Chapter III

There the verandah, spilled and spun
With deep bignonia, foaming all its frame
With fiery blooms, seems pouring for the sun
A cataract of flame.

The oleander hedges soak
The dusk with fragrance: and the gray moss sweeps
Its streamers from the cypress and live-oak
Where blue the ocean sleeps.

“Oh, love, love, love!” the wood-dove coos;
“Oh, love, love, love, for ever!
They who the crimson rose refuse,
All other flowers, too, may lose--
So choose thou now or never!
Oh, love, love, love!”

LONG AGO

When the winter wind comes sighing
Like a ghost, and softly trying
Door and window, and the dying
Light upon the hearth burns low;
How his heart, that’s old, remembers
Love that faded as the embers
Into ashes, or December’s
Vanished snow.

And he seems to see her sitting
With the tranquil firelight flitting
On her face and fitful knitting,
While her chair goes to and fro;
As she sat once in the hours
That are gone; that, like the flowers,
Died, with all that youth embowers,
Long ago.

Then he seems to hear her speaking,
And her rocker faintly creaking,
And his hand goes dimly seeking
Hers that is not there, ah, no!
Hers, whose memory keeps reaching
From the past fond arms, beseeching
Heart and soul till, past all preaching,
Both o’erflow.

Oh, caresses lost that take him
In his dreams and wildly wake him!
Tears that blind and sighs that shake him,
Is there any cure for woe?--
Answer, love, whose eyes once merried!
Joy, whose cheeks and lips were cherried!
You, whom long ago he buried,
Long ago.

SELF

A Sufi said to me in dreams:
Behold! from Sodomite to Peri
Earth tablets us: man lives and is
Man’s own long commentary.

Is one begat at Bassora,
One lies at Damietta dying--
The plausibilities of God
All possibles o’erlying.

But when lust burns within the flesh--
Hell’s but a homily on Heaven--
Put then the individual first,
And of thyself be shriven.

Neither in adamant nor brass
The scrutinizing eye records it:
The arm is rooted in the heart,
The heart that rules and lords it.

Be that it is and thou art all:
And what thou art so hast thou written
Thee of the lutanists of Love,
Or of the torture-smitten.

ASPIRATION

God knew he strove against pale lust and vice,
Wound in the net of their voluptuous hair:
God knew that to their kisses he was ice,
Their arms around him there.

God knew against the front of fate he set
A front as stern, with lips as sternly pressed;
Raised clenched and ineffectual hands that met
The iron of her breast.

God knew what motive his sad soul inspired:
God knew the star for which he climbed and craved:
God knew, and only God, the hell that fired
His heart and in it raved.

And yet he failed! failed utterly!--No lie
Of Hell, that writhes within its simmering pit,
Sank deeper down than he, who, with the cry,
“Now shall I rest from it!”

Died; was remembered, haply, for a day;
Who hoped to rise rolled in the morning’s rose,
The flame of fame, and still lies laid away
Where no one cares or knows.

PEACE

I

When rose-leaves ’neath the rose-bush lie
And lilies bloom and lilacs die,
When days fall sadder than a sigh,
Lay me asleep;
Where breezes blow the rose-leaves by,
Lay me asleep.

II

When to the dusty, dreary day
No lonely cloud brings cooling gray,
And languidly the tree-tops sway
And flowers there,
Come thou as silently and pray
As flowers there.