Place on thy brow the mystic diadem With women’s faces cunningly embossed, Whereon each memory glitters like a gem; But mark that mine were regal loves that lost And loved like queens, nor haggled for the cost-- And having conquered, oh be kind to them! AT NIGHTFALL Sweet is the highroad when the skylarks call, When we and Love go rambling through the land. But shall we still walk gaily hand in hand At the road’s turning and the twilight’s fall? Then darkness shall divide us like a wall, And uncouth evil nightbirds flap their wings; The solitude of all created things Will creep upon us shuddering like a pall. This is the knowledge I have wrung from pain: We, yea, all lovers, are not one, but twain, Each by strange wisps to strange abysses drawn. But through the black immensity of night Love’s little lantern, as a glow-worm’s bright, May lead our steps to some stupendous dawn. FINALE How changed the house is when not Love is there! Your deep eyes vex me like some magic book I cannot ponder. Nay, I will not brook The weariness of your too golden hair! Hush! Was not that the creaking of a stair? Was it Love’s footfall or the wind? I look In vain for him in every hidden nook-- There is no sound of laughter anywhere.... Ah, sweet, he has forsaken us, not base, But heedless, boyish--and the world is wide! He sees not now your sorrow-haunted face, Nor feels the dagger that has pierced my side, And how all joy is vanished from the place As from a house in which a child has died. THE LOVE SEAL A silver sea beneath the stars-- We paid to love his mystic rites, And from thy lips I kissed the scars Of fiercer joys and stranger nights. What redder lips, what mouth of fate, Till Buddha noddeth near the goal, Shall, stronger still, obliterate My one night’s madness from thy soul? I brand thee through eternity, Upon thy blood I set my seal, And boy and girl and change and sea Cannot wipe out my mark or heal. While the great life-snake sheds its coat, I must rehearse my tragic part, To kiss the love-wounds from thy throat, And burn the iron in thy--heart. RESPITE (_For M. E. V._) I shall not, dead, miss love’s sublimities, The pageantry, the passion, and the smart, But only this, the sweet proximities Of flesh to flesh, of heart-beat to the heart. I shall not, dead, remember anything, The sun, the moon, the waters, and the lands, The wild adventure of my journeying: Only the weary flutter of white hands. Let earth the maggot feed upon my brain, Let me forget the rime, the rune, the rose, If but this vision to the end remain: A little body, birdlike, nestling close.