‘This is the way,’ laugh’d the great god Pan
(Laugh’d while he sat by the river),
‘The only way,
since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.’
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the
reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The
sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of
a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed
with the reeds of the river. (i)
I THOUGHT once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wish’d-for years,
Who
each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals old or young:
And, as I mused it in his
antique tongue,
I saw in gradual vision through my tears
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years—
Those
of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping,
how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery,
while I strove,
‘Guess now who holds thee?’—‘Death,’ I said. But there
The silver answer rang—‘Not Death,
but Love.’
UNLIKE are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering
two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink
thee, art
A guest for queens for social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears
even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-
lights at me—
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The
chrism is on thine head—on mine the dew—
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
GO from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon
the threshold of my door
Of individual life I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely
in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore—
Thy touch upon the palm. The
widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And
what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He
hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
IF thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say,
‘I love her
for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine,
and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’—
For these things in themselves, Belovàd,
may
Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine
own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and
lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.
WHEN our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until
the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curving point,—what bitter wrong
Can the earth do us, that
we should not long
Be here contented? Think! In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us, and
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