I HAVE gathered the dewy roses,
The lily and columbine,
The ivy, and iris, and myrtle,
And pale sweet jessamine;
And out where some brave heart is lying
In an unmarked lonely place,
For his dear, dear sake, I will strew them,
Who slumbers at Rocky Face.

I woke when the odorous morning
Came royally from the gloom,
And I wept as my gay companions
Went culling from bloom to bloom;
Ah, little they know of the sighing.
And little of all the tears
That stifle the heart that is asking
The loves of its happy years!

Were love but true, no frost would mar the flowers,
No fatal frost that down the garden bowers
Steals hideously from bloom to blissful bloom,
The shimmering weft of summer's golden loom,
And mocks with blight their radiant, dreamful hours.

Nor would the waste and wreck of orient towers,
Slow-sunken from the reach of sun and showers,
Tax the unfeatured sands for burial room,
Were love but true.

For love is lord of earth's phantasmal powers,
And all that seems with his own fact he dowers.
The shapes of art, the growths of nature's womb,

Give me no mansions ivory white
Nor palaces of pearl and gold;
Give me a child for all delight,
——Just four years old.

Give me no wings of rosy shine
Nor snowy raiment, fold on fold,
Give me a little boy all mine,
——Just four years old.

Give me no gold and starry crown
Nor harps, nor palm branches unrolled;
Give me a nestling head of brown,
——Just four years old.

Give me a cheek that's like the peach,
Two arms to clasp me from the cold;
And all my heaven's within my reach,
——Just four years old.

The angels wings is white as snow,
O, white as snow,
White
as
snow.
The angels wings is white as snow,
But I drug ma wings
In the dirty mire.
O, I drug ma wings
All through the fire.
But the angels wings is white as snow,
White
as

This resolve: with trouble's brow
To forswear trouble and keep
A surface innocence and sleep
To smooth the mirror
With never, never,
And now, now.

The image, not yet in recognition, had grace
To be lasting in death's time, to postpone the face
Until the face had gone.
Her regiments sprang up here and fell of peace,
Her banners dropped like birds that had never flown.

And her arrested hand, clasping its open palm,
Pressed on from finger to finger
The stroke withheld from trouble
Till it be only ageless brow,
A renunciatory double

When clouds drift over the earth,
over life a sorrow,
when the tears rain down
on parched despairing hearts,
when lament is everywhere
recollecting the heart's pain
remember then the full-moon nights
in dream cities after the earthquake.

In the desert of vexation,
hand at your forehead,
existence becomes a curse,
success beyond the sandy wastes.
Within the alien, cruel jungle
of the world I call
when life's become a burden,
a tumult of the spirit,
in that same moment I remember
you, and the tears stop.

They tell me, when my tongue grows warm on thee,
Dear gentle hill, with tresses green and bright,
That thou art wanting in the finishing sight
Sweetest of all for summer eye to see;—
That whatsoe'er thy charm of spire and tree,
Of dell wrapped in, or airy-viewing height,
No water looks from out thy face with light,
Or waits upon thy walks refreshfully.

It may be so,—casual though pond or brook:—
Yet not to me so full of all that 's fair,
Though fruit-embowered, with fingering sun between,
Were the divinest fount in Fancy's nook,

As I came down into the Place of Spain,
Above the motors tooting in the streets
I heard a voice that asked, “Well, who was Keats?”
In the best accent of Nebraska's plain.
A thin but rigid female, who in vain
Perused her Baedeker's close-printed sheets,
Answered: “An Irish Poet,” scattering sweets
Of information to the Vast Inane.

Who was he? A voice, forgotten in some quarters
Apparently. The mortal lyric cry
Stilled by the house where the man came to die;
A lost identity of long ago;
Music and love quenched by the many waters.

Does the heart grieve on,
After its grief is gone
Like a slow ship moving
Across its own oblivion?

Heart! Heart! Do you not know
That I have conquered pain,
Have parted from my woe?
That my proud feet have found their path again,
After the pathless heights—long after—
And that my hands have learned to bless
Their overflowing emptiness,
My lips grown reconciled to laughter?

O laggard of dead roads,
O heart that will not heal nor break
Nor yet forget!
Tell me, whose tears are these
That greet me as I wake?
Why is my pillow wet?

I am afraid to go into the woods,
I fear the trees and their mad, green moods.

I fear the breezes that pull at my sleeves,
The creeping arbutus beneath the leaves,

And the brook that mocks me with wild, wet words:
I stumble and fall at the voice of birds,

At the golden tumult of April stars,
Touching to song my silent scars.

Think of the rainbow that lurks in showers,
Think of the meadows of fierce-eyed flowers;

And the little things with sudden wings
That buzz about me and dash and dart,
And the lilac waiting to break my heart.