Page:Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia.djvu/36

 :And gaunt they stalk me naked through the world;
 * Too fondly now I bend unto the fierce
 * Necessity of bliss, yet in each glow
 * Of golden angour yearn forever toward
 * Some quiet gloom where plead the nightingales
 * Of lustral hope. I am a garden old
 * Where drift dead blossoms now and broken dreams
 * And only ghosts of old pale Sorrows walk.


 * Earth, April after April, beauteous is,
 * But from this body worn, yet once so fair,
 * My tired eyes gaze, as from a ruined tower
 * Some nesting bird looks out upon the sun.
 * These vagrant feet too many homes have known
 * To claim one door; all my waste heart is now
 * An impregnant thing of weeds and wilful moods,
 * Where even Love’s most lowly groundling ne’er
 * Could creep with wearied plumes, and be at rest:
 * Not now like our sad plains of Sicily,
 * Pensive with happier harvests year by year
 * This bosom is,—but hot as Aetna’s, torn
 * And seared with all the fires of vast despairs,—
 * A menace and a mockery where still brood
 * On its dark heights the eagles of Unrest.


 * Yet had you only loved me, who can tell
 * How humble I had been, how I had tried
 * From this poor broken twilight to re-build
 * The Dawn, and from Love’s ashes to re-dream
 * The flower.