O WHITE wind, numbing the world
to a mask of suffering hate!
and thy goblin pipes have skirl’d
all night, at my broken gate.

O heart, be hidden and kept
in a half-light colour’d and warm,
and call on thy dreams that have slept
to charm thee from hate and harm.

They are gone, for I might not keep;
my sense is beaten and dinn’d;
there is no peace but a grey sleep
in the pause of the wind.

O My Lord, Your dwelling places are lovely
Your Presence is manifest, not in mystery.
My dream brought me to the Temple of God
And I praised its delightful servants,
And the burnt offering, its meal and libation
Which rose up in great pillars of smoke.
I delighted in the song of the Levites,
In their secrets of the sacrificial service.
Then I woke, and still I was with you, O Lord,
And I gave thanks - for to You it is pleasant to give thanks

0 little root of a dream
you hold me here
undermined by blood,
no longer visible to anyone,
property of death.

Curve a face
that there may be speech, of earth,
of ardor, of
things with eyes, even
here, where you read me blind,

even
here,
where you
refute me,
to the letter.

translated by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov

You have become a forge of snow-white fire,
A crucible of molten steel, O France!
Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn
And fade in light for you, O glorious France!
They pass through meteor changes with a song
Which to all islands and all continents
Says life is neither comfort, wealth, nor fame,
Nor quiet hearthstones, friendship, wife nor child,
Nor love, nor youth's delight, nor manhood's power,
Nor many days spent in a chosen work,
Nor honored merit, nor the patterned theme
Of daily labor, nor the crowns nor wreaths

O gather me the rose, the rose,
While yet in flower we find it,
For summer smiles, but summer goes,
And winter waits behind it.

For with the dream foregone, foregone,
The deed foreborn forever,
The worm Regret will canker on,
And time will turn him never.

So were it well to love, my love,
And cheat of any laughter
The fate beneath us, and above,
The dark before and after.

The myrtle and the rose, the rose,
The sunshine and the swallow,
The dream that comes, the wish that goes

O CITY, look the Eastward way!
Beyond thy roofs of shadowy red and grey
Floats like a lily on the airy stream,
Radiant and vast, a cloud,
Around whose billowy head
Splendour from out the glooming West is shed
As if it were not ever to take flight,—
And on its edge of gleam
In the clear blue of waning afternoon,
Faint as a spirit slipping from the shroud,
Faint, and yet gathering light,
The Moon.

O city, dream and pray!
This is thy evensong at close of day.

The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
And, if the sun looks through, 'tis with a face
Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,
When done the journey of her nightly race,
Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place.
For days the shepherds in the fields may be,
Nor mark a patch of sky - blindfold they trace,
The plains, that seem without a bush or tree,
Whistling aloud by guess, to flocks they cannot see.

The timid hare seems half its fears to lose,
Crouching and sleeping 'neath its grassy lair,

Not quite the same the springtime seems to me,
Since that sad season when in separate ways
Our paths diverged. There are no more such days
As dawned for us in that last time when we
Dwelt in the realm of dreams, illusive dreams;
Spring may be just as fair now, but it seems
Not quite the same.

Not quite the same in life, since we two parted,
Knowing it best to go our ways alone.
Fair measures of success we both have known,
And pleasant hours; and yet something departed
Which gold, nor fame, nor anything we win,

NOT heaving from my ribb'd breast only;
Not in sighs at night, in rage, dissatisfied with myself;
Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs;
Not in many an oath and promise broken;
Not in my wilful and savage soul's volition;
Not in the subtle nourishment of the air;
Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists;
Not in the curious systole and diastole within, which will one day
cease;
Not in many a hungry wish, told to the skies only;

O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!
There time and life move lazily along.
There by the banks of blue-and-silver streams
Grass-sheltered crickets chirp incessant song,
Gay-colored lizards loll all through the day,
Their tongues outstretched for careless little flies,
And swarthy children in the fields at play,
Look upward laughing at the smiling skies.
A breath of idleness is in the air
That casts a subtle spell upon all things,
And love and mating-time are everywhere,
And wonder to life's commonplaces clings.