Beneath us stream the golden hours
The slower for our hearts, where now,
Two ripe grenades on the same bough,
Their globes of bronze together swung,
Have stayed the stream they overhung
With fallen heaps of flowers.
For never was she half so fair
Whose colours bleed the red rose white
And milk the lilies of their light:
In her snowed breasts where sorrow dies,
All the white rills of Canaan rise,
And cedars in her hair.
Half-way across a flowery land
Through which our still reluctant feet
Must pass, for every halt too fleet,
We pause upon the topmost hill
Whence streams of wine and honey spill
To some rapacious strand.
There, sisters of the milky way,
The rills of Canaan sing and shine:
Diluvial in the waves of wine
Whose gulls are rosy-footed doves
The glorious bodies of my loves
Like dolphins heave the spray—
Red Rhones towards the sounding shore
Through castled gorges roaring down
By many a tiered and towery town,
High swollen with a spate of hours,
And strewn with all the dying flowers
That we shall love no more—
Torrential in the nightingale,
My spirit hymns them as they go
For wider yet their streams must flow
With flowery trophies heaped more high
Before they drain their sources dry
And those clear fountains fail.
I cannot think (so blue the day)
That those fair castalies of dreams
Or the cool naiads of their streams,
Or I, the willow in whose shade
Their wandering music was delayed,
Should pass like ghosts away.
The azure triumphs on the height:
Life is sustained with golden arms:
The fire-red cock with loud alarms
Arising, drums his golden wings
And in the victory he sings,
The Sun insults the night.
O flying hair and limbs of fire
Through whose frail forms, that fade and pass,
Tornadoing as flame through grass,
Eternal beauty flares alone
To build herself a blazing throne
Out of the world’s desire—
The summer leaves are whirled away:
The fallen chestnut in the grass
Is trampled by the feet that pass
And like the young Madonna’s heart
With rosy portals gashed apart
Bleeds for the things I say.