Mutations
Those love cannot leave alone
Love those, cannot leave alone
Cannot love, leave those alone
Leave those, cannot love alone
Those cannot leave love alone
Those love cannot leave alone
Love those, cannot leave alone
Cannot love, leave those alone
Leave those, cannot love alone
Those cannot leave love alone
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory -
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
I have been urged by earnest violins
And drunk their mellow sorrows to the slake
Of all my sorrows and my thirsting sins.
My heart has beaten for a brave drum's sake.
Huge chords have wrought me mighty: I have hurled
Thuds of gods' thunder. And with old winds pondered
Over the curse of this chaotic world,-
With low lost winds that maundered as they wandered.
I have been gay with trivial fifes that laugh;
And songs more sweet than possible things are sweet;
And gongs, and oboes. Yet I guessed not half
When thy heart, love-filled, grows graver,
And eternal bliss looks nearer,
Ask thy heart, nor show it favour,
Is the gift or giver dearer?
Love, love on; love higher, deeper;
Let love's ocean close above her;
Only, love thou more love's keeper,
More, the love-creating lover.
O voice of ecstasy and lyric pain,
Divinely throated and divinely heard
Among old England's songsters! Sprite or bird,
Haunting the woods of song with raptured strain!
In whose wild music Love is born and slain.
And young Desire cries ever a battle word,
And Passion goes, ready with kiss or sword,
To make us captive or set free again.
Above the flowery meads of English song,
Enchantment-sweet, her golden numbers pour,
Commanding and compelling, like Desire!
O nightingale and lark, how o'er the throng
Among the myrtles as I walk'd
Love and my sighs thus intertalk'd:
Tell me, said I, in deep distress,
Where I may find my Shepherdess?
--Thou fool, said Love, know'st thou not this?
In every thing that's sweet she is.
In yond' carnation go and seek,
There thou shalt find her lip and cheek;
In that enamell'd pansy by,
There thou shalt have her curious eye;
In bloom of peach and rose's bud,
There waves the streamer of her blood.
--'Tis true, said I; and thereupon
I went to pluck them one by one,
To make of parts an union;
Albion's most lovely daughter sat on the banks of the Mersey dangling her landing stage in the water.
The daughters of Albion
Arriving by underground at Central Station
Eating hot ecclescakes at the Pierhead
Writing 'Billy Blake is fab' on a wall in Mathew St
Taking off their navyblue schooldrawers and
Putting on nylon panties ready for the night
The daughters of Albion
See the moonlight beating down on them in Bebington
Throw away their chewinggum ready for the goodnight kiss
Sleep in the dinnertime sunlight with old men
If to a girl who loves us truly
Her mother gives instruction duly
In virtue, duty, and what not,--
And if she hearkens ne'er a jot,
But with fresh-strengthen'd longing flies
To meet our kiss that seems to burn,--
Caprice has just as much concerned
As love in her bold enterprise.
But if her mother can succeed
In gaining for her maxims heed,
And softening the girl's heart too,
So that she coyly shuns our view,--
The heart of youth she knows but ill;
For when a maiden is thus stern,
Virtue in truth has less concern
Motherless baby and babyless mother,
Bring them together to love one another.
From the Portuguese.
HEAVY my heart is, heavy to carry,
Full of soft foldings, of downy enwrapments--
And the outer fold of all is love,
And the next soft fold is love,
And the next, finer and softer, is love again;
And were they unwound before the eyes
More folds and more folds and more folds would unroll
Of love--always love,
And, quite at the last,
Deep in the nest, in the soft-packed nest,
One last fold, turned back, would disclose
You, little heart of my heart,
Laid there so warm, so soft, so soft,