which led the Israelite,
         Thy soul, through day or dark,
A visible brightness on the chosen ark
      Of thy sweet body and pure,
            Shall it assure,
With auspice large and tutelary gleams,
Appointed solemn courts, and covenanted streams.”

Cease, Spring’s little children, now cease your lauds to raise;
That dream is past, and Sylvia, with her sweet, feat ways.
   Our lovèd labour, laid away,
   Is smoothly ended; said our say,
         Our syllable to Sylvia.
Make sweet, you birds on branches! make sweet your mouths with May!
   But borne is this burthen,
            Sung unto Sylvia.

Part the Second

And now, thou elder nursling of the nest;
      Ere all the intertangled west
         Be one magnificence
Of multitudinous blossoms that o’errun
The flaming brazen bowl o’ the burnished sun
         Which they do flower from,
How shall I ’stablish thy memorial?
Nay, how or with what countenance shall I come
         To plead in my defence
         For loving thee at all?
I who can scarcely speak my fellows’ speech,
Love their love, or mine own love to them teach;
A bastard barred from their inheritance,
   Who seem, in this dim shape’s uneasy nook,
Some sun-flower’s spirit which by luckless chance
   Has mournfully its tenement mistook;
When it were better in its right abode,
Heartless and happy lackeying its god.
How com’st thou, little tender thing of white,
Whose very touch full scantly me beseems,
How com’st thou resting on my vaporous dreams,
   Kindling a wraith there of earth’s vernal green?
         Even so as I have seen,
   In night’s aërial sea with no wind blust’rous,
A ribbèd tract of cloudy malachite
         Curve a shored crescent wide;
And on its slope marge shelving to the night
   The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous
      Medusa newly washed up from the tide,
Lay in an oozy pool of its own deliquious light.

Yet hear how my excuses may prevail,
   Nor, tender white orb, be thou opposite!
Life and life’s beauty only hold their revels
In the abysmal ocean’s luminous levels.
         There, like the phantasms of a poet pale,
The exquisite marvels sail:
Clarified silver; greens and azures frail
As if the colours sighed themselves away,
And blent in supersubtile interplay
   As if they swooned into each other’s arms;
         Repured vermilion,
         Like ear-tips ’gainst the sun;
And beings that, under night’s swart pinion,
Make every wave upon the harbour-bars
         A beaten yolk of stars.
But where day’s glance turns baffled from the deeps,
         Die out those lovely swarms;
And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps.

Love and love’s beauty only hold their revels
In life’s familiar, penetrable levels:
         What of its ocean-floor?
         I dwell there evermore.
         From almost earliest youth
         I raised the lids o’ the truth,
And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight;
Ever I knew me Beauty’s eremite,
   In antre of this lowly body set.
      Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.
         Nathless I not forget
How I have, even as the anchorite,
   I too, imperishing essences that console.
Under my ruined passions, fallen and sere,
   The wild dreams stir like little radiant girls,
Whom in the moulted plumage of the year
   Their comrades sweet have buried to the curls.
Yet, though their dedicated amorist,
How often do I bid my visions hist,
   Deaf to them, pleading all their piteous fills;
Who weep, as weep the maidens of the mist
   Clinging the necks of the unheeding hills:
And their tears wash them lovelier than before,
That from grief’s self our sad delight grows more,
Fair are the soul’s uncrispèd calms, indeed,
   Endiapered with many a spiritual form
         Of blosmy-tinctured weed;
But scarce itself is conscious of the store
   Suckled by it, and only after storm
Casts up its loosened thoughts upon the shore.
      To this end my deeps are stirred;
      And I deem well why life unshared
      Was ordainèd me of yore.
      In pairing-time, we know, the bird
      Kindles to its deepmost splendour,
      And the tender
      Voice is tenderest in its throat;
      Were its love, for ever nigh it,
      Never by it,
      It might keep a vernal note,
      The crocean and amethystine
            In their pristine
         Lustre linger on its coat.
      Therefore must my song-bower lone be,
            That my tone be
         Fresh with dewy pain alway;
      She, who scorns my dearest care ta’en,
            An uncertain
         Shadow of the sprite of May.
      And is my song sweet, as they say?
’Tis sweet for one whose voice has no reply,
            Save silence’s sad cry:
And are its plumes a burning bright array?
They burn for an unincarnated eye
A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath
   Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure,
Urges me glittering to aërial death,
   I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour;
Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny
   Obeying of my heart’s impetuous might.
      The earth and all its planetary kin,
Starry buds tangled in the whirling hair
That flames round the Phoebean wassailer,
   Speed no more ignorant, more predestined flight,
      Than I, her viewless tresses netted in.
As some most beautiful one, with lovely taunting,
Her eyes of guileless guile o’ercanopies,
         Does her hid visage bow,
And miserly your covetous gaze allow,
         By inchmeal, coy degrees,
         Saying—“Can you see me now?”
Yet from the mouth’s reflex you guess the wanting
         Smile of the coming eyes
In all their upturned grievous witcheries,
         Before that sunbreak rise;
And each still hidden feature view within
Your mind, as eager scrutinies detail
The moon’s young rondure through the shamefast veil
      Drawn to her gleaming chin:
            After this wise,
From the enticing smile of earth and skies
I dream my unknown Fair’s refusèd gaze;
And guessingly her love’s close traits devise,
      Which she with subtile coquetries
Through little human glimpses slow