for R.M.



I love shaking the bones in your arm
the humerus, radius and ulna.

Some people have such bones –
men, like you, across the top of the back!

I love you at the train station
so young . . .

The song of that bird
executed only in the morning and evening.

I love the way
you just do it!

Perfect commas, two profiles, eyelashes
moles and turtles in your smile.

I love the movement between our reality
and imagination – that gold step

[HERNANI, ACT I.]


To mount the hills or scaffold, we go to-morrow:
Hernani, blame me not for this my boldness.
Art thou mine evil genius or mine angel?
I know not, but I am thy slave. Now hear me:
Go where thou wilt, I follow thee. Remain,
And I remain. Why do I thus? I know not.
I feel that I must see thee--see thee still--
See thee for ever. When thy footstep dies,
It is as if my heart no more would beat;
When thou art gone, I am absent from myself;
But when the footstep which I love and long for

O thou, by long experience tried,
Near whom no grief can long abide;
My love! how full of sweet content
I pass my years of banishment!

All scenes alike engaging prove
To souls impressed with sacred love
Where'er they dwell, they dwell in thee;
In heaven, in earth, or on the sea.

To me remains nor place nor time;
My country is in every clime;
I can be calm and free from care
On any shore, since God is there.

While place we seek, or place we shun,
The soul finds happiness in none;
But, with a God to guide our way,

Where are the bay-leaves, Thestylis, and the charms?
Fetch all; with fiery wool the caldron crown;
Let glamour win me back my false lord's heart!
Twelve days the wretch hath not come nigh to me,
Nor made enquiry if I die or live,
Nor clamoured (oh unkindness!) at my door.
Sure his swift fancy wanders otherwhere,
The slave of Aphrodite and of Love.
I'll off to Timagetus' wrestling-school
At dawn, that I may see him and denounce
His doings; but I'll charm him now with charms.
So shine out fair, O moon! To thee I sing

SAY, is it day, is it dusk in thy bower,
Thou whom I long for, who longest for me?
Oh! be it light, be it night, 'tis Love's hour,
Love's that is fettered as Love's that is free.
Free love has leaped to that innermost chamber,
Oh! the last time, and the hundred before:
Fettered love, motionless, can but remember,
Yet something that sighs from him passes the door.
Nay, but my heart when it flies to thy bower,
What does it find there that knows it again?
There it must droop like a shower-beaten flower,

The brand is on thy brow,
A dark and guilty spot;
'Tis ne'er to be erased!
'Tis ne'er to be forgot!

The brand is on thy brow!
Yet I must shade the spot:
For who will love thee now,
If I love thee not?

Thy soul is dark, — is stained; —
From out the bright world thrown;
By God and man disdained,
But not by me, — thy own!

Oh! even the tiger slain
Hath one who ne'er doth flee,
Who soothes his dying pain!
— That one am I to thee!

I made a hundred little songs
That told the joy and pain of love,
And sang them blithely, tho' I knew
No whit thereof.

I was a weaver deaf and blind;
A miracle was wrought for me,
But I have lost my skill to weave
Since I can see.

For while I sang -- ah swift and strange!
Love passed and touched me on the brow,
And I who made so many songs
Am silent now.

When I would sing of crooked streams and fields,
On, on from me they stretch too far and wide,
And at their look my song all powerless yields,
And down the river bears me with its tide;
Amid the fields I am a child again,
The spots that then I loved I love the more,
My fingers drop the strangely scrawling pen,
And I remember nought but nature's lore,
I plunge me in the river's cooling wave,
Or on the embroidered bank admiring lean,
Now some endangered insect life to save,
Now watch the pictured flowers and grasses green;

I SANG of the sun on the waters,
And then of the wind in the wood;
And the people hearkened my singing
And said that the song was good.
I sang of the sheep on the mountains,
And then of the thrush on the hill;
And the people hearkened my singing
And said it was better still.
I sang of the bliss of lovers,
And then of their hopes that fall;
And the people hearkened my singing
And said it was best of all.
For the song that is loved of the people,
And sought since the world began,
Is the sad and beautiful music

The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.


This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.


Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.


The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.