When I am near you, I am like a child,
I'm still and simple, I am undefiled.
I speak my love in a forgotten tongue.
And use the words I knew when I was young.
My Love! You have restored me in a hundred ways.
You gave me back my happy childish days.
When I saw you, you went to my head,
You were like wine to my brain,
I walked in London through the rain,
To see a man who had been ten years dead.
For pleasure I forgot the years,
Old time, old death, old tears.
O SPRING of my Content,
The parching days are spent.
Where'er your feeding waters move
There is the sweet increase of love.
I, wanderer in a wilderness
Starved of all hope and comfortless,
Now lay me down in groves of cool delight
Which you have nurtured, in a charmed night.
To the tired traveller in summer's heat,
The thought of airy trees is sweet.
Come, in my straight stretched arms discover
A leafy road, thou weary Lover.
Love with a liquid ecstasy
Did wholly fill me up,
And since his drink is sweet to me
Can I despise his cup?
Knowledge, to me, is wearisome from books,
I learn so readily from words and looks.
Give me yourself as free as air and rain.
I'll drink, I'll think, and send you flowers again.
I WISH you'd a farm on the hills, my Dear,
And need not work for hire.
For though I'm cold in the churchyard here.
And cannot sit by your fire,
I'd walk the paths of your house, some nights,
And haply look into your room:
Then I'd always see my Love's home-lights
When I stood on the rail of my tomb.
Am I pleasant?
Tell me that, old Wise!
Let me look into your eyes,
To see if you can comprehend my beauty,
That is a lover's duty.
I look at you to see
If you can think of anything but me.
Ah, you remember praise and your philosophy!
My love shall be a sphere of silence and of light,
Where Love is all alone with love's delight. —
Here is a woodcutter who is so weak
With love of me, he cannot speak.
Tell me, dumb man, am I pleasant, am I pleasant?
Farewell, philosopher! I love a peasant.
I love your hands:
They are big hands, firm hands, gentle hands;
Hair grows on the back near the wrist ...
I have seen the nails broken and stained
From hard work.
And yet, when you touch me,
I grow small ....... and quiet ........
....... And happy ..........
If I might only grow small enough
To curl up into the hollow of your palm,
Your left palm,
Curl up, lie close and cling,
So that I might know myself always there,
....... Even if you forgot.
Gushing from the mouths of stone men
To spread at ease under the sky
In granite-lipped basins,
Where iris dabble their feet
And rustle to a passing wind,
The water fills the garden with its rushing,
In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.
Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,
Where trickle and plash the fountains,
Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.
Splashing down moss-tarnished steps
It falls, the water;
And the air is throbbing with it.
With its gurgling and running.
With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.
And I wished for night and you.
You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colours.
My vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
As I would free the white almond from the green husk
So would I strip your trappings off,
Beloved.
And fingering the smooth and polished kernel
I should see that in my hands glittered a gem beyond counting.