My silks and fine array, My smiles and languish’d air, By Love are driven away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have. His face is fair as heaven When springing buds unfold: O why to him was’t given, Whose heart is wintry cold? His breast is Love’s all-worshipp’d tomb, Where all Love’s pilgrims come. Bring me an axe and spade, Bring me a winding-sheet; When I my grave have made, Let winds and tempests beat: Then down I’ll lie, as cold as clay: True love doth pass away! _486._ _Reeds of Innocence_ Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped: he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’ So I sung the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight; And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear. _487._ _The Little Black Boy_ My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O, my soul is white! White as an angel is the English child, But I am black, as if bereaved of light. My mother taught me underneath a tree, And, sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissèd me, And, pointing to the East, began to say: ‘Look at the rising sun: there God does live, And gives His light, and gives His heat away, And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday. ‘And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove. ‘For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear, The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice, Saying, “Come out from the grove, my love and care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.”’ Thus did my mother say, and kissèd me, And thus I say to little English boy. When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy, I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee; And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him, and he will then love me. _488._ _Hear the Voice_ Hear the voice of the Bard, Who present, past, and future, sees; Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walk’d among the ancient trees;