Classic Poem

(1)

It was all quiet on that little hill,
And through the dusk a hazy quiet fell,
Quiet as lulled as after a slow bell
The silver quaver falters and is still.
There was no stir among the trees at all
Nor any lift of air along the ground;
Only soft rain that settled with no sound,
And rain drops on still leaves too stilled to fall.

He thought the stillness was her bridal house
And here within hushed walls of secretness
She lay and waited till his love should rouse
Echoes of longing, and with love's excess
Ring down this silence on a rising chime,
Ring down the heavens and the roof of time.

(2)

Turning he raised the latch and passed the door
And stood upon the threshold of her room,
As though he stood upon the farthest shore
Of wonder and awaited there the bloom
Of moonrise on the sea. O, surely here,
Here in this heart of silence he should find
That something sought which now as he came near
Was like moonrise and music in his mind.

Here, surely here, his very flesh should know
Beauty that has no knowledge in the flesh,
And beauty known within that mortal mesh
Should be immortal and true beauty show.
So should his body be his subtle brain
And thought be sense and sense be thought again.
(3)

Things he had loved because he knew them lost,
Things he had loved and never yet had found—
The unintelligible beauty tossed
Back from a foolish dream—the smothered sound
Of laughter from a window swiftly barred
In some monk's chronicle—the ruined grace
Of carven marbles that old rains had marred—
Things he had lost and loved were in that place.

And she was like the voice of those lost things
Haunting the body that his arms held near,
And singing there of other loves as sings
The bird at evening of another year.
But now she slept and was herself and seemed
More than his love and less than he had dreamed.

(4)

She was herself, not his, not anything
That might be his or he might ever own,
Or ever think, or with much thinking bring
To words that may be spoken out and known;
And that dear image he had coined of her
To spend his love, and gilded with her head,
Was but the counterfeit love's pensioner
Should hoard for all his wealth when she was dead,

And all he knew of her was something less
Than what his hand could learn against her side,
Or what his mouth remembered from the press
Of her mute mouth. She had become the bride
Of something in his sense that understood
The touch of things, the moments of the blood.

(5)

They say they are one flesh:
They are two nations.
They cannot mix nor mesh:—
Their conjugations

Are cries from star to star.
They would commingle,
They couple far and far—
Still they are single.

With arms and hungry hands
They cling together,
They strain at bars and bands,
They tug at tether,

Still there are walls between,
Still space divides them,
Still are themselves unseen,
Still distance hides them.