Classic Poem

Like the first swallow in the spring returning,
Fly through the night-blue air to yon far place,
My song, and gently unto her whose face
Is hid from me, oh, tell my sad life's yearning.

Fly, song, thou only know'st beyond forgetting
My bosom's loneliness
And grief that burns in springtime's fairest hours,
And thou alone dost know the fiery fretting
Of this my keen distress.
The sun no longer gleams through forest bowers.
Through misted panes I see how evening lowers.
Night soon will spread her starry tent on high,
And with a faltering wing my dream will fly
Where shadows do not tell of night returning.

For there the sunlight ever is descending
On groves of cypress blue,
There ever glow the flame-red beams of even
On fruit-trees under snowy blossoms bending,
And splash with sun-bright hue
The lilies that beneath yon boughs have thriven.
But that land lies beyond the rim of heaven,
The pale horizon bounds it like a wall.
Yon garden where the cool, blue shadows fall
Lies evermore beyond mine eyes' discerning.

But, song, do thou, on whose transparent pinions
No bonds of clay have might,
Pass o'er the skyey tracts within my vision,
Directing unto fancy's fair dominions
Thy summer-gleaming flight
To where within some fruit-tree grove Elysian
Dwells Beatrice. Oh, let her know thy mission
From me who tarry in the dark sad world;
While from the boughs the petals white and curled
Fall on her dress, reveal my spirit's yearning.

What is eternal in my life's commotion,
What's winged in my thought,
All rays of sunlight through my senses streaming,
Are fibres from the web of my devotion
To her. 'T was she who taught
All the sad passion of my poet-dreaming
Made into song by twilight's pensive gleaming,
When evening's dark regret weighed hard on me —
Tell it not thus, but sweetly as may be,
O song, thou swallow with the spring returning.