4. Oh, love, love, no, love! not so, indeed! But a little good grain too. 5. And such as you were, I took you for mine: To watch the olive and wait the vine, 6. Well, and if none of these good things came, The man was my whole world, all the same, With his flowers to praise, or his weeds to blame, And, either or both, to love. 7. Yet this turns now to a fault-there! there! That I do love, watch too long, And wait too well, and weary and wear; Fit subject for some new song: 8. How the light, light love, he has wings to fly How my wisdom has bidden your pleasure good-bye, And why should you look beyond? V. ON THE CLIFF. 1. I leaned on the turf, I looked at a rock Left dry by the surf; For the turf, to call it grass were to mock: Dead to the roots, so deep was done The work of the summer sun. 2. And the rock lay flat As an anvil's face: No iron like that! Baked dry; of a weed, of a shell, no trace: Sunshine outside, but ice at the core, Death's altar by the lone shore. 3. On the turf, sprang gay With his films of blue, No cricket, I'll say, But a warhorse, barded and chanfroned too, The gift of a quixote-mage to his knight, Real fairy, with wings all right. 4. On the rock, they scorch From a brandished torch, Fell two red fans of a butterfly: No turf, no rock, in their ugly stead, Is it not so 5. With the minds of men? The level and low, The burnt and bare, in themselves; but then With such a blue and red grace, not theirs, Love settling unawares! VI. UNDER THE CLIFF. 1. "Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no? Which needs the other's office, thou or I? Dost want to be disburthened of a woe, And can, in truth, my voice untie Its links, and let it go? 2. “Art thou a dumb, wronged thing that would be righted, Of scorn,―hopes, early blighted, 3. "We have them; but I know not any tone Dost think men would go mad without a moan, A pathos like thy own? |