love poetry

Hush-a-by, baby,
Your name is so lovely.
He who gave it to you is a gallant fellow.
Bo, bo, bo, bo, bo.
Hush-a-by, darling.

Hush-a-by, baby,
May sleep come to my darling,
Let it come swiftly, not on foot, but on horseback.
Bo, bo, bo, bo, bo.
Hush-a-by, my lovely child.

LOVE AND JEALOUSY .

How much are they deceiv'd who vainly strive
By jealous fears to keep our flames alive!
Love's like a torch, which, if secur'd from blasts,
Will faintlier burn, but then it longer lasts
Expos'd to storms of jealousy and doubt,
The blaze grows greater, but 'tis sooner out.

He's gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We'll walk no more on Cotswold
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.

His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn river
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now . . .
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers —
Hide that red wet

An heritage of hopes and fears
And dreams and memory,
And vices of ten thousand years
God gives to thee.

A house of clay, the home of Fate,
Haunted of Love and Sin,
Where Death stands knocking at the gate
To let him in.

Here doth Dionysia lie:
She whose little wanton foot,
Tripping (ah, too carelessly!)
Touched this tomb, and fell into 't.

Trip no more shall she, nor fall.
And her trippings were so few!
Summers only eight in all
Had the sweet child wandered through.

But, already, life's few suns
Love's strong seeds had ripened warm.
All her ways were winning ones;
All her cunning was to charm.

And the fancy, in the flower,
While the flesh was in the bud,
Childhood's dawning sex did dower

Fortune, Nature, Love, long have contended about me,
Which should most miseries, cast on a worm that I am.
Fortune thus gan say: "Misery and misfortune is all one,
And of misfortune, fortune hath only the gift.
With strong foes on land, on seas with contrary tempests
Still do I cross this wretch, what so he taketh in hand."
"Tush, tush," said Nature, "this is all but a trifle, a man's self
Gives haps or mishaps, ev'n as he ord'reth his heart.
But so his humor I frame, in a mould of choler adjusted,

Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.

Alas, how hardly things go right!
'Tis hard to watch in a summer night,
For the sigh will come, and the kiss will stay;
And the summer night is a wintry day.

And yet how easily things go right,
If the sigh and a kiss of a summer's night
Come deep from the soul in the stronger ray
That is born in the light of the winter's day.

Do but consider this small dust, here running in the glass,
By atoms moved.
Could you believe that this the body was
Of one that loved?
And in his mistress' flame playing like a fly,
Turned to cinders by her eye?
Yes, and in death as life unblest,
To have't expressed,
Even ashes of lovers find no rest.

I

Face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, I saw her:
God and she and I only, there I sat down to draw her
Soul through the clefts of confession:
" Speak, I am holding thee fast,
As the angel of resurrection shall do at the last!"
" My cup is blood-red
With my sin," she said,
" And I pour it out to the bitter lees,
As if the angels of judgment stood over me strong at the last,

I
Fluttering spread thy purple pinions,
Gentle Cupid o'er my heart;
I a slave in thy dominions;
Nature must give way to art.
II

Mild Arcadians, ever blooming,
Nightly nodding o'er your flocks,
See my weary days consuming,
All beneath yon flowery rocks.
III

Thus the Cyprian goddess weeping,
Mourned Adonis, darling youth:
Him the boar in silence creeping,
Gored with unrelenting tooth.
IV

Cynthia, tune harmonious numbers;
Fair Discretion string the lyre;