.
Thus roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes.

Two words there are, both short, of beauty rare,
Whose sounds our lips so often love to frame,
But which with clearness never can proclaim
The things whose own peculiar stamp they bear.

'Tis well in days of age and youth so fair,
One on the other boldly to inflame;
And if those words together link'd we name,
A blissful rapture we discover there.

But now to give them pleasure do I seek,
And in myself my happiness would find;
I hope in silence, but I hope for this: