Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Love in Exile (Songs). VI. “L’Envoi”

Mathilde Blind (1841–1896)

THOU art the goal for which my spirit longs;

As dove on dove,

Bound for one home, I send thee all my songs

With all my love.

Thou art the haven with fair harbour lights;

Safe locked in thee,

My heart would anchor after stormful nights

Alone at sea.

Thou art the rest of which my life is fain,

The perfect peace;

Absorbed in thee the world, with all its pain

And toil, would cease.

Thou art the heaven, to which my soul would go

O dearest eyes,

Lost in your light you would turn hell below

To Paradise.

Thou all in all for which my heart-blood yearns!

Yea, near or far—

Where the unfathomed ether throbs and burns

With star on star,

Or where, enkindled by the fires of June,

The fresh earth glows,

Blushing beneath the mystical white moon

Through rose on rose—

Thee, thee I see, thee feel in all live things,

Beloved one;

In the first bird which tremulously sings

Ere peep of sun;

In the last nestling orphaned in the hedge,

Rocked to and fro,

When dying summer shudders in the sedge,

And swallows go;

When roaring snows rush down the mountain pass,

March floods with rills,

Or April lightens through the living grass

In daffodils;

When poppied cornfields simmer in the heat

With tare and thistle,

And, like winged clouds above the mellow wheat,

The starlings whistle;

When stained with sunset the wide moorlands glare

In the wild weather,

And clouds with flaring craters smoke and flare

Red o’er red heather;

When the bent moon, on frostbound midnight’s waking,

Leans to the snow

Like some world-mother whose deep heart is breaking

O’er human woe.

As the round sun rolls red into the ocean,

Till all the sea

Glows fluid gold, even so life’s mazy motion

Is dyed with thee:

For as the wave-like years subside and roll,

O heart’s desire,

Thy soul glows interfused within my soul,

A quenchless fire.

Yea, thee I feel, all storms of life above,

Near though afar;

O thou my glorious morning star of love

And evening star.