Longing and Absence

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine.

Can I ever know you or you know me?

You came back to us in a dream and we were not here.

 

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose garden.

My sad heart foams at the stern. 4

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying Unbroken wings. And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices And the weak spirit quickens to rebel For the bent goldenrod and the lost sea smell.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

 

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.

Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine— A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine.

Where’er I roam, whatever realms to see, My heart untravel’d fondly turns to thee; Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain, And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

… La belle dame sans merci

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more. Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never.

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day-time, and falling into at night.

There is no pleasure to me without communication; there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind but I grieve that I have no one to tell it to.

Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.

Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.

 

O! for a falconer’s voice,

 

Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.

Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum