When my love was away,
Full three days were not sped,
I caught my fancy astray
Thinking if she were dead,

And I alone, alone:
It seem'd in my misery
In all the world was none
Ever so lone as I.

I wept; but it did not shame
Nor comfort my heart: away
I rode as I might, and came
To my love at close of day.

The sight of her still'd my fears,
My fairest-hearted love:
And yet in her eyes were tears:
Which when I question'd of,

'O now thou art come,' she cried,

I have scarcely left you
When you go in me, crystalline,
Or trembling,
Or uneasy, wounded by me
Or overwhelmed with love, as
when your eyes
Close upon the gift of life
That without cease I give you.

My love,
We have found each other
Thirsty and we have
Drunk up all the water and the
Blood,
We found each other
Hungry
And we bit each other
As fire bites,
Leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,
Keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too
A rose.

Ah, happy air that, rough or soft,
   May kiss that face and stay;
And happy beams that from above
   May choose to her their way;
And happy flowers that now and then
   Touch lips more sweet than they!

But it were not so blest to be
   Or light or air or rose;
Those dainty fingers tear and toss
   The bloom that in them glows;
And come or go, both wind and ray
   She heeds not, if she knows.

But if I come thy choice should be

In this fair stranger’s eyes of grey
Thine eyes, my love, I see.
I shudder: for the passing day
Had borne me far from thee.

This is the curse of life: that not
A nobler calmer train
Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot
Our passions from our brain;

But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-chok’d souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.

I struggle towards the light; and ye,
Once-long’d-for storms of love!
If with the light ye cannot be,
I bear that ye remove.

A yawning gulf between
My vision-tree and my reality-plant.
A yawning gulf between
The place I love to live and the place I live.
I love to live under the vault of heaven.
Alas, my existence lives
In the valley of the shadow of death.
Peace has escaped my remembrance;
Delight, too.

But I know a swing of the pendulum
Will change my face and fate.
My surrender supreme
Shall marry my dream-boat
With my reality-shore.

They were all fed on many a plaint and tear
The humble blooms on my Parnassus grown;
My tears of love flowed not for you alone,
But also for the land I hold so dear.

My soul was filled with bitterness and fear
At love so scant to a trusting Mother shown;
The thought that no more love from you I've known
Torments and tears me like a wound severe.

All the reward I wished for was that you
With me a poet's timeless fame might share
That native songs our poignant tale might bear;

That all Slovenes should waken and that true

These tear-stained flowers of a poet's mind,
Culled from my bosom, lay it wholly bare;
My heart's a garden: Love is sowing there
Sad elegies each with my longing signed.

You are their sun whose radiance, purblind,
I seek in vain at home and everywhere,
In theatre, on promenade and square,
Midst revels where the chains of dancers wind.

How often through the town with watchful eyes
I wander, praying for a fate more kind,
Yet catch no glimpse of that elusive prize.

I shed my tears to loneliness confined:

Oh, the world is all too rude for thee, with much ado and care;
Oh, this world is but a rude world, and hurts a thing so fair;
Was there a nook in which the world had never been to sear,
That place would prove a paradise when thou and Love were near.

And there to pluck the blackberry, and there to reach the sloe,
How joyously and happily would Love thy partner go;
Then rest when weary on a bank, where not a grassy blade
Had eer been bent by Trouble's feet, and Love thy pillow made.

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

I

She has laughed as softly as if she sighed,
She has counted six, and over,
Of a purse well filled, and a heart well tried -
Oh, each a worthy lover!
They "give her time"; for her soul must slip
Where the world has set the grooving;
She will lie to none with her fair red lip:
But love seeks truer loving.

II