"Little child of my five senses
and of my tenderness."
Let us cradle our loves,
We will have good children.
Well cared for,
We will fear nothing on earth,
Happiness, good fortune, prudence,
Our loves
And this leap from age to age,
From the order of a child to that of an old man,
Will not diminish us.
(Confidence).
I fell asleep and dreamed that I
Was flung, like Vulcan, from the sky;
Like him was lamed-another part:
His leg was crippled and my heart.
I woke in time to see my love
Conceal a letter in her glove
One lovely name adorns my song,
And, dwelling in the heart,
Forever falters at the tongue,
And trembles to depart.
I
He was not learned in any art;
But Nature led him by the hand;
And spoke her language to his heart
So he could hear and understand:
He loved her simply as a child;
And in his love forgot the heat
Of conflict, and sat reconciled
In patience of defeat.
II
Before me now I see him rise-
A face, that seventy years had snowed
With winter, where the kind blue eyes
Like hospitable fires glowed:
A small gray man whose heart was large,
And big with knowledge learned of need;
With her 't is well now. She died young,
With all her hope and faith unmarred,
Nor lived to see the pearls, Love strung,
Without regard,
Cast, lost among
The disillusions that make life so hard.
Time on her body now can lay
No soiling hand and spoil what's fair:
He shall not turn the gold hair gray,
Nor bring crabbed Care,
Day after day,
To line the white brow with the heart's despair.
Far better thus. Yea, even so,
To die before faith turns to dust,
Before the heart has learned to know,
Orpheus I am, come from the deeps below,
To thee, fond man, the plagues of love to show.
To the fair fields where loves eternal dwell
There's none that come, but first they pass through hell:
Hark, and beware! unless thou hast loved, ever
Beloved again, thou shalt see those joys never.
Hark how they groan that died despairing!
Oh, take heed, then!
Hark how they howl for over-daring!
All these were men.
They that be fools, and die for fame,
They lose their name;
And they that bleed,
LOVE and pity are pleading with me this hour.
What is this voice that stays me forbidding to yield,
Offering beauty, love, and immortal power,
Æons away in some far-off heavenly field?
Though I obey thee, Immortal, my heart is sore.
Though love be withdrawn for love it bitterly grieves:
Pity withheld in the breast makes sorrow more.
Oh that the heart could feel what the mind believes!
Cease, O love, thy fiery and gentle pleading.
Soft is thy grief, but in tempest through me it rolls.
Love must kiss that mortal’s eyes
Who hopes to see fair Arcady.
No gold can buy you entrance there;
But beggared Love may go all bare—
No wisdom won with weariness;
But Love goes in with Folly’s dress—
No fame that wit could ever win;
But only Love may lead Love in.
Only he knows the bitterness of love
Who has deeply felt its pangs.
When you are in trouble
No one comes near you:
When fortune smiles.
All come to share the joy.
Love shows no external wound.
But the pain pervades every pore
Devotee Mira offers her body
As a sacrifice to Giridhara for ever.
[Translated by A.J. Alston]
No butterfly whose frugal fare
Is breath of heliotrope and clove,
And other trifles light as air,
Could live on less than doth my love.
That childlike smile that comes and goes
About your gracious lips and eyes,
Hath all the sweetness of the rose,
Which feeds the freckled butterflies.
I feed my love on smiles, and yet
Sometimes I ask, with tears of woe,
How had it been if we had met,
If you had met me long ago,
Before the fast, defacing years
