Classic Poem

I saw her 'mid the long green stalks
Of silky corn in summer-time;
I saw her midst red hollyhocks,
And watched the sunlit pantomime;
For lovelier brown was in her hair
And silkier brown fell o'er her eyes,
And, fairer than her garden fair,
I saw a coming paradise.

I breathed with her the heavy musk
Afloat upon the eventide,
And ran behind her in the dusk
And dreamed I walked close by her side.
Somehow the perfume stole my breath;
Somehow the moonbeams quenched my sighs;
And then I kissed the lips of death —
Yet lived with her in paradise!

At morn I found her where lush grass
Lived, specked with lilies large and white;
Ah, solemn clouds that pause and pass
Afar from sea-green marge to marge!
Yet when I look again to see
That one sweet face of all most wise,
Across a dark infinity
Glows evermore that paradise!

At night the glow-worm held his lamp
Against her forehead pure and white,
And down the greensward, cool and damp,
She wandered, minstrel of the night.
I hear her often when I tread
The soft turf where I know she lies;
They count her name among the dead —
Then flames my surer paradise!

If in the realms of amethyst
And plains where buds are blossoming
Are clouds of gold or purple mist,
I'll find her in some eve of spring,
Her lilied limbs asleep amid
The glory where some angel flies
And stops, where softly she has hid
My childhood's dreams of paradise.

So, near her grave are hollyhocks
Red, like her lips, and there along
The brooklet grows the tasselled stalks,
And thither floats the robin's song.
That far-off perfume haunts the air;
Wan moonbeams overfill my eyes;
I dream, and fondle with her hair,
And call it all my paradise.