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O thou whose beauty moving among men
Is like the wind's way on the woods below,

Filling all nature where its pathway lies
With arms that supplicate and trembling sighs.

Sonnet XIII
I fancied, while you stood conversing there,

Superb, in every attitude a queen,
Her ermine thus Boadicea bare,

So moved amid the multitude Faustine.
My life, whose whole religion Beauty is,

Be charged with sin if ever before yours
A lesser feeling crossed my mind than his

Who owning grandeur marvels and adores.
Nay, rather in my dream-world's ivory tower

I made your image the high pearly sill,
And mounting there in many a wistful hour,

Burdened with love, I trembled and was still,
Seeing discovered from that azure height

Remote, untrod horizons of delight.
Sonnet XIV

It may be for the world of weeds and tares
And dearth in Nature of sweet Beauty's rose

That oft as Fortune from ten thousand shows
One from the train of Love's true courtiers

Straightway on him who gazes, unawares,
Deep wonder seizes and swift trembling grows,

Reft by that sight of purpose and repose,
Hardly its weight his fainting breast upbears.

Then on the soul from some ancestral place
Floods back remembrance of its heavenly birth,

When, in the light of that serener sphere,
It saw ideal beauty face to face

That through the forms of this our meaner Earth
Shines with a beam less steadfast and less clear.

Sonnet XV
Above the ruin of God's holy place,

Where man-forsaken lay the bleeding rood,
Whose hands, when men had craved substantial food,

Gave not, nor folded when they cried, Embrace,
I saw exalted in the latter days

Her whom west winds with natal foam bedewed,
Wafted toward Cyprus, lily-breasted, nude,

Standing with arms out-stretched and flower-like face.
And, sick with all those centuries of tears

Shed in the penance for factitious woe,
Once more I saw the nations at her feet,

For Love shone in their eyes, and in their ears
Come unto me, Love beckoned them, for lo!

The breast your lips abjured is still as sweet.
Sonnet XVI

Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest,
With single rites the common debt to pay?

On some green headland fronting to the East
Our fairest boy shall kneel at break of day.

Naked, uplifting in a laden tray
New milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine,

Not without twigs of clustering apple-spray
To wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine.

The morning planet poised above the sea
Shall drop sweet influence through her drowsing lid;

Dew-drenched, his delicate virginity
Shall scarcedisturb the flowers he kneels amid,

That, waked so lightly, shall lift up their eyes,
Cushion his knees, and nod between his thighs.

Kyrenaikos
Lay me where soft Cyrene rambles down

In grove and garden to the sapphire sea;
Twine yellow roses for the drinker's crown;

Let music reach and fair heads circle me,
Watching blue ocean where the white sails steer

Fruit-laden forth or with the wares and news
Of merchant cities seek our harbors here,

Careless how Corinth fares, how Syracuse;
But here, with love and sleep in her caress,

Warm night shall sink and utterly persuade
The gentle doctrine Aristippus bare, --

Night-winds, and one whose white youth's loveliness,
In a flowered balcony beside me laid,

Dreams, with the starlight on her fragrant hair.
Antinous

Stretched on a sunny bank he lay at rest,
Ferns at his elbow, lilies round his knees,

With sweet flesh patterned where the cool turf pressed,
Flowerlike crept o'er with emerald aphides.

Single he couched there, to his circling flocks
Piping at times some happy shepherd's tune,

Nude, with the warm wind in his golden locks,
And arched with the blue Asian afternoon.

Past him, gorse-purpled, to the distant coast
Rolled the clear foothills. There his white-walled town,

There, a blue band, the placid Euxine lay.
Beyond, on fields of azure light embossed

He watched from noon till dewy eve came down
The summer clouds pile up and fade away.

Vivien
Her eyes under their lashes were blue pools

Fringed round with lilies; her bright hair unfurled
Clothed her as sunshine clothes the summer world.

Her robes were gauzes -- gold and green and gules,
All furry things flocked round her, from her hand

Nibbling their foods and fawning at her feet.
Two peacocks watched her where she made her seat

Beside a fountain in Broceliande.
Sometimes she sang. . . . Whoever heard forgot

Errand and aim, and knights at noontide here,
Riding from fabulous gestes beyond the seas,

Would follow, tranced, and seek . . . and find her not . . .
But wake that night, lost, by some woodland mere,

Powdered with stars and rimmed with silent trees.
I Loved . . .

I loved illustrious cities and the crowds
That eddy through their incandescent nights.

I loved remote horizons with far clouds
Girdled, and fringed about with snowy heights.

I loved fair women, their sweet, conscious ways
Of wearing among hands that covet and plead

The rose ablossom at the rainbow's base
That bounds the world's desire and all its need.

Nature I worshipped, whose fecundity
Embraces every vision the most fair,

Of perfect benediction. From a boy
I gloated on existence. Earth to me

Seemed all-sufficient and my sojourn there
One trembling opportunity for joy.

Virginibus Puerisque . . .
I care not that one listen if he lives

For aught but life's romance, nor puts above
All life's necessities the need to love,

Nor counts his greatest wealth what Beauty gives.
But sometime on an afternoon in spring,

When dandelions dot the fields with gold,
And under rustling shade a few weeks old

'Tis sweet to stroll and hear the bluebirds sing,
Do you, blond head, whom beauty and the power

Of being young and winsome have prepared
For life's last privilege that really pays,

Make the companion of an idle hour
These relics of the time when I too fared

Across the sweet fifth lustrum of my days.
With a Copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Leaving College

As one of some fat tillage dispossessed,
Weighing the yield of these four faded years,

If any ask what fruit seems loveliest,
What lasting gold among the garnered ears, --

Ah, then I'll say what hours I had of thine,
Therein I reaped Time's richest revenue,

Read in thy text the sense of David's line,
Through thee achieved the love that Shakespeare knew.

Take then his book, laden with mine own love
As flowers made sweeter by deep-drunken rain,

That when years sunder and between us move
Wide waters, and less kindly bonds constrain,

Thou may'st turn here, dear boy, and reading see
Some part of what thy friend once felt for thee.

Written in a Volume of the Comtesse de Noailles
Be my companion under cool arcades

That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square
Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades

White belfries burn in the blue tropic air.
Lie near me in dim forests where the croon

Of wood-doves sounds and moss-banked water flows,
Or musing late till the midsummer moon

Breaks through some ruined abbey's empty rose.
Sweetest of those to-day whose pious hands

Tend the sequestered altar of Romance,
Where fewer offerings burn, and fewer kneel,

Pour there your passionate beauty on my heart,
And, gladdening such solitudes, impart

How sweet the fellowship of those who feel!
Coucy

The rooks aclamor when one enters here
Startle the empty towers far overhead;

Through gaping walls the summer fields appear,
Green, tan, or, poppy-mingled, tinged with red.

The courts where revel rang deep grass and moss
Cover, and tangled vines have overgrown

The gate where banners blazoned with a cross
Rolled forth to toss round Tyre and Ascalon.

Decay consumes it. The old causes fade.
And fretting for the contest many a heart

Waits their Tyrtaeus to chant on the new.
Oh, pass him by who, in this haunted shade

Musing enthralled, has only this much art,
To love the things the birds and flowers love too.

Tezcotzinco
Though thou art now a ruin bare and cold,

Thou wert sometime the garden of a king.
The birds have sought a lovelier place to sing.

The flowers are few. It was not so of old.
It was not thus when hand in hand there strolled

Through arbors perfumed with undying Spring
Bare bodies beautiful, brown, glistening,

Decked with green plumes and rings of yellow gold.
Do you suppose the herdsmansometimes hears

Vague echoes borne beneath the moon's pale ray
From those old, old, far-off, forgotten years?

Who knows? Here where his ancient kings held sway
He stands. Their names are strangers to his ears.

Even their memory has passed away.
The Old Lowe House, Staten Island

Another prospect pleased the builder's eye,


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