Nor for men's reverence hadst thou need to wear The holy flower of grey time-hallowed hair; Nor were it fit that aught of thee grew old, Fair lover all thy days of all things fair. And hear we not thy words of molten gold Singing? or is their light and heat acold Whereat men warmed their spirits? Nay, for all These yet are with us, ours to hear and hold. The lovely laughter, the clear tears, the call Of love to love on ways where shadows fall, Through doors of dim division and disguise, And music made of doubts unmusical; The love that caught strange light from death's own eyes,[1] And filled death's lips with fiery words and sighs, And half asleep let feed from veins of his Her close red warm snake's mouth, Egyptian-wise: And that great night of love more strange than this,[2] When she that made the whole world's bale and bliss Made king of all the world's desire a slave, And killed him in mid kingdom with a kiss; Veiled loves that shifted shapes and shafts, and gave,[3] Laughing, strange gifts to hands that durst not crave, Flowers double-blossomed, fruits of scent and hue Sweet as the bride-bed, stranger than the grave; All joys and wonders of old lives and new That ever in love's shine or shadow grew, And all the grief whereof he dreams and grieves, And all sweet roots fed on his light and dew; All these through thee our spirit of sense perceives, As threads in the unseen woof thy music weaves, Birds caught and snared that fill our ears with thee, Bay-blossoms in thy wreath of brow-bound leaves. Mixed with the masque of death's old comedy Though thou too pass, have here our flowers, that we For all the flowers thou gav'st upon thee shed, And pass not crownless to Persephone. Blue lotus-blooms and white and rosy-red We wind with poppies for thy silent head, And on this margin of the sundering sea Leave thy sweet light to rise upon the dead. [Footnote 1: _La Morte Amoureuse._] [Footnote 2: _Une Nuit de Cleopatre._] [Footnote 3: _Mademoiselle de Maupin._] SONNET (WITH A COPY OF _Mademoiselle de Maupin_) This is the golden book of spirit and sense, The holy writ of beauty; he that wrought Made it with dreams and faultless words and thought That seeks and finds and loses in the dense Dim air of life that beauty's excellence Wherewith love makes one hour of life distraught And all hours after follow and find not aught. Here is that height of all love's eminence Where man may breathe but for a breathing-space And feel his soul burn as an altar-fire To the unknown God of unachieved desire, And from the middle mystery of the place Watch lights that break, hear sounds as of a quire, But see not twice unveiled the veiled God's face. AGE AND SONG (TO BARRY CORNWALL) I