Now to the listening soul in you who read These lines, she tells it all-- How dear her day, how dark shall be, indeed, The hour when night must fall. THE UNDISSUADABLE AUSTERITY Less than it is we would the Truth should seem: Holy and marvellous the Actual is-- But stern her lips, and bitter is her kiss Upon the brows of dream. BLIND PLAYERS Day breaks, and the old drama Repeats itself anew: The hind wakes to be hunted, The huntsman to pursue-- The lover and the belovèd, Each one doomed to his part; The victor and the vanquished, The hushed and the hurrying heart-- In terror and in triumph They play it through again, The old, unchanging drama Of passion and of pain, As the great Will has willed it, That, in all forms being cast, Wars on Itself forever. O may they at the last-- The falcon, and the fledgling He stoops to from the sky; The lips that are so eager, The lips that would deny-- When the old war is ended, When the stern Will is done, Meet in eternal pity And know themselves as one! TRAVAIL Before the sacred beauty of the morn How fade the wrangling wisdoms of the earth! Wisdom is beauty in the womb, unborn; Wisdom is beauty laboring for birth. Wisdom, the ghost of Beauty, in the wide Womb of the world lies clamoring for life, While the white Beauty, the immortal Bride, Sits throned upon the summits void of strife. So the bright flower, bending from the soil, Sums up and scorns the wisdom of the sage; And Helen’s beauty, soaring beyond toil, The laboring beauty of the poet’s page. So, when the veils of mystery are furled, Earth’s wisdom blooms in heaven’s beauty above ... Beauty is all the wisdom of the world Uttered by the seraphic lips of love! THE POET TELLS OF HIS LOVE How shall I sing of Her that is My life’s long rapture and despair-- Sorrow eternal--Loveliness, To whom each heart-beat is a prayer! Utterly, endlessly, alone Possessing me, yet unpossessed-- The dark, the drear belovèd One That takes the tribute of this breast: Dæmon disconsolate, in vain, In vain petitioned and implored-- How many a midnight of disdain Darkly and dreadfully adored! Beauty, the virgin, evermore Out of these arms with laughter fled-- Vanished--a voice by slope and shore Haunting the world--Illusion dread-- Most secret Siren, on whose coast, ’Mid spray of perishing song, are hurled All desolate lovers, all the lost Souls, and half-poets of the world: Through sleepless nights and lonely days In tears and terror served and sought-- Light beyond light--the supreme Face That blinds the adoring eyes of thought! How shall I sing of Her? Nay all, All song, all sorrow, all silence of This desperate heart that is Her thrall, Trembles and tries to tell my love! THE BURIED DREAM