pearl,
  To shape that little thing your ear:
Creation, just to make one girl,
  Hath travailed with exceeding fear.

The moonlight of forgotten seas
  Dwells in your eyes, and on your tongue
The honey of a million bees,
  And all the sorrows of all song:
You are the ending of all these,
  The world grew old to make you young.

All time hath traveled to this rose;
  To the strange making of this face
Came agonies of fires and snows;
  And Death and April, nights and days
Unnumbered, unimagined throes,
  Find in this flower their meeting place.

Strange artist, to my aching thought
  Give answer: all the patient power
That to this perfect ending wrought,
  Shall it mean nothing but an hour?
Say not that it is all for nought
  Time brings Eternity a flower.

All the words in all the world
  Cannot tell you how I love you,
All the little stars that shine
  To make a silver crown above you;

"ALL THE WORDS IN ALL THE WORLD"

All the flowers cannot weave
  A garland worthy of your hair,
Not a bird in the four winds
  Can sing of you that is so fair.

Only the spheres can sing of you;
  Some planet in celestial space,
Hallowed and lonely in the dawn,
  Shall sing the poem of your face.

"I SAID—I CARE NOT"

I said—I care not if I can
  But look into her eyes again,
But lay my hand within her hand
  Just once again.

Though all the world be filled with snow
  And fire and cataclysmal storm,
I'll cross it just to lay my head
  Upon her bosom warm.

Ah! bosom made of April flowers,
  Might I but bring this aching brain,
This foolish head, and lay it down
  On April once again!

"ALL THE WIDE WORLD IS BUT THE THOUGHT OF YOU"

All the wide world is but the thought of you:
Who made you out of wonder and of dew?
Was it some god with tears in his deep eyes,
Who loved a woman white and over-wise,
That strangely put all violets in your hair—
And put into your face all distance too?

"LIGHTNINGS MAY FLICKER ROUND MY HEAD"

Lightnings may flicker round my head,
  And all the world seem doom,
If you, like a wild rose, will walk
  Strangely into the room.

If only my sad heart may hear
  Your voice of faery laughter—
What matters though the heavens fall,
  And hell come thundering after.

"THE AFTERNOON IS LONELY FOR YOUR FACE"

The afternoon is lonely for your face,
  The pampered morning mocks the day's decline—
  I was so rich at noon, the sun was mine,
Mine the sad sea that in that rocky place
  Girded us round with blue betrothal ring.
  Because your heart was mine, your heart, that precious thing.

The night will be a desert till the dawn,
  Unless you take some ferry-boat of dreams,
  And glide to me, a glory of silver beams,
Under my eyelids, like sad curtains drawn;
  So, by good hap, my heart can find its way
  Where all your sweetness lies in fragrant disarray.

Ah! but with morn the world begins anew,
  Again the sea shall sing up to your feet,
  And earth and all the heavens call you sweet,
You all alone with me, I all alone with you,
  And all the business of the laurelled hours
  Shyly to gaze on that betrothal ring of ours.

"SORE IN NEED WAS I OF A FAITHFUL FRIEND"

Sore in need was I of a faithful friend,
  And it seemed to me that life
Had come to its much desired end—
  Just then God gave me a wife.

I had seen the beauty of fairy things,
  And seen the women walk;
I had heard the voice of the seven sins
  And all the wonderful talk.

Ah, the promising earth that seems so kind,
  And the comrades with outstretched hand—
But did you ever stand alone
  In a black, forsaken land?
Then the wonderful things that God can do
  One comes to understand:

How He turns the desert dust to a dream,
  And the lonely wind to a friend,
And makes a bright beginning
  Of what had seemed the end:
'Twas in such an hour God placed in mine
  The moonbeam hand of a friend.

"I THOUGHT, BEFORE MY SUNLIT TWENTIETH YEAR"

I thought, before my sunlit twentieth year,
That I knew Love, and Death that goes with it;
And my young broken heart in little songs,
Dew-like, I poured, and waited for my end
Wildly—and waited—being then nineteen.
I walked a little longer on my way,
Alive, 'gainst expectation and desire,
And, being then past twenty, I beheld
The face of all the faces of the world
Dewily opening on its stem for me.
Ah! so it seemed, and, each succeeding year,
Thus hath some woman blossom of the divine
Flowered in my path, and made a frail delay
In my true journey—to my home in thee.

October 27, 1911.

II

TO A BIRD AT DAWN

O bird that somewhere yonder sings,
  In the dim hour 'twixt dreams and dawn,
Lone in the hush of sleeping things,
  In some sky sanctuary withdrawn;
Your perfect song is too like pain,
And will not let me sleep again.

I think you must be more than bird,
  A little creature of soft wings,
Not yours this deep and thrilling word—
  Some morning planet 'tis that sings;
Surely from no small feathered throat
  Wells that august, eternal note.

As some old language of the dead,
  In one resounding syllable,
Says Rome and Greece and all is said—
  A simple word a child may spell;
So in your liquid note impearled
Sings the long epic of the world.

Unfathomed sweetness of your song,
  With ancient anguish at its core,
What womb of elemental wrong,
  With shudder unimagined, bore
Peace so divine—what hell hath trod
This voice that softly talks with God!

All silence in one silver flower
  Of speech that speaks not, save as speaks
The moon in heaven, yet hath power
  To tell the soul the thing it seeks.
And pack, as by some wizard's art,
The whole within the finite part.

To you, sweet bird, one well might feign—
  With such authority you sing
So clear, yet so profound, a strain
  Into the simple ear of spring—
Some secret understanding given
Of the hid purposes of Heaven.

And all my life until this day,
  And all my life until I die,
All joy and sorrow of the way,
  Seem calling yonder in the sky;
And there is something the song saith
That makes me unafraid of death.

Now the slow light fills all the trees,
  The world, before so still and strange,
With day's familiar presences,
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