Chapter II

Along the city-ways
Already day’s vehement tumult had begun:
Through street and justled alley, court and square,
The tireless and eternal Heart poured forth
Its myriad human faces, grave or glad,
On the old course of toil (a choral hymn
From the lips of Life) each face a testimony
Of some prefiguring love. O the delight,
The incredible bounty and sustaining will
Of passionate longing, peopling all the earth--
And the joy of man and woman! The laughing boys!
The milkman clanking along in his cart, and there
Two bonneted old women, and there a thief,
Perhaps, with a night’s booty sneaking home!
Yet solemn all and sacred, with new eyes
I saw them then, and in each face I seemed
With a new soul to read the soul beneath;
Through love and pain and sorrow having passed
Into the breast of all humanity--
Through love and sorrow. Yes, and for your sake,
Being human, all things human touched to love
This heart of mine, made holy; and the thought
Of the million other hearts beyond the dawn--
The gladness, and the sadness, and the pain--
Came back upon me like a lifting music,
Beautiful, and most sorrowful, and divine.

Till a vast compassion
Up through the springs of all my being welled
Intolerably! Ah, even as to myself,
Unfaithful, the exuberant Bounty stooped
With arms of pity; so I longed to do--
To lose myself at last in the Great Self
That beams upon the just and the unjust,
Carelessly shedding radiant light around:
Compassing finite hate with infinite love,
With beauty, ugliness, and death with life!

So through that street of pouring souls I passed,
Torn between grief and ecstasy. But none
Guessed the immortal secret that I bore
Close at the fluttering heart--the fear--the joy--
The very beat and memory in my blood,
The exquisite sense and lingering pain of you.

BUT LOVE--

Flowing in the sunlight here,
The river shines like a glass,
Even as it did last year;
On the hillside the grass
Bows, as the breezes pass--
But my love is gone, my love is gone.

Where is she--where, and how?
Has she forgotten me yet?
Ah, she has forgotten me now!
She is too lovely for regret:
Would that I ever could forget,
My love is gone, my love is gone!

It is so still--so still ...
The sound of a rumbling train
Rushes into the hill.
Autumn comes again
With the old wonder and pain--
But love comes never again

ANNE

Belovèd--O adorable and false--
Whom have you taken now in the dear toils?

By what pale margins do your footsteps stray,
Or what enchanted wood? What valleys hold
The lily of your loveliness? What hills
Have known your weight upon them, what far shores?

Twilight comes tenderly, while evening lifts
Along the pallid rim her lonely star--

O happy heart on which your heart is laid!

THE SILENCE

In the evening, in the quiet Park, we walked together
After so many and after so many years--
We walked again in the evening, in the warm May weather,
After the partings and tears.

And under the splendor, under the starry skies,
We walked, without sound or sigh, in a calm unbroken;
As the dead walk together in a long-lost Paradise--
Silent, with no word spoken.

EXULTATION

Before the dawn the very thought of you,
That wakes me, as the morning wakes the night,
Floods all my heart with most exultant joy.

The thought of you that rises with the stars,
When evening wheels all glittering through the dark,
Floods all my heart with most exultant joy.

O life and joy and breath and death of me,
With every breath I draw you in like air!
O I shall die of you, of you, of you!

Though now you banish me forevermore,
Never to look upon your face again--
Think you that I shall sorrow for my love?

Though I shall lie upon my bed of death
And know you have forgotten me forever--
Think you that I shall sorrow for my love?

O life and joy and breath and death of me,
I shall cry out exultant--and lie dead!
O I shall die of you, of you, of you!

O love, I love you better than you know!
I love you as the water loves the sea.
I love you as the twilight loves the dark.

The trumpets of the morning, to my heart
From shining towers blow the thought of you;
The waves of evening flood my heart with you.

O life and joy and breath and death of me,
With every breath I draw you in like air!
O I shall die of you, of you, of you!

SONG OF SONGS

My heart is like a shady grove
That harbors, for a June,
My thoughts, like song-birds mad with love
Under the moon.

On all the windy boughs they sit
And in the blowing grass--
But one bird silently enters it,
And sings, alas!

Then all the rest grow sad and still
That made a happy noise:
There is no sound on all the hill
But that one voice,

Faint with the memories in his breast--
It is the thought of _you_--
And when it ceases, all the rest
Are silent, too.

SORROWFUL FREEDOM

Long days I begged of my heart to be
Released from a love that haunted me--
The memory of a last embrace,
A tyrannous and a lovely face.

“Free me,” I said, “from an old love,
The memory and the might thereof--
Free to follow and take my fill
Of beauty and laughter where I will.”

Never a word my heart replied:
But on a day the old love died;
Vanished, never to come again,
All the passion and all the pain.

Come--we are free to take our fill
Of beauty and laughter where we will--
O heart, are we free forevermore
From the old sorrow we loved before!

STARLESS MORNING

Toward starless morning, when deep night had bowed
On slumber’s pillow my unhappy head,
Through the dim room it drifted like a cloud--
And swayed in silence by my lonely bed.

What had they done to you, that dumbly so
You covered with your hands your quiet face--
Dear, out of kindness, that I might not know
What horror there had wrought its dark disgrace!

It was those hands, too passionately, too well
Loved, that betrayed you--O most piteous guest!
And to my heart, in the intolerable
Rage of despair, that shadow I had pressed,

Mingling in a shrill cry our grief supreme--
My sweet--my pretty! But, as I had drawn
That anguish to my arms, they clasped a dream;
And heaven glimmered with the approaching dawn.

PHANTOM

Along the edge of the great, moving sea--
That moaned forever on her barren bars,
The old, sad love came back again to me,
Moving quietly under the quiet stars.

O sad love, do not smile upon me so,
Nodding so gently with your little head--
All the old wonder of your eyes is dead,
And the sea-winds have chilled you long ago!

LEGEND

Where are you hid from me, belovèd one
That I am seeking through the lonely world--
A wanderer, on my way home to you?

Dark is the night and perilous the road:
At many a breast in longing have I leaned,
At many a wayside worshipped; and my heart
Is tired from long travelling.

Perhaps
In centuries to come you wait for me,
And are as yet an iris by the stream
Lifting her single blossom, or the faint
Tremulous haze upon the hills--and we
Have missed each other.

O if it be so,
Then may this song reach to the verge of doom--
Ages unborn--to find you where you are,
My lonely one; and like a murmuring string,
Faint with one music, endlessly repeat

To you, not even knowing I was yours,
Her plaintive burden from the dolorous past:
Telling of one upon a hopeless quest--
How in the dark of Time he lost his way!