love poems

I will fight for my land,
I will work for my land,
Will it foster with love, in my faith, in my child.
I will eke every gain,
I will seek boot for bane,
From its easternmost bound to the western sea wild.

Here is sunshine enough,
Here is seed-earth enough,
If by us, if by us all love's duty were done.
Here is will to create;
Though our burdens be great,
We can lift up our land, if we all lift as one.

A still procession goes
Amid the battle's booming,
Its arm the red cross shows;
It prays in many forms of speech,
And, bending o'er the fallen,
Brings peace and home to each.

Not only is it found
Where bleed the wounds of battle,
But all the world around.
It is the love the whole world feels
In noble hearts and tender,
While gentle pity kneels;--

It is all labor's dread
Of war's mad waste and murder,
Praying that peace may spread;
It is all sufferers who heed
The sighing of a brother,

The dogs were whining; they sensed too well
The load upon the sled;
The rough-hewn box with the light-o'-love--
A girl, 'twas said.

A week ago, at the Palace Bar,
She sang the songs of France;
But many a heart is lead the while
The feet must dance.

Kisses she gave and kisses she took,
Sinned for her daily bread;
But all we knew as we eyed the box
Was: she was dead.

We placed upon it (How much it hurt
Only the good God knows!)
A gaud she had worn in her dusky hair--

If this should never end--
This wandering in oblivious mood
Along a rutless road that leads
From wood to deeper wood--
This crunching with unheedful foot
Acorns, I think, and withered leaves ...
Perhaps a rotten root--

If this should never end--
This seeing with insentient eyes
Something that seems like earth, and, too,
Like overbending skies;
This feeling, well--that time is space,
Space, time; and each a pallid glass
In which Life sees her face--

If it should never end--

I

(Before He Comes)

Sweet under swooning blue and mellow mist
September waves of forest overflow
The hills with crimson, amaranth and gold.
Winds warm with the memory of scented hours
Dead Summer gathers in her leafy lap,
Rustle the distance with dim murmurings
That sink upon the air as soft as shades
Dropt from the overleaning clouds to earth;
While golden-rod and sedge and aster hushed
In sunny silence and the oblivion
Of life drawn from the insentient veins of Time,

I care not what they say who hold
We should speak but of life and joy;
I have met death in one I love,
Death lusting to destroy.

And I have fought him vein by vein,
Loosened his cold and creeping clutch,
Driven him from her--twice and thrice--
With might too much.

Yet with too little! for I know
That she at last will lie there still.
Then all my fire of love shall fail
To thaw that chill;

For it will freeze light from her eyes,
Pulse from her breast and from her soul
Me, whom no opiate of peace

I am not other than men are, you say?
But faulty and failing? And your love can lend
No glory of illusion to o'erlay
The lack, and make me seem one in whom blend
Nobilities wherein your heart may lose
All that it feels of flaw in me, or rues?

Can it so be? Did ever woman love
Whose faith wreathed not about the brow she chose
Aureolas illumining him above
All that another thinks he is, or knows?
I ask it bravely, for the way is long,
And, haloless, should I not lead you wrong?

I heard the buds open their lips and whisper,
Whisper,
"Spring is here!"
The robins listened
And sang it loud.
The blue-birds came
In a fluttering crowd.
The cardinal preached
It high and proud,
Spring!

And thro the warm earth their song went trilling,
Trilling,
"Wake! Arise!"
The kingcups quickly
Assembled, strong.
The bluets stept

I

In other worlds I loved you, long ago:
Love that hath no beginning hath no end.
The woodbine whispers, low and sweet and low,
In other worlds I loved you, long ago;
The firwoods murmur and the sea-waves know
The message that the setting sun shall send.
In other worlds I loved you, long ago:
Love that hath no beginning hath no end.


II

And God sighed in the sunset; and the sea
Chanted the soft recessional of Time
Against the golden shores of mystery;

A drizzle of drifting rain
And a blurred white lamp o'erhead,
That shines as my love will shine again
In the world of the dead.

Round me the wet black night,
And, afar in the limitless gloom,
Crimson and green, two blossoms of light,
Two stars of doom.

But the night of death is aflare
With a torch of back-blown fire,
And the coal-black deeps of the quivering air
Rend for my soul's desire.

Leap, heart, for the pulse and the roar
And the lights of the streaming train