Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long forgotten snow.
The days remember and the nights remember
The kingly hours that once you made so great,
Deep in my heart they lie, hidden in their splendor,
Buried like sovereigns in their robes of state.
Let them not wake again, better to lie there,
Wrapped in memories, jewelled and arrayed--
Many a ghostly king has waked from death-sleep
And found his crown stolen and his throne decayed.
We will never walk again
As we used to walk at night,
Watching our shadows lengthen
Under the gold street-light
When the snow was new and white.
We will never walk again
Slowly, we two,
In spring when the park is sweet
With midnight and with dew,
And the passers-by are few.
I sit and think of it all,
And the blue June twilight dies,--
Down in the clanging square
A street-piano cries
And stars come out in the skies.
Will it always be like this until I am dead,
Every spring must I bear it all again
With the first red haze of the budding maple boughs,
And the first sweet-smelling rain?
Oh I am like a rock in the rising river
Where the flooded water breaks with a low call--
Like a rock that knows the cry of the waters
And cannot answer at all.
Death went up the hall
Unseen by every one,
Trailing twilight robes
Past the nurse and the nun.
He paused at every door
And listened to the breath
Of those who did not know
How near they were to Death.
Death went up the hall
Unseen by nurse and nun;
He passed by many a door--
But he entered one.
Waves are the sea's white daughters,
And raindrops the children of rain,
But why for my shimmering body
Have I a mother like Pain?
Night is the mother of stars,
And wind the mother of foam--
The world is brimming with beauty,
But I must stay at home.
Oh you are coming, coming, coming,
How will hungry Time put by the hours till then?--
But why does it anger my heart to long so
For one man out of the world of men?
Oh I would live in myself only
And build my life lightly and still as a dream--
Are not my thoughts clearer than your thoughts
And colored like stones in a running stream?
Now the slow moon brightens in heaven,
The stars are ready, the night is here--
Oh why must I lose myself to love you,
My dear?
Never again the music blown as brightly
Off of my heart as foam blown off a wave;
Never again the melody that lightly
Caressed my grief and healed the wounds it gave.
Never again--I hear my dark thoughts clashing
Sullen and blind as waves that beat a wall--
Age that is coming, summer that is going,
All I have lost or never found at all.
Will you come as of old with singing,
And shall I hear as of old?
Shall I rush to open the window
In spite of the arrowy cold?
Ah no, my dear, ah no,
I shall sit by the fire reading,
Though you sing half the night in the snow
I shall not be heeding.
Though your voice remembers the forest,
The warm green light and the birds,
Though you gather the sea in your singing
And pour its sound into words,
Even so, my dear, even so,
I shall not heed you at all;
Though your shoulders are white with snow,
Though you strain your voice to a call,
When, in the gold October dusk, I saw you near to setting,
Arcturus, bringer of spring,
Lord of the summer nights, leaving us now in autumn,
Having no pity on our withering;
Oh then I knew at last that my own autumn was upon me,
I felt it in my blood,
Restless as dwindling streams that still remember
The music of their flood.
There in the thickening dark a wind-bent tree above me
Loosed its last leaves in flight--
I saw you sink and vanish, pitiless Arcturus,
You will not stay to share our lengthening night.
Nothing is new, I have seen the spring too often;
There have been other plum-trees white as this one
Like a silvery cloud tethered beside the road,
I have been waked from sleep too many times
By birds at dawn boasting their love is beautiful.
The grass-blades gleam in the wind, nothing is changed.
Nothing is lost, it is all as it used to be,
Unopened lilacs are still as deep a purple,
The boughs of the elm are dancing still in a veil of tiny leaves,
Nothing is lost but a few years from my life.
Your heart is bound tightly, let
Beauty beware,
It is not hers to set
Free from the snare.
Tell her a bleeding hand
Bound it and tied it,
Tell her the knot will stand
Though she deride it;
One who withheld so long
All that you yearned to take,
Has made a snare too strong
For Beauty’s self to break.