There is no day for thee, my soul, like this, No spring of lovely words. Nay, even the kiss Of mortal love that maketh man divine This light cannot outshine: Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch The shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match This leafy ecstasy. Sweet words may cull Such magical beauty as time may not destroy; But we, alas, are not more beautiful: We cannot flower in beauty as in joy. We sing, our musèd words are sped, and then Poets are only men Who age, and toil, and sicken.... This maim’d tree May stand in leaf when I have ceased to be. THE JOYOUS LOVER O, now that I am free as the air And fleet as clouds above, I will wander everywhere Over the ways I love. Lightly, lightly will I pass Nor scatter as I go A shadow on the blowing grass Or a footprint in the snow. All the wild things of the wood That once were timid and shy They shall not flee their solitude For fear, when I pass by; And beauty, beauty, the wide world over, Shall blush when I draw near: She knows her lover, the joyous lover, And greets him without fear. But if I come to the dark room From which our love hath fled And bend above you in the gloom Or kneel beside your bed, Smile soft in your sleep, my beautiful one, For if you should say ’Nay’ To the dream which visiteth you alone, My joy would wither away. DEAD POETS ODE WRITTEN AT WILTON HOUSE Last night, amazed, I trod on holy ground Breathing an air that ancient poets knew, Where, in a valley compassed with sweet sound, Beneath a garden’s alley’d shades of yew, With eager feet passèd that singer sweet Who Stella loved, whom bloody Zutphen slew In the starred zenith of his knightly fame. There too a dark-stoled figure I did meet: Herbert, whose faith burned true And steadfast as the altar candle’s flame. Under the Wilton cedars, pondering Upon the pains of Beauty and the wrong That sealeth lovely lips, fated to sing, Before they reach the cadence of their song, I mused upon dead poets: mighty ones Who sang and suffered: briefly heard were they As Libyan nightingales weary of wing Fleeing the temper of Saharan suns To gladden our moon’d May, And with the broken blossom vanishing. So to my eyes a sorrowful vision came Of one whose name was writ in water: bright His cheeks and eyes burned with a hectic flame; And one, alas! I saw whose passionate might Was spent upon a fevered fen in Greece; One shade there was who, starving, choked with bread; One, a drown’d corpse, through stormy water slips; One in the numbing poppy-juice found peace; And one, a youth, lay dead With powdered arsenic upon his lips.