Canto 8Night by the Sea
Book 1. Part One - England and Baroda 1883 – 1898
Songs to Myrtilla
Night by the Sea
Love, a moment drop thy hands;
Night within my soul expands.
5Veil thy beauties milk-rose-fair
In that dark and showering hair.
Coral kisses ravish not
When the soul is tinged with thought;
Burning looks are then forbid.
10Let each shyly-parted lid
Hover like a settling dove
O’er those deep-blue wells of Love.
Darkness brightens; silvering flee
Pomps of foam the driven sea.
15In this garden’s dim repose
Lighted with the burning rose,
Soft narcissi’s golden camp
Glimmering or with rosier lamp
Censered honeysuckle guessed
20By the fragrance of her breast, —
Here where summer’s hands have crowned
Silence in the fields of sound,
Here felicity should be.
Hearken, Edith, to the sea.
25What a voice of grief intrudes
On these happy solitudes!
To the wind that with him dwells
Ocean, old historian, tells
All the dreadful heart of tears
30Hidden in the pleasant years.
Summer’s children, what do ye
By the stern and cheerless sea?
Not we first nor we alone
Heard the mighty Ocean moan
35England and Baroda, 1883–1898
By this treasure-house of flowers
In the sweet ambiguous hours.
Many a girl’s lips ruby-red
With their vernal honey fed
40Happy mouths, and soft cheeks flushed
With Love’s rosy sunlight blushed.
Ruddy lips of many a boy
Blithe discovered hills of joy
Ruby-guided through a kiss
45To the sweet highways of bliss.
Here they saw the evening still
Coming slowly from the hill
And the patient stars arise
To their outposts in the skies;
50Heard the ocean shoreward urge
The speed and thunder of his surge,
Singing heard as though a bee
Noontide waters on the sea.
These no longer. For our rose
55In her place they wreathed once, blows,
And thy glorious garland, sweet,
Kissed not once those wandering feet.
All the lights of spring are ended,
To the wintry haven wended.
60Beauty’s boons and nectarous leisure,
Lips, the honeycombs of pleasure,
Cheeks enrosed, Love’s natal soil,
Breasts, the ardent conqueror’s spoil,
Spring rejects; a lovelier child
65His brittle fancies has beguiled.
O her name that to repeat
Than the Dorian muse more sweet
Could the white hand more relume
Writing and refresh the bloom
70Of lips that used such syllables then,
Dies unloved by later men.
Songs to Myrtilla
Are we more than summer flowers?
Shall a longer date be ours,
75Rose and springtime, youth and we
By the everlasting sea?
Are they blown as legends tell
In the smoke and gurge of hell?
Writhe they in relucent gyres
80O’er a circle sad of fires?
In what lightless groves must they
Or unmurmuring alleys stray?
Fields no sunlight visits, streams
Where no happy lotus gleams?
85Yet, where’er their steps below,
Memories sweet for comrades go.
Lethe’s waters had their will,
But the soul remembers still.
Beauty pays her boon of breath
90To thy narrow credit, Death,
Leaving a brief perfume; we
Perish also by the sea.
We shall lose, ah me! too soon
Lose the clear and silent moon,
95The serenities of night
And the deeper evening light.
We shall know not when the morn
In the widening East is born,
Never feel the west-wind stir,
100Spring’s delightful messenger,
Never under branches lain
Dally with the sweet-lipped rain,
Watch the moments of the tree,
Nor know the sounds that tread the sea.
105With thy kisses chase this gloom: —
Thoughts, the children of the tomb.