A Red, Red Rose
My luve is like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June:
My luve is like the melodie,
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare-thee-weel, my only luve,
And fare-thee-weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it were ten-thousand mile.
Natural History
(A Letter to Katharine, from the King Edward Hotel, Toronto)
The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unwinds a thread of her devising:
A thin, premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all the journey down through space,
In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,
She builds a ladder to the place
From which she started.
Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken strand to you
For my returning.
One Cigarette
No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker’s tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I’ll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.
To Mary
I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,
And yet thou art not there;
I fill my arms with thoughts of thee,
And press the common air.
Thy eyes are gazing upon mine,
When thou art out of sight;
My lips are always touching thine,
At morning, noon, and night.
I think and speak of other things
To keep my mind at rest:
But still to thee my memory clings
Like love in woman’s breast.
I hide it from the world’s wide eye
And think and speak contrary;
But soft the wind comes from the sky,
And whispers tales of Mary.
The night wind whispers in my ear,
The moon shines in my face;
A burden still of chilling fear
I find in every place.
The breeze is whispering in the bush,
And the dews fall from the tree,
All, sighing on, and will not hush
Some pleasant tales of thee.
My love is faren in a land;
Alas why is she so?
And I am so sore bound
I may not come her to.
She hath my heart in hold
Wherever she ride or go,
With true love a thousandfold.
Westron wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
from Amoretti
LXXVIII
Lacking my love I go from place to place,
like a young fawn that late hath lost the hind;
and seek each where, where last I saw her face,
whose image yet I carry fresh in mind.
I seek the fields with her late footing signed,
I seek her bower with her late presence decked.
yet nor in field nor bower I her can find;
yet field and bower are full of her aspect.
But when my eyes I thereunto direct,
then idly back return to me again,
and when I hope to see there true object,
I find my self but fed with fancies vain.
Cease then, my eyes, to seek her self to see,
and let my thoughts behold her self in me.
To Marguerite – Continued
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour –
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain –
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who order’d, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire? –
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
The Definition of Love
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic pow’r depose.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed,
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced,
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.
Between
As we fall into step I ask a penny for your thoughts.
‘Oh, nothing,’ you say, ‘well, nothing so easily bought.’
Sliding into the rhythm of your silence, I almost forget
how lonely I’d been until that autumn morning we met.
At bedtime up along my childhood’s stairway, tongues
of fire cast shadows. Too earnest, too highstrung.
My desire is endless: others ended when I’d only started.
Then, there was you: so whole-hog, so wholehearted.
Think of the thousands of nights and the shadows fought.
And the mornings of light. I try to read your thought.
In the strange openness of your face, I’m powerless.
Always this love. Always this infinity between us.
Air and Angels
Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see,
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is,
Love must not be, but take a body too,
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid love ask; and now
That it assume thy body I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love’s pinnace over-fraught:
Ev’ry thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere;
Then, as an angel, face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love’s sphere;
Just such disparity
As is ’twixt air and angels’ purity,
’Twixt women’s love, and men’s will ever be.
Coda
Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.
So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.
But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.
Words, Wide Night
Somewhere, on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this
is what it is like or what it is like in words.
Broadcast
Giant whispering and coughing from
Vast Sunday-full and organ-frowned-on spaces
Precede a sudden scuttle on the drum,
‘The Queen’, and huge resettling. Then begins
A snivel on the violins:
I think of your face among all those faces,
Beautiful and devout before
Cascades of monumental slithering,
One of your gloves unnoticed on the floor
Beside those new, slightly-outmoded shoes.
Here it goes quickly dark. I lose
All but the outline of the still and withering
Leaves on half-emptied trees. Behind
The glowing wavebands, rabid storms of chording
By being distant overpower my mind
All the more shamelessly, their cut-off shout
Leaving me desperate to pick out
Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.
The Letter
Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.
Love Song (for Anna)
Bear with me my love
in the hour of my silence;
the air is crisscrossed
by loud omens and songbirds
fearing reprisals of middle day
have hidden away their notes
wrapped up in leaves
of cocoyam… What song shall I
sing to you my love when
a choir of squatting toads
turns the stomach of day with
goitrous adoration of an infested
swamp and purple-headed
vultures at home stand
sentry on the rooftop?
I will sing only in waiting
silence your power to bear
my dream for me in your quiet
eyes and wrap the dust of our blistered
feet in golden anklets ready
for the return someday of our
banished dance.
The Shortest and Sweetest of Songs
Come
Home.
The Avenue
Who has not seen their lover
Walking at ease,
Walking like any other
A pavement under trees,
Not singular, apart,
But footed, featured, dressed,
Approaching like the rest
In the same dapple of the summer caught;
Who has not suddenly thought
With swift surprise:
There walks in cool disguise,
There comes, my heart?
With a vow