furelisie

[furelisie]

Sonnet 29

I think of thee!—my thoughts do twine and bud

About thee, as wild vines, about a tree,

Put out broad leaves, and soon there 's nought to see

Except the straggling green which hides the wood.

Yet, O my palm-tree, be it understood

I will not have my thoughts instead of thee

Who art dearer, better! Rather, instantly

Renew thy presence; as a strong tree should,

Rustle thy boughs and set thy trunk all bare,

And let these bands of greenery which insphere thee

Drop heavily down,—burst, shattered, everywhere!

Because, in this deep joy to see and hear thee

And breathe within thy shadow a new air,

I do not think of thee—I am too near thee.

[furelisie]

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

[furelisie]

Since Feeling is First

Since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry

—the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

[furelisie]

One Hundred Love Sonnets

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, 
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: 
I love you as one loves certain obscure things, 
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries 
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, 
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose 
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, 
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you, 
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, 
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

[furelisie]

The Canonization

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,

With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

Take you a course, get you a place,

Observe his honor, or his grace,

Or the king's real, or his stampèd face

Contemplate; what you will, approve,

So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veins fill

Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

Litigious men, which quarrels move,

Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

Call her one, me another fly,

We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,

And we in us find the eagle and the dove.

The phœnix riddle hath more wit

By us; we two being one, are it.

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

We die and rise the same, and prove

Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,

And if unfit for tombs and hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

And by these hymns, all shall approve

Us canonized for Love.

And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love

Made one another's hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

Into the glasses of your eyes

(So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize)

Countries, towns, courts: beg from above

A pattern of your love!"

[furelisie]

She Walks In Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night 
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright 
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light 
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

II.

One shade the more, one ray the less, 
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress, 
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express 
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

III.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, 
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow, 
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below, 
A heart whose love is innocent!

[furelisie]

Claire De Lune

Your soul is as a moonlit landscape fair, Peopled with maskers delicate and dim, That play on lutes and dance and have an air Of being sad in their fantastic trim.

The while they celebrate in minor strain Triumphant love, effective enterprise,

They have an air of knowing all is vain,—

And through the quiet moonlight their songs rise,

The melancholy moonlight, sweet and lone,

That makes to dream the birds upon the tree, And in their polished basins of white stone The fountains tall to sob with ecstasy.

[furelisie]

Le Pont Mirabeau

Under the Mirabeau Bridge

there flows the Seine

And our loves recall how then

After each sorrow joy came back again

Let night come on bells end the day

The days go by me still I stay

Hands joined and face to face let's stay just so

While underneath

The bridge of our arms shall go

Weary of endless looks the river's flow

Let night come on bells end the day

The days go by me still I stay

All love goes by as water to the sea

All love goes by

How slow life seems to me

How violent the hope of love can be

Let night come on bells end the day

The days go by me still I stay

The days the weeks pass by beyond our ken

Neither time past

Nor love comes back again

Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine

Let night come on bells end the day

The days go by me still I stay

[furelisie]

Anabelle Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea—

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

[furelisie]

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee

[furelisie]

Letters to Milena

I want in fact more of you.

In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you.

I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you

[furelisie]

Sonnet 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death

[furelisie]

Love is Parallax

Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:

train tracks always meet, not here, but only

    in the impossible mind's eye;

horizons beat a retreat as we embark

on sophist seas to overtake that mark

    where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd

that one man's devil is another's god

    or that the solar spectrum is

a multitude of shaded grays; suspense

on the quicksands of ambivalence

    is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,

until the stars tick out a lullaby

    about each cosmic pro and con;

nothing changes, for all the blazing of

our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move

    implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks

to knock them down with logic or with luck

    and contradict ourselves for fun;

the waitress holds our coats and we put on

the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun

    who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,

would have me swallow the entire sun

    like an enormous oyster, down

the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark

of comet hara-kiri through the dark

    should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames

in dubious doorways forget their monday names,

    caper with candles in their heads;

the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in

scattering candy from a zeppelin,

    playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish

in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish

    blessings right and left and cry

hello, and then hello again in deaf

churchyard ears until the starlit stiff

    graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans

to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;

    brazen actors mock at him,

multiply pink harlequins and sing

in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing

    while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins

and separate the flutes from violins:

    the algebra of absolutes

explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes

that jar, while each polemic jackanapes

    joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':

though prima donna pouts and critic stings,

    there burns throughout the line of words,

the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion

which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:

    an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing

the secret of their ecstasy's in going;

    some day, moving, one will drop,

and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals

only to reopen as flesh congeals:

    cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells

of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells

    and heavens till the spirits squeak

surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's

bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks

    away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,

and god or void appall us till we drown

    in our own tears: today we start

to pay the piper with each breath, yet love

knows not of death nor calculus above

    the simple sum of heart plus heart

[furelisie]

Immortal Beloved

My angel, my very self… Why this profound sorrow, when necessity speaks — can our love endure without sacrifices, without our demanding everything from one another; can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, that I am not wholly yours? — Dear God, look at Nature in all her beauty and set your heart at rest about what must be — Love demands all, and rightly so… No doubt we shall meet soon; and today also time fails me to tell you of the thoughts which during these last few days I have been revolving about my life — If our hearts were always closely united, I would certainly entertain no such thoughts. My heart overflows with a longing to tell you so many things — Oh — there are moments when I find that speech is quite inadequate — Be cheerful — and be for ever my faithful, my only sweetheart, my all, as I am yours. The gods must send us everything else, whatever must and shall be our fate

[furelisie]

Come When I Sleep.

Oh! when I sleep, come near my resting-place,

As Laura came to bless her poet's heart,

And let thy breath in passing touch my face -

At once a space

My lips will part.

And on my brow where too long weighed supreme

A vision - haply spent now - black as night,

Let thy look as a star arise and beam -

At once my dream

Will seem of light.

Then press my lips, where plays a flame of bliss -

A pure and holy love-light - and forsake

The angel for the woman in a kiss -

At once, I wis,

My soul will wake

[furelisie]

Sweet Charmer

Though heaven's gate of light uncloses,

    Thou stirr'st not - thou'rt laid to rest,

    Waking are thy sister roses,

    One only dreamest on thy breast.

            Hear me, sweet dreamer!

                Tell me all thy fears,

            Trembling in song,

                But to break in tears.

    Lo! to greet thee, spirits pressing,

    Soft music brings the gentle dove,

    And fair light falleth like a blessing,

    While my poor heart can bring thee only love.

    Worship thee, angels love thee, sweet woman?

    Yes; for that love perfects my soul.

    None the less of heaven that my heart is human,

    Blent in one exquisite, harmonious whole.