Semblance
Love was the flight of a crimson bird
Across the forest of your soul,
Where cypress-leaf and cypress-bole,
By mordant airs of autumn stirred,
Sigh with a long and sea-like word.
Joy was the burning heart-red bloom
A fair and wandering witch let fall
At twilight from her coronal,
Where mottling ivies mesh the tomb
Lost in a laurel-given gloom.
Time is the drip of fountain-spray
Upon the unbroken sword you flung
Amid the pouting poppies young
In a lost garden far away,
Where the white girls of Circe lay.
Life is a house of painted stone
Reflected in a sunless lake,
Where drowning domes and turrets shake
In the black winds for ever blown
From shoreless tides no sail has known.
Grief is the mirror-builded hall
Wherein you roam eternally,
Seeking the ghost you shall not see
In sorrow half-sardonical–
And meet yourself at every wall.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1961, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 62 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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