Here in the dusk I see her face again
As then I knew it, ere she fell asleep;
Renunciation glorifying pain
Of her soul's inmost deep.
I shall not see its like again! the brow
Of passive marble, purely aureoled,--
As some pale lily in the afterglow,--
With supernatural gold.
As if a rose should speak and, somehow heard
By some strange sense, the unembodied sound
Grow visible, her mouth was as a word
A sweet thought falters 'round.
So do I still remember eyes imbued
With far reflections--as the stars suggest
The silence, purity and solitude
Of infinite peace and rest.
She was my all. I loved her as men love
A high desire, religion, an ideal--
The meaning purpose in the loss whereof
God shall alone reveal.
A Dream Shape
With moon-white hearts that held a gleam,
I gathered wild flowers in a dream,
And shaped a woman, whose sweet blood
Was odor of the wildwood bud.
From dew, the starlight arrowed through,
I wrought a woman's eyes of blue;
The lids, that on her eyeballs lay,
Were rose-pale petals of the May.
I took the music of the breeze,
And water whispering in the trees,
And shaped the soul that breathed below
A woman's blossom breasts of snow.
Out of a rose-bud's veins I drew
The fragrant crimson beating through
The languid lips of her, whose kiss
Was as a poppy's drowsiness.
Out of the moonlight and the air
I wrought the glory of her hair,
That o'er her eyes' blue heaven lay
Like some gold cloud o'er dawn of day.
A shadow's shadow in the glass
Of sleep, my spirit saw her pass:
And, thinking of it now, meseems
We only live within our dreams.
For in that time she was to me
More real than our reality;
More real than Earth, more real than I--
The unreal things that pass and die.
