The Need to Love

The need to love that all the stars obeyEntered my heart and banished all beside.Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.

Before the beauty of the west on fire,The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed,Cloud-like arose the image of desire,And cast out peace and maddened solitude.

I sought the City and the hopes it held:With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled,As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleledShut out the fair horizons of the world --

A truant from the fields and rustic joy,In my changed thought that image even soShut out the gods I worshipped as a boyAnd all the pure delights I used to know.

Often the veil has trembled at some tideOf lovely reminiscence and revealedHow much of beauty Nature holds besideSweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield:

Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled eavesWhen summer cumulates their golden chains,Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves,Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes,

An organ-grinder's melancholy tuneIn rainy streets, or from an attic sillThe blue skies of a windy afternoonWhere our kites climbed once from some grassy hill:

And my soul once more would be wrapped entireIn the pure peace and blessing of those yearsBefore the fierce infection of DesireHad ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears

Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did,Again ere long the prison-shades would fallThat Youth condemns itself to walk amid,So narrow, but so beautiful withal.

And I have followed Fame with less devotion,And kept no real ambition but to seeRise from the foam of Nature's sunlit oceanMy dream of palpable divinity;

And aught the world contends for to mine eyeSeemed not so real a meaning of successAs only once to clasp before I dieMy vision of embodied happiness.