love poetry

Father John's bread was made of rye,
Felicite's bread was white;
Father John loved the sun noon-high,
Felicite, the moon at night.

Father John drank wine with his bread;
Felicite drank sweet milk;
Father John loved flowers, pungent and red;
Felicite, lilies soft as silk.

Father John's soul was made of bronze,
That God's salt was corroding;
Felicite's soul was a wind that runs
With a blue flame of foreboding.

Between these two was the shadow of a dome
That cut their lives in twain;

Fair face the Greeks had worshipped, have you come
With me to make your home?
You look at me with those deep, haunting eyes,
And all my life replies.

The silence thrills with vague, bewitching tone;
I am no more alone:
I who have sat upon the shore of Time,
Coaxing my lute to rhyme,

Feel in my heart, at impulse of your will,
Youth's eager music thrill;
And since the years have left me not so old,
Now their long tale is told,

But I can love the lovely, and be glad,
I hide the cypress wreath I had

I LAY upon my narrow bed,
And dreamed life's happy moments o'er;
I thought that love my footsteps led
Beside a pleasant shore.

Care for a moment loosed its grasp,
And breathing deep the fragrant brine,—
My hand locked in my lover's clasp,—
I felt his pulses throb with mine;

And dear contentment seemed my right,—
There roaming from the world apart;
I saw his eyes, I felt their light
Beam through the shadows, in my heart;

And waves, and trees—all nature—sang
A paeon by that pleasant shore.

My soul goes questing like the honey-bee,
In untrod gardens, where Love walked of old,
And, humming on sweet errands, slyly learns
The secrets the Madonna lilies hold;

Where the Sun Dial Miser jealous counts
His glowing tale of golden-slipping hours,
That all escape, despite his watchful care,
To paint the sun-dreams in the hearts of flowers.

And no one thinks the honey-bees have souls,
That drink the love vow from the blushing rose,
But, by the fountain's silver poetry,
The marble Faun stone-smiles; he better knows.

Love's early honey-moon is passing sweet.
The enraptured lovers wander hand in hand
Through the wild roses and the golden wheat,
And passion's glamour clothes the sea and land.
Her eyes outvie
The starlit sky:
Love is so full of light that nought else gleams.
Love would give light,
Were the world black as night:
Love would create its heaven of stars and dreams!

Then come maturer days. Glad children glance—
Upon the tree of life love's blossoms blow.
And yet some element of old romance

Look upon Sapho's lip, and you will swear,
There is a love-like-leven rising there.

Hark, all you ladies that do sleep!
The fairy queen
Bids you awake, and pity them that weep.
You may do in the dark
What the day doth forbid.
Fear not the dogs that bark;
Night will have all hid.

But if you let your lovers moan,
The fairy queen
Will send abroad her fairies everyone,
That shall pinch black and blue
Your white hands and fair arms,
That did not kindly rue
Your paramours' harms.

In myrtle arbours on the downs,
The fairy queen
This night by moonshine, leading merry rounds,

O, Mark yon Rose-tree! when the West
Breathed on her with too warm a zest
She turns her cheek away;
Yet, if one moment he refrain,
She turns her cheek to him again,
And woos him still to stay!

Is she not like a maiden coy,
Prest by some amorous-breathing boy?
Tho' coy, she courts him too:
Winding away her slender form,
She will not have him woo so warm
And yet will have him woo!

How cold are they who say that Love
Must first be planted in the heart,
And cultured by the hand of Time,
To make its leaves and blossoms start!
No! 'tis a plant that springs at once
Up to the full and perfect form;
Unlike the willow or the oak,
It bends not, breaks not in the storm.

How cold are they who say that Love
Must, like the diamond in the mine,
Be sought with care and polished well
Ere we can see its beauties shine!
No! in the soul's blue Heaven it springs,
With beams that Age can never mar,—

The sweet embodiment of an ideal,
Of vague desires and bazed unconscious yearnings
Suddenly shapened, the soul's inconstant turnings
At once transfixed; of all that sense doth feel
In mute mysterious glimmerings, nor reveal
By any mode of thought's constrained discernings
In channels of wrought words, and mystic burnings
Imaged and transfused to form's semblative seal:
Nay, these poor similies strained to construe
The soul's fine sense that will not brook expression,
A sense that will not mate with reasoned sense,