Classic Poem

Death had sunk the world from under my feet;
Love had given thee wings to fly;
And we met as the dawn and the darkness meet—
Thou the dawn, and the darkness I.

My soul was a gloom that had blotted heaven;
And thine was a fine ascending fire
That streamed it through with a luminous leaven
Of hope of morning and day's desire.

Love wrought the miracle of raising the dead:
Though on the tomb the seal had been put,
Thine eyes to my buried passion said,
‘Come forth!’ and it came, bound hand and foot.

Sad memory drowned itself in those eyes—
Fell into their liquid deeps and sunk;
And the darkness of all the earth and skies
To those two crystals of darkness shrunk.

When we met our fate—rememberst the place?—
My day was barren, my dream was done;
But the bright warm flush of thy radiant face
On my frozen heart flamed like a sun.

That look! it created the world anew:
Thy presence came to me like the sweep
Of a full white sail to the sudden view
Of a shipwrecked man on the deep.

I knew I was saved; I knew that thy voice
Should sing the cries in the night to peace;
But I felt it almost a guilt to rejoice
That love from the dead had love's release.

Thou hadst never suffered, and couldst not know
How past and present in me were whirled—
How the breeze out of sunrise seemed to blow
From the sundown of the underworld.

But love is a god, and to him one day
Is a thousand years that are past:
I woke from the dreams that had flown away,
And, behold, they were true at last.

It seemed we had dwelt in the Morningstar
Ere the soul of either was born;
And I saw thy face in glimmerings far
Of memory's earliest morn.

The barefooted little damsel that played
With me in the plash on the marge
Of the blue Ke-u-ka was flashed and rayed
In the beam of this love so large.

Thy passionate voice, so sweetly that robbed
My soul of its will and made it slave,
Was the girl Fanny Wolcott's when she sobbed
My heart from me at her father's grave.

The victorious eyes that once I had met
And mistaken for heavenly blue
Were dark as that night I remember yet,
Because they were thine and were true.

Thou seemed the soul after death from the eve
When we strolled Miami's green shore
And heard the cricket and katydid grieve
That with them we should tryst no more.

The two strong loves that had fought for my heart
And at last laid them down and smiled
To divide and rend it to graves apart
Arose in thee and were reconciled.

From kiss on the sweet sad face in the night,
From tears for the night-wind's human moan,
O! the waking to find, in love's new light,
All faces, all voices thy own!