Why am I fettered with eternal change?
I follow after changeless love, and find
Nothing but change; I seek, and seem to find,
And find I have lost:, and follow after love,
Seeking in passionate humility.
I find a shaken star within a pool;
A little water troubles it, I lean.
Closer, and mine own shadow blots it out.
Yet I desire the star, not this bright ghost.
I take a woman's heart into my hand;
It sighs for love, and trembles among sighs,
And half awakens into a delicate sleep,
And calls to me in whispers out of dreams.
Then the dream passes, and I too know I have dreamed.
Why is it that the world was made so ill,
Or we that suffer it, or this soul its toy,
This body that is the image of the world.
Made ill, or made for a pastime: he that made it
Loved not the thing he made, or tired of it,
Or could not end it; for he gave us life,
And the body; and therewith he gave us dreams;
And having made one substance of the soul
And body, wrought division, and flung his war
Into the little passionate city of man.
I desire love, I desire only love,
For I am lonelier than the wandering sea.
And I could be more constant than the tide;
And one by one, I seek a lonely soul
And then a lonely soul, and every soul
Leans to me beckoning out of a little heaven.
And cries me a joyous cry, welcoming me,
And sighs farewell amid inexorable tears.
No woman has found me faithless; it is she
Who shows me mine own image in her eyes,
And in mine own eyes finds a shadowy friend
That is her own desire beholding her.
All leave me, for the world's sake or for love's,
Because a dream is stronger than desire,
Because the world is stronger than a dream,
Because a soul has feared the face of joy,
Seeing it aflame with unendurable laughter;
And I am mine own rival, and I pass
Upon the cold and endless journeying,
Hopeless in all the mockery of hope.
What shall the end of all things be? I wait
Cruel old age, and kinder death, and sleep,
