Our age bereft of nobility How can our faces show it? I look for love. My lips stand out dry and cracked with want of it. Oh it is well. My poem shall show the need for it.
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
Calm was the sea to which your course you kept, Oh, how much calmer than all southern seas! Many your nameless mates, whom the keen breeze Wafted from mothers that of old have wept. All souls of children taken as they slept Are your companions, partners of your ease,
I In a far country, and a distant age, Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth, A boy was born of humble parentage; The stars that shone upon his lonely birth Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame— Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.
II ’T is said that on the night when he was born, A beauteous shape swept slowly through the room; Its eyes broke on the infant like a morn, And his cheek brightened like a rose in bloom;
What none knows is when, not if. Now that your life nears its end when you turn back what you see is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No, it is a vast resonating chamber in which each thing you say or do is
new, but the same. What none knows is how to change. Each plateau you reach, if single, limited, only itself, in- cludes traces of all the others, so that in the end limitation frees you, there is no end, if you once see what is there to see.
But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once: Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. You turn your face, but does it bring your heart? I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, Treat his own subject after his own way, Fix his own time, accept too his own price, And shut the money into this small hand When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly? Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love! I often am much wearier than you think, This evening more than usual, and it seems As if—forgive now—should you let me sit Here by the window with your hand in mine And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,
[Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene: It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth, Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek, And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest, Stained and conserved with juice of terebinth, Covered with cloth of hair, and lettered Xi, From Xanthus, my wife's uncle, now at peace: Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name. I may not write it, but I make a cross To show I wait His coming, with the rest, And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.]
I said, "If one should wet his lips with wine, "And slip the broadest plantain-leaf we find,
Child, the current of your breath is six days long. You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed; lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first hunger is not wrong. The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded down starch halls with the other unnested throng in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head
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