| SWEET I blame you not for mine the fault was, had I not been made of common clay | |
| I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed yet, seen the fuller air, the larger day. | |
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| From the wildness of my wasted passion I had struck a better, clearer song, | |
| Lit some lighter light of freer freedom, battled with some Hydra-headed wrong. | |
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| Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but made them bleed, | 5 |
| You had walked with Bice and the angels on that verdant and enamelled mead. | |
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| I had trod the road which Dante treading saw the suns of seven circles shine, | |
| Ay! perchance had seen the heavens opening, as they opened to the Florentine. | |
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| And the mighty nations would have crowned me, who am crownless now and without name, | |
| And some orient dawn had found me kneeling on the threshold of the House of Fame. | 10 |
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| I had sat within that marble circle where the oldest bard is as the young, | |
| And the pipe is ever dropping honey, and the lyre’s strings are ever strung. | |
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| Keats had lifted up his hymenæal curls from out the poppy-seeded wine, | |
| With ambrosial mouth had kissed my forehead, clasped the hand of noble love in mine. | |
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| And at springtide, when the apple-blossoms brush the burnished bosom of the dove, | 15 |
| Two young lovers lying in an orchard would have read the story of our love. | |
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| Would have read the legend of my passion, known the bitter secret of my heart, | |
| Kissed as we have kissed, but never parted as we two are fated now to part. | |
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| For the crimson flower of our life is eaten by the canker-worm of truth, | |
| And no hand can gather up the fallen withered petals of the rose of youth. | 20 |
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| Yet I am not sorry that I loved you—ah! what else had I a boy to do,— | |
| For the hungry teeth of time devour, and the silent-footed years pursue. | |
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| Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and when once the storm of youth is past, | |
| Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death a silent pilot comes at last. | |
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| And within the grave there is no pleasure, for the blind-worm battens on the root, | 25 |
| And Desire shudders into ashes, and the tree of Passion bears no fruit. | |
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| Ah! what else had I to do but love you, God’s own mother was less dear to me, | |
| And less dear the Cytheræan rising like an argent lily from the sea. | |
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| I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days, | |
I have found the lover’s crown of myrtle better than the poet’s crown of bays.
THE END. | 30 |
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