VIGNETTES OVERSEAS

BEYOND the sleepy hills of Spain,

The sun goes down in yellow mist,

The sky is fresh with dewy stars

Above a sea of amethyst.

Yet in the city of my love

High noon burns all the heavens bare —

For him the happiness of light,

For me a delicate despair.

Oh give me neither love nor tears,

Nor dreams that sear the night with fire,

Go lightly on your pilgrimage

Unburdened by desire.

Forget me for a month, a year,

But, oh, beloved, think of me

When unexpected beauty burns

Like sudden sunlight on the sea.

Nisida and Prosida are laughing in the light,

Capri is a dewy flower lifting into sight,

Posilipo kneels and looks in the burnished sea,

Naples crowds her million roofs close as close can be;

Round about the mountain's crest a flag of smoke is hung —

Oh when God made Italy he was gay and young!

When beauty grows too great to bear

How shall I ease me of its ache,

For beauty more than bitterness

Makes the heart break.

Now while I watch the dreaming sea

With isles like flowers against her breast,

Only one voice in all the world

Could give me rest.

I asked the heaven of stars

What I should give my love —

It answered me with silence,

Silence above.

I asked the darkened sea

Down where the fishers go —

It answered me with silence,

Silence below.

Oh, I could give him weeping,

Or I could give him song —

But how can I give silence

My whole life long?

On lowlands where the temples lie

The marsh-grass mingles with the flowers,

Only the little songs of birds

Link the unbroken hours.

So in the end, above my heart

Once like the city wild and gay,

The slow white stars will pass by night,

The swift brown birds by day.

Oh for the rising moon

Over the roofs of Rome,

And swallows in the dusk

Circling a darkened dome!

Oh for the measured dawns

That pass with folded wings —

How can I let them go

With unremembered things?

The bells ring over the Anno,

Midnight, the long, long chime;

Here in the quivering darkness

I am afraid of time.

Oh, gray bells cease your tolling,

Time takes too much from me,

And yet to rock and river

He gives eternity.

The fountain shivers lightly in the rain,

The laurels drip, the fading roses fall,

The marble satyr plays a mournful strain

That leaves the rainy fragrance musical.

Oh dripping laurel, Phoebus sacred tree,

Would that swift Daphne's lot might come to me,

Then would I still my soul and for an hour

Change to a laurel in the glancing shower.

The moon grows out of the hills

A yellow flower,

The lake is a dreamy bride

Who waits her hour.

Beauty has filled my heart,

It can hold no more,

It is full, as the lake is full,

From shore to shore.

The day that I come home,

What will you find to say,—

Words as light as foam

With laughter light as spray?

Yet say what words you will

The day that I come home;

I shall hear the whole deep ocean

Beating under the foam.