Page:Prometheus Bound, and other poems.djvu/149

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only three in all God's universe

Have heard this word thou hast said; Himself, beside

Thee speaking and me listening! and replied

One of us. . that was God! . . and laid the curse

So darkly on my eyelids as to amerce

My sight from seeing thee,—that if I had died,

The deathweights, placed there, would have signified

Less absolute exclusion. "Nay" is worse

From God than from all others, O my friend!

Men could not part us with their worldly jars,

Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend:

Our hands would touch, for all the mountain-bars;—

And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,

We should but vow the faster for the stars.

are we, unlike, O princely Heart!

Unlike our uses, and our destinies.

Our ministering two angels look surprise

On one another, as they strike athwart

Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art

A guest for queens to social pageantries,

With gages from a hundred brighter eyes

Than tears, even, can make mine, to ply thy part

Of chief musician. What hast thou to do

With looking from the lattice-lights at me,

A poor, tired, wandering singer? . . singing through

The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?

The chrism is on thine head,—on mine, the dew,—

And Death must dig the level where these agree.