And first first-loves, a multitude, The exaltation of their pain; Ancestral childhood long renewed; And midnights of invisible rain; And gardens, gardens, night and day, Gardens and childhood all the way.
What Middle Ages passionate, O passionless voice! What distant bells Lodged in the hills, what palace state Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells, Without desire, without dismay, Some morrow and some yesterday.
All-natural things! But more--Whence came This yet remoter mystery? How do these starry notes proclaim A graver still divinity? This hope, this sanctity of fear? _O innocent throat! O human ear!_
Longer than thine, than thine, Is now my time of life; and thus thy years Seem to be clasped and harboured within mine. O how ignoble this my clasp appears!
Thy unprophetic birth, Thy darkling death; living I might have seen That cradle, marked those labours, closed that earth. O first, O last, O infinite between!
Now that my life has shared Thy dedicated date, O mortal, twice, To what all-vain embrace shall be compared My lean enclosure of thy paradise:
To ignorant arms that fold A poet to a foolish breast? The Line, That is not, with the world within its hold? So, days with days, my days encompass thine.
Child, Stripling, Man--the sod. Might I talk little language to thee, pore On thy last silence? O thou city of God, My waste lies after thee, and lies before.
Across what calm of tropic seas, 'Neath alien clusters of the nights, Looked, in the past, such eyes as these! Long-quenched, relumed, ancestral lights!
The generations fostered them; And steadfast Nature, secretwise-- Thou seedling child of that old stem-- Kindled anew thy dark-bright eyes.
Was it a century or two This lovely darkness rose and set, Occluded by grey eyes and blue, And Nature feigning to forget?
Some grandam gave a hint of it-- So cherished was it in thy race, So fine a treasure to transmit In its perfection to thy face.
Some father to some mother's breast Entrusted it, unknowing. Time Implied, or made it manifest, Bequest of a forgotten clime.
Hereditary eyes! But this Is single, singular, apart:-- New-made thy love, new-made thy kiss, New-made thy errand to my heart.
Three times have I beheld Fear leap in a babe's face, and take his breath, Fear, like the fear of eld That knows the price of life, the name of death.