I had not bid for beautifuller hours
Had I not found the door so near unsealed,

Nor hoped, had you not filled my arms with flowers,
For that one flower that bloomed too far afield.

If I have wept, it was because, forsaken,
I felt perhaps more poignantly than some

The blank eternity from which we waken
And all the blank eternity to come.

And I betrayed how sweet a thing and tender
(In the regret with which my lip was curled)

Seemed in its tragic, momentarysplendor
My transit through the beauty of the world.

The Bayadere
Flaked, drifting clouds hide not the full moon's rays

More than her beautiful bright limbs were hid
By the light veils they burned and blushed amid,

Skilled to provoke in soft, lascivious ways,
And there was invitation in her voice

And laughing lips and wonderful dark eyes,
As though above the gates of Paradise

Fair verses bade, Be welcome and rejoice!
O'er rugs where mottled blue and green and red

Blent in the patterns of the Orient loom,
Like a bright butterfly from bloom to bloom,

She floated with delicious arms outspread.
There was no pose she took, no move she made,

But all the feverous, love-envenomed flesh
Wrapped round as in the gladiator's mesh

And smote as with his triple-forked blade.
I thought that round her sinuous beauty curled

Fierce exhalations of hot human love, --
Around her beauty valuable above

The sunny outspread kingdoms of the world;
Flowing as ever like a dancing fire

Flowed her belled ankles and bejewelled wrists,
Around her beauty swept like sanguine mists

The nimbus of a thousand hearts' desire.
Eudaemon

O happiness, I know not what far seas,
Blue hills and deep, thy sunny realms surround,

That thus in Music's wistful harmonies
And concert of sweet sound

A rumor steals, from some uncertain shore,
Of lovely things outworn or gladness yet in store:

Whether thy beams be pitiful and come,
Across the sundering of vanished years,

From childhood and the happy fields of home,
Like eyes instinct with tears

Felt through green brakes of hedge and apple-bough
Round haunts delightful once, desert and silent now;

Or yet if prescience of unrealized love
Startle the breast with each melodious air,

And gifts that gentle hands are donors of
Still wait intact somewhere,

Furled up all golden in a perfumed place
Within the folded petals of forthcoming days.

Only forever, in the old unrest
Of winds and waters and the varying year,

A litany from islands of the blessed
Answers, Not here . . . not here!

And over the wide world that wandering cry
Shall lead my searching heart unsoothed until I die.

Broceliande
Broceliande! in the perilous beauty of silence and menacing shade,

Thou art set on the shores of the sea down the haze
of horizons untravelled, unscanned.

Untroubled, untouched with the woes of this world
are the moon-marshalled hosts that invade

Broceliande.
Only at dusk, when lavender clouds in the orienttwilight disband,

Vanishing where all the blue afternoon they have drifted in solemn parade,
Sometimes a whisper comes down on the wind from the valleys of Fairyland ----

Sometimes an echo most mournful and faint like the horn of a huntsman strayed,
Faint and forlorn, half drowned in the murmur of foliage fitfully fanned,

Breathes in a burden of nameless regret till I startle,
disturbed and affrayed:

Broceliande --
Broceliande --

Broceliande. . . .
Lyonesse

In Lyonesse was beauty enough, men say:
Long Summer loaded the orchards to excess,

And fertile lowlands lengthening far away,
In Lyonesse.

Came a term to that land's old favoredness:
Past the sea-walls, crumbled in thundering spray,

Rolled the green waves, ravening, merciless.
Through bearded boughs immobile in cool decay,

Where sea-bloom covers corroding palaces,
The mermaid glides with a curious glance to-day,

In Lyonesse.
Tithonus

So when the verdure of his life was shed,
With all the grace of ripened manlihead,

And on his locks, but now so lovable,
Old age like desolating winter fell,

Leaving them white and flowerless and forlorn:
Then from his bed the Goddess of the Morn

Softly withheld, yet cherished him no less
With pious works of pitying tenderness;

Till when at length with vacant, heedless eyes,
And hoary height bent down none otherwise

Than burdened willows bend beneath their weight
Of snow when winter winds turn temperate, --

So bowed with years -- when still he lingered on:
Then to the daughter of Hyperion

This counsel seemed the best: for she, afar
By dove-gray seas under the morning star,

Where, on the wide world's utmost">uttermost extremes,
Her amber-walled, auroral palace gleams,

High in an orientchamber bade prepare
An everlasting couch, and laid him there,

And leaving, closed the shining doors. But he,
Deathless by Jove's compassionless decree,

Found not, as others find, a dreamless rest.
There wakeful, with half-waking dreams oppressed,

Still in an aural, visionary haze
Float round him vanished forms of happier days;

Still at his side he fancies to behold
The rosy, radiant thing beloved of old;

And oft, as over dewy meads at morn,
Far inland from a sunrise coast is borne

The drowsy, muffled moaning of the sea,
Even so his voice flows on unceasingly, --

Lisping sweet names of passion overblown,
Breaking with dull, persistent undertone

The breathless silence that forever broods
Round those colossal, lustrous solitudes.