Love in her eyes sits playing,
And sheds delicious death;
Love in her lips is straying,
And warbling in her breath;
Love on her breast sits panting,
And swells with soft desire;
Nor grace, nor charm, is wanting
To set the heart on fire.

I CANNOT tell what this love may be
That cometh to all, but not to me.
It cannot be kind as they'd imply,
Or why do these gentle ladies sigh?
It cannot be joy and rapture deep,
Or why do these gentle ladies weep?
It cannot be blissful as 'tis said,
Or why are their eyes so wondrous red?

Though everywhere true love I see
A-coming to all, but not to me,
I cannot tell what this love may be!
For I am blithe and I am gay,
While they sit sighing all night, all day.
Think of the gulf 'twixt them and me,

A magnet hung in a hardware shop,
And all around was a loving crop
Of scissors and needles, nails and knives,
Offering love for all their lives;
But for iron the magnet felt no whim,
Though he charmed iron, it charmed not him;
From needles and nails and knives he'd turn,
For he'd set his love on a Silver Churn!
His most aesthetic,
Very magnetic
Fancy took this turn—
“If I can wheedle
A knife or a needle,
Why not a Silver Churn?”

And Iron and Steel expressed surprise,
The needles opened their well-drilled eyes,

Along the Yodo
where they cut wild rice,
when it rains the marsh waters overflow,
like my love,
growing deeper than ever

They called my love a poor blind maid:
I love her more for that, I said;
I love her, for she cannot see
These gray hairs which disfigure me.
We wonder not that wounds are made
By an unsheathed and naked blade;
The marvel is that swords should slay,
While yet within their sheaths they stay.
She is a garden fair, where I
Need fear no guardian's prying eye;
Where, though in beauty blooms the rose,
Narcissuses their eyelids close.

If any song I sing for you should be
But made to please a poet's vanity,
A richly jewelled and an empty cup
In which no hallowed wine is offered up,
A thing of chosen rhyme and cunning phrase,
Fashioned that it may bring its maker praise;
If love in me grow only soft and sweet,
Remembering not with what worn and weary feet
It journeyed to your fields of golden grain,
The quiet orchards folded in the rain,
The twilight gardens and the morning birds;
If love remembers not and brings you words,
Words as your thanks; if in an idle hour

I love you with my life—'tis so I love you;
I give you as a ring
The cycle of my days till death:
I worship with the breath
That keeps me in the world with you and spring:
And God may dwell behind, but not above you.

Mine, in the dark, before the world's beginning:
The claim of every sense,
Secret and source of every need;
The goal to which I speed,
And at my heart a vigour more immense
Than will itself to urge me to its winning.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Moon, that against the lintel of the west
Your forehead lean until the gate be swung,
Longing to leave the world and be at rest,
Being worn with faring and no longer young,
Do you recall at all the Carian hill
Where worn with loving, loving late you lay,
Halting the sun because you lingered still,
While wondering candles lit the Carian day?
Ah, if indeed this memory to your mind
Recall some sweet employment, pity me,
That with the dawn must leave my love behind,
That even now the dawn's dim herald see!

Women have loved before as I love now;
At least, in lively chronicles of the past—
Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow
Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast
Much to their cost invaded—here and there,
Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest,
I find some woman bearing as I bear
Love like a burning city in the breast.
I think however that of all alive
I only in such utter, ancient way
Do suffer love; in me alone survive
The unregenerate passions of a day
When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,