Sing on! sing on! I would be drunk with life, Drunk with the trampled vintage of my youth, I would forget the wearying wasted strife, The riven veil, the Gorgon eyes of Truth, The prayerless vigil and the cry for prayer, The barren gifts, the lifted arms, the dull insensate air! Sing on! sing on! O feathered Niobe, Thou canst make sorrow beautiful, and steal From joy its sweetest music, not as we Who by dead voiceless silence strive to heal Our too untented wounds, and do but keep Pain barricadoed in our hearts, and murder pillowed sleep. Sing louder yet, why must I still behold The wan white face of that deserted Christ, Whose bleeding hands my hands did once enfold, Whose smitten lips my lips so oft have kissed, And now in mute and marble misery Sits in his lone dishonoured House and weeps, perchance for me? O Memory cast down thy wreathèd shell! Break thy hoarse lute O sad Melpomene! O Sorrow, Sorrow keep thy cloistered cell Nor dim with tears this limpid Castaly! Cease, Philomel, thou dost the forest wrong To vex its sylvan quiet with such wild impassioned song! Cease, cease, or if ’t is anguish to be dumb Take from the pastoral thrush her simpler air, Whose jocund carelessness doth more become This English woodland than thy keen despair, Ah! cease and let the north wind bear thy lay Back to the rocky hills of Thrace, the stormy Daulian bay. A moment more, the startled leaves had stirred, Endymion would have passed across the mead Moonstruck with love, and this still Thames had heard Pan plash and paddle groping for some reed To lure from her blue cave that Naiad maid Who for such piping listens half in joy and half afraid. A moment more, the waking dove had cooed, The silver daughter of the silver sea With the fond gyves of clinging hands had wooed Her wanton from the chase, and Dryope Had thrust aside the branches of her oak To see the lusty gold-haired lad rein in his snorting yoke. A moment more, the trees had stooped to kiss Pale Daphne just awakening from the swoon Of tremulous laurels, lonely Salmacis Had bared his barren beauty to the moon, And through the vale with sad voluptuous smile Antinous had wandered, the red lotus of the Nile Down leaning from his black and clustering hair, To shade those slumberous eyelids’ caverned bliss, Or else on yonder grassy slope with bare High-tuniced limbs unravished Artemis Had bade her hounds give tongue, and roused the deer From his green ambuscade with shrill halloo and pricking spear. Lie still, lie still, O passionate heart, lie still! O Melancholy, fold thy raven wing! O sobbing Dryad, from thy hollow hill Come not with such despondent answering! No more thou wingèd Marsyas complain, Apollo loveth not to hear such troubled songs of pain!