THE gull's image and the gull
Meet upon the water
All day I have thought of her
There is nothing left of that year
(There is sere-grass
Salt colored)
We have annulled it with
Salt
We have galled it clean to the clay with that one autumn
The hedge-rows keep the rubbish and the leaves
There is nothing left of that year in our lives but the leaves of it
As though it had not been at all
As though the love the love and the life altered
Even ourselves are as strangers in these thoughts
Why should I weep for this?

Life is up and takes the morning;
Why should love still lie abed?
Lo! the charms of slumber scorning,
Tramps the troop that must be led.
Thousands come from hill and valley
Loud the town with clamour fill;
Why must then their leader dally,
Couched with Cleopatra still?
Life's awake — let Duty waken!
Love's a snare at such a time,
When Mars' harness should be taken
And the hearts of heroes chime.
Let the leader leave the lady!
Cupid is not lord of these,
Now the War-god ranks them ready
To post over land and seas.

FROM the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry:
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment
Book unfold!

Look from thy window and see
My passion and my pain;
I lie on the sands below,
And I faint in thy disdain.
Let the night-winds touch thy brow
With the heat of my burnings sigh,

O love is like an untamed steed!--
So hot of heart and wild of speed,
And with fierce freedom so in love,
The desert is not vast enough,
With all its leagues of glimmering sands,
To pasture it! Ah, that my hands
Were more than human in their strength,
That my deft lariat at length
Might safely noose this splendid thing
That so defies all conquering!
Ho! but to see it whirl and reel--
The sands spurt forward--and to feel
The quivering tension of the thong
That throned me high, with shriek and song!
To grapple tufts of tossing mane--

If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.

Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.

For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?

Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why"
I love you now until I die.

Her beauty is the bourne thought cannot pass;
And the angel of the heart's intelligence,
Young Love, might deem that boundary infinite,
So he within the glamour of her eyes,
As in some ether too thin to be weighed,
Might breathe for ever.

I
Fair is my Love and cruel as she 's fair;
Her brow-shades frown, although her eyes are sunny.
Her smiles are lightning, though her pride despair,
And her disdains are gall, her favours honey:
A modest maid, deck'd with a blush of honour,
Whose feet do tread green paths of youth and love;
The wonder of all eyes that look upon her,
Sacred on earth, design'd a Saint above.
Chastity and Beauty, which were deadly foes,
Live reconciled friends within her brow;
And had she Pity to conjoin with those,
Then who had heard the plaints I utter now?

I have been touched with her, and have ta'en (Unclear
The acquaintance of her beauty like a dream,
Or as it were a flower of Faerie breathed
By an immortal; for the light and air
Of life and love so, so endue her, she
Puts on and off the sweetest favours like
The momentary raiment that
A goddess dons and doffs.

Beauty does not walk through lovely days.
Beauty walks with horror in her hair.
Down long centuries of pleasant ways
Men have found the terrible most fair.
Youth is lovelier in death than life,
Beauty mightier in pain than joy.
Doubly splendid burn the fires of strife,
Brighter in the brightness they destroy.

Off on the prairie, where the balmy air
Kisses the waving corn,
There lives a farmer, with a daughter fair--
Fair as a summer's morn!
She has a nature gentle as a dove,
Pure as the mountain snows;
Say! is it strange that everyone should love--
Love such a girl as Rose?

Beautiful Rose! lovely Rose!
Pride of the prairie bower!
Everybody loves her--everybody knows
She is the fairest flower.

Rose is a lady yet from early dawn,
Labors her skillful hand;
She is the housewife, now her mother's gone--
Gone to the better land.