Like sunlight round you—had you sweetly died,
I should have loved you now as women love
The wonder and the silence of the West
When with sad eyes they breathe a last farewell
To where the black ships go so proudly out,—
Watching with twilit faces by the Sea,
Till down some golden rift the fading sails
Darken and glow and pale amid the dusk,
And gleam again, and pass into the gloom.
Phaon
Nay, Violet-Crowned, once in our time we loved,
The hand of that love’s ghost shall lead you back.
Life, without you—life is an empty nest!
A grove with god and altar lost! A lute
Whereon no lonely fingers ever stray.
When in the moonlight Philomela mourned
Sad-throated for poor murdered Itylus,
And when the day-birds woke the dewy lawn
And white the sunlight fell across my bed
And all the dim world turned to gold again,—
Oft then, it seemed, the truant would come home,
Back as a bird to its forgotten nest,
And O the lute should find its song, and life
Be glad again!
Sappho
Be glad again! Your words but live and die
Like desert blooms, flow’rs blown and gone again
Where no foot ever fell.
Where no foot ever fell. I shall go Home,—
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