YOUNG LOVE

Surely at last, O Lady, the sweet moon

That bringeth in the happy singing weather

Groweth to pearly queendom, and full soon

Shall Love and Song go hand in hand together;

For all the pain that all too long hath waited

In deep dumb darkness shall have speech at last,

And the bright babe Death gave the Love he mated

Shall leap to light and kiss the weeping past.

For all the silver morning is a-glimmer

With gleaming spears of great Apollo's host,

And the night fadeth like a spent out swimmer

Hurled from the headlands of some shining coast.

O, happy soul, thy mouth at last is singing,

Drunken with wine of morning's azure deep,

Sing on, my soul, the world beneath thee swinging,

A bough of song above a sea of sleep.

Who is the lady I sing?

Ah, how can I tell thee her praise

For whom all my life's but the string

Of a rosary painful of days;

Which I count with a curious smile

As a miser who hoardeth his gain,

Though, a madhearted spendthrift the while,

I but gather to waste again.

Yea, I pluck from the tree of the years,

As a country maid greedy of flowers,

Each day brimming over with tears,

And I scatter like petals its hours;

And I trample them under my feet

In a frenzy of cloven-hoofed swine,

And the breath of their dying is sweet,

And the blood of their hearts is as wine.

O, I throw me low down on the ground

And I bury my face in their death,

And only I rise at the sound

Of a wind as it scattereth,

As it scattereth sweetly the dried

Leaves withered and brittle and sere

Of days of old years that have died —

And, O, it is sweet in my ear

And I rise me and build me a pyre

Of the whispering skeleton things,

And my heart laugheth low with the fire,

Laugheth high with the flame as it springs;

And above in the flickering glare

I mark me the boughs of my tree,

My tree of the years, growing bare.

Growing bare with the scant days to be.

Then I turn to my beads and I pray

For the axe at the root of the tree —

Last flower, last bead — ah! last day

That shall part me, my darling, from thee!

And I pray for the knife on the string

Of this rosary painful of days:

But who is the Lady I sing?

Ah, how can I tell thee her praise!