Sung by the nightingale to birth
Whose ringing pearls were all the dew
With which, the long dry summer through,
The rainless azure fed their dearth—
Pomegranates, colder than the noon,
In whom a maiden breast rebels,
Forcing the smooth gold of their shells
To split with rubies to the moon.
In whose half-opened husks we see,
Where the rich blood of autumn swells,
The membranes and the rosy cells
To which the sunbeam was the bee:—
Like musing brows with patience fraught
Until their secret gems be shown,
And through their inward toil alone
Made royal with a crown of thought:—
As to some poet’s labours wed
To dream Golcondas from despair,
Till some pure act of faith or prayer
Shall freeze the crimson tears they shed:—
Like lovers’ hearts to ripeness grown
The rapturous red wine they bleed
Is chambered in each lustrous seed
As light within a carven stone.
Warm-flushing through their films of frost
With rosy smiles and crystal teeth
A yielding beauty seems to breathe
Whose language on our lips is lost.
Their speech in coolness dies away,
Thawed by a breath, they change and tremble
As the lips they most resemble
When one red kiss is all they say.
Too fain in fragrance to escape,
Their form eludes the clearest phrase
When Psyche, in a sister’s praise,
Would carve her crystals in their shape.
In vain her vision seeks to prove
The secret structure of those grains
Whose dewy membranes and lit veins
Remind her most of those I love.
If new similitudes to try,
Fusing them with her speech, she sips
Those seeds whose death upon the lips
Is half a kiss and half a sigh—
Moulding those phrases with her tongue
That melt as sweetly, by a spell
So transient that she cannot tell
If they be tasted, kissed, or sung—
Their gems so ruddy to the eye
Are snow upon the mouth that sips:
But even when they cheat the lips
And, born of song, on perfume die,—
Are most conspiring with her theme
The true resemblance to disclose,
And tell the secrets of the rose
Whose changing reveries they seem.