tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">"The Gift of Body, When the Soul is Given"

THE SUNLIT HOURS

I


O the splendour of this joy of ours,
Woven of gold of the sun-lit hours!
Here stands the house in soft repose,
The garden and the orchard-close.
Here is the bench beneath the apple trees
Where lazily the blanched spring
Its petals now doth fling.
And here the luminous birds one sees
Soaring, like presages of light,
In the clear heaven of their flight.
And here, as of caresses rained in showers
From the lips of the higher blue,
Two lovely tarns of softest hue,
Bordered naively with involuntary flowers.
O the splendour of our joy, for we
Live doubly, in ourselves, and day's high ecstasy.




II


What tho' we see it break before us into flowers,
This garden where we pass the clear and silent hours?
In our two hearts are spirit-flow'rs unfurled,
Where blooms the fairest garden in the world.

For as flow'rs we live and breathe
When in laughter love breaks forth,
And our sorrows sigh like trees
In the dark winds from the North;

For we live as limpid lakes at calm
That mirror roses heavy with their balm,
And rich vermilion lilies of the South,
Each like a warm red mouth;
For we utter all delight
That leaps in feasts and in the spring
When in vows our words take flight,
Soar exultant on the wing.

Oh! what flowers are in our hearts unfurl'd
Within the fairest garden in the world!




III


This carven column whereon monsters cling
And twist among themselves with ravening jaws,
They seem to pant, and grip with mighty claws,
And from each other anguished cries to wring—
This was my soul before it knew thyself,

Oh, thou the ever new, the ever old!
Who earnest forth to me from deeps of self
Ardour between thy hands and joy untold.

I breathe a scent of faint familiar flow'rs
Within thy heart that sleep;
And thirsty memory drinks deep
Of kindred echoes from past years of ours;
At the same instants in our childhood, tears,
Unknowing, we have wept;
We must have known like gladness and like fears,
Like trysts with grief have kept;
Long since was I bound to thee as thine own
By One who came, inscrutable, unknown,
Upon my life's adventurous battle field.
Oh! had I searched His face, forgetting fear,
I should have known thine eyes this many a year,
That there between his eyelids were reveal'd!




IV


The night, unfolding, banishes the day;
The moon seems, in its long survey,