We are the hope and ease, Joy and the pleasure, Authors of love and peace, Love that shall never cease, Free as the azure. Birth of our eyes--the might, Power and strength of light, Victor o'er death and night, Flesh and its yearnings: And from our utt'rance streams Beauty with burnings After completer dreams, Fuller discernings.
Morning and birth are ours, Dew that is blown From our light lips like flowers; Clouds and the beating showers, Stars that are sown; Song and the bursting buds, Life of the many floods, Winds that are strown.
Ye in your darkness are Dark and infernal; Subject to death and mar! But in the spaces far, Like our effulgent star, We are eternal!
O tear-eyed goddess of the marble brow, Who showerest snows of tresses on the night Of anguished temples! lonely watcher, thou Who bendest o'er the couch of life's dead light! Who in the hollow hours of night's noon Rockest the cradle of the child, Whose fever-blooded eyeballs seek the moon To cool their pulses wild. Thou who dost stoop to kiss a sister's cheek, Which rules the alabastar death with youth; Thou who art mad and strangely meek,-- Empress of passions, couth, uncouth, We kneel to thee!
O Sorrow, when the sapless world grows white, And singing gathers on her springtide robes, On some bleak steep which takes the ruby light Of day, braid in thy locks the spirit globes Of cool, weak snowdrops dashed with frozen dew, And hasten to the leas below Where Spring may wandered be from the rich blue Which rims yon clouds of snow. From the pied crocus and the violet's hues, Think then how thou didst rake the bosoming snow, To show some mother the soft blues Of baby eyes, the sparkling glow Of dimple-dotted cheeks.
On some hoar upland, hoar with clustered thorns, Hard by a river's wind-blown lisp of waves, Sit with young white-skinned Spring, whose dewy morns Laugh in his pouting cheeks which Health enslaves. There feast thee on the brede of his long hair, Where half-grown roses royal blaze. And cool-eyed primroses wide-diskéd bare, Frail stars of moonish haze, Contented lie wound in his breathing arms:-- 'Tis meet that grief should mingle with the wan, That blue of calms and gloom of storms Reign on the burning throne of dawn To glorify the world.