Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight; Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more--O, never more!
On a poet's lips I slept Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept. Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aerial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, Nor heed nor see what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.
And thou art dead, as young and fair As aught of mortal birth: And form so soft and charms so rare, Too soon returned to earth: Though earth received them in her bed, And o'er the spot the crowd may tread In carelessness or mirth, There is an eye which could not brook A moment on that grave to look.
I will not ask where thou liest low Nor gaze upon the spot; There flowers or weeds at will may grow, So I behold them not: It is enough for me to prove That what I loved and long must love Like common earth can rot; To me there needs no stone to tell 'Tis nothing that I loved so well.
Yet did I love thee to the last As fervently as thou, Who didst not change through all the past And canst not alter now. The love where death has set his seal Nor age can chill, nor rival steal, Nor falsehood disavow: And, what were worse, thou canst not see Or wrong, or change, or fault in me.
The better days of life were ours; The worst can be but mine: The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers, Shall never more be thine. The silence of that dreamless sleep I envy now too much to weep, Nor need I to repine That all those charms have passed away, I might have watched through long decay.
The flower in ripened bloom unmatched Must fall the earliest prey; Though by no hand untimely snatched, The leaves must drop away: And yet it were a greater grief To watch it withering leaf by leaf, Than see it plucked to-day; Since earthly eye but ill can bear To trace the change to foul from fair.
I know not if I could have borne To see thy beauties fade; The night that followed such a morn Had worn a deeper shade: Thy day without a cloud hath past, And thou wert lovely to the last, Extinguished, not decayed; As stars that shoot along the sky Shine brightest as they fall from high.
