Before Her Portrait in Youth

AS lovers, banished from their lady’s faceAnd hopeless of her grace,Fashion a ghostly sweetness in its place,Fondly adoreSome stealth-won cast attire she wore,A kerchief or a glove:And at the lover’s beckInto the glove there fleets the hand,Or at impetuous commandUp from the kerchief floats the virgin neck:So I, in very lowlihead of love,—Too shyly reverencingTo let one thought’s light footfall smoothTread near the living, consecrated thing,—Treasure me thy cast youth.This outworn vesture, tenantless of thee,Hath yet my knee,For that, with show and semblance fairOf the past HerWho once the beautiful, discarded raiment bare,It cheateth me.As gale to gale drifts breathOf blossoms’ death,So dropping down the years from hour to hourThis dead youth’s scent is wafted me to-day:I sit, and from the fragrance dream the flower.So, then, she looked (I say);And so her front sunk downHeavy beneath the poet’s iron crown:On her mouth museful sweet—(Even as the twin lips meet)Did thought and sadness greet:SighsIn those mournful eyesSo put on visibilities;As viewless ether turns, in deep on deep, to dyes.Thus, long ago,She kept her meditative paces slowThrough maiden meads, with wavèd shadow and gleamOf locks half-lifted on the winds of dream,Till love up-caught her to his chariot’s glow.Yet, voluntary, happier Proserpine!This drooping flower of youth thou lettest fallI, faring in the cockshut-light, astray,Find on my ’lated way,And stoop, and gather for memorial,And lay it on my bosom, and make it mine.To this, the all of love the stars allow me,I dedicate and vow me.I reach back through the daysA trothed hand to the dead the last trump shall not raise.The water-wraith that criesFrom those eternal sorrows of thy pictured eyesEntwines and draws me down their soundless intricacies!