Landor, not that I doubt your word,
That you had strove with none
At seventy-five and had deferred
To nature and art alone;
It is rather that at thirty-two
From us I see them part
After they served, so sweetly, you-
Yet nature has no heart:
Brother and sister are estranged
By his ambitious lies
For he his sister Helen much deranged-
Outraged her, and put coppers on her eyes.
It is time to give that-of-myself which I could not at first:
To offer you now at last my least and my worst:
Minor, absurd preserves,
The shell's end-curves,
A document kept at the back of a drawer,
A tin hidden under the floor,
Recalcitrant prides and hesitations:
To pile them carefully in a desparate oblation
And say to you "quickly! turn them
Once over and burn them".
Now I (no communist, heaven knows!
Who have kept as my dearest right to close
My tenth door after I've opened nine to the world,
WE HAVE loved each other in this time twenty years
And with such love as few men have in them even for
One or for the marriage month or the hearing of
Three nights' carts in the street but it will leave them:
We have been lovers the twentieth year now:
Our bed has been made in many houses and evenings:
The apple-tree moves at the window in this house:
There were palms rattled the night through in one:
In one there were red tiles and the sea's hours:
We have made our bed in the changes of many months and the
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
Were thou and I the white pinions
On some eager, heaven-born dove,
Swift would we mount to the old dominions,
To our rest of old, my love!
Were thou and I trembling strands
In music's enchanted line,
We would wait and wait for magic hands
To untwist the magic twine.
Were we two sky-tints, thou and I,
Thou the golden, I the red;
We would quiver and glow and darken and die,
And love until we were dead!
Nearer than wings of one dove,
Than tones or colours in chord,
The woman he loved, while he dreamed of her,
Danced on till the stars grew dim,
But alone with her heart, from the world apart
Sat the woman who loved him.
The woman he worshipped only smiled
When he poured out his passionate love.
But the other somewhere, kissed her treasure most rare,
A book he had touched with his glove.
The woman he loved betrayed his trust,
And he wore the scars for life;
And he cared not, nor knew, that the other was true;
But no man called her his wife.
809
Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality,
Nay, it is Deity—
Unable they that love—to die
For Love reforms Vitality
Into Divinity.
O Love, in every battle victor owned;
Now on a maiden's soft and blooming cheek,
In secret ambush hid;
Now o'er the broad sea wandering at will,
And now in shepherd's folds;
Of all the Undying Ones none 'scape from thee,
Nor yet of mortal men
Whose lives are measured as a fleeting day;
And who has thee is frenzied in his soul.
Unbreakable, O Lord,
Is the love
That binds me to You:
Like a diamond,
It breaks the hammer that strikes it.
My heart goes into You
As the polish goes into the gold.
As the lotus lives in its water,
I live in You.
Like the bird
That gazes all night
At the passing moon,
I have lost myself dwelling in You.
O my Beloved - Return.
Now in these last spent drops, slow, slower shed,
Love dies, Love dies, Love dies--ah, Love is dead!
Sad Love in life, sore Love in agony,
Pale Love in death; while all his offspring songs,
Like children, versed not in death's chilly wrongs,
About him flit, frighted to see him lie
So still, who did not know that Love could die.
One lifts his wing, where dulls the vermeil all
Like clotting blood, and shrinks to find it cold,
And when she sees its lapse and nerveless fall
