Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.

"Come then, ye other children, Nature's

share

With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship;

Let me greet you lip to lip,

Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning

With our Lady-Mother's vagrant
tresses,

Banqueting

With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured daïs,
Quaffing as your taintless way is,
From a chalice

Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."
So it was done:

I in their delicate fellowship was one
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
I knew all the swift importings

On the wilful face of skies;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;
All that's born or dies

Rose and drooped with - made them
shapers

Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine

With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,

Heaven and I wept together,

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;

Against the red throb of its sunset-heart

I laid my own to beat,

And share commingling heat; But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.

In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.

For ah! we know not what each other says

These things and I; in sound I speak

Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;

Let her, if she would owe me, Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me

The breasts o' her tenderness: Never did any milk of hers once bless My thirsting mouth.

Nigh and nigh draws the chase With unperturbed pace Deliberate speed, majestic instancy; And past those noisèd Feet

A voice comes yet more fleet "Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke! My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,

And smitten me to my knee;
I am defenceless utterly.

I slept, methinks, and woke,

And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.

In the rash lustihead of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with

smears,

I stand amid the dust o' the mounded

years

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,

Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

Yea, faileth now even dream The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist; From the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist

I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist, Are yielding; cords of all too weak account

For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
Ah! is Thy love indeed

A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to
mount?
Ah! must
Designer infinite! -

by silences.

canst limn with it?

My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;

And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, split down ever

From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sighful branches of my mind. Such is; what is to be?

The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?

I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity; "Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then

Round the half glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again.

But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound

With glooming robes purpureal, cypresscrowned;

His name I know, and what his trumpet

saith.

Whether man's heart or life it be which yields

Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields

Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;

That Voice is round me like a bursting

sea:

"And is thy earth so marred,

Shattered in shard on shard?

But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.

All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:

Rise, clasp my hand, and come!"

Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest! Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."

TO A SNOWFLAKE

WHAT heart could have thought you? Past our devisal

(O filigree petal !)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,

From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?

Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapour?

"God was my shaper.

Passing surmisal,

He hammered, He wrought me,

From curled silver vapour,

To lust of His mind:

Thou couldst not have thought me! So purely, so palely,

Tinily, surely,

"And human love needs human meriting: How hast thou merited

Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?

Alack, thou knowest not

How little worthy of any love thou art! Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee Save Me, save only Me?

Insculped and embossed, With His hammer of wind, And His graver of frost."

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

Not for thy harms,

would not agree.

Till, when the low sun drank
Those milky mists that cloak
Hanger and hollied bank,
The winter world awoke
To hear the feeble bleat

Of lambs on the downland farms:

A blackbird whistled sweet;
Old beeches moved their arms
Into a mellow haze
Aërial, newly-born:

And I, alone, agaze,

Stood waiting for the thorn
To break in blossoms white,
Or burst in a green flame.
So, in a single night,
Fair February came,
Bidding my lips to sing
Or whisper their surprise,
With all the joy of spring
And morning in her eyes.