I wish you were a rare, stringed instrument Beneath my hand, and from you I would wring Such unimagined music, as was sent Never before, along the quivering nerves; Such strange, sharp discords, out of which I'd mould Music more sweet than the spring nightingale's; Then, ere the magic of the sound was old, Would I not rend each string? 

 Possess you? Ah, not with the world's possession, You still, strange creature; neither force nor will Could make you serve a man's mere earthly passion. I would dissolve you, in one blinding flash, Into a drop of elemental dew, And let you trickle down the barren rock Into the black abyss, if so I knew That you henceforth were powerless to mock My spirit with your smile. 

 

 

   THE ETERNAL FLUX 

 Let us hold April back One splendid hour To bless the passionate earth With golden shower Of sunlight from the blue; Oh April skies, That earth yearns up to; blue has burned to gold, Gold pales and dies In delicate faint rose, Oh flowing time, oh flux eternal. Hold The hour back. The April hour goes. 

 Then, let it be of May, When sound and sight And all that's beauty manifest Through all the day, Of deep on deep with green, Of light on light Across the waves of blossom, when the white Is lovelier than the rose, except the rose Is loveliest of all; When through the day the cuckoo calls unseen, And at nightfall The nightingale, whose music no man knows The magic heart of, sitting in the dark Sings still the world-old way; When all of these, Flowers and birds, and sunset and pale skies Seem gathered up in scent, And all of sound and sight Dissolved, ethereal, not of ears and eyes But only the soul-beauty of the brain Flows, in such waves of perfume, over all —Or like a song in colour, of such strain As spirits finer than our own must hear (The beautiful made clear); Then, then, when it is May, Surely our hand must touch eternity. Day pales to night, stars pale upon the day, And May's last blossoming hour flows away. 

 Not of June either, though the hanging skies Make but a little span 'Twixt light and growing light; And when through that short darkness palely flies The silent great white moth —A spirit lost in the night, A soul, without will or way—; When the arch of trees Is duskily green, and close as a builded house Where love with love might stay, Guarded and still, from sight; When the hay is sweet in the fields And love is 

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