WITH furnaces

Of instant flame, and petals of pure light,

AND love and faith, the vehement heart of all.

FOR this can love, and does love, and loves me. (or)

FOR this can love, and does, and loves but me.

THE forehead veiled and the veiled throat of Death.

THOU that beyond thy real self dost see
A self ideal, bid thy heart beware.

AND plaintive days that haunt the haggard hills
With bleak unspoken woe.

To know for certain that we do not know
Is the first step in knowledge.

THINK through this silence how when we are old
We two shall think upon this place and day.

AN ant-sting's prickly at first,
But the pain soon dies away;
A gnat-sting's worse the next day;
But a wasp 'tis stings the worst.

AND mad revulsion of the tarnished light.

His face, in Fortune's favours sunn'd,
Was radiantly rubicund.

THE glass stands empty of all things it knew.

O THOU whose name, being alone, aloud
I utter oft, and though thou art not there,
Toward thine imaged presence kiss the air.

I SAW the love which was my life flow past 'Twixt shadowed reaches, like a murmuring stream:I was awake, and lo it was a dream.

OR give ten years of life's most bitter wane
To see the loved one as she was again.

AND of the cup of human agony
Enough to fill the sea.

EVEN as the moon grows clearer on the sky
While the sky darkens, and her Venus-star
Thrills with a keener radiance from afar.

(THE Imperial Cloak-Paludamentum).
Imperatorial car,

And purple-dyed paludament of war.

MY LADY (CANZONE)

I'LL tell you of my Lady all I know;
And, if my lady knew

That I would tell this, she would etc. etc.

And say, “Why, all is his, so let him tell.”

She is full of incidents, like all beautiful Nature.

Then follow descriptive lines about her different attitudes, expressions, etc. Perhaps to wind up by saying that nothing one can say is so expressive of her as her own name, which means herself only: and that cannot be said for others to hear.

LAST LOVE (CANZONE)

LOVE hath a chamber all of imagery;
And there is one dim nook,

A little storied web wherein my heart
From leaf to leaf is read as in a book.

One part in the middle of the web begun and left unfinished; a face with ravelled threads falling over it and hiding it. Love says that the time has come to resume and finish this part of the web, though much has come between since it was begun.

FOR the garlands of heaven were all laid by,
And the Daylight sucked at the breasts of a Lie.

THE Wounded hart and the dying swan
Were side by side

Where the rushes coil with the turn of the tide-
The hart and the swan.

(In the alternate stanzas-The swan and the hart.)

WITHIN those eyes the sedulous yearning throe,
And all the evil of my heart

A thousand times forgotten.

АH if you had been lost for many years,
And from the dead to-day were risen again!

ON THE TWO BRIDAL-BIERS

How sweet a solace is the bridal-bed-
Dawn as prepared, evening as hallowèd,

FASHIONED with intricate infinity.

Aн dear one, we were young so long

I thought that youth would never wane—
Ah dear one, I've been old so long,
How long until we meet again?

JOAN OF ARC

THIS word had Merlin said from of old :-
That out of the Oak Tree Shade

In the day of France's direst dule,
God's hand should send a Maid.

And where Domremy, by Burgundy,
Sits crowned with its oakenshaw,

Even there Joan d'Arc, the Maid of God's Ark,
The light of the day first saw.

*

*

*

*

Where spirits go, what man may know?

Yet this may of man be said :

That, when Time is o'er and all hath sufficed,
Shall the world's chief Christ-fire rise to Christ
From the ashes of Joan the Maid.

THE tombless fossil of deep-buried days.

AND 'mid the budding branches' sway

Our antlers met in battle-play

When our fetlocks felt the Spring.

IN galliard gardens of strange aventine,
Or sway of tidal night.

WHEN we are senseless grown, to make stones speak.

OR, stamped with the snake's coil, it be
The imperial image of Eternity.

COULD Keats but have a day or two on earth
Once every year!

DÎS MANIBUS

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, whose honoured rôle
Was to be scribe to Nero's soul,

And make French flesh to creep and crow
O'er Carthaginian Salammbô,

Lies here-in body, as in the brain,
Like Morgue-corpse tumid from the Seine.
What shall be writ above his grave?
Vitellius', Nero's dying stave ?
"Fui Imperator," shall it flow,
Or "Qualis artifex pereo"?

"Aн lads, I knew your father."

What wide world

Of meaning in those words! They mean that he,
Being gone before, has known that mystery
From living Plato and Socrates fast-furl'd.

THIS little day-a bird that flew to me-
Has swiftly flown out of my hand again.
Ah have I listened to its fugitive strain
For what its tidings of the sky may be?

No ship came near aloof with heed
They tacked, as still as death;
For round our walls the sea was dense
With reefs whose sharp circumference

Was the great stronghold's sure defence.

AND plaintive days that haunt the haggard hills With bleak unspoken woe.

INEXPLICABLE blight

And mad revulsion of the tarnished light.

FOREIGN

(With some English Translations)