There is that in love
which, by the syntax of,
men find women and join
their bodies to their minds

--which wants so to acquire
a continuity, a place,
a demonstration that it must
be one's own sentence.

It is not that I love you less
Than when before your feet I lay,
But to prevent the sad increase
Of hopeless love, I keep away.

In vain (alas!) for everything
Which I have known belong to you,
Your form does to my fancy bring,
And makes my old wounds bleed anew.

Who in the spring from the new sun
Already has a fever got,
Too late begins those shafts to shun,
Which Phœbus through his veins has shot.

Too late he would the pain assuage,
And to thick shadows does retire;
About with him he bears the rage,

Sun! stay thy course, this moment stay--
Suspend the o'er flowing tide of day,
Divulge not such a love as mine,
Ah! hide the mystery divine;
Lest man, who deems my glory shame,
Should learn the secret of my flame.

O night! propitious to my views,
Thy sable awning wide diffuse;
Conceal alike my joy and pain,
Nor draw thy curtain back again,
Though morning, by the tears she shows,
Seems to participate my woes.

Ye stars! whose faint and feeble fires
Express my languishing desires,
Whose slender beams pervade the skies,

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death

By the road of ways
In the three-part shadow of troubled sleep
I come to you the double the multiple
as like you as the era of deltas.

Your head is as tiny as mine
The nearby sea reigns with spring
Over the summers of your fragile form
And here one burns bundles of ermine.

In the wandering transparency
of your noble face
these floating animals are wonderful
I envy their candour their inexperience

Your inexperience on the bed of waters
Finds the road of love without bowing
By the road of ways

'OH, love me! love me!'
The sea-maid sings ori the pebbly shore—
'Love me! oh, love me!'
The tears they gather, the tears run o'er;
She looks to the sea, she looks to the hill,
But no one comes, and the night is still—
'Oh, love me! love me!'

'Oh, love me I love me!'
Singing so sadly, singing so long—
'Love me! oh, love me!
I would give true love, so deep, so strong,
To him who would give true love to me.'
Nought on the hill, and nought on the sea—
'Oh, love me! love me!'

'Love me! oh, love me!'

The sea, my mother, is singing to me,
   She is singing the old refrain,
Of passion, of love, and of mystery,
   And her world-old song of pain;
Of the mirk midnight and the dazzling day,
That trail their robes o'er the wet sea-way.

The sea, my mother, is singing to me
   With the white foam caught in her hair,
With the seaweed swinging its long arms free,
   To grapple the blown sea air:
The sea, my mother, with billowy swell,

Who lay against the sea, and fled,
Who lightly loved the wave,
Shall never know, when he is dead,
A cool and murmurous grave.

But in a shallow pit shall rest
For all eternity,
And bear the earth upon the breas
That once had worn the sea.

Why should you swear I am forsworn,
Since thine I vowed to be?
Lady, it is already morn,
And 'twas last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.

Have I not loved thee much and long,
A tedious twelve hours' space?
I must all other beauties wrong,
And rob thee of a new embrace,
Could I still dote upon thy face.

Not but all joy in thy brown hair
By others may be found;—
But I must search the black and fair,
Like skilful mineralists that sound
For treasure in unploughed-up ground.

Love me wildly, to distraction,
scare away my huge affliction,
in the cage of an abstraction,
I, an ape, jump up and down,
bare my teeth in malediction,
for I have no faith or fiction,
in the terror of His frown.

Mortal, do you hear my singing,
or mere nature's echoes ringing?
Hug me, don't just stare unseeing
as the sharpened knife comes down--
there's no guardian that's undying
who will hear my song and sighing:
in the terror of His frown.

As a raft upon a river,
Slovak raftman, whosoever,