Poem XVI

"Yet love can die!" she murmured once again;For this was in that City by the Sea,That old grey City of Pain,Built on the shifting shores of MysteryAnd mocked by all the immeasurable main."Love lives to die!"Under the deep eternal skyHis deeper voice caught up that deep refrain;

"A year ago, and under yonder sunEarth had no Heaven to hold our hearts in one!For me there was no love, afar or nigh:Love, even our love, in time must surely die."Then memory murmured, "No";And he remembered, a million years ago,He saw the sea-waves wistfully westward wend;And heard her voice whispering in their flowAnd calling through the silent sunset-glow.Love that hath no beginning hath no end.

"Love dies to live!" How wild, how deep the joyThat knows no death can e'er destroyWhat cannot bear destruction! By these eyesI know that, ere the fashioning of the skies,Or ever the sun and moon and stars were madeI loved you. Sweet, I am no more afraid.

"Love lives to die!"Under the deep eternal skyHer wild sweet voice caught up that deep refrain:There, in that silent City by the Sea,Listening the wild-wave music of Infinity,There, in that old grey City of mortal pain,Their voices mingled in mystic unisonWith that immortal harmonyWhich holds the warring worlds in one.

Their Voice, one Voice, yet manifold,Possessed the seas, the fields, the sky,With utterance of the dream that cannot die;Possessed the West's wild rose and dappled gold,And that old secret of the setting sunWhich, to the glory of Eternity,Time, tolling like a distant bell,Evermore faints to tell,And, ever telling, never yet has told.One, and yet manifoldArose their Voice, oh strangely one againWith murmurs of the immeasurable main;As, far beyond earth's cloudy bars,Their Soul surpassed the sunset and the stars,And all the heights and depths of temporal pain,Till seas of seraph music round them rolled.

And in that mystic planeThey felt their mortal yearsBreak away as a dream of painBreaks in a stream of tears.

Love, of whom life had birth,See now, is death not sweet?Love, is this heaven or earth?Both are beneath thy feet.

Nay, both within thy heart!O Love, the glory nears;The Gates of Pearl are flung apart,The Rose of Heaven appears.

Across the deeps of change,Like pangs of visible song,What angel-spirits, remote and strange,Thrill through the starry throng?

And oh, what wind that blowsOver the mystic Tree,What whisper of the sacred Rose,What murmur of the sapphire Sea,What dreams that faint and failFrom harps of burning gold,But tell in heaven the sweet old taleAn earthly sunset told?

Hark! like a holy bellOver that spirit Sea,Time, in the world it loves so well,Tolls for Eternity.

Earth calls us once again,And, through the mystic Gleam,The grey old City of mortal painDawns on the heavenly dream.

Sweet as the voice of birdsAt dawn, the years return,With little songs and sacred wordsOf human hearts that yearn.

The sweet same waves resoundAlong our earthly shore;But now this earth we lost and foundIs heaven for evermore.

Hark! how the cosmic choir,In sea and flower and sun,Recalls that triumph of desireWhich made all music one:

One universal soul,Completing joy with pain,And harmonising with the WholeThe temporal refrain,

Until from hill and plain,From bud and blossom and tree,From shadow and shining after rain,From cloud and clovered bee,From earth and sea and sky,From laughter and from tears,One molten golden harmonyFulfils the yearning years.

Love, of whom death had birth,See now, is life not sweet?Love, is this heaven or earth?Both are beneath thy feet.

In other worlds I loved you, long ago;Love that hath no beginning hath no end;The sea-waves whisper, low and sweet and low,In other worlds I loved you, long ago;The May-boughs murmur and the roses knowThe message that the dawning moon shall send;In other worlds I loved you, long ago;Love that hath no beginning hath no end.