Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/218

 Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep

Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone

Were that which makes life worth the pain to live.

What is so fair as lovers in their joy

That dies in sleep, their sleep that wakes in joy?

Caressing arms are their light pillows. They

That like lost stars have wandered hitherto

Lonesome and lightless through the universe,

Now glow transfired at Nature's flaming core;

They are the centre; constellated heaven

Is the embroidered panoply spread round

Their bridal, and the music of the spheres

Rocks them in hushed epithalamium.

I know that there are those whose idle tongues

Blaspheme the beauty of the world that was

So wondrous and so worshipful to me.

I call them those that, in the palace where

Down perfumed halls the Sleeping Beauty lay,

Wandered without the secret or the key.

I know that there are those, of gentler heart,

Broken by grief or by deception bowed,

Who in some realm beyond the grave conceive

The bliss they found not here; but, as for me, 168