Might
I not say? ‘Yet even here,
But for one hour, O Love, I strive
To keep so sweet a thing alive:’
But
I should turn mine ears and hear
The
moanings of the homeless sea,
The sound of streams that swift or slow
Draw down Æonian hills, and sow
The
dust of continents to be;
And
Love would answer with a sigh,
‘The sound of that forgetful shore
Will change my sweetness more and more,
Half-dead
to know that I shall die.’
O
me, what profits it to put
And idle case? If Death were seen
At first as Death, Love had not been,
Or
been in narrowest working shut,
Mere
fellowship of sluggish moods,
Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape
Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,
And
bask’d and batten’d in the woods.