Though time and change, harsh time’s imperious child,
That wed strange hands together, might not wed
High hearts by hope’s misprision once beguiled;
Faith, by the light from either’s memory shed,
Sees, radiant as their ends were undefiled,
One goal for each—not twain among the dead
Unreconciled.
CONCORD.
RECONCILED by death’s mild hand, that giving
Peace gives wisdom, not more strong than mild,
Love beholds them, each without misgiving
Reconciled.
Each on earth alike of earth reviled,
Hated, feared, derided, and forgiving,
Each alike had heaven at heart, and smiled.
Both bright names, clothed round with man’s thanksgiving,
Shine, twin stars above the storm-drifts piled,
Dead and deathless, whom we saw not living
Reconciled.
MOURNING.
ALAS my brother! the cry of the mourners of old
That cried on each other,
All crying aloud on the dead as the death-note rolled,
Alas my brother!
As flashes of dawn that mists from an east wind smother
With fold upon fold,
The past years gleam that linked us one with another.
Time sunders hearts as of brethren whose eyes behold
No more their mother:
But a cry sounds yet from the shrine whose fires wax cold,
Alas my brother!
APEROTOS EROS.
STRONG as death, and cruel as the grave,
Clothed with cloud and tempest’s blackening breath,
Known of death’s dread self, whom none outbrave,
Strong as death,
Love, brow-bound with anguish for a wreath,
Fierce with pain, a tyrant-hearted slave,
Burns above a world that groans beneath.
Hath not pity power on thee to save,
Love? hath power no pity? Nought he saith,
Answering: blind he walks as wind or wave,
Strong as death.
TO CATULLUS.
MY brother, my Valerius, dearest head
Of all whose crowning bay-leaves crown their mother
Rome, in the notes first heard of thine I read
My brother.
No dust that death or time can strew may smother
Love and the sense of kinship inly bred
From loves and hates at one with one another.
To thee was Cæsar’s self nor dear nor dread,
Song and the sea were sweeter each than other:
How should I living fear to call thee dead
My brother?
‘INSULARUM OCELLE.’
SARK, fairer than aught in the world that the lit skies cover,
Laughs inly behind her cliffs, and the seafarers mark
As a shrine where the sunlight serves, though the blown clouds hover,
Sark.
We mourn, for love of a song that outsang the lark,
That nought so lovely beholden of Sirmio’s lover
Made glad in Propontis the flight of his Pontic bark.
Here earth lies lordly, triumphal as heaven is above her,
And splendid and strange as the sea that upbears as an ark,
As a sign for the rapture of storm-spent eyes to discover,
Sark.
IN SARK.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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