Ah, did we know to give her all her right, What wonders even in our poor clay were done! It is not Woman leaves us to our night, But our brute earth that grovels from her sun. Where shine you? On what happier fields and flowers? Heaven's lamps renew their lustre less divine, But only serve to count my darkened hours. If with your presence went your image too, Our nobler cultured fields and gracious That brain-born ghost my path would never domes cross Which meets me now where'er I once met O'er these leaves her wrist has slid, Sunshine left there by her eyes; Rarest woods were coarse and rough, Seek we first an altar fit For such victims laid on it: Fire I gather from the sun On the altar now, alas, All is ashes now, but they And their radiance round me hovers THE PROTEST I COULD not bear to see those eyes On all with wasteful largess shine, And they who do their souls no wrong, But keep at eve the faith of morn, Shall daily hear the angel-song, "To-day the Prince of Peace is born!" MY PORTRAIT GALLERY OFT round my hall of portraiture I gaze, By Memory reared, the artist wise and holy, From stainless quarries of deep - buried days. There, as I muse in soothing melancholy, Your faces glow in more than mortal youth, Companions of my prime, now vanished wholly, The loud, impetuous boy, the low-voiced maiden, Now for the first time seen in flawless truth. Ah, never master that drew mortal breath Can match thy portraits, just and generous Death, Whose brush with sweet regretful tints is laden! Thou paintest that which struggled here below Half understood, or understood for woe, Mak'st round the sacred front an aureole glow Woven of that light that rose on Easter morning. PAOLO TO FRANCESCA I WAS with thee in Heaven: I cannot tell If years or moments, so the sudden bliss, When first we found, then lost, us in a kiss, Abolished Time, abolished Earth and Hell, Left only Heaven. Then from our blue there fell The dagger's flash, and did not fall amiss, For nothing now can rob my life of this, That once with thee in Heaven, all else is well. Us, undivided when man's vengeance came, God's half-forgives that doth not here divide; And, were this bitter whirl-blast fanged with flame, To me 't were summer, we being side by side: This granted, I God's mercy will not blame, For, given thy nearness, nothing is denied. SONNET SCOTTISH BORDER The following letter to Mr. Howells, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, in which this sonnet was printed, is a little out of proportion as a head-note to a poem of fourteen lines, but it is too characteristic and too indicative of Lowell's extreme solicitude over his verse to be omitted. "There was one verse in the Border sonnet which, when I came to copy it, worried me with its lack of just what I wanted. Only one? you will say. Yes, all; but never mind this one most. Instead of 'Where the shy ballad could its leaves unfold' read dared its blooms.' I had liefer 'cup,' but cup is already metaphoric when applied to flowers, and Bottom the Weaver would be sure to ask in one of the many journals he edits How unfold a cup? Does he mean one of those pocket drinking-cups - leathern inconveniences that always stick when you try to unfold 'em?' Damn Bottom! We ought not to think of him, but then the Public is made up of him, and I wish him to know that I was thinking of a flower. Besides, the sonnet is, more than any other kind of verse, a deliberate composition, and susceptible of a high polish," as the dendrologists say of the woods of certain trees. Or shall we say grew in secret bold'? I write both on the opposite leaf, that you may choose one to paste over and not get the credit of tinkering my rhymes. dared its blooms grew in secret bold. |