Songs (I)
(thee will i praise between those rivers whose white voices pass upon forgetting(fail me not)whose courseless waters are a gloat of silver;o'er whose night three willows wail, a slender dimness in the unshapeful hour making dear moan in tones of stroked flower; let not thy lust one threaded moment lose: haste)the very shadowy sheep float free upon terrific pastures pale, whose tall mysterious shepherd lifts a cheek teartroubled to the momentary wind with guiding smile,lips wisely minced for blown kisses,condemnatory fingers thinned of pity—so he stands counting the moved myriads wonderfully loved, (hasten,it is the moment which shall seek all blossoms that do learn,scents of not known musics in whose careful eyes are dinned; and the people of perfect darkness fills his mind who will their hungering whispers hear with weepings soundless,saying of "alas we were chaste on earth we ghosts:hark to the sheer cadence of our grey flesh in the gloom! and still to be immortal is our doom; but a rain frailly raging whom the hills sink into and their sunsets,it shall pass. Our feet tread sleepless meadows sweet with fear") then be with me:unseriously seem by the perusing greenness of thy thought my golden soul fabulously to glue in a superior terror;be thy taut flesh silver,like the currency of faint cities eternal—ere the sinless taint of thy long sinful arms about me dream shall my love wholly taste thee as a new wine from steep hills by darkness softly brought— (be with me in the sacred witchery of almostness which May makes follow soon on the sweet heels of passed afterday, clothe thy soul's coming merely,with a croon of mingling robes musically revealed in rareness:let thy twain eyes deeply wield a noise of petals falling silently through the far-spaced possible nearaway from huge trees drenched by a rounding moon)
This poem is in the public domain.